Forever Curious, Part 11
Chapter 4: A Sea of Hyperwaves
A Sea of Hyperwaves
As Na-Yeli prepares to dive through the next rabbit hole, she wonders why the atmospheres of the separate layers don’t mix through these openings. A kind of semi-permeable membrane? she thinks, a kind of intelligent filter that lets life-sized objects through but not gasses? In that case, fauna from each layer would be let through, and then, most probably, meet their untimely end. Possibly evolutionary pressure has made the openings off-limit for native fauna, she thinks.
As it is, prudence demands that she sends five probes through first, to examine what is in the third layer. What was the saying? Only fools rush in, she thinks, where angels fear to tread. Does that make her an angel? She suspects both KillBitch and LateralSys have a different interpretation. She programs five of her Kittis to do a quick in-and-out; that is, go through the transition, fly a full circle to survey the area, come back, and report. So I can go in somewhat prepared, Na-Yeli hopes.
They pass through the Diaphragm Gate and immediately Na-Yeli loses all contact with them. She waits a bit—she programmed them to come back after five minutes no matter what—but only one comes back, and already after two minutes. No other, not after ten minutes, not after fifteen minutes. Eerie.
The one that came back encountered a thick atmosphere and gale-force winds. The latter probably swept the other probes away. Ye dogs, she thinks, I’m about to dive straight into a storm. Now she curses herself, as she’s slowly losing the courage to dive in. So much for caution, she thinks, steels herself, and bites the bullet. I can’t stay in the fractal maze forever.
She lets herself be carried higher by an updraft, then heads down, speeding up as fast as she can. If these winds in there are really so strong, she realizes, then they might slam me against the barrier if I don’t pass through fast enough. Speed is of the essence. She rushes to the opening as straight down as she can possibly get, mentally crossing her fingers, thinking Oh my dog, oh my farting dog.
She pierces through the Diaphragm Gate, straight as an arrow, eyes open, hoping she won’t crash into something. She’s hit by a very painful shock, like a massive body slap starting at her head and moving down over her body to her feet, at exactly the same speed with which she’s diving through. The pressure increase, she thinks, too late, I should’ve doubled my internal pressure to match. The moment she’s through, though, she’s swept into the madly rotating wall of the craziest vortex she’s ever seen. Hurricane-force winds push her into a path that’s spiraling outwards. She doesn’t want to go there, and she needs all her hard-won flying skills to push herself inwards. Struggling with all her might, she manages to break through the eyewall into a relative pocket of tranquility.
The eye of the passage and the eye of the hurricane didn’t align, she thinks over her intense pain, that’s for sure.
In the meantime, her instruments and sensors aren’t sitting idle. 95% N2, 2% CO2, and 2% O2, supersaturated with 1% H2O vapor, her spectrometer reports, with traces of NO, NO2, H2O2, H2S, O3, and Na+, Ca2+, Cl-, SO32-, SO42-, H+ and O2- ions. Pressure: 205,000 N/m2, or about twice Earth-normal. That’s the body slap I got when entering, she realizes, as the pain slowly recedes, twice earth, but with much less Oxygen, she thinks, too bad, as I would have loved to get some fresh air into my recycling unit. If she filters carefully, she can still do that, though.
On top of that, she needs to prepare better next time, as she could have increased her internal pressure before going through the gate. Then again, after overthinking it, she might have lost the courage to dive through. And she only wants to invoke KillBitch—or LateralSys, for that matter—when absolutely necessary, because using them comes with a price. After a KillBitch episode, she’s utterlyy exhausted, and she greatly prefers to enter a new layer well-rested, if she can help it.
There is light in this layer, visible light with a subtle red tint. Na-Yeli’s search program hunts through the encyclopedia in her triple-redundant quantum computer via her implant and finds a match. A gas-phase reaction of chemiluminescence: NO + O3 ⟶ NO2 + O3. This delivers a visible broadband from red to infrared light. Not as crazy as the non-stop light show in the fractal maze, Na-Yeli thinks, nor as dark as in the helium layer. Good.
Right in the center of the vortex—the proverbial eye of the storm—she’s orienting herself. A massive circular wall of clouds rotating around her like crazy. Everything seems to be circling the same vortex. Well, at least that explains where my poor Kittis went, she thinks, swept away like voices in a hurricane.
