Forever Curious, Part 22
Chapter 7: Too Strange to Let
Too Strange to Let
As is her wont, Na-Yeli explores the next layer with a few Kittis. They find nothing. No atmosphere in the penultimate layer, just a vacuum. Na-Yeli figured that would happen eventually, in the Core at the least. She does have a high-efficient ion thruster, but its power reserves are—necessarily—limited. The gravitational force of about 1.1 G in this layer will keep dragging her down, and she will not have an atmosphere to fly through—read: to push off against—and possibly no ground to stand on.
Which means that in the Core—if or when she gets there—she needs to achieve an orbit around the extremely massive object right at its center (if her guess is correct). If there is no ground floor to speak of in the penultimate layer—unlike the Fractal Maze, the Sea of Hyperwaves, and the Berserker Forest—then standing on the inner barrier is no alternative either. Matter-eating spaghettification will take care of that.
She prefers to keep the power reserve of her ion thruster as close to maximum as possible, as she never knows how much she might need it at the core. So she can either enter the penultimate layer and quickly boost herself into orbit, or she can select a slingshot trajectory that moves as close to the inner barrier as feasible. The latter is faster, but also requires much more energy in case she needs to change direction, and dog knows what she—and the Moiety Alien—will run into this time.
Then she gets an inspiration: she can improvise some extra boost, using the materials in the Doom Bell layer. She programs her nanobots to produce a makeshift compressor—driven by a sound-powered generator, similar ones have recharged all her systems—and an air bottle with a nozzle. Her exoskin has been able to extract quite some metal particles from the Doom Bell layer’s atmosphere. After a while, she has a pressurized air bottle with a nozzle she can use for course changes as she orbits through the vacuum of the penultimate layer.
What both baffles and worries her is that her probes register almost nothing, just a vacuum with a background temperature of about 40 ºK—about ten times space normal—and nothing else. No strange objects, no light or other sources of electromagnetic radiation, or radiation of any kind that they can measure. Even her Casimir plates measure a normal vacuum. Her instruments are too small to measure either neutrinos or gravity waves—even if she suspects there are plenty of the latter—but neither are a danger to her or her companion.
One of her theories is that all these layers are a test, a kind of filter. Intelligent beings that successfully pass through all of them will arrive at the core to pick up or see something there. A message, a reward, a revelation, something. Passing through an empty vacuum is not much of a test, as everybody had already done that just to get to this Enigmatic Object anyway.
So something must be wrong, horribly, undeniably wrong. But what? She can’t keep pondering this right here in the sonic madness of the Doom Bell layer forever, as her energy reserves are slowly, yet inevitably depleted. She has to go to the next layer. But she knows so damn little ...
She decides to send in one last swarm of Kittis, programming them to make a thirty-minute round trip at full speed, which should take them through, which should take them through most of the southern hemisphere—well hemi-shell would be more appropriate—of the penultimate layer. This lack of information scares her more than anything else.
While the probes make their tour, she thinks about what if. What if she encounters something so crazy, so dangerous she needs extra thinking time? Running constant figure-eight patterns, which means changing orbits every once-and-a-while, takes energy, of which she only has a limited amount. On top of that, here at the South Pole, the electromagnetic field is weakest, meaning precious little recharging abilities.
She scrambles to think of the best energy-saving holding pattern there is, and inspiration strikes. A pogo stick with sacrificial material at its very bottom, so she can jump on and off the inner barrier. She could even use it to jump around that whole layer, if necessary, as the inner diameter is only 14.75 kilometers (as measured by her Kittis). Three hours jumping, four tops.
She has to compactify most of the material of their ELM-shield anyway—as it seems there is no spare material in the penultimate layer—so she might as well partly refurbish some of it into a pogo stick. Even if she may not need it, it makes her feel better.
Most of the probes come back, a few don’t. Those that have returned report a frantically rippling magnetic field in the equatorial region and some fast-moving heat signatures. And they confirm the local background radiation of about 40 ºK, or—in other words—something is heating this layer up. But slowly, very slowly. Something is happening in the equatorial region, and she doesn’t trust it. Not one bit.
