Forever Curious, Part 21
Chapter 6: Doom Bells
They’re almost ready to dive in—she explained her findings and plans to the best of her ability to the Moiety Alien—but she wants to perform a few more measurements first. She sends in her modified, much sturdier Kittis in ten-minute in-and-out explorations in order to pinpoint the source of the massive sound waves. Where it is if there’s more than one source and if it—or they—are moving towards the Diaphragm Gate. If only to prevent them from going in when the very source of this auditory horror is straight upon them.
Over one hour, her Kittis not only survive but pinpoint no less than three possible sources of the sound waves. Only one of these appears to be in ‘line of sight’—better make that ‘line of sound’, Na-Yeli thinks—and two seem to be beyond the horizon of the inner globular barrier. It doesn’t tell her much, only that the chances of it appearing on their doorstep, as it were, are very small. Her systems are ready, she gestures to the Moiety Alien, which gives its assent, and in they go, Kittis first, then Na-Yeli and the forward half of the ELM shield followed by the Moiety Alien in the aft half. The ELM shield feed-forwarded by the Kitti Soundcloud.
Na-Yeli holds her breath—both mentally and physically—as the first, wildly fluctuating sound leaks hit her. It hurts like hell for the first few seconds while the system adapts, shifts frequencies, and improves the anti-sound reflections. She eyes the Moiety Alien, who shows no signs of distress. Probably because she braced herself, the pain is not too horrible.
Next, she gradually transforms the ELM shield which is now effectively their metamaterial exoskin into something resembling a hang-glider, as gliding is still the most energy-efficient mode of transport in an atmosphere. This disturbs the efficiency of the ELM shield so she must perform this shape-shifting maneuver with care, slower than she normally performs it, slower than she’d like. But she has no choice.
Finally, they’re ready to go—Na-Yeli on top of the Moiety Alien as this seems to be the best way to leverage most of its mysterious floatation power—looking like a cross between a hang-glider and the classic Jumbo 747. Na-Yeli checks her system’s last reckoning of the origin of the last massive sound wave, and then, on a hunch, plots a course not the furthest away from it, but relatively close by.
It’s not quite fly-by-wire, as Na-Yeli remains firmly in control, but rather survive-by-wire as they will not last long if the ELM shield fails. Yet she still manages to get their shape aerodynamically optimized for extra lift. She’s going to need it, as the gravity in this layer averages 0.78 G and the pressure close to Earth normal, meaning it’s getting close to the edge of conditions where she can still hang-glide. As such, this whole contraption is her personal sound castle in the sky.
The processing power of her triple-redundant quantum computers is stretched to the limit as the massive amount of vibration data comes in through three dimensions. Exacting extrapolations, intricate interpolations, constantly evolving inferences—the system crunches numbers to save its life. Literally.
The ELM shield provides both Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien with a protective, three-dimensional wave of sound cancellation (and some extra thrust, to boot). The fact that both of them are still alive proofs that the system is working. Gradually, Na-Yeli diverts more energy to her ion thruster, speeding them up. The noise that does pass through is loud, multitudinous, irritating, and distracting, but bearable. It’s frightening, haunting, yet eerily familiar.
Then it strikes Na-Yeli. It sounds like a church bell, she thinks, way out of tune, with a thousand overtones and reverberations, but the first wave—the original—is like a bell. She pays more attention to it. Unmistakably.
Closer to the Core, they don’t have that much distance to travel from opening to opening—if circumstances allow them to take the shortest route—so Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien should reach the final opening in less than ninety minutes if nothing holds them up.
Only then does it occur to her to check her cameras. She’s been so focused on sound—basically on how to survive in this sonic inferno—that she merely expected nothing but darkness. She’s wrong. The sky is alive with colors, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of ghostly appearances, a mix of constant lightning—with certainly no lack of thunder—and Aurorae Borealis.
Crazy, multihued apparitions, sometimes branched like lightning, sometimes curtained like polar light, sometimes self-similar like fractals. Sonoluminescence lighting up the sky, Na-Yeli thinks, whiplashed so hard by sheer noise it glows in response. Not sure if it’s the N2 or O2 that’s occasionally lighting up or the many, many metal particles that saturate this atmosphere, but the end result sure is pretty, and awe-inspiring. The things she can show her family and friends if she survives all this.
