Escaping the Relativity Prison
While preparing to get out of the Core, Na-Yeli’s shocked to find that two of her Kitti probes have unusual damage. Something small—about 2 millimeters across in the worst case and about 0.5 millimeters across in the other—has passed right through them, obliterating everything in their path. No burn marks, no signs of explosions or lasers, just a straight path of total destruction.
She has a strong inkling of precisely what caused it, and it chills her to the bone. If this is what I think it is, she thinks, mortally afraid, then I’d rather face the full strangelet balls without KillBitch.
She and the Moiety Alien can’t enter the next layer right now; more exploration—and preparation—is required. Never mind that this delay will set them off even more, temporally speaking. As they continue to orbit the naked singularity at the very center of the Enigmatic Object, they pass timelike geodesics—unleashed by the lifting of the Cauchy horizon—and move through time. Forwards or afterward, they don’t know, only that they’re getting ever farther into the past or the future.
I need to make probes that are as hard as possible, Na-Yeli thinks frantically, as time is of the essence. What’s the hardest material that we can make?
Diamond still is, and an inner cushion of syntactic foam also protects them against extremely high pressures. She works as fast as she can to program the ultra-advanced 3D printers and metamaterials to produce ten new probes of the highest sturdiness. In the meantime, she witnesses how the Moiety Alien—against her best, most frenetic gestures of ‘don’t do it’—does its usual peek-a-boo routine. At the Diaphragm Gate, it minimizes four of its orbitals, aims those at the semi-permeable membrane, gently pushes those through, and then enlarges the smallest ones by deflating the four biggest ones.
Na-Yeli watches as the four largest orbitals slowly deflate, then sees the Moiety Alien jerk back as if hit by something. Idiot, she can’t help but think, I told you so! But things are not well with the Moiety Alien. Normally, all eight of its orbitals return to their typical, all-eight-exactly-the-same sizes. Right now, they don’t. And the Moiety Alien has the uncanny ability to ‘float’ everywhere—in gravity fields, outer space, and the strangest of environments. Now, it just falls down, spiraling towards the singularity in the exact center of the Enigmatic Object.
Na-Yeli can’t let that happen and immediately engages her ion thruster on an interception trajectory. While the naked singularity has no event horizon, there is a gravitational point of no return for Na-Yeli, where she doesn’t have sufficient energy to escape its attracting clutches.
She barely catches up with the falling Moiety Alien before that inescapable radius and uses her last erg of energy to get them both in a stable orbit. While its orbitals remain asymmetrical—four too large, four too small—it manages to wobble them slightly up and down, both a sign that it’s still alive and its way to say ‘thank you’. Na-Yeli lets out a sigh of deep relief. ‘It’s alright,’ she gestures, ‘I’ll get us out of here.’ In reality, she doesn’t have the faintest clue how. But for now, they’re still alive, if not exactly kicking.
Now, it will take a few precious hours to recharge my batteries, she thinks, thanking dog that she decided against asking the alter-Universal aliens to bring the naked singularity’s charge back to its previous value. So, she’s recharging through the SEKO’s—the Super Extreme Kerr Object, LateralSys’s name for the naked singularity—fast-rotating magnetic field. About ninety minutes remaining, her charge counter reads. In any other layer, that would just have been a minor setback. In here, where lifting the Cauchy horizon has unleashed time-like geodesics, time is extremely precious. Time that stretches out towards a dark past or an uncertain future.
There’s nothing I can do about it, Na-Yeli resents, as I’ll need most of the energy first to get into the highest orbit and then need to recharge again. She certainly does not want to enter the next layer with partially charged batteries. She also figures that she better employ that—unintended—extra time usefully. Her newest, sturdiest probes are now ready, and their much better fuel-to-mass ratio allows them to both escape this orbit and enter through the North Pole’s Diaphragm Gate. Na-Yeli programs them to stay in for twenty minutes and then go back.
Twenty-two minutes later, nine return. Only three are undamaged; the other six show the same scars as the two previous, less sturdy ones, as if a bullet or piece of shrapnel passed through them, obliterating everything in its path. No escaping the horrible conclusion, Na-Yeli thinks, this is ultra-dense matter, most probably strangelet debris. She wonders if the stuffed strangelet balls—veritable mountains with a two-point-five kilometer diameter—have broken down into smaller pieces. These mountains of strange matter were moving with speeds sometimes over a thousand kilometers per hour. If they fell apart, Na-Yeli estimates, the shrapnel will bounce around at similar speeds. Invisible, unavoidable, and virtually indestructible.
It’s more terrifying than her worst nightmare. A two-and-a-half kilometer thick layer where uncountable pieces of strangelet debris are bouncing around at very high speeds. Her radar, sonar, and lidar will detect them, but they’re moving so fast she can’t evade them.
