Forever Curious, Part 23
Chapter 8: Breaching the Core
Strangely, the Slow CEO almost approves of KillBitch’s notion of just jumping through. There’s nothing to get for them in this penultimate layer, and staying there will just waste energy. So going through and hoping there will be ways to recharge her batteries and resupply her metamaterials is probably right. Of course, behind this Diaphragm Gate could also be another layer of ‘just’ two point five kilometers thick, and four more. But somehow Na-Yeli thinks that’s not going to happen, especially regarding the gravity—at 2.5 kilometers it would become a crippling 50 G.
But—as is her wont—circumspection gets the better of her and she decides that a quick peek-a-boo before going in is prudent. Nevertheless, Na-Yeli’s willing to bet good money that there’s both a vacuum and a point mass—a neutron star or a black hole—in the Core, anyway. She sends a series of Kittis, variously programmed to return after five, ten, and fifteen minutes, through the last semi-permeable membrane.
In the meantime, the Moiety Alien does its peek-a-boo routine, shrinking four of its orbitals to minimum size, pushing them through the gate’s diaphragm, then blowing them up. Quite far, as Na-Yeli observes, the orbitals on her side shrink to almost minimum size. Then they become their, for what it’s worth, ‘normal’ size and the Moiety Alien pulls its four other orbitals back into the stuffed strangelet layer. Then it nods emphatically, the closest thing to a thumbs-up it can give.
Encouraging, but Na-Yeli prefers to await the findings of her probes. They all return undamaged, with the same reports. There’s a vacuum inside the Core, light—electromagnetic radiation varying from the infrared to ultraviolet range—a background radiation temperature of 20 ºK, and a gravitational force at the very center that pulls at the probes with approximately 1.5 G. The pictures of the light emanating from the center are both enchanting and strange—she has to see that light show for herself. None of her probes have measured anything directly dangerous—apart from the extreme point mass in the middle of it all—and Na-Yeli gestures for the Moiety Alien to jump through.
As if eager, it immediately complies and Na-Yeli has to scramble to follow in its ghostly wake. At the other side of the Diaphragm Gate, she immediately has to expend a considerable amount of her energy reserves to get herself into an orbit around the point mass. She can’t afford a low orbit, as to get out of that will require more energy than she can store, or generate. She doesn’t want to scrape the spaghettifying barrier, either, so settles for an orbit with a radius of fourteen-and-a-half kilometers or two-hundred-and-fifty meters free from the forbidding ceiling. Not that the point mass at the very center is any less forbidding.
As she settles into her orbit—which proves to be, to her surprise, quite a choppy ride—Na-Yeli concentrates on her instruments only. The light show she’s witnessed after passing through the last rabbit hole is just too mesmerizing, too distracting. Now that her orbit is stable, she can make a mental progress report, and turn her attention to the light fantastic later.
They made it! They’re in the Core, and considering all the remnants of previous expeditions she’s seen—and she suspects they’re but a small sample of the whole—that’s no mean feat. But before she takes stock of the situation right here in the Core, she has one loose end to tie up. The artifact KillBitch spotted as she hurled herself—her other self has ovaries of adamantium—through the strangelet balls.
She studies the pictures and the data that her instruments could take in the, admittedly, very tight time frame. The cylinder is clearly artificial, someone made it. And there are broken pieces sticking out from it, probably meaning it once was attached to something bigger. What it is, is one question. But the bigger mystery is, how does it stay there?
There’s no superglue or other adhesive known to man that could keep such an object in place on a strangelet ball. As they bounce against each other, the speed changes from several hundred kph in one direction to several hundred kph in the other. A momentum change that would break off even welded connections (supposing one could weld anything to strangelet, which is, of course, impossible). So what gives?
A piece of neutronium, kept in place by gravity? She runs a few quick calculations, but even that would be thrown off by the immense momentum changes at every bounce. Also a piece of strangelet, an accidental leftover from the initial construction? Na-Yeli doesn’t believe it. Whoever made these strangelet balls would never let such a blemish deface such austere perfection. No way.
She can only tick off the most likely candidates: the four basic forces. Gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. She’s already crossed off gravity and sees no way how the weak nuclear force could bind this artifact to the strangelet ball’s surface. The strong nuclear force would only work if the artifact was also made from strangelet, and she discarded that idea. So only the electromagnetic force remains. This artifact has to be charged.
