If I understand the hypersounders correctly, Na-Yeli thinks, we’ll be less vulnerable the more data we have. Meaning that we have a decent chance of making it all the way through if we survive the first couple of minutes.
Since the strangelet shrapnel will pass through all ordinary matter, there’s no reason to make her probes sturdy. Rather the contrary, make them as minimal as possible—which saves material—and maximize their lidar abilities. Then, prepare a number of probe recovery probes to haul in the ones that have stopped functioning. If all goes well—and Na-Yeli is still deathly afraid to make the crossing at all—then the failure rates should decrease as they home in on the strange attractors—while heading for their negatives—the strange detractors. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, she thinks, QED or dead.
The probes go in, first, miniaturized to the max. If possible, she’d miniaturize herself, as well—and the Moiety Alien—but, ironically, she would need a particular machine to upload her mind, and she didn’t bring that, as her biological body is required in order to pass the shutter.
They need to go in deeply so they can map as much of the Strange Hail as possible. On the other hand, if they stay in too long—having no access to the hypersounders’ special knowledge—strange attractor savants, she nicknames them—they might get damaged beyond repair. At some point, she has to follow them, without a quick peek-a-boo to see if the coast is clear, or at least to find out when the coast will be clear—as they need as much speed as possible, as well. Hoping not to accumulate too much damage before their system knowledge is updated. Then, at that point, she and the ailing Moiety Alien are committed.
She hates to do this to her alien friend, but she has no idea when it will recover, and increasingly dreads to stay in this naked singularity-cum-time machine core any longer than necessary. Between, well, what? She thinks. Not a rock and a hard place, more like the machine gun fire from hell and the one-way stairway to heaven. Not quite Schrödinger’s Purgatory, but rather the wings of indestructible butterflies.
Speed is of the essence, so Na-Yeli gives her probes about five minutes to inspect as she and her companions make three more orbits of ninety-eight seconds each. With a quick burst from her thruster, she’ll maintain their orbital speed of 464 meters per second—close to 1670 kilometers per hour—and speed through the Diaphragm Gate, then make a quick turn towards the clockwise rotation, trying to maintain speed as much as possible, hoping they won’t gather too much damage and wishing the hypersounders—their strange attractor savants—can figure out the safest trajectory soon.
Na-Yeli’s beyond scared. She didn’t think it possible, but this invisible, unstoppable hail of strangelet debris terrifies Na-Yeli even more than the mountainous strangelet balls they originated from. It’s even worse than the good old-fashioned death by a thousand cuts, Na-Yeli thinks, oblivion by a million mini-razors. And—to KillBitch’s lament—it can’t be overcome by sheer courage alone. Only through wits, scientific analysis, and sheer savant-like intuition.
Like a full-on crack addict, she’s mainlining a constant stream of tranquilizers. Still, she trembles like a child afraid of the dark. Problem is this problem is not under her control. It’s a phenomenon that she can’t influence—well, the same was true for the stuffed strangelet balls—but at least these were localized in the equatorial region. The Strange Hail is everywhere, almost intractable and completely unstoppable. She has to trust utter aliens—evolved copies of utter aliens, at that—to provide her with intuitive knowledge of a chaotic system too complex for her state-of-the-art, triple-redundant quantum computers to track. And hope that these strange attractors do appear, that the hypersounders do predict them correctly and that they can then move to the places where the congregations of the strange attractor are not. Two large ifs and a negation. If she wasn’t already doped to the gills with tranquilizers, and if it wouldn’t affect her judgment, she’d get drunk, zonked, zoned out of her wits.
Now she has to settle for drunk with fear, the fear of death, and the fear of the unknown.
The probes are in for four minutes, entering the twilight zone of being there long enough or maybe too long. She almost completes her third orbit since she sent them through, and initiates the pass-through maneuver. At least, she thinks, when a piece of Strange Hail passes through me, I won’t feel it immediately. She hopes that’s not just the tranquilizers speaking.
She’s through and all of her probes but one are still functional. Their info is relayed to the hypersounders through an interface that she developed together with the communication AI and the hypersounders, while the hypersounders are in constant contact with the communication AI.
—we’re still alive— it signals dryly —now wait a little while as they visualize the strange attractor—
Na-Yeli, torn between self-medicated tranquility and naked, undiluted fear, tries to keep herself busy by looking at the healthy stats of all her systems. It’s a composite statistic, averaged over three systems—excluding the biological health of her crew and herself—first, the inner system of triple-redundant quantum computers complete with the communication AI; second, the Faraday cage protecting them from; third, the magnetic field of the superconducting metamaterials of their exoskin. A steady 100% as they entered, but already dropping into the low nineties. If that little while whiles a bit longer, Na-Yeli thinks, we’re all passed beyond the point of no return.
As the healthy readings drop below 85%, the interface screen shows the predicted strange attractor superimposed—in a shimmering red not unlike a complementary-colored Aurora Australis—in a 3D projection of the second layer. It’s beautiful, Na-Yeli thinks through her fear, like a tapestry of a dozen abstracted chaos butterflies. However, these are the areas they should avoid. As the health stats count down to the low eighties, she waits for the predicted regions of lowest Strange Hail density. After a few seconds that seem to stretch forever, they appear in bright green. Without thinking, Na-Yeli heads for the nearest region, noticing that the green—unlike the red of the strange attractor—is not interconnected everywhere. Typical, she thinks, Murphy would approve. They have a few dangerous crossings to make. In fact, this whole crossing verges on suicide, so what does that make these, well, perilous crossings? Spitting Beëlzebub in the eye? Telling kamikazes that they’re doing it wrong? Na-Yeli almost wishes she’d sit out the end of time in the Core but then gets a tentative grip on herself.