She has two options. One is diving into the penultimate layer and converting part of the gravitational energy into getting her into orbit—basically around the point mass that she’s fairly sure must be in the Core—and once in orbit, her energy expenditure is zero. Disadvantage, she’ll be moving fast. If her estimate of the point mass in the Core is correct—about 4.68 x 1019 kilograms, or about twice the mass of 16 Psyche, one of the larger asteroids in Earth’s solar system’s Asteroid Belt—then an orbit of about 17 kilometers will take her 124 seconds (just over two minutes), traveling at a staggering 1540 kilometers per hour. In other words, only about half a minute before she heads straight into whatever it is at the equatorial region. At fifteen-hundred-and-forty clicks, not much time for—costly—course corrections.
Her second option is to let herself drop down to the inner barrier of the penultimate layer—needing to brake with the makeshift compressed air bottle—and then bounce around on her tailor-made pogo stick until either she’s figured out what the hell is happening in there, or the sacrificial material at the bottom of her stick is used up. She wishes she could just hover like the Moiety Alien—she even doesn’t understand how it does it, both in an atmosphere and in a vacuum—but it’s one of those things she likes to get to the bottom of when they get out of here alive. If they get out of here at all.
She can’t stay in this blaring pandemonium indefinitely—and she’s only got ELM-Shield layers left, so no redundancy—even if it truly is the devil she knows. She gestures for the patiently waiting Moiety Alien to follow her and they jump through, one by one. Gravity is stronger in here, slightly more than Earth normal, meaning she needs to expend more energy to break her fall. She points the nozzle of the pressurized air bottle downwards and gently lets out air. She opens the nozzle further until she falls at an acceptable speed, while her radar, sonar, and lidar measure the distance to the bottom.
Different from all previous layers, this penultimate layer is only 2.5 kilometers thick. On the one hand, this will greatly reduce the amount of energy she needs to slow her descent. On the other hand, it makes this seemingly empty layer feel rather claustrophobic in comparison. She still has air left when she finishes her descent, and while the gravity has increased to 1.4G at the inner barrier, she’s designed her pogo stick for well over 2G.
During her descent, her instruments try to take in as much information as possible. As far as they can measure, everything from the polar region to the very beginning of the equatorial region is empty, nothing but vacuum between two impenetrable barriers. In the equatorial region, though ...
It’s unmistakable on her radar, sonar, and lidar, six giant spheres rolling—or sliding—exactly over the equator. Their diameters match the thickness of the layer, two-and-half kilometers across. They make the sixty-five-meter-across, one-thousand-ton Doom Bells seem tiny in comparison. On top of that, they move faster. Much faster.
They bang against each other all the time at speeds that put a deep, existential fear into her. The speeds her radar, sonar and lidar measure vary from one hundred up to three hundred meters per second. In other units, three-hundred-and-sixty up to well over a thousand kilometers per hour. These humongous monsters sometimes exceed jetliner speeds.
It doesn’t make sense. If these giant spheres are solid metal their weight would be about 5 x 1014 kilograms or 500 trillion tons. Ten thousand times as light as the point mass in the Core, but massive enough that she should feel a gravitational pull nearby. But then getting to move at these speeds would have taken a truly tremendous amount of energy. Her estimations showed that the average speed of the Doom Bells—about 40 kph—more or less matched the equilibrium it would have from the energy it gained through frame drag plus the electromagnetic push and the energy it lost through air friction and the über-noisy bounces.
On the other hand, there is no air friction in here. But can frame drag alone accelerate such massive monsters to such monstrous speeds? She somehow doubts it.
On top of that, why do these monsters stay put exactly on the equator? If their diameter fits inside the thickness of this layer, they should be moving all through it. Na-Yeli thanks Murphy that this is not the case, but she would feel much better if she knew why. Dancing on her pogo stick, she increases the measurements of her radar, sonar, and lidar to the highest precision available, and cross-checks all data. There it is—the outer barrier (and the inner one) are not exactly spherical. They have a very slight bulge at the equator and are very slightly flat at the poles. When she compares the measurement of all the six giant spheres—not easy to do at the speeds and bounces they’re making, but a statistic average will have to do—it appears that these just exactly fit in the, very minor, bulge at the equator.
While this fact saves her ass, Na-Yeli is baffled. The barriers between the layers—whatever they are—seem impenetrable and cause spaghettification of every solid material that touches them. She’s experienced that—actually the bottom of her pogo stick is experiencing it with every languid bounce she makes—up and close, personally. Several times already.