It has to be charged very considerably. Extremely considerably. And on top of that, remain charged as it comes into contact—even if intermittently and randomly—with the charged Mercury. Indeed, while Na-Yeli can conceive of a few ways to charge something this drastically, she doesn’t see how it could keep that charge almost indefinitely. It doesn’t make sense, a material that doesn’t lose its charge.
If her mind had been a clockwork mechanism, there would have been an audible ‘click’, as suddenly it clicks into place. There is one type of material—which is still purely theoretical—that can, namely monopoles. Monopoles, according to some, exist only in physical dissertations, in theses about physics. A purely theoretical material, as none of the known alien species—including humanity—have discovered any. With the possible single exception of the HarLeGuins. The HarLeGuins—a race discovered by humans in a constellation named after Ursula K. Le Guin, a race who almost committed communal hara-kiri after the shock of First Contact—announced to have discovered ‘the true secret of monopoles’, but when asked to deliver proof of their claims, they declined, stating that they want to keep the secret to themselves, suggesting they use the monopoles for their inertialess space drives.
No one has been able to get their hands—or alien appendages—on one of these legendary drives. So the artifact her instruments have spotted might possibly be the remnant of this mythical inertialess drive, supposedly a pure monopole. Interesting, but it’ll have to wait until Na-Yeli gets back to civilization. She’s got a, well, if not actually bigger, most definitely a more massive, fish to fry.
The light show in here. How can she even begin to describe it? Rainbow-colored structures inside a three-dimensional maze of fairy tale luminescence. Circles within circles within circles. Spirals spiraling out of control. Bubbles upon bubbles within bubbles. All with a transparent gloss of the full visible spectrum, like perfectly round soap bubbles in space. Around the area of the singularity—Na-Yeli doesn’t think it’s a neutron or quark star for a second, it’s way too weird for that—the varying lights are both converged and reflected, appearing like a self-similar structure, a refraction of a constantly varying light, a kaleidoscopic bouquet of fractal sunflowers. While it appears to be self-similar, the whole of it is never really the same. While Na-Yeli realizes that her constantly shifting position is probably partly to blame, it doesn’t diminish the magic in the slightest.
It’s faint; that is, much less bright than daylight on Earth. Yet it is the dimness that gives the Core’s light fantastic a ghostly appearance, an ethereal quality. and a transparent frailty that makes it even more mesmerizing. In this case, less is indeed more.
At a whim, she programs her cameras to check the infrared and ultraviolet sides of the human-centered spectrum, as well. They show the same—albeit in false colors—a dazzling array of circles, spirals, and bubbles at every level whose borders display the full range of its respective spectrum. So aliens who see in infrared or ultraviolet get the same spectacle, Na-Yeli thinks, incredible. A rapture that depicts how we see the light.
Only after she’s shifted her orbit to different tilts, does she find the source of the mesmerizing light show. It’s emanating from the singularity at the center, a pulsating beam from its south side. This flashing light beam then reflects against the globular barrier and slightly diverges, then its divergent reflections are reflected and diverge, etcetera and so forth until they disperse into the multihued spectacle Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien were witnessing when they entered.
It can’t be just the reflection of these pulsating beams, there must be something else that gives this amazing depth, this undeniable aura to the light show in the Core. Na-Yeli doesn’t want to destroy her sense of wonder by checking her database, she has to figure it out for herself. If it’s truly a singularity down there, then it must be gravitational lensing. But if it’s a true singularity, how can light escape from it? Now she’s caught in a paradox.
Looking at the fantastic light show a bit more clearly, less dewy-eyed, she notices that there’s a minor imperfection, a tiny break from the perfect symmetry, a minuscule black splotch in the Core’s mesmerizing lava lamp. That’s a shame, and more than a little bit irritating. What is it?
If all the light emits from the singularity at the Core, then—logically speaking—this black blemish must be from something orbiting it. Na-Yeli sets her radar, lidar, and sonar to their highest resolution and performs a few complete sweeps of the Core—not that hard in a sphere with a twenty-nine-point-five-kilometer diameter.
Typically, the black hole doesn’t show—its diameter probably too small to be picked up by her instruments—but there’s a dark sphere with a one-meter diameter orbiting it at a mere two hundred and twenty meters.
That it hasn’t collapsed into itself under these immense forces is truly a testament to its engineers. But Na-Yeli estimates the chances of anything living in there at zero. The gravitational forces over there are about sixty-five hundred G. The tidal forces alone will rip anything apart. And even if some enormously extreme type of life still survived over there, the energy—per kilogram—required to move it to a higher orbit is more than any propulsion system she can come up with can deliver. With the single exception of matter/antimatter conversion, but so far nobody has been able to work out a stable solution for containing the antimatter. Countless experimental facilities have gone up in an expanding wave of gamma ray radiation trying to achieve just that.