Somehow, despite her harrowing thoughts, she pilots the lot of them professionally, expertly taking the shortest connections. And—as if her life wasn’t complicated enough in the Strange Hail already—she has to keep energy expenditure in mind, as well. If she shifts orbits too often—remaining in a particular orbit costs no energy—she might also not have enough left in her batteries to cross the next layer. On the one hand, their speed is tremendous—close to one thousand clicks; that is the local orbital speed of about 1500 kph minus friction—on the other hand, each maneuver eats up huge amounts of her battery power. She lets out a tiny sigh of relief when they enter the green zone—even if it’s, for all she knows, psychosomatic—and tries to remain in it as long as possible. Barely twenty-five seconds have passed since entering.
They’re in the green zone, yet their vital statistics keep counting down, dropping out of the eighties straight into the seventies. “This can’t go on,” Na-Yeli says to nobody in particular. “The moment these vital stats drop below forty, we run out of redundancy. Then any hit can be the proverbial last straw.”
—the hypersounders ask for patience— the communication AI signals —the longer we’re in here, the better they get to know the system, and the better our chances—
“Which remains to be seen,” Na-Yeli says, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Albeit, in this case, I would have preferred to fast.” Yet she has no choice but to swallow the predicament.
They move onwards in the deadly darkness of the Strange Hail layer. Then, a sudden, sharp stab of pain shoots through her left biceps and left upper leg—she’s in a fetal posture, the best surface-to-volume ratio to minimize hits, while her exoskin struggles to form an aerodynamic shape around her and the Moiety Alien—like being pierced with an infinitely sharp needle. A piece of strange hail just went through her, and while she’s bleeding, her enhanced immune system scrambles to repair the damage. She tries not to imagine what would happen if a Strange Hailstone—no matter how small—passes through a vital organ.
Despite the pain, Na-Yeli tries to keep to the projected green areas as much as possible, gritting her teeth and grinding her soul. Their system’s vital statistics keep dropping, yet Na-Yeli thinks—nay, fervently hopes—that the rate of decline is slowing down. It keeps counting down through the seventies and is approaching the sixties. Slowly, very slowly, but still much too fast for Na-Yeli’s liking, while her pain recedes as her immune system does its job.
At the one-minute mark, almost halfway through the layer, the vital stats drop into the sixties. This can’t go on, Na-Yeli thinks, but she keeps it to herself as she doesn’t want to lower morale. Again, at unpredictable times, she feels a sharp shock of pain at a random place in her body. It’s much less painful than the very first one. She’s not sure if these instances are real or imagined or that the Strange Hailstones hitting her are just quite a bit smaller than the very painful first one. She can only hope that they’re psychosomatic manifestations of the impotence she’s feeling, the crushing guilt that neither of her three personalities nor all of them together can handle this crisis.
To prevent herself from going completely bonkers, she tries to keep busy. Not only does she fervently—almost religiously—monitor the three healthy stats: Inner System = 74%, Faraday Cage = 68%, Outer Field = 59%, but she’s constantly figuring out which to repair first, as well. In the best-case scenario, their repair rate overtakes their accumulated damage rate until they regain full functionality. In the worst-case scenario, their accumulated damage outruns their repairs and damages the repair system beyond repair. Right now, they’re still closer to the worst-case scenario.
She’s doing the maneuvering almost subconsciously, staying in the green areas—constantly updated by the hypersounders via the communication AI—while trying to keep ‘dark crossings’ to a minimum. And even then, part of her attention quickly switches to the Moiety Alien, who, somehow, seems to know when she’s looking at it and responds with reassuring movements. Nevertheless, Na-Yeli can’t escape the impression that it’s slowly deteriorating. Deep in her mind, she knows it’s pointless to envelop it in another protective layer. Yet, deep in her heart, she hates herself for not doing it, anyway.
She’s multitasking like crazy, which is good. If she would stop thinking for a millisecond, she’d probably freeze with fear and overload the shit recycling unit. Their health stats are going down—albeit not as fast as in the beginning—but on the other hand, their distance to the semi-permeable membrane of the Doom Bells layer is also decreasing. They’re getting closer fast—if anything, Na-Yeli isn’t slowing down, balancing orbital mechanics with the least damaging route—at this rate, their crossing should take no second longer than two minutes. The most intense two minutes of her life. So far.
We’re almost through, Na-Yeli thinks, barely believing it, and not only are we still alive, but also mainly functioning. She quickly sends three probes through the Diaphragm Gate as she does a final test with the anti-speakers. The speakers test out alright, and she outright welcomes the idea of being in a layer where ‘only’ the loudest possible sound can kill you if your anti-sound system fails. That’s science and technology she understands, and—more importantly—they’ve done it before. Bring it on!
Author’s note: still late and not catching up, I know. On top of that, I will be very busy, both professionally and personally until the end of May. So more schedule slippages may occur. I ask forgiveness.
After August, I hope to have much more time to keep this substack streamlined, plus more writing time. Until that time, thanks for your patience and many thanks for reading!