Try as she might, she can’t think of a solution, a way to ensure safe passage. She considers her options:
Speed through it as fast as possible, using the shortest trajectory;
Ask the hyper-advanced aliens on the other side of the SEKO for help;
Consult LateralSys (her pride be damned);
Option 1 assumes—more honestly, hopes—that by staying in there as short as possible, the accumulated damage not only does not kill Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien (she’ll be damned before she leaves it behind) but that they can also recover from it, as there are five more layers to cross. Five layers that may have changed beyond recognition, as well.
Option 1 also assumes that she can dive into the next layer—which used to be the Doom Bells’ realm—unprepared. If the Doom Bells layer has not changed, diving in there without anti-speakers and a cloud of drones is certain death. And if it has changed, they need to inspect the next layer with a few drones to see if they can enter or how they need to prepare. So right now, option 1 is her last—probably suicidal—resort.
Option 2 is also wrought with well-nigh insurmountable difficulties. For one, the communication between them and the hyper-advanced aliens is severely limited. They did exchange information, but only as in: ‘let’s exchange all information each side has’. Humongous amounts of info, but a process that’s easy to convey. Same with her request for extra power. But to explain what she thinks is going on in the old ‘stuffed strangelets’ layer and then ask for a solution is extremely difficult. She’ll bet her communication AI will spend virtual eternities to set up the correct protocols.
But that’s not even the biggest problem. Should she ask the hyper-advanced aliens for help? They didn’t set up this Enigmatic Object, this cosmic conundrum-cum-deathtrap for nothing. If they wanted to communicate with anybody, they could have just put up the naked singularity without the Enigmatic Object around it or—if it needs a veil—hide it behind just one of these impenetrable layers with a shuttered opening.
No—she suspects—they made it so stupendously hard to get all the way to the Core, to the SEKO, because they only want intelligent species in there that are up to it. That are technologically advanced enough to send in a small, yet well-equipped messenger, and that have the wit, flexibility and sheer fortitude to make it all the way through. And back out again.
The moment she asks for help, she’ll probably disqualify herself. That is what Na-Yeli, the slow CEO, firmly believes. She hates to die, but she hates to fail even more. So, asking the aliens in the other Universe for help would imperil her mission. OK, dying will also imperil her mission. However...
Thinking that through, she should prepare a capsule with all her findings and hand that to the Moiety Alien. If it recovers, and she can get it through to the next layer, it could deliver that message if she perishes along the way. A lot of ifs and a long shot, but then she might not have died in vain. She’ll bring it up if and when the Moiety Alien recovers—which will be hard for her to tell, but whatever.
Which leaves option 3. Na-Yeli doesn’t exactly like to consult LateralSys too often, as the ensuing migraine wreaks havoc with her thought processes for several hours afterward. But she sees no alternative. She hangs back, invokes the self-hypnosis that brings up her über-creative other, and slowly fades away.
Eighty-five minutes later, just before her batteries reach their full charge, she awakes to the memorandum of LateralSys:
Slow CEO of a company that could be massively successful,
The situation we’re facing here may very well be intractable. But before I explain that, one small thing might help us somewhat.
The strangelet balls that we initially passed were negatively charged. In retrospect, there must have been a process that kept them negatively charged, as the ongoing contact with the wildly sloshing, positively charged mercury should have discharged them. Most probably, the fast-rotating electromagnetic field of the SEKO kept the strangelet balls charged, as their surface is much bigger than that of the sloshing mercury (which was located mainly around the equator).
This means that the strangelet balls extracted energy from the SEKO’s electromagnetic field—in the same way that we do with our superconductor-threaded exoskin. This probably means that our alter-Universal aliens have to keep pumping energy in the SEKO on their side, if only to maintain it as a naked singularity (which makes me wonder if this doesn’t violate our energy conservation laws, so possibly they might extract some energy from us at other locations—maybe black holes)?
In any case, whatever the process, the strangelet balls were negatively charged. The positively charged materials—the sloshing mercury—will have settled on the inner barrier. Since it’s already the substantiation of an element, it already consists of its atomic constituents—hence, no spaghettification. It’ll probably form a thin, positively charged, levitated layer around the inner barrier.
The Strange Hail, though, is so hard that it will either wear down much slower or possibly not wear down at all. On top of that, the strange hailstones will keep interacting with the fast-rotating electromagnetic field, which might help them maintain their negative charge, even if they lose some of it when they bounce through the thin, positively charged Mercury layer above the inner barrier.
In that case, if we use our superconducting-doped exoskin to generate the fiercest magnetic field possible (within our means) and aim the magnetic North Pole ahead of us, we might be able to deflect the Strange Hail somewhat. Not shield us from them altogether—as they move too fast—but deflect them a bit, which might lessen our accumulated damage as we make our passage.
