Eventually, humanity—like all alien races that achieved a certain level of technological development—heard the siren song. Gravity waves in such a pattern that they had to be artificial. The pattern was as straightforward as it was irresistible: repetitive binary numbers representing the first eleven primes, the five Planck units, and Universal coordinates of its position over time. Here I am, come hither.
A trap, a call for help, or interstellar spam? Whatever it was—or will prove to be—only the most Luddite of souls would deny that it had accelerated the development of interstellar travel. While the speed of light limit still applies to everyone—human or alien, all had their version of Einstein—humanity had to go there. Especially as it was not in our quadrant of the Milky Way.
Inevitably, they found they weren’t the only ones, and certainly not the first. Whole alien civilizations had arisen and fallen, epic interstellar wars had been fought, and complex interspecies treaties had been forged on the anvil of the Enigmatic Object.
So alien it made other aliens seem like garden variety critters. So inscrutable it made string theory look like a simplified Rubik’s cube. So impenetrable it gave the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way a run for its photons.
Once the regular, if rare, opening sequence of the ‘shutter’ had been figured out, many had gone in. A few had come out. None had come close to finding out the Enigmatic Object’s inner secrets, inner workings, let alone its raison d’être.
Despite the treaty, there was a huge black market in classified information that certain alien species claimed they had extracted from the Enigmatic Object. The veracity of that information was as fluent as the momentum of an electron whose position had just been nailed. The speculations about what was in its—supposed—seven layers dwarfed the greatest myths and legends ever created by pre-starfaring cultures.
Nevertheless, the human race had bartered hugely valuable goods to get inside information. After all, what’s the worth of highly desirable goods, rare materials, or other earthly matters when the prize was the secret of the Universe?
More skeptic souls proposed that humanity—or any alien race, for that matter—would be better off putting all that effort into finding out the secret of the Universe through the scientific method. The problem with that, time-honored approach, was that it was facing an insurmountable obstacle. Like the way Moore’s Law in the early 21st Century and quantum computing in the early 22nd had run into the physical limits of their respective technologies, the scientific method had run into a Planck wall. The energy densities required to truly test the latest version of string theory—or its many competing theories—were unachievable in any practical manner.
No interspecies cooperation was going to pay for an accelerator the size of the Milky Way—never mind if it could be built—when every theory agreed that its findings would only be the next intermediate step in the twisted stairway to the ultimate theory of everything. Energy densities of Big Bang proportions were required, and nobody wanted to sacrifice the Universe itself, with all its intelligent species, to find out its secrets, in the extremely unlikely case they could.
The siren song of an Enigmatic Object of a more manageable size was much more appealing than neigh-unending investments in good old experimental physics. So humanity, like many species before them, had prepared one of their best, an explorer-cum-scientist-cum-champion, armed with their best technology and most up-to-date knowledge, to go down the inscrutable, cosmic rabbit hole.
Which is where Na-Yeli Maya finds herself, fighting to stay alive in the very first layer, with no time to find out what’s in there, what makes it tick, let alone why it’s there in the first place. Nobody said it would be easy, she thought, even worse, nobody guaranteed I would come out alive. Nevertheless, she’s extremely excited to be here.
In the aftermath of the deadly dogfights, Na-Yeli takes stock. Battery health lower than thirty percent, a big rip in her exoskin—which is slowly healing—and forty percent of her sensors offline, also being repaired. The repairs consume materials and the batteries need to be recharged. For the moment, all is clear according to her radar, lidar, and sonar, so she reprograms the metamaterials of her exoskin to become permeable to electromagnetic radiation, and extends two cylindrical fins, doped with conducting materials, perpendicular to the Enigmatic Objects quickly rotating field, in this converting a tiny amount of it into energy for charging her batteries. At some point, she will need to replenish her physical stock of materials, too, if she keeps losing metamaterials from her hull during battles.
Using all the updrafts she can find in this frigid heliumscape, Na-Yeli makes her way to the South Pole using as little energy as possible. Slowly, her batteries charge up to above eighty percent. But the peace and quiet don’t last long, as a flock of alien birds is approaching from the Southwest. It makes Na-Yeli wonder if anything ever gets the time to sleep—even in the majority of alien races, the sleep cycle was an ingrained evolutionary tool—without becoming prey. That’s probably why, so far, all of them come in flocks, she thinks, so one half can guard the other. Her computer implants point out that there are beings that let only one hemisphere sleep while the other wakes, but this particular adaptation would not work for Na-Yeli. So she better get out of here before the need for sleep arises.
With a weary sigh, she pulls in her recharging fins, reprograms her exoskin to Faraday cage mode, and mentally prepares for battle. But, even in the far distance, there is something familiar about this flock. A flickering, metallic sheen as from a multitude of double rotors. The cylindrical silhouettes of exactly the same size she remembers—and her instruments confirm. The botswarm she met when she first got in. Is it the same botswarm, or a different one?
The previous one was, if not hostile, at least indifferent. Na-Yeli strongly prefers not to waste a lot of energy and effort with another pointless battle. Yet the last, almost lethal encounter is still fresh in her mind.
She grinds her teeth, brings everything up to battle readiness, and lets the botswarm approach, ready to either fire or flee at the slightest sign of trouble. But exactly like the botswarm at the Arctic regions, this one also matches her course, and flies a few circles around her, never really coming close enough for direct contact. Again, to the utter disappointment of the communication AI, they don’t react to any of Na-Yeli’s transmissions—as neither the bat-mats and the X-Kites did—only observe. Again, like the first encounter, they seem to lose interest and head back to where they came from, in utter silence.
