Forever Curious, Part 13
Chapter 4: A Sea of Hyperwaves
[JUMP BACK TO PART 12]
Sometime later, she’s slowly getting there. She’s learned to discern the faint shadows of the Screw-Worms—there is one higher harmonic frequency that’s still noticeable, if you know how to listen—and finds that going towards them, pushed by the stream they’re spiraling against, is the most efficient way to catch them. Like algae and plankton, anybody or anything can just scoop them up, meaning they’re flora that’s still got a long evolutionary way to go before it can even think of becoming fauna. She’s caught about half of her estimated quota when things go astray.
Seemingly out of nowhere, she’s grabbed by powerful jaws and dragged down. The underwater predator has grabbed her in the middle, her head, shoulders, and legs are outside its grip. The infrared sensors in her exoskin of these parts notice the vague contours of a big, shark-like body with a long, thick, almost elephant-like trunk with a jaw that’s caught her. The beast’s eyes shine with an infrared glow, her sonar still sees nothing, only a short lidar burst outlining the true size of the predator.
Incredible, Na-Yeli thinks as she’s stuck in the beast’s maw, an elephant shark with stealth capabilities.
On second thought, it’s a logical evolutionary advantage in these Stygian depths. Clamped by the Stealth Shark’s powerful jaws, her arms are pinned to her sides. What’s it gonna do, chew me open and eat me? she thinks, good luck with that, my exoskin can take more than one thousand bars of pressure. What she could have realized, though, is that this underwater predator would use a similar strategy like the bat-mats in the helium layer.
They go down. She—the prey—upfront. Oh my dog, she thinks, it’s gonna spaghettify me to death and then feast on my remains. She’s trying to think of a way, like an improvised hydraulic cylinder, to open up these powerful jaws. But before she can cobble something together she’s slammed, quite unceremoniously, against the fearful barrier.
The metamaterials of her exoskin start to spaghettify. Well, this gives a whole new meaning to the term bottom feeder, she thinks desperately. It’ll be moments, minutes at the most before her hull is breached and she dies from the extreme pressure. Now only some spaghetti sauce and a feisty meal to seal the deal, she thinks, dark comedy her last defense, before blacking out.
Yet Na-Yeli hasn’t lost consciousness, as KillBitch has come to the fore. She needs to fight, but her arms are pinned down and her legs can’t reach the Stealth Shark. Her most fearful weapon remains: her brain. Taking inspiration from the razor-sharp branches in the fractal maze, she quickly programs the tips of two of her mini-torpedoes to become pointed to the molecular—nay—atomic level. Quickly launches them, as her protective skin is spaghettifying away from her.
The mini-torpedoes make a sharp turn, then drill themselves deep into the body of the Stealth Shark, and explode. It does the job, the muscles of the mighty beast go slack, apart from its jaw that remains tight in a death grip, a final rictus.
Nevertheless, its tail stopped moving so now only its weight is pushing her against the barrier. KillBitch pushes against the barrier with her legs in such a manner that she and the whole shark still holding her topple over. As the shark’s dead body hits bottom, she pushes again, liberating her body and the shark’s trunk from the deadly barrier. The weight distribution works against her, though, and she comes down again.
KillBitch remains icy calm and keeps pushing off, trying to use different parts of her feet, in order to minimize the spaghettifying wear and tear. Keeps dancing this awkward death grip dance until she finally has the ion thruster in the right position. Then she fires it up: human exopod and Stealth Shark slowly rising from the fatal foundation. She keeps moving up until they’re at a safe distance, buoyed up by a rising thermal. Then she leaves—KillBitch burns through energy reserves like nobody’s business—and leaves it up to the slow CEO to get out of the dead beast’s rictus.
Silently thanking the KillBitch part of her while simultaneously hoping that part will remain inactive for the rest of the trip, the slow CEO part of Na-Yeli improvises two cylinder-powered force multipliers while trying to ignore the pain, muscle cramps, and bruises that the fight for survival have left behind. Very slowly, at an infuriating pace, the mighty jaws with the triple rows of serrated, backward-pointing teeth open far enough for her to get out.