Her radar and lidar—her sonar is useless in this extremely noisy environment—warn her of an incoming object. Thankfully, it’s not coming directly at them but is merely passing inside the radar’s range. It’s moving at about 40 kilometers per hour—something they can easily dodge. Na-Yeli combines the measurements of both sonar and lidar to get an appropriate size of the object. The numbers are crunched and the first estimate rolls out and Na-Yeli gasps. A globular object of sixty-five meters across, she thinks, and I have a very strong inkling of what it’s made of.
She checks the frequency response spectrum of the first and most powerful sound wave and compares it with a few from her database. Spectra from way back, when expert craftsman created a mold, then carefully cast and ground a bronze mass into a well-sounding bell.
The data don’t match exactly, but for all intents and purposes, it’s close enough. Characteristic peaks in the 360 to 4800 Hertz range, and while the intensity of her measurements is right at the very top of the scale, the shapes are remarkably similar. I’m willing to bet good money that this 65-meter monstrosity bouncing around here is made mainly of bronze, Na-Yeli thinks, which would put its weight at about a thousand tons. A bell from Hell. A Doom Bell.
The momentum of such a cannonball is immense. At some point, this almost unstoppable force meets a truly unmovable object—one of the two barriers of this layer. Why it’s such an unyielding barrier is something Na-Yeli hopes to find out, even if right now she’s at a loss. In any case, this massive bronze ball bounces against this unbreakable wall at 40 kps, rings like a bell, releasing something in the order of 150 Megajoules of energy, causing sound waves that would do the Krakatau eruption proud.
Now that she’s got the course and speed of the object, Na-Yeli and her equipment can extrapolate where it will bounce off the barrier again and know where the first—and loudest—sound wave will come from. This should greatly reduce the computational stress of her anti-sound system, the one thing for which she has no backup. But the calculations don’t add up to the massive cacophony they’re experiencing.
Don’t tell me there’s more than one, Na-Yeli, forced to think the unthinkable. So she calculates for two, for three, for four. Three bells match their measured monster sounds best. As if on cue, her radar and lidar report a second globular object, this time 64 meters across, moving at about the same speed. The little brother, Na-Yeli thinks, for your value of ‘little’, as it will release only some 143 MegaJoules per bounce. Ten minutes later, the third one comes into view—the first one having already disappeared beyond the horizon—clicking in at 66 meters, with about the same speed, releasing about 157 MJ/bounce.
Since it knows what is causing these maxed-out sound waves, her system becomes more predictive. It knows the approximate size, last position, and momentum of the three objects—and by correlating all the incoming data from their sound-and-vision sensor cloud these approximations become ever more precise—and it knows the size and exact borders of this penultimate layer. So it can predict where the next bounces of these bronze billiard balls against the round tables are, and the subsequent sound waves.
As prediction and actual measurement match ever closer, the load of the system gradually decreases. If the model is right, Na-Yeli might be able to run a second tracking/anticipating program on a second core.
Ideally, the predictive calculations and the data from their Soundcloud should match. Yet it never fully does. Their merging stops at about a 98% match. This is strange, as her state-of-the-art, triple-redundant quantum computer should be able to push matching certainty to well over 99.9%, leaving less than 0.1% for chaotic sound and sensor precision.
Yet, a good 2% remains unpredictable. Nothing to worry about, as her Soundcloud and ELM shield can easily deal with that, but strange nonetheless. Is there yet another, much smaller ball bouncing around? For it to get to the same decibel levels, it would have to move much, much faster, while it would encounter quite a bit more friction from the air in this layer. But nothing of the kind has been picked up by her radar, nor by her lidar.