Unfortunately, whoever that was, is toast. These aliens came close, though. As it is, they literally came too close. She gives a silent salute to their achievement and then moves on.
Beautiful as it is, and despite the single blemish of another failed expedition, she can’t remain enraptured with this unearthly light show forever, even if she’s sorely tempted, after all the things she’s been through. But duty calls, and she needs to analyze, if not everything, then as much as possible. Now, while the light is fantastic, the gravity doesn’t quite feel right, either.
The gravity field does not seem, or feel, constant. According to her best calculations, Na-Yeli expected to settle in an orbit with a period of 98 seconds, moving at 464 m/s or close to 1670 kph, where she would experience a gravitational pull of about 1.5 G. As far as she can tell, the average gravitational pull might be about 50% stronger than on Earth, but it sure feels choppy and turbulent. As if the gravity varies depending on her location in space. But all her positioning equipment, including her radar, sonar, and lidar carefully measuring her position relative to the outer barrier, pin her at 250 meters from it, at every point of her orbit. If she wobbles, then it’s barely measurable.
A turbulent ride that shakes her faith in physics. Well, at least a little. Because other observations seem to indicate that she’s slowly going insane.
It started with the Moiety Alien. She’s sure, as sure as she can be in this weirdest of all places, that there was only one of them. If it had a twin or an army of clones, then it sure knew how to hide them. So, to the very best of her—normally sharp—observations, they arrived with the two of them: one Na-Yeli (even if with an induced multiple-personality disorder) and one Moiety Alien.
But as she looks at the Moiety Alien, she sees ghostly copies of it—she looks again—before and after it. In the places where it’s been, and in the places where it’s going to be. At least she hopes orbital mechanics still work.
And it can’t be her eyes, as she’s seeing it through her external cameras. While these are normally projected straight onto her eyes, she can double-check them on her internal monitors. And on those internal monitors, those ghostly Moiety Aliens appear, as well.
Then something else strikes her. She’s been so ... distracted, and ... enraptured that she never bothered to look straight in front of her, as her radar, sonar, and lidar normally alert her of anything in her path, and her probes didn’t report anything like ghostly doubles of themselves, either. She’s made quite a few rounds already, and never bumped into anything. Even if her orbit is wobbly, it does always return to where it started. Unsteady, yet stable.
But now she looks in front of her, afraid of what she might see. And there it is, a ghostly image of herself. And one a bit further forward, and more. Each one getting vaguer, more transparent until they fade out of view. And if staring herself in the back isn’t awkward enough, what will happen if she looks back ...
She has to, even if she doesn’t quite want to. And indeed, ghostly copies of herself in the orbit behind her, all of them also looking back. If I make it back to the Berserker Forest, Na-Yeli swears, I’ll teach my megafauna friends to make booze. Being drunk might equalize this doubled-up double vision. But she knows but all too well that it’s not true.
She knows she should focus on the singularity stack in the center of the Core, but these impossible, well-nigh ungraspable phenomena throw her completely off track. A freakish light show is one thing. A turbulent orbit is another. But echoes of herself which—she’s now double, well make that triple-checking—do actually seem to exist. Otherwise, her radar, sonar, and lidar are lying, too, even if the echoes they see do get dimmer the farther away they are.
Then she wonders if her radar, sonar, and lidar are reliable, as well. Do they measure actual echoes or echoes of echoes? Or echoes of echoes of echoes? Echoes all the way down? What was this thing called, sanity?
The Moiety Alien doesn’t seem to care. It’s in a slightly lower orbit than Na-Yeli, a few arc degrees out of the way. Four of its orbitals—Na-Yeli could never tell the eight of them apart, even after they’ve shrunk and swollen, even after they’ve changed colors and even mimicked camouflage back in the Berserker Forest—are aimed straight at the singularity, so possibly it’s doing something, following its own agenda. Or it’s gone past bonkers—which Na-Yeli now sure is—into catatonia.
Now she’s afraid that she really has died, smashed to a Planck pulp by the monstrous strangelet spheres, and this is merely a wild dream of the afterlife, LSD visions of the next dimension. All she experiences merely an occurrence at a singularity convergence.