It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. And it also means—in order to save energy—that we have to move with the direction of the SEKO’s fast-rotating electromagnetic field. Also, this will give us some extra momentum. Keep in mind, though, that our backside will not deflect Strange Hail at all but rather try to pull some Strange Hail in. Overall, we should defect more of it than we pull in the faster we move. Speed is of the essence.
Then we get to the location of the Strange Hail and how it is spread around and keeps spreading around. This is a problem for which I—with my current knowledge—have no direct solution. Chaos Theory is fairly well understood, in that certain chaotic dynamic systems—and the ‘Strange Hail’ situation unfortunately applies—will become intractable over time. There are so many possible different configurations in iteration after iteration that they become unpredictable, meaning that the number of possible future states becomes so numerous that even the most powerful computer—even if that computer is the size of the Universe—at some point cannot keep up.
Thus, predictable configurations disappear beyond a veil of unpredictability. This chaotic event horizon is tracked through the Lyapunov exponent. As far as I can calculate, the Lyapunov exponent of the Strange Hail is way too low for us to find a safe passage through it. So I tried a different approach.
Due to the lifting of the Cauchy horizon, we’re crossing timelike geodesics—traveling through time. The mathematics for this are rather esoteric, to say the least. I tried to develop those so that I could figure out if we were traveling forwards or backward in time, so that we might try to move in the opposite direction, hoping that we could get back to where we came from and thus know what we can expect in the upper layers.
This involves abstract principles and theorems like the Newman-Penrose formalism, the Levi-Civita connection, Ricci rotation coefficients, the Goldberg-Sachs theorem, and many more. I couldn’t work it out. It is either beyond me, or we need a different kind of mathematics—let’s call it novo-mathematics—to find out. I saw tantalizing hints of that in the data the inter-Universal aliens sent us, yet I simply lack the chops and the knowledge to make sense of it. You need a better genius (sighs).
Also, simply going to a retrograde orbit—crossing the timelike geodesics the other way—does not work, either, as the null rays of the geodesic need to be shear-free (that is, they don’t distort), and they most emphatically are not. On top of that, it’s impossible to get into an orbit that is exactly retrograde to the original one, as the inclination will be slightly different, hence a different way of crossing the timelike geodesics. Right now, to put it bluntly, we don’t know the fuck what we’d be doing. Which leaves us no other option than deal with the situation as it is.
Back to square one. With our current understanding of Chaos Theory, we cannot calculate a safe passage through the ‘Strange Hail’—the calculations become intractable. Yet, many dynamically chaotic systems revert to temporarily stable configurations—albeit that these configurations evolve over time—called strange attractors. The bad news is that—in most cases—these strange attractors lie beyond the Lyapunov exponent’s predictability horizon. The good news is that they must be there.
If we know the shape and evolution of the Strange Hail’s strange attractor, then we know where most of the Strange Hail is likely to be at certain times. Subsequently, then we know the areas where the Strange Hail is most likely not present—our safe passageway. How can we detect the strange attractor?
For one, we could send in probes, hoping they keep functioning long enough to measure it. Given the size of the next layer—even if it’s quite a bit smaller than the more upper ones—and the amount of material at our disposition, this is extremely unlikely to work, like a butterfly trying to go against a hurricane.
As a last resort, we might ask the hyper-advanced aliens in the other Universe, but I know you already considered that. You do realize that I can read your mind, right? No worries here, as I agree. We can’t be considered true partners if they need to hold our hands at the slightest sign of problems (hey, they’re hyper-advanced, we’re not).
Which gives us our last option—I know, it’s getting desperate—and that is get advice from beings who have a strong affinity with dynamically chaotic system. You copied and downloaded just such beings: the life from pure sound—let’s call them ‘hypersounders’—from the Doom Bells layer.
These beings have evolved inside a wildly chaotic environment and might have developed a unique sensibility to ‘sensing’ a system’s strange attractors—in their case, areas of 190 dB and higher—as their very life depends on it. They might have a more advanced understanding—even if it’s not a conscious one, maybe it’s more like a sixth sense—of how to recognize or predict a system’s strange attractors.
It’s far-fetched, I know. But they might be our last hope.
—LateralSys
Author’s note: Due to high working pressure at the day job, I wasn’t able top post this on the Wednesday, as originally planned. Employers relentlessly put higher pressure on older employees (well, basically all employees), without checking if this is feasible or not. Well, I’ve taken some actions that should alleviate this problem from August this year onwards. Until that time, my apologies for missed deadlines, but be assured that I will ascertain that “Forever Thrilled” will be available here in full before the end of 2024 (and the same for “The Replicant, the Mole & the Impostor”).
I just need to get through the next seven (six-and-a-half…;-) months unscathed. Then things will be much more plain sailing. Supporting me with a free subscription—or even (sigh) a paid one—will help me very much, indeed. To those who’ve been supporting me throughout: many thanks! And many thanks for reading to everybody!