It’s more noise than Chaos Theory—to the best of their knowledge—can account for. It’s an unpredictable source of sound that should not be there. Yet Na-Yeli and all her instruments can’t pinpoint another source of sound, and it must be huge in order to peak at the levels they’re looking at. Not something to be easily overlooked. Or otherwise, Chaos Theory needs to be refined. Which is another option, as Na-Yeli cannot find any known natural environment with these extreme sound levels. Like the way General Relativity could only truly be refined when humanity was able to perform direct measurements and experiments on an existing black hole.
An unexpected sound wave passes through the ELM shield. This was not uncommon when they were just getting started, the system being adjusted as the algorithms were being fine-tuned. That it’s happening now, after the system is fine-tuned, and updated with the actual main sources of the sound blasts, is worrying.
Na-Yeli checks the status monitors, but they show no anomalies. The triple-redundant quantum stacks are working fine, the ELM shield’s health readings are all above 90%, and the Soundcloud of Kittis all report back as fine and functioning, as well.
If it’s not her system, then something unexpected might be happening outside, in this Doom Bells soundscape from Hell? She surely hopes not, because that means their understanding of the dynamics of this system is incomplete, which might get them killed.
Another fierce sound blast coming through, rattling her teeth, hurting her eardrums (which are fully enveloped in sound-dampening foam already). And another. This can’t go on: she feels pain in her abdomen, hoping nothing is ruptured yet. Her ears beep and her belly hurts, and she doesn’t really want to know what other damage is being done.
She adapts her original program. First, she extends the reach of her Kittis, so they can hear strange peaks sooner. Then she maximizes the reaction time of her ELM shield, which was set a bit lower to save energy. In places like this, she’s constantly balancing budgets, feeling like a juggler that’s keeping up ever more clubs every time, dreading the moment she can’t keep them all in the air. Now, her system is faster while consuming more energy. First, survive this, then see if they’ve got enough battery capacity left to make it to the South Pole’s Diaphragm Gate.
Her tweaks work, as the sound blasts coming through reduce in power and frequency. The disturbances keep going for another two minutes, then—as sudden as they appeared—stop. Na-Yeli lets out a sigh of relief she didn’t know she was holding. If things stay calm for the next few minutes, she might set everything back to its original parameters. Or maybe not. Right now she’s just glad to be alive.
Things remain, well, not exactly calm, but predictable. They’re making good progress, and while Na-Yeli wonders if the 2% of unpredictable noise has something to do with the previous disturbances, and is something her system can handle. In any case, the sooner they are out of this excessively hostile place, the better. But something keeps nagging at Na-Yeli. Her subconscious—which has a direct link to LateralSys—keeps badgering her while she can’t quite put her finger on what is off about it. Before she can think about it further, her cameras pick up a flashing light source.
Short/short—long—short/short. The interstellar code for distress (on Earth this used to be S.O.S. in Morse code as short/short/short—long/long/long—short/short/short). Impelled by treaties and ingrained behavior across the galaxy, Na-Yeli has no choice but to check this out, and offer help, if possible.
Luckily, it’s not that far from her course, and while her energy balance is slightly negative—she’s using more power than she generates—the sound power harvesting parts of her ELM shield greatly extend her battery life. She could do an extra round in this layer if she felt like it. Well, her teenage self liked the odd blast of extreme noise metal, but she knows when she’s been outclassed. Anyway, towards the source of the distress call.
Like her own, the outer skin she finds has been aerodynamically shaped for flight, and indeed it does fly, probably because it carries much less weight than Na-Yeli. The alien exoskin is ruptured everywhere, yet the whole delta wing structure has more or less remained in one piece. Na-Yeli matches course and aims her floodlight at the fractured vessel. As far as she can see, the alien spacecraft is empty. She circles it several times, studying it from as many angles as is feasible, but no signs of life.
Somehow, though, parts of the autonomous systems are still running, a testament to their sturdiness (and their designers). The alien craft is using the same type of power harvesting from the Enigmatic Object’s fast-rotating electromagnetic field, embedded in its wings, and apparently still connected to its emergency lights, that keep sending their distress message to a stupendously noisy, yet otherwise empty world. Empty of life—current observers exempted—that is.
