Kepler climbed up the ladder. Everything was so easy. He reached the surface of the planet and ran around the airlock a few times. He didn’t even get winded. He could feel the ground under his soles, but he couldn’t feel the cold snow of the frozen atmosphere. The heat insulation was perfect. He stepped on a stone. Kepler bent over, picked it up, and scraped the snow off it. The stone looked black in the red light of the sun. He reached back and flung the stone in a high arc into the sky. It disappeared immediately in the twilight.
“Show the way,” he said.
An arrow appeared in his visor. The landing module was about a kilometer from the airlock. Kepler bent his arms and jogged the distance. He didn’t know when he would next have an opportunity to run under an open sky. The destination was 3,500 light-years away. On board the ninety-niner the time would go much more quickly, but for the rest of the universe he would disappear for 3,500 cycles. Oh well, what did he care about the rest?
Kepler stood still and lifted his arm. “Time,” he said.
On his forearm appeared a hologram of an ancient Rolex. The second hand crept across the face. That was actual time. In ancient human history, that was the only time people knew. Kepler followed the second hand with his eyes. It must have been a horrible feeling back then. Every tick of the clock brought humans a step closer to their deaths, and it was a big step. Eighty cycles between birth and passing, a total of 2.5 billion steps. People must have been terribly stressed.
But he had time. His life would end in a few gigacycles, together with the universe. What were 3,500 cycles compared to that?
“Johannes, where are you? I’m already on the ship.”
The butler must have overtaken him without his noticing. Kepler sighed. He had to hurry in actual time. Regardless of the long stretches of time, if he wanted to meet Zhenyi, they had to be at the same place at the same second. That seemed to him like a relic from ancient human history. For a long time, scientists had tried to find a way to change this, but the principle appeared to have shaped this universe. The speed of light was immutable and couldn’t be surpassed.
Under the arrow on the display was a distance indicator. Kepler squinted to make it out. The low air pressure in his suit obviously influenced his eyes’ ability to focus. That wouldn’t happen in an artificial body. It was another 300 meters.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, and started walking.
The ship was huge, and it was beautiful. Kepler was looking at a ninety-niner up close for the first time. His body had often traveled on one, but until now his consciousness had always been transferred via laser link. He leaned on the console in front of his seat and savored the view.
In front of him and off to one side shimmered the giant sphere of the dark matter plant. It glowed red. It was almost as though it was glowing from the inside, but that must have been the light of the central star. The sphere looked like a massive version of the orb that Zhenyi had hidden in the wood for him. Of course! That must have been a hint that he had overlooked.
Then there were the enormous sails, four of them. They protruded into space above, below, and to the sides. At the moment they were half furled, or so it seemed. The light from the red dwarf at the center of the system wasn’t able to move them. The number of systems in which a ship could simply travel under sail had continued to decline in the last few gigacycles. That was another reason traveling had become so expensive. At some point all ships would have to furl their sails. They would no longer proudly traverse the darkest recesses of the universe, but would have to rely solely on the power of their conventional propulsion systems.
They were steering toward the energy sphere. There was a scaffold there that carried the loading modules. They were tiny compared to the rest of the ship.
“We could still get into the laser link,” said the butler. “We have a consciousness extractor onboard.”
“No, thank you. We’re more flexible with the ship. There might not even be a laser receiver in the vanished system.”
“I consider that unlikely. To delete a system from the database is one thing, but to remove such a huge structure without anyone noticing...”
“But how do we even communicate with a system that doesn’t exist?”
“We have the coordinates. That’s enough. I’m only thinking of you, Johannes. The acceleration is murderous. You’ve never flown in your body while conscious.”
“Then I’ll just have to endure it.”
“Propulsion ignition in three minutes,” the butler announced.
Kepler swam naked in a thick, jelly-like mass. The butler claimed there was nothing better to protect him from the acceleration, so he had cheerfully gotten into the tub. There was a breathing mask over his face. He could only see patches of color, but he heard the butler’s voice and the replies from the ship’s AI.
“There’s still time for a consciousness extraction,” said the butler.
“I’ll cope.”
“I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Hopefully the butler was wrong! But he had to go through with it.
“You can increase the pain relief level with a vocal command.”
“I know.”
Millions of nanomachines swam in the jelly, monitoring his vital functions and supplying pain killers to his bloodstream as needed. That was at least somewhat reassuring. The temperature of the jelly was exactly 36.7 degrees. In spite of this Kepler felt cold, and he was afraid. But he would never admit it.
“It’s time,” said the butler.
A fist gripped him and tried to crush his body. Was that normal? He closed his eyes, but it didn’t get any darker. A red curtain appeared before his eyes. Behind it drums were beating, two times a second or faster. That must be his heart! He needed to calm himself. Kepler tried to breathe deeply, but his chest wouldn’t expand. The jelly was suddenly as hard as concrete. He had made a mistake. He should have listened to the butler.