So as these giant spheres roll against the barriers, they should experience spaghettification of their material to its atomic constituents. The massive amount of metal particles in the Doom Bell layer showed that this process was ongoing with the Doom Bells, meaning they were probably much bigger to begin with. So these giant spheres should already have worn down sufficiently so that they would roam all across this layer. Yet they don’t.
The Enigmatic Object is old. So either some immensely advanced aliens set up this nightmare trap just before the Moiety Alien and she arrived here—unlikely in the extreme—or this has been going on for quite some time, meaning these giant spheres don’t wear down. Meaning they cannot be normal matter, they have to be made from something much, much stronger.
She racks her brain and her database. Neutronium? No, they’re way too big to be neutron stars. They would have collapsed into black holes well before they even got close to this size. What if they’re hollow? But then they should have collapsed under their own weight, and before that thin slivers of neutronium will experience beta decay, in which case they would have decayed into protons, electrons, and a stupendous amount of freed up energy in the form of gamma rays.
A quark-gluon plasma? That’s so hot she’d be burnt to a cinder. Black holes? At that size, they would have merged and swallowed up the whole Enigmatic Object, easily, before you could say ‘singularity’.
The only thing left is strange matter or strangelets. Then again, strange stars of that size would also have collapsed into a black hole due to gravitational pressure. So a hollow strangelet? Theoretically, if its surface tension is above a certain threshold, a strangelet could be stable. Still, a hollow sphere of strangelet should implode on itself due to the same gravitational forces. Something must keep it from collapsing.
Maybe they’re stuffed? But even the strongest common material—Osmium? Titanium?—would be too weak to resist such pressure. She double-checks her database. Theoretically, strangelets can have a charge, if only for about a few femtometers thick, basically one or two layers of strangelet (a strangelet; that is, an up, down and strange quark, is about two femtometers across). Suppose the inside strangelet layer of this hollow strangelet sphere is charged? And then inside this hollow strangelet sphere, there is a core—which can be normal materials, say ions—that has the same charge, meaning the electromagnetic force keeps the hollow strangelets from collapsing under their own weight?
Madness, but it’s the only plausible explanation she can come up with. She has to know, so she sends in a sacrificial probe to measure the magnetic field of one such giant sphere, let it bounce off one of them if necessary. She is indeed already measuring a faint magnetic field, and if she can overcome her fear and gently move closer to the equator with her pogo stick, she should see the intensity of this field increase.
Hop by hop, she gets closer, ready to rocket herself away with the air pressurized bottle, or her ion thruster if necessary, buttocks pinched with sheer anxiety. Bit by bit, the intensity of the magnetic field increases, as well. Extrapolating, Na-Yeli calculates that it should be very strong on the surface of the—she mentally named them already—stuffed strangelets.
The probe returns, and it measured a very strong magnetic field, about 3.2 Tesla, at the very surface it bounced back from—and miraculously came back in one piece. It also shows that there is a liquid sticking to the giant sphere, that is ‘shaken off’ at every bounce, but immediately after that flings back to the nearest sphere, as if something is attracting it towards them. It even managed to capture a tiny globule of the liquid—Na-Yeli now sees it bounced off several times from the giant sphere as if it had a thrill ride—which Na-Yeli’s spectrometer now analyses. Hg and Hg2+. Mercury and Mercury ions positively charged quicksilver where the ions form about 0.6% of the total.
Normally, if she can foresee where two of these giant balls clash against each other, she could easily fly through the spaces between them either near the inner or the outer barrier. Tens, maybe even hundreds of meters of room. Just a matter of careful timing.
But the Mercury changes everything. Positively charged, it sticks to the stuffed strangelets, meaning these are negatively charged. So they must be hollow, with a core of negatively charged ions inside that keep the—also negatively charged—strangelet shell from collapsing under its own weight. The Hg2+ ionic Mercury then sticks to the giant stuffed strangelets, and tends to go to where it feels the most negative charge; that is, near the equators of the giant strangelet spheres.
Every time the strangelet spheres bash against each other, the Mercury is shaken off at a tremendous speed, also varying from 100 to 300 meters per second or some seven hundred kilometers per hour on average.
So if Na-Yeli dives through one of the open spaces between the spheres there will be Mercury sloshing at her, Mercury with a density thirteen times that of water moving at the speed of a jet airliner. Quicksilver, indeed. That’s not survivable.