Na-Yeli travels onwards. According to her instruments—based mainly on the alien object’s magnetic field strength—and a combination of gyro headings, distance traveled, and dead reckoning, Na-Yeli estimates that she must be getting close to the South Pole of the second shell. The environment below has, as above, become dim, quiet, and again—thankfully—rather boring. In the distance, a circle of light appears.
Visible light, even. Which is good, since the need to keep radar, lidar, and sonar running constantly was slowly depleting her freshly charged batteries. While she still has plenty of reserves, she never knows when she’s going to need them. The circle of light’s still quite a bit off from the strength of daylight on Earth, but considerably brighter than the faint UV-glow—for which she needs filters—in this frigid, shrill, helium-filled layer. Is it light from the next layer seeping through, or merely a mark for the South Pole gate?
The next uncertainty is the set-up of the next opening. If it’s a shutter timed like the first one, then she might need to have to wait two hundred and thirty-three days. That seems next to impossible, in this environment. If it’s an actual opening of the same size, she should be able to pass without incident, as she’s lost some mass through the fired mini-torpedoes and the use of her ion thruster. However, if for some reason it’s tighter—more restrictive—she might go down in spaghettified flames.
The gravitational signature of the whole alien object is immensely complex. Gravity waves superposed on gravity waves, gravity waves of all kinds interfering with each other, and more. On top of that these gravity waves are weak, so in order to measure them in all three dimensions a carefully aligned, laser-operated network the size of a solar system is necessary. A bit too large for her to take along, as it is.
So she can only do a few indirect measurements through a number of sacrificial probes. As they get ripped to their atomic components, they do confirm that the gravitational ‘safe passage’ in this opening is the same as in the very first one (within the measuring error). While the temptation is large, she doesn’t want to fly through the circle of light. Safety first, as there is no immediate hurry.
One of the secrets humanity managed to get about the inside of the Enigmatic Object—at a price that Na-Yeli can barely imagine—was that the openings between the inside shells were not like the outside ‘shutter’. While supposedly the same size—which Na-Yeli just confirmed—the inner gates are reported to be like a strange kind of permeable membrane, a Diaphragm Gate if you wish, that filters out everything except sentient biological matter and everything in contact with it. Dead matter, machines, or even machine intelligences would find those Diaphragm Gates as impenetrable as the barrier shells. Relatively simple biological life forms like plants, lichen, or fungus would also not get through. Sentient life forms, and most definitely self-conscious life forms—and everything in contact with it and not further than twenty centimeters away—would pass, taking into account the size of the gate.
Assuming these data were correct, humanity developed hybrid drones, in order to allow Na-Yeli to take a ‘sneak peek’ into the conditions of the next layer, and—if necessary—make preparations. The actual drones are uplifted Kitti’s hog-nosed bats—the smallest bats known to humanity that barely survived the Anthropocene—fully integrated with the most advanced drone machinery. They can be cloned easily, making it possible for Na-Yeli to produce new ones if the original ones are damaged beyond repair, or lost.
In honor of their origin, Na-Yeli calls the hybrid, sentient drones ‘Kittis’. Right now, she has ten of them. Because they can—hopefully—traverse the diaphragm gates before or after Na-Yeli, they don’t count against her maximum mass limitation (only when she crosses the shutter, and when she has to do that the second time around it means she’s on her way back home, and this has become a luxury problem). Assuming there is useable material in the other layers—she most certainly doesn’t want to hunt or scavenge the life forms in this frigid helium layer—she doesn’t need to cannibalize from her own.
Now is the time to find out: can her Kittis pass through and return? Can she pass through? Na-Yeli strongly believes these gates will be traversable, otherwise, there is no point to this whole object. Whatever its secrets, whatever its surprises or unique environments, they’re all useless if they can’t be reached. Deep inside, Na-Yeli thinks there is a method to this madness, and she’s intent on unveiling it, no matter what it takes.
So she sends out a few Kittis to see if they can get through the, well, rabbit hole to the next layer. She programs them for a five-minute reconnoiter in the next layer. As fast as she can see, they pass through the membrane—which is opaque, yet somehow seems impossibly thin—without a problem.
Five minutes later, they return. They’ve measured an atmosphere about twice as thick as the helium frigidscape she’s still hovering in with her vacuum balloon. No radioactivity, same fast-rotating electromagnetic field, slightly stronger gravitational pull—all things that are not unexpected.
Their camera recordings do indeed show a strange wonderland beyond the semi-permeable rabbit hole: multi-hued reflections from glassy structures that shine with an eerie grace. Those are some ten to twenty meters in the distance, so there should be sufficient space for flying. According to their measurements, the gravity is still small enough, and the atmosphere thick enough for her to hang-glide through.
It seems safe to enter. Question is, will that transparently thin, flimsy diaphragm let her through, as well? She’s already calling it a semi-permeable membrane, or Diaphragm Gate. Only one way to find out.
She rides a long, upswing thermal and then positions herself stack above the middle of the circle of light, then gets into a fetal position as the form-fitting craft reverts to a sphere, then steers it straight down the middle, accelerated by the one-twentieth G pull of whatever mass there is stack in the Enigmatic Object’s center. Approaching the passage, she notices that the Diaphragm Gate’s semi-permeable membrane reflects her oncoming image, and does she see a slight ripple before contact …
—or—
Author’s note: and this concludes Na-Yeli’s trek through the Spiral Dogfights layer (see illustration above). What’s in store for her in the next layer, called ‘The Fractal Maze’? Stay tuned! “An intricately woven, intriguing space adventure. . .” according to The Prairies Review.