Above, the outer barrier, where droplets of water are reduced to Hydrogen and Oxygen while burning right back into water again, visible as pale blue sparks against the dark heavens. Sometimes, as the vortex shifts through the unpredictable powers of physics and random chance, the circular light of the Diaphragm Gate appears into view.
Down, way down—about five kilometers, according to her instruments—a churning sea. Or at least it looks like one. Zooming in, it appears that the wild waters below also form a vortex, albeit of the maelstrom kind. A large body of water, by the looks of it, she thinks, makes sense, as all this water vapor has to come from somewhere.
Conceivably, she could turn her shape-shifting exoskin into a floatation device, some kind of boat, even. Looking at the roaring waves below, where the mighty whirlwind turns into a messy maelstrom, she thinks it’s not a good idea. Well, it’s very windy at the pole, she thinks, maybe it clears up further south. Way down south, she corrects, remembering the fast-moving clouds on the far horizon.
While performing a figure-of-eight holding pattern in the eye of the storm, Na-Yeli considers her options. She likes to study her environment and get an idea of what makes it tick—might always come in handy, might prevent nasty surprises—but she also has a mission. Roughly speaking, her mission is to find out what makes the whole Enigmatic Object tick (and by extension, possibly what makes the whole Universe tick), and studying everything in the separate layers would be tantamount to getting lost in the details. While she did have plenty of time in the fractal maze, as she was forced to take the long way around, she might be able to take a shortcut here.
Why fight the storm, she figures, if you can ride it?
Option 2 is to get down to the water level, improvise a boat-like structure, and sail from the North to the South Pole—that is, if the sea (the huge amount of Na+ and Cl- ions in the air make it likely that the water is salt) does go on all the way to the South Pole—but the waves swept up by this storm will not make it a nice trip, to say the least.
Option 3 is to get down to the water level, and turn into a makeshift submarine—after all, if she can survive in a vacuum, so she can underwater—and travel below the waves to the other side of this layer. While she may have to get into the water at some point anyway, traveling underwater is much slower than flying through an atmosphere, especially an atmosphere so close to Earth-normal as this one.
So she prepares for option 1: ride the storm. It’ll be a wild ride, for sure, but with some luck, it can cut her travel time quite short, at least in this layer. Back in the solar system, they’ve taken her through several category 5 hurricanes before sending her through the edge of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, with four-hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour winds. She can take some punishment.
Her plan is straightforward. She’ll speed up to the highest velocity she can get, then dive into the eyewall as lateral as possible—as they trained her on Earth and Jupiter. Then enter the vortex, then spiral away from the vortex until she comes out of the storm. Once out of the storm, she can head straight South, taking the shortest route to the South Pole. If no crazy local creatures attack her, she can then dive down in the water, turn her shape-shifting exoskin into a submarine, and head for the opening. Easy come, easy go. So things will get rough at first, but should eventually calm down.
She comes out of her holding pattern in an ever-widening spiral while accelerating. Then checks if there are no crazy things ahead, and makes contact with the eyewall. Initially, it’s a blast, even as the shocks she gets from ‘scooping’ the storm’s inner barrier are quite severe. Yet the most advanced shock-absorbing foam humanity can make is taking most of the true sting out of them. She rides the storm—your speed is for nothing, she sings inwardly, and your energy for free—her speed increasing to a few hundred clicks, tempestuous winds throwing her around, yet nothing she can’t take. So far, so good.
But as she spirals ever more outward, the storm remains fierce. She approaches the 66th parallel—the Arctic Circle if you want—and the storm shows no sign of abating. If anything, it’s increasing. So far and not so good.
She does a few quick calculations. Here in the third layer from the outside, the outer diameter is one-hundred-and-seven kilometers. Storm systems on Earth, let alone Jupiter or Neptune can be—and, like the Great Red Spot and Great Dark Spot often are—much bigger than that. Oh shit, she realizes, the atmosphere of this whole layer is probably one huge storm. So far and oh my dog.
She’s doing well over five hundred kilometers per hour already. If this goes on, she fears, the winds at the equatorial region will be insane.