A lasered siren song in a screaming sky, both extremely sad yet uncannily poetic. After recording it all, there’s not much more Na-Yeli can do, apart from putting out the distress signal. But she thinks better of that, as it somehow belongs here, by now. A monument of endurance in a layer that constantly out-screams itself.
Still, it makes her wonder. Is this environment truly lifeless? What is excessively hostile to some species, might be exactly the right environment for others. On Earth, certain bacteria thrive near deep-sea volcanic vents, at pressures and temperatures that would kill all other Gaian life. There are beings—both alien and human, both natural and genetically modified—who survive and even thrive in the vacuum of space (as long as there’s an energy source relatively nearby). Sundiver probes in other solar systems have found signs of plasma beings in the solar corona. So how far-fetched would the existence of beings made from pure sound be?
Na-Yeli doesn’t know, cannot possibly know. The 2% they can’t explain might as well be some new kind of sonic chaos that is unknown to man. It might be self-sustaining sound sculptures randomly repeating, self-amplifying auditory patterns, an emergent type of übernoise. The chances of it being, by any definition, alive, are exceedingly small. The chances of it being, in any meaning of the word, sentient, are even more insignificant.
But extremely insignificant does not equal zero. And anything above zero is—when it comes to the possibility of life—not negligible. Then there was this episode where her ELM shield let significant sound peaks through: either this was the 2% that fell beyond Chaos Theory’s calculations passing through them, or—she knows this sounds crazy—the prodding of curious creatures that see something new, something strange? So if this one-in-a-million chance—better make that one-in-a-kazillion—is true, then they’re looking at life. At living beings. She should at least make some kind of record of it, even if it means they need to stay a little bit longer in this cacophonous hellscape.
Suppressing the anxiety that’s constantly fueled in this brassy inferno, Na-Yeli forces herself to look at this extremely unlikely phenomenon in the long run. Something must be sweeping these huge bronze balls along, she figures, otherwise, both friction and the energy releases that each extreme sound blast present should have stopped them in their tracks ages ago. She can’t be sure of exactly what keeps powering this ghastly pandemonium, but has a strong inkling, like a quickly rotating neutron star—or black hole—right in the center of this Enigmatic Object. The gravity throughout the layers has to come from somewhere, and apparently, the barriers between the layers do not—or cannot—filter out gravity. When—make that if—she’s got time, she might be able to calculate if the frame drag from such a rotating point mass would be sufficient to overcome the air friction and energy losses through bouncing that the oversized, globular Doom Bell surely must suffer.
On top of that, the fast-rotating electromagnetic field might generate currents inside the conductive bronze spheres, which might help push them along, as well. Quite possibly, the speed at which they’re moving is the equilibrium between the frame drag and electromagnetic push on one side, and the air friction and bounces against the impenetrable barriers on the other side.
And there’s another thing each Doom Bell should be losing—mass. Her probes already measured very high concentrations of metal particles, meaning that each Doom Bell must be losing minute pieces of it at every boisterous rebound. On top of that, it’s already quite hot—close to 32 ºC—and since there is no heat sink that she’s aware of—and she suspects that the barriers between the layers are near-perfect insulators, otherwise the whole Enigmatic Object would have cooled down to the cosmic background temperature long ago—so over time, it will only get hotter.
Simply meaning that the current situation—never mind how it got into that state—is not going to last forever. Either the mass of the Doom Bells will be low enough so that their bounces will generate lower sound levels, or it will get so hot in here that they will simply melt.
Either scenario means doom for any living beings of pure sound that need this crazy meganoise environment to live, possibly to thrive. But, the cynic in her says, there have been plenty of species both in Earth’s history and on many other worlds that have been living on borrowed time as their environment changes while they did not. Extinction is part of evolution.
No, the compassionate scientist in her says, a life-form so rare, so quintessentially unique surely deserves its own zoo. So how can she save them? She can’t recreate their environment, so the only thing she can do is copy it, or better, make a computer simulation of it. That should be easy, as her computers now know exactly how this layer works. Also, plenty of processor space is available now as they, seemingly, have the situation under control. If worse comes to worst, and she needs the spare CPU power to survive, she could kill the simulation, but would only do that with a heavy heart.