It’s getting too much, too overwhelming. Na-Yeli needs to step back, take a breath. She knows it, but is reluctant, as she also knows that there’s someone just dying to cast her oblique light as this madness. Once, just this once, Na-Yeli aka the Slow CEO wanted to figure this out completely by herself. Deep within, though, she knows she needs her complete self to find out what the hell is going on. So she swallows her disinclination and lets go, go with the flow, slant as she goes ...
An undetermined time later, the Slow CEO returns to Na-Yeli’s conscious fore, together with the anticipated migraine—the price to pay. As the stars and wrinkly white stripes in her vision recede, and the true pain in her frontal lobes rises to the fore, Na-Yeli wishes that this wouldn’t be necessary.
But, through a quirk of evolution, or a quality in reality’s design, it has to be like this. While humanity tried, it couldn’t get all these different qualities seamlessly into one persona. Somehow running the three of them—or even just two—is beyond the brain’s capacity, the way running more than one Operating System one computer doesn’t work: the moment there are two CPUs—each with its own OS—they become separate computers. Through synthetic biology and genetic modification, humanity tried to make bigger brains, but as the size of the brains increased—helped by artificially accelerated evolution—something else, something ungraspable, something indefinable, some might call it a soul—would get lost. Bigger, faster, but not necessarily better.
Nevertheless, despite—or maybe because of—the price Na-Yeli pays, LateralSys never disappoints. Her sideways self can be arrogant, aloof, and more than a bit bitchy, but she always delivers. On her own, LateralSys might be an autistic genius, an idiot savant who compensates her genius by being utterly detached or intensely antisocial, or both. She would not function in a group, let alone a full society of human beings without help—an unfortunate interface, a necessary evil as LateralSys would call it—and forget about communicating with aliens, at all. Like a magpie on acid, the smartest butterfly in the world, she would flutter from glittering enigma to shiny conundrum to ineffable mystery, never caring for the larger picture, unaware of her place in the grand scheme of things. LateralSys will deign to ignore it, but she knows she needs the other parts of Na-Yeli’s psyche to survive and to communicate.
In a similar way, KillBitch has certain superior qualities. Her essence stemming from survival instincts honed since time immemorial, she becomes hyper-fast by switching off the majority of the brain’s functions—as much as she can get away with without stopping the brain from functioning altogether. Subsequently, both the brain and the body operate at the fastest clock speed possible, with superhumanly fast reflexes. While fear isn’t actively suppressed—it’s still a major contributor to survival when used right—it’s put on lower priority as better alternatives—courage, snapshot decision making, ruthlessness—come to the fore. As with LateralSys, KillBitch comes with a price—an explosive energy expenditure that can only be carried out for a limited time, after which Na-Yeli needs considerable time to recover.
Even the Slow CEO has a price, even if it’s not clear up front. While she always tries to find the best possible solution, performing the finest balancing act possible and feasible, the Slow CEO always doubts herself. The moment her decision is made, she has qualms. Even as the solution works as planned—or even beyond expectations—she still has second thoughts, wondering if somewhere in the myriad of possibilities, something even better just slipped through her fingers. This lingering sense of insecurity never really goes away, and—slowly yet inevitably—builds up to a crisis of self belief. While she’s not intrinsically suicidal, the Slow CEO needs to be brought back to Earth by her schizophrenic sisters, every once in a while, no matter how much she denies it. It resets her self doubts and immensely increases her feelings of self-worth.
The three of them—together with an ineffable alien, a superposed extraterrestrial infection, and a cast of downloaded beings of pure sound—are now at the center of the greatest enigma of the known Universe. They’ll need everything they’ve got to solve it—or even to figure out a way to solve it—and then get out of here, as well. Secretly, the Slow CEO wishes that LateralSys would invent teleportation, no matter how grisly the details, so that KillBitch could beam the three of them out of here. After they’ve taken the prize, of course. And to get closer to finding out if there is a prize—and if it’s indeed there, what it is and how to get it—Na-Yeli needs LateralSys’s report.
Paradox, paradox, shining bright
In the Enigmatic Object’s darkest night
What lateral mind or eye
Could frame thy supersymmetry?
—or—
Author’s note: the big reveal, as in: “the emperor has no clothes”…;-). Yet a naked singularity is one of the strangest objects in the cosmos—many will insist they’re not possible (as per Roger Penrose’s ‘cosmic censorship’ hypothesis). Well, this one’s pretty much shielded—as in: stupendously hard to get to—for a reason. Which reason? Stay tuned! (And many thanks for reading).
Sorry, just noticed this. Many thanks!
just bought the book on Kindle, will report when... thanks