Of course, the movement of the Mercury is even more chaotic than that of the strangelet spheres. There is a minor change that she might be missed by it altogether, but that chance is truly unpredictable.
Then her best bet is to dive straight between the middle of two giant spheres right when they part and be through before one of them returns—normally one will meet a neighbor sooner, and bounce back first. No quicksilver in between, as that bounces off to the sides. But if she times wrongly, she’ll be squashed flatter than a bug on the windshield of a speeding car, flatter than a probe slamming into a neutron star.
She is committed, she could get back into the Doom Bells layer if she unpacked her compactified ELM shield, but she’s been sent in to complete this mission. Yet she’s scared shitless.
She carefully pogos closer to the incomprehensible violence of the equatorial region of this penultimate layer, but the closer she gets, the more terrified she becomes.
Despite her fear, she’s already programming her computer systems to take snapshots of the strangelet spheres’ positions and momenta, and while the behavior, in the long run, will be chaotic, it should be predictable within certain safety margins in the short run. Like the weather, very good to predict for the next few hours, more difficult for the next few days, and almost impossible for the next few weeks. She’s a trained scientist, and it’s science, stupid! Just trust the equipment and the calculations, and you’ll be fine.
But still, she’s deadly afraid. Science doesn’t feel, doesn’t experience these unstoppable mountains, doesn’t imagine how truly implacable and horribly destructive they are. She’s never been so afraid in her life, an existential terror intensified by each soundless mega-bounce, a bottomless dread deepened with each invisible ultra-clash. Something she can’t overcome: some people have incurable vertigo, some people have untreatable claustrophobia, she has this. No test ever showed this very singular phobia, how could it? This situation is as unique as the phobia it engenders within her. She’s paralyzed with angst so immense it defies description.
And now the Moiety Alien gestures for her to follow it. She waves a definite no-no, bouncing on her pogo stick, whose bottom sacrificial material is slowly running out. The Moiety Alien makes a shrugging gesture—it learned really well—and moves to the violently bouncing giant spheres nevertheless. It accelerates as it approaches them, zigs and zags a bit as it chooses its final trajectory, and then simply dives in. Na-Yeli quickly launches a probe with a powerful torch after it, and even then she has to superimpose the radar/sonar/lidar data to see what actually happens.
It takes all of Na-Yeli’s willpower not to close her eyes in abject fear. Time seems to slow down as she watches her companion dive straight into that hyper-kinetic turmoil, seemingly to meet its untimely death as it shoots almost straight into a strangelet sphere, only to see a hole opening, maybe just in time. But no, it closes while the Moiety Alien is diving through, it’ll be smashed into a million little pieces ...
But no. Lightning-fast, it squeezes its forward globules, well, forward, as its aft globules, which are near the inevitable collision, shrink to their minimum size. It won’t work, Na-Yeli thinks at adrenalin hyperspeed, you can’t squeeze them to sub-Planck size. Then the giant spheres part, and she sees the Moiety Alien move onwards, seemingly unharmed. Only then does she realize that it didn’t go straight through the center—where the giant spheres meet—but just a bit off it. A spot narrow enough for it to squeeze through, and where the quicksilver is sloshed aside.
Very smart, she thinks, thankful her companion is still in one piece, but I can’t squeeze myself together like that.
To make its point, it comes back again two minutes later, beckoning her again, almost impatient, as if saying, c’mon, it’s cool, a piece of cake. But Na-Yeli has made too many calculations, she knows the masses and the forces involved. They’re almost off the scale, and invisible without instruments. Her most powerful torch can only light an insignificant spot on a twenty-five-hundred-meter diameter sphere. Uncontrollable forces operating in total silence and in utter darkness. She can’t unsee or unthink them, and the fact that they’re both absolutely quiet and completely invisible only adds to her existential terror.
For the life of her, she can’t do this. For the life of her, she must do this. Bouncing gently on a pogo stick in a dark vacuum, she’s frozen with indecision and fear. Then the sensors at the bottom of her pogo stick tell her that her sacrificial material is running out, spaghettifying into a thin vacuum. She has to act now, but she can’t overcome her fear. She faints, probably preferring slow spaghettification above jumping out of existence in the blink of an eye ...