And it does go on. Spiraling outwards from the 66th parallel, the wind speeds only increase. Not only the wind above but also the waves below, she sees to her dismay. The highest wave ever recorded on Earth—a tsunami crashing into Lituya Bay in Alaska—was well over five hundred meters. Surely, they can’t get that high in here, right? Na-Yeli tells herself, against her better judgment, a smaller body of water, no time to build up sufficiently.
Her eyes tell her differently. As the wind speed exceeds one thousand kilometers per hour, the waves keep getting higher, as well. The winds are now so strong that she cannot turn back. Even at maximum power, her ion thruster cannot overcome the immense gale forces. Like it or not, she’s committed to, what seems, a one-way trip straight into hell. What have I done, she rues, why didn’t I take the serenity of the submarine trip?
At the 44th parallel—about halfway between the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Cancer—the winds she’s riding make a class 5 hurricane seem like a tempest in a teapot. About twelve-hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour, but not quite Mach One as the air pressure is twice Earth-normal. It’s closer to the Tropic of Cancer that things become supersonic. About Mach One for this environment, she reads on her instruments, winds exceeding the sonic barrier. She’s tossed around like crazy, but her shape-shifting exoskin has expanded while filling the space between her and her outer hull with the best shock-absorbing foam known to man. It’s extremely rough, but so far she hasn’t experienced any major damage. Mentally, though, she’s never been so scared. Oh my dog, the winds at the equator will be close to Mach One point Five, she thinks, the worst is yet to come.
She doesn’t know the half of it. If the super winds at the equator won’t be her end, then there’s something else rising to finish the job. It’s impossible to miss, even for a Na-Yeli hanging on for dear life. The sea level was almost five kilometers under the upper barrier at the North Pole, as measured by her radar, sonar, and lidar. Obviously, in this wildly rotating madhouse—Na-Yeli is now completing a full turn in twelve minutes—there will be a considerable flattening at the poles, and a subsequent bulging at the equator. So let’s say the distance between the average sea water level and the upper barrier at the equator is approximately three kilometers.
Then she looks at the height of the waves below her as she crosses the 23rd parallel or this place’s churning Tropic of Cancer. She can’t believe her eyes as her gaze turns south, towards the equator. That’s not possible, she thinks, they’re reaching all the way to the ceiling.
For a few moments, her mind switches from ‘scared-to-death’ mode into ‘sense-of-wonder-squared’ mode. That’s not possible, she thinks again, yet is unable to discard the evidence before her eyes, this is the most awesome thing ever.
A perfectly symmetrical row of waves, sixteen of them, all curling in upon themselves like surf about to crash, circling the equator in thirty-six minutes. With a circumference of almost three-hundred-and-thirty-six kilometers, that equates to about five-hundred-and-sixty kilometers per hour. All of them, without exception, seemingly scraping the ceiling, the upper barrier that is the roof of this layer. It’s scary, yet I don’t know why, she can’t help but sing, ‘scuse me while I touch the sky. And in the red-tinted sky, the waves are indeed purple.
A teetering train of tsunamis on the brink is the best explanation the scientist in her can come up with, synchronized to perfection and self-reinforcing like a resonant vibration. An undulating sequence of soliton waves sweeping through the sea snake Ouroboros who’s realized—too late—that it’s been swallowing more than it can contain, and yet somehow doesn’t know its current situation is impossible, like Wily E Coyote sprinting like crazy above an abyss in the precious seconds that it doesn’t realize it should fall. Eventually, gravity brought the resourceful, yet unlucky coyote down. Why hasn’t gravity, even at 0.125 G, brought these stupendous solitons down? Or did Na-Yeli just arrive at the moment of this crazy system’s suspension of disbelief, before it all comes crashing down?
In practical terms, though, it means her untimely end, even if she survives the full strength of this mother of all hurricanes, this top dog of all typhoons. If the top of the waves does make contact with the ceiling, she’ll be squashed like a bug, or, more correctly, pulverized like an ant under an elephant’s foot. Even if there is a hand’s width space between the waves and the roof, she’ll be pushed against the upper barrier and spaghettified at five-hundred-and-sixty kilometers per hour. Atomized by the finest cheese grater ever, Na-Yeli’s turning to black humor, unfortunately, nobody from the Guinness Book of Space Records to witness this.