But then the pressure let up again. The red curtain opened. Behind his eyelids he saw only darkness. He opened his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We need to refuel. You can come out of there if you like.”
Kepler reached down to push himself upwards in the tub until his face emerged from the jelly. He was looking directly at a huge window. The image was a little blurred. There must still be some jelly on the glass of the breathing mask.
“Great view, isn’t it?”
Above them floated the K2-288B star. From here it looked more orange than red. Protuberances sailed slowly across its surface. It was a grand vision. Objectively, the red dwarf might be geriatric, but from this vantage point it appeared powerful and dangerous. Despite everything, it was still a star whose interior was so hot that it melted atoms into new elements. Kepler couldn’t remember ever having seen a star so close up.
One of the sails moved into his field of view. Like the ship itself, it was studded with solar cells that converted the star’s radiating energy into electrical energy.
“How long will we stay in orbit?” asked Kepler.
“One day. The energy extraction is very inefficient here. The next Dyson sphere is ten light-years away. We’ll have to refuel there for the big jump.”
Great. That meant that he would be tortured four more times, each time they accelerated and again when they braked. Maybe he should extract his consciousness after all. But he had already decided to arrive and greet Wang Zhenyi in one piece.
Cycle YC3.4, IRS 13 E3N
“Start,” said Gropius, and then he activated the propulsion unit.
Everything now depended on how precise his simulations were. He slowed his system clock, his internal sense of time, so that time went ten times faster for him. The asteroid set itself in motion. Walter Gropius, the sky architect, inspected its course. It looked good. The asteroid had the necessary momentum. He uncoupled the propulsion system. Then Gropius transferred himself with a laser pulse to the asteroid
’s destination, a terrestrial planet roughly the size of Terra.
The asteroid wouldn’t collide with it for 20 cycles, so Gropius slowed his system clock even further. The equivalent of every Terra year was now only half a minute for him. The planet wasn’t to be pitied. Like almost all Milky Way planets, it had never harbored life.
Then it was time. The asteroid impacted. It was half the size of the terrestrial moon. The impact was catastrophic. The orbital station where Gropius was based was hit by chunks of the planet’s crust. To be safe, the architect transferred his consciousness to the gas giant orbiting further out. The asteroid didn’t just tear a chunk out of the planet, it also altered its course. The planet was shunted toward the center of the system, where it disrupted the rotation of another planet. This made room farther out and caused a resonance in the huge gas planet, which in turn had enough mass to influence the sun.
Gropius didn’t need much. Just a small movement of the star in the right direction, that was what this maneuver was supposed to trigger. He made time run a little faster. The star in the center of the planetary system, E3N, was not alone. It moved in a tight group, called IRS 13, with at least a dozen other stars, around a medium-sized black hole. The fact that E3N was dancing to a different tune wasn’t without influence on its twelve companions. They altered their orbits around the black hole. But E3N was only a means to an end. The architect’s main target was E3C. This star was the closest to the black hole and, just as his simulations had demonstrated, its orbit was now oscillating intensely enough to move it dangerously close. Gropius was excited. The trap would soon snap shut. If E3C went beyond the minimum safe distance, its time would be up.
But then E2 accelerated. This unremarkable star suddenly lurched forward, as though it was trying to escape from the others. Gropius hadn’t predicted this. Apparently, E2 was not merely filling the hole left by E3C, but was also not slowing down. A gap opened up in the constellation of the thirteen stars, a gravitational trough, and then what had to happen happened—E3C was pulled back in by its friends and thus rescued from the black hole. He’d failed. His simulation hadn’t taken all of the factors into account.
Gropius was annoyed. That was what transpired when they didn’t allow him enough time. It wasn’t easy to feed a black hole. Although they supposedly swallowed everything and never missed anything, it was far from child’s play to bring an object so close to a black hole that it disappeared into it. Especially when the object was a star.
He played the simulation through once more. This was the fifth failed attempt. He wasn’t so sure now that it had been a good idea to select IRS 13 as the playground for the tests. A couple of stars orbiting around a medium-sized black hole would have been simple enough, he thought. But even if he found a solution, he couldn’t be sure it could be transferred successfully to Sagittarius A*. The huge black hole in the center of the Milky Way, swollen to three times its size since the collision with Andromeda, was the actual target.
Gropius was proud to be a part of it. The Rescue Project would be humanity’s magnum opus—and probably its last-ever great achievement. If it was successful, it would guarantee their survival for one or two gigacycles. Energy would again be available in excess. But for that to happen, they had to turn the core of the galaxy into an AGN—an active galactic nucleus—also known as a quasar. Quasars were celestial objects so immensely bright they were still recognizable from a distance of billions of light-years. A gigantic Dyson sphere constructed around a quasar, absorbing all the energy it radiated into space, would fulfill all of humanity’s energy requirements on its own. But all known quasars were too far away. So to create one, they had to transform the black hole at the center of the Milky Way itself.