But not KillBitch. KillBitch will never die without a fight, and will always part in a blaze of glory rather than sizzle out right before the final opening. She quickly opens the nozzle of the air pressurized bottle and rises to the diametrical middle of this penultimate layer, following the cues of the ‘dive-through’ program the Slow CEO did set up but was too frozen in fear to follow up on. Once the bottle is empty, she uses the ion thruster to get her into the correct orbit, then takes the longest way to the other side, in order to come as close as to the orbital speed—almost 800 kph—as possible.
After somewhat more than a third of a turn, KillBitch is meeting the clash of the strangelet spheres head-on. That she’s moving with approximately the same speed as the fast-moving, massively bouncing monsters makes her feel good. It gives her a sense of equality, of being at the same level, no matter how false that equivalence, in reality, is.
It’s all or nothing, or as digital as an analog life can get. Her body is soaked with adrenalin, her senses operate at top speed and subjective time slows down. KillBitch isn’t crazy, as she’s following the program’s cues. The short-time predictability of these giant, rebounding balls should be good, actually quite easy for the massive computing power of her triple-redundant quantum CPUs. At some point, you just have to trust the program and your own speed and agility.
As she enters the danger zone—the juggling game of the gods—time, for her, slows down to a crawl. The gargantuan strangelet spheres seem to move in slow motion, like globular mountains creeping in a lucid dream. Initially, her course seems to be aimed straight at one, but as she gets closer, as if by magic it moves away.
Slowly, deceptively slowly as the adrenalin in KillBitch’s system reaches new record levels. It’s as if her soul is alight with holy fire. A gap between two mountainous spheres opens, and as she dives into it, deeper and deeper and deeper, she experiences—through her lidar’s reflections—just how huge these stuffed strangelets are.
Then—out of nowhere—she sees something that shouldn’t be there. An artifact on a giant artifact (even KillBitch doesn’t doubt that the strangelet balls are constructs) that emits radiation of a very specific frequency, glowing in such a narrow spectrum that her spectrometers could not ignore this extremely particular spike. The actual glow is well outside the visible spectrum, so is superposed on KillBitch’s vision with false color, in this case, a deep amber. A rapid burst of lidar flashes catch it in ‘real’—read: visible to humans—colors and estimates its size as about two meters and its shape as a cylinder, probably a hollow cylinder. Then—in the blink of a hyperactive eye—they’re past it.
In the meantime, the gap has reached its maximum size and is narrowing again, while KillBitch sees that she’s not yet at the right side of the curve. The slope is still going up, ever so slightly. Then there’s no more slope, a piece that’s almost straight while the other sphere—also a near-flat surface from her vantage point—is closing in. Like a bug between two rapidly closing hands, like a piece of red hot metal between the hammer and the anvil ...
But she’s a quick bug, a damned fast bug. She’s a speeding, hot rod, goddamn screeching metal motherfucker. Her face stretched in an all-or-nothing grin, she gets out of harm’s way just in time.
Through!
She raises a lone fist to the uncaring forces of destruction, in defiance, in victory. Open wide the dopamine gates, her hormonal system says and she gets the high of all highs, a furious spit in the face of death. For the shortest of moments, she even gets overconfident. I could turn around and do this again, right now. But as she moves past the northernmost position of the giant strangelet balls, she sees the Moiety Alien speeding up in parallel to her, about one strangelet ball diameter away. Since you’re here, as well, KillBitch rationalizes her urge to do it again away, we might as well stay, and get to the very bottom of this.
They gradually match their courses inwards, towards the final Diaphragm Gate at the North Pole. As it is, KillBitch just wants to jump through, at full throttle, and get all this shit over with. But somewhere down, deep inside, she knows that’s probably not the wisest course of action. So she attaches a fresh layer of sacrificial material on the pogo stick, lowers herself down near the opening, and settles into a gentle bouncing rhythm—the program can, by now, do it automatically with ease—and let the boss take over, again. The chickenshit coward!
—or—
Author’s note: a full chapter in one post? Yes, like the very first one (meaning it’ll work if they’re short enough), even if it’s a bit long for a substack post. The final three of the final chapter will be somewhat shorter as Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien (+ their crew) enter the Core in their effort to unravel the secrets of the Enigmatic Object. What will they find? Stay tuned, welcome to the new subscribers and many thanks for reading!