This is an enemy even too big for KillBitch, while LateralSys is too busy appreciating the incredible beauty of this all. It’s up to the slow CEO to find a way out of this, or come up with the best last words as she circles this layer at one-seventh of an RPM.
If she’s lucky, very lucky, stupendously lucky, she might stay between two of the hyperwaves as she circles the equator. But she has almost no control over her position, nor her speed, and will most likely either be hit from behind or thrown into one head first.
Head first? a desperate scenario for survival unfolds before her mind’s eye, what about I go down as fast as I can get, and then use my ion thruster to push myself into the wave before me. Once inside the wave, she must swim down, down, and down while maintaining the same rotational speed as the wave, until she is below the very bottom of the wave, into the deep blue sea itself.
There will be a massive undertow and dog knows what kinds of eddies and vortices, Na-Yeli thinks, but let’s face it, it can’t be worse than this magnificent nightmare I’m in right now.
To the very best of her abilities, she maneuvers down as she positions herself in between two hyperwaves, massive walls of water hurtling along at tremendous speeds. Initially, she wants to get in at the middle—she estimates that there’s a twenty-one-kilometer gap between the hyperwave tops—when she finds that the super-hurricane winds already want to push her into the wave in front of her. Of course, she realizes, the wind pushes the waves, but the waves will not go as fast as the wind.
Meaning she would have been pushed into a hyperwave anyway. However, that would be near the top, as the fastest winds are near the top and the thermal updrafts naturally push her that way, as well. The top is the place she wants to avoid, so the best tactic is to enter just before an onrushing hyperwave, then fire her ion thruster’s afterburner so that she goes down, as far as possible while the super-hurricane winds push her to the hyperwave in front.
Down as fast as she can before she gets too close to the utter madness of the equator, slowly getting closer to this aqueous uprising to end all uprisings. Down in a relative way, as she’s already moving with a humongous speed. Maintaining an aerodynamic shape in the direction of the wind, so that it’s pushing her as little as possible, trying to reduce the speed difference between her and the wall of water as much as she can, while going down. Luckily, the wind speeds decrease as she goes down, slowing her down to well below one thousand kilometers per hour.
She sees the wall of water coming closer and—at the last possible moment—reverses course and goes against the wind, with all her might. Her speed decreases to nine-hundred, eight hundred, almost seven hundred kilometers per hour as she hits the wave. She’s managed to reduce the speed difference to under one-hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour, yet the impact is still massive. But survivable.
Alive by dead reckoning, she thinks, now swim with all I’ve got. Again, everything is relative. If she doesn’t swim down, but down and too much forward or afterward, she will swim herself out of the wave to an untimely end. While dead reckoning may have saved her, a wrong live estimation may kill her.
Down, I have to go down, she tells herself, but not out, as she desperately swims down in this surf of the titans, this soliton wave of the gods. She estimates that she has about two kilometers to go before she is out of the wave and into the deep blue sea. About a thirty-minute swim if she equals the world record for 800 meters freestyle, which she can top because she does have all the enhancements professional athletes are forbidden to use. Thirty minutes will be almost one full rotation at this parallel, pure madness.
But that’s not all. If she can get down, she has to prepare for the immense pressures at the bottom of the sea—where the opening of the South Pole will be—as well. She mentally programs the shape-shifting metamaterials of her exoskin to form a one-seater arrangement with a hull of syntactic foam blend of tiny glass spheres and epoxy resin that stands up to the extreme pressure, floats, and allows her movement, because she has to swim. Swim for dear life.
She uses all she’s got, pushes herself and all her enhancements into the red, and touches a cold, irresistibly strong undertow after thirty-one minutes. She doesn’t have the power, nor the will to fight it, and lets herself be carried along, waiting for that fateful moment when she’ll be thrown out of the water, into the mother of all storms. But it doesn’t happen. She stays underwater, breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
—or—
Author’s note: And so the fourth chapter starts. From a crystalline grotto to the wildest of seas. Is this purely a KillBitch area, or will LateralSys or even the Slow CEO be needed? Stay tuned, and thanks for reading, new and old readers alike!