Out of the Stealth Shark’s death grip, and out of immediate threats, Na-Yeli ponders how to proceed. For the dome she needs to fabricate, she can use the Stealth Shark’s dead body as well. If it contains sufficient amounts of carbon, I’m good, she thinks, as the metamaterials can work wonders with carbon. A double graphene skin supported by the same syntactic foam blend of tiny glass spheres and epoxy resin that keeps the pressure out of her personal enclosure. On top of that, she needs to restock on matter for the metamaterials that were spaghettified during her struggle with the Stealth Shark.
Strip the shark of its useful material here, or at the opening? Neither is a good option, as she’s likely to be an attractive target for other predators while floating quietly like a sitting duck. On top of that, discarding useless parts of the Stealth Shark’s corpse—that will sink to the bottom—might attract scavengers that look for the signs of spaghettification. She prefers to be on the move.
So her best option is to remove the useful ingredients while she’s moving—she’s designing a number of intelligent strip-mining bots with highly miniaturized spectrometers that will move between her and the shark through a hollow tether—and then dump the useless part of the shark at a safe distance from the opening, to lure potential predators and scavengers away from the passage to the next layer.
I have to cross at least another twelve kilometers towing a dead Stealth Shark, Na-Yeli thinks, and my sonar is useless against its kind. So what does she have? Visible light might betray over a large distance—she can’t assume these Stealth Sharks are blind—while giving her only limited sight. Then she remembers the Stealth Shark’s eyes. They had an infrared glow. Anything that lives down here has to burn—or generate, like the Screw-Worms—energy, giving off a faint infrared glow. On top of that, the low wavelength of the infrared radiation doesn’t disperse as much as visible light, so an infrared sensor would have a longer range.
Thus, Na-Yeli lowers the frequency—and energy expenditure—of her radar and sonar, and reconfigures her light sensors to be maximally sensitive in the infrared range. It gives her an immediate hit. There, an infrared flicker, with a faint sonar beat, Na-Yeli notices, far enough to be unthreatening, and close enough to be able to follow me.
She hasn’t recovered enough to be going into another fight if she can avoid it. So Na-Yeli heads into a direction that’s slightly away from where the Diaphragm Gate is—never smart to show your destination to your potential enemies—and, as her strip-mining bots begin their job, monitors the following alien closely.
It’s barely visible, Na-Yeli thinks, if it stayed a bit farther away, I wouldn’t have noticed it. Does it want to be seen? As she takes the semi-touristic route to the South Pole, the barely discernible alien presence follows her, always keeping the exact same distance. This slow-moving stalemate continues for a while as Na-Yeli, yet recovering, still feels weak. Then her infrared sensors notice a second presence approaching. Its infrared contours are but all too familiar to Na-Yeli. A second Stealth Shark.
Ain’t it grand, she thinks, I’m towing a dead Stealth Shark, am about to be attacked by a live one, with a third alien standing by for spectator sports.
Then, to her utter surprise, the alien following her positions itself between her and the onrushing Stealth Shark. Its infrared signature becomes better defined, eight balloon-like lobes tied together through invisible tethers. A Moiety Alien? Na-Yeli’s astonishment peaks through her fear, They’re even here?
The Stealth Shark doesn’t seem surprised, nor impressed. It simply attacks the Moiety Alien, its powerful jaws gobble up the forward four balloon-like lobes, then bite with all their might. This doesn’t seem to faze the Moiety Alien, though—nobody’s been able to detect any emotion in them, anyway, over many millennia—whose caught lobes, also called orbitals—don’t break, show no cracks, and don’t even change color as they stay pitch black.
Without further ado, its four free lobes shrink into nothingness while its four captured ones double in size. In the deadly silent waters, Na-Yeli hears a sickening crack. Then all eight orbitals return to their original size and the Moiety Alien moves out of the Stealth Shark’s jaws, whose opening remains unnaturally wide.