This will take some time, so she takes a small detour while she sets up the Doom Bells simulation. In the meantime, she tries to analyze the ‘two unpredictable percent’ as much as possible, looking for recurring processes to the best of her—and the quantum computer’s—ability. When the Doom Bells simulation is up and running, she runs it at a highly accelerated rate, to see if a similar kind of unpredictable noise-within-the-noise arises. After the equivalent of ten thousand years of real-time, the amount of unpredictable noise reaches the 1% threshold.
This encourages Na-Yeli because if nothing showed up in the simulation, it would mean the simulation is too far removed from the real thing, and the copies of the ‘real 2%’ would probably not survive. Now she hopes they have a fighting chance.
But she also needs to consider if she’s not inadvertently creating simulated noise life, which might compete with the noise life she’s—even if indirectly—trying to conserve. Throwing some imaginary dice in her mind, she decides to copy the ‘real 2%’ as much as possible when the ‘simulated unpredictable noise’ has reached 1.5% in her simulation. This will increase the whole to 3.5%, but she thinks there is plenty of space for the extra 2%.
When that point is reached, she slows the simulation down to real-time and copies the real 2% into her simulation. The whole process takes up about 20% of her third backup computer, a sacrifice she’s more than willing to take if it means conserving, no matter how indirectly, what might be a once-in-a-lifetime look at a bizarre new form of life.
Even if it means that the originals will eventually die, their copies—and their copy’s descendants—may live on. And be studied. And who knows, maybe someone—thankfully she’s not looking at a mirror—would be crazy enough to recreate their original environment, and try to resurrect the originals. With replaceable Doom Bells, air filtering, and temperature control, she surreptitiously thinks (and hopes).
She decides to make one final detour through this hyper-level sound layer—all systems are still fine, including back-ups—to see how the simulation develops. The 3.5% unpredictable noise remains quite stable, and she can still recognize reoccurring patterns in the simulation that match the real ones. Now she can only pray to the single god she believes in—most scientists and engineers call them Murphy—begging them to leave her sound beings alone.
Now, she must travel onwards, as the last opening awaits. She hates leaving a layer without discovering its most important secrets, without figuring out what makes it tick. But she should stay here as shortly as possible, to minimize the wear and tear on both her ELM shield and her probes, as she might need them on the way back. And the bow wave of anti-sound her system’s producing might actually hurt the—admittedly possible—life in this sonic madness. She was already taking a bigger risk than warranted. But it’s worth it, her conscience says.
So they arrive at the South Pole’s Diaphragm Gate, where Na-Yeli needs to proceed with at least the same caution as with which she entered this penultimate layer, this realm of the Doom Bells. Hovering over the final opening—through the Moiety Alien’s floatation powers assisted by the careful flapping of Na-Yeli’s exowings keeping her in a figure-of-eight holding pattern—she prepares to send a few probes through. Probes she can now miss, as they’ve only half a globe to monitor, and her radar will detect the eventual incoming of a massive Doom Bell well in advance.
—or—
Author’s note: with a little help from my friends1, I figured out that the decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, meaning an increase of 10 decibels means the power of the sound increases by a factor of ten, so 100 dB is 1010 more than 0 dB. So something like ‘a million decibels’ simply does not exist (with the single exception of the Big Bang, if that). Sound waves are variations of air pressure, so the loudest sound possible in air is about 194 dB; that is, the amplitude of the air pressure wave is 2 bar, varying from 0 bar (vacuum) to 2 bar. Because the vacuum is the lowest limit, sound cannot have more than 194 dB in Earth normal atmospheric pressure.
The eruption of the Krakatau in 1883 is estimated to have reached 180 dB, producing tsunamis of over 30 metres high, killing an estimated 36,000 to 120,000 people (directly and indirectly). Poor Na-Yeli is experiencing the full 194 dB in the Doom Bells layer, using a technical jiu-jitsu to stay alive. Extremely brutal. Will things get even more brutal in the next layer? Stay tuned! And many thanks for reading!
Reference to Joe Cocker;