Gropius’s experiments on IRS 13 were supposed to be the preparation for this enormous project—at least the first part of it. He was supposed to awaken the black hole, Sagittarius A*. To awaken a black hole and turn it into an active galactic nucleus, you had to feed it with matter from as many stars as possible. The Milky Way had 200 billion stars. A large number of those were now white and red dwarfs, but that didn’t matter—there was definitely enough matter there to feed it. However, no one knew exactly how much nourishment Sagittarius A* needed, and at what point in time, to transform into a quasar. So they had to be able to send as many stars as possible into it in a short space of time.
Several sky architects had developed plans for this. But Gropius’s ideas had met with the agreement of the Convention, and now he knew why. No one had to make any sacrifices on his account. He followed the butterfly principle—small causes were supposed to trigger significant effects. But he had just seen once more how complicated it was to plan these effects in advance with any precision. Maybe they should have sent ten thousand white dwarfs into the black hole, equipped with propulsion units, like his competitor Le Corbusier had suggested. But humanity would have had to invest a considerable proportion of its energy stocks into this concept.
Gropius transferred himself back to the propulsion unit that had thrown the asteroid off course. He would have to consider a more direct way of separating the stars of this little group. He sped up his system clock. Time passed slowly again, like in ancient times. That would allow him enough time to be able to thoroughly contemplate the problem.
Cycle YC3.7, Dyson Sphere 3Z
The journey was a great adventure. Kepler had stopped being annoyed that he’d accepted it. On all his previous interstellar flights he hadn’t experienced much of the journey itself. After all, his consciousness had been divided into its informational bits and traveled along a modulated laser beam, while his body had slept soullessly. Now he was experiencing what it really meant to travel in space—endless boredom, interrupted by occasional stops at refueling stations.
Up to this point Kepler had been particularly savoring the boredom. For him it meant leisure, and he actually enjoyed it. He had swayed around in his jelly, now and then eating something that was poured into his mouth through a hose, had a look into the nothingness before him, and then gone back to sleep, protected by the wobbly mass.
He hadn’t left his sleeping pit, and the pain he’d experienced at the start had significantly faded. The fact that time went slowly in a ninety-niner, at 99 percent of the speed of light, was only one side of the coin. The other was that, with him on board, the ship couldn’t accelerate hard continuously. That meant it took longer to reach top speed. Actually, the flight had so far consisted almost entirely of accelerating and braking, and both were very uncomfortable.
Now they had a long phase of braking behind them. The butler declared that they had reached Dyson Sphere 3Z, their first and only stop-over.
Kepler searched the sky, but couldn’t see anything. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he asked.
“Yes, Johannes, we are.”
Kepler shrugged his shoulders. In this system, there were no planets whose movement patterns could give away the position of a central star. He was an astronomer. He was interested in natural celestial phenomena, not artificial objects. He had always shied away from sky architecture as a subject, not because it seemed less worthwhile to him, but because the architects interfered with the natural order of the universe. They shifted planets into the habitable zones to increase the yield of the plantations. They regulated the magnetic pulses of the stars to protect human colonies from deadly flares. And they constructed gigantic spheres around especially bright celestial fires, using the energy sucked out of them to allow human interstellar travel to continue, independent of the galactic tides.
Was that really necessary? Didn’t everything already move quickly enough on its own? The sun wandered through the Milky Way at 220 kilometers per second. If you had enough time and patience, you could quite easily reach every backyard of the Milky Way in 240 megacycles.
Kepler had always assumed that the universe would one day avenge itself for this hubris. But that hadn’t happened. His own thoughts had turned out to be hubris. The univers
e didn’t give a damn about humanity. It was born, it grew, and it would die. Nothing else counted. That had made him slightly more sympathetic toward the architects.
How were you supposed to recognize a Dyson sphere? Even though he’d never learned to, he should be able to extrapolate using his knowledge of physics. Obviously it must be visible in infrared, with the spectrum of a blackbody, at least if it wasn’t defective. This Dyson sphere was obviously not fully functional, or he would have already detected it in the optical range, because its protuberances would be visible. He switched the screen to infrared.
And there it was. Right in front of them hovered a perfect sphere whose pitch-black surface glowed in infrared. He had to hand it to the architects. Erecting such a construction was a masterwork and absolutely worthy of a human. Because it was, like a human, the perfect parasite. The sphere absorbed all the energy emitted by the star. Part of it was given off in infrared, which was unavoidable due to the laws of physics. But the majority was usable. Usually, automated factories distributed across the outer surface of the sphere concentrated the energy by producing dark matter, which could then be used in the ball drives of the refueling spaceships. Or they stored it to drive the massive laser guideway, which he had always used up to now to fire himself across the universe.
“How long will we stay here?” asked Kepler.
“The refueling will take a day at the most,” replied the butler. “We’ll fly a little closer so the barges can reach us more easily.”
The Death of the Universe: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 1) Page 4