With its jaw broken or dislocated, the second Stealth Shark decides to cut its losses and goes away. As its infrared signature fades into the cold underwater distance, Na-Yeli, still with the dead Stealth Shark in tow, faces the Moiety Alien with a mixture of relief and bafflement.
Thanks, she thinks, not knowing how to communicate with the alien, and Why? They’ve never interfered with anything, ever.
The first recorded observation of a Moiety Alien was well over twenty-five thousand years ago, in what humans call the Orion Nebula, by the Avuncular Hive Minds. Their appearance baffled everybody, except physicists studying electron clouds.
They always consist of eight parts: strange globules or lobes that look like falling water droplets. But instead of falling, these eight droplets have their tapered ends pointed to a single center. The tapered ends becoming so thin that for all intents and purposes, they are invisible at the very nucleus of the eight-orbital entity. Yet these invisible strings—even the highest resolution optical equipment couldn’t discern them—keep the eight droplets—that looked like the orbitals of a carbon atom, multiplied by two—together, always.
What keeps these eight moiety-orbitals together? An applied Uncertainty Principle? A combination of quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling? Heterotic strings? Nobody knew.
Normally, these eight orbitals are exactly the same size. Hence the moniker ‘moiety’. However, they can change the size of four orbitals relative to the four others. Always in proportion, that is, if four orbitals were shrunk to near-invisibility, the other four would be exactly two times as big. Again theoretically, it might be possible to let seven orbitals shrink into almost-nothingness, and the eight one would be eight times as big. But such a thing was never observed, as the Moiety Aliens always kept a certain kind of symmetry going. It could be linear symmetry, point symmetry, or rotational symmetry, and it was always perfect.
As they appeared in more inhabited systems, the myths and folklores of some of these visited alien species told that finding the home of the Moiety Aliens would lead you to the origin of symmetry.
According to stories that were either so old as to be labeled myths or so new as to be labeled rumors, the Moiety Aliens could change the color of their orbitals. While Moiety Aliens of different colors—expanding well into the infrared and ultraviolet—had been sighted, nobody had ever seen a Moiety Alien change color. Even more unverified reports talked about patterns appearing on the orbitals of a Moiety Alien, but even if that were true, they never used that supposed ability to communicate.
They were both the ultimate neutrals and the ultimate ciphers. They just were. Where they originally came from was unknown. Every other alien species had a home system, even the Horsehead Nebula’s enormous intelligent gas clouds that were moving in anti-time—who found the Moiety Aliens, like most aliens, too small to notice, and who said that the Enigmatic Object had always been there, in other words: it would still be there in the far future—together with the extremely short-lived singular nanoflies feeding on Hawking radiation.
Nobody had any clue as to how they crossed interstellar space, they just showed up. Apart from their colors, they were indistinguishable at the individual level. They didn’t participate in wars, they didn’t use or steal resources, they didn’t occupy valuable estate.
Some aggressive or careless aliens had opened fire on some of them. The orbitals that the projectiles, missiles or lasers hit always shrunk down to the invisible level faster than the weapons could destroy, or even impact them. If the explosions were powerful enough to destroy the—quickly doubled—bigger orbitals, the whole Moiety Alien popped out of existence, and seemingly popped up somewhere else, as if quantum tunneling. Because all the Moiety Aliens look exactly the same, nobody could say for sure that either the Moiety Alien at the explosion was really destroyed—although nobody ever found remains—and one of its kin merely pretended that its sibling had magically jumped through space, or that they did initiate a massive quantum tunneling event.
They didn’t communicate. They didn’t seem to interact with other aliens in any measurable manner. They just were.
They showed up in several inhabited systems, stayed there for a while, then disappeared. Were they the perfect drones for some galactic god? The ultimate tease? The mindless manifestations of some unknown principle?
Nobody knew. They just were. And then they were gone.
[JUMP TO PART 14]
—or—
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Author’s Note: As Na-Yeli persists, so should I. We’re almost at the midpoint of the first half. I slacked off in the second half of June as the day job and my social schedule intensified. July looks less busy, so I’ll scramble to catch up. So expect quick successions of Forever Curious and The Replicant in the Refugee Camp. Thanks for reading!