“And is that why you decided to go out and buy so many groceries?” she asked.
“My cousin called me and told me I should. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but then I remembered ‘72.”
“Hoarding goods will only make the problems worse.”
“Yes, I know, it’s irrational, but who will help me when all of the supermarkets are empty?”
“We would help you, Señora.”
“But how would you be able to help if you hadn’t hoarded things yourself?”
Maribel didn’t reply, because in some sense the old woman was right. Nevertheless, she hoped that Chen hadn’t gotten caught up in the panic too.
Finally she was standing in front of her apartment door. She inserted the key in the lock and turned it. Carefully she pushed to swing the door open. Sometimes her daughter would leave one of her toys right in the middle of the hallway, and she didn’t want to step on anything. She switched on the light. The hallway was surprisingly clean. Suddenly the living room door opened. Luisa came running out to greet her.
“Mommy, Mommy, you’re home,” her six-year-old said, wrapping her arms around her.
Maribel’s heart warmed, and her facial muscles relaxed. She was home.
“Let’s let Mommy at least take her shoes off,” said Chen, who now greeted her, also in Spanish. They had lived together on Tenerife for 11 years now, and people could barely tell that Spanish wasn’t his native language.
Maribel untied her shoes. Then she gave her husband a hug too. She was very thankful for him. He worked half-days so that they didn’t have to find a sitter for Luisa after preschool. In the fall, her daughter would be going to elementary school. Maribel couldn’t believe how quickly time passed.
“And how was your day?” she asked.
“Daddy picked me up earlier than usual!” Luisa said proudly, “and then we went to the iron tower.”
“The memorial for the airplane disaster in Mesa Mota Park. The preschool called me because they wanted to close early,” Chen explained.
The comment made her feel a little bad. The preschool never called her first. She understood why. In the last three years, she had probably picked up Luisa five times. But still...
“Have they cleaned up those ruins that are there?” she asked. At the edge of the park were two abandoned buildings that were eyesores.
“No, they’re still there,” Chen said.
“It was great,” Luisa said. “There were a lot of people there, all looking up at the sky. There was even an ice cream man.”
“That’s great,” Maribel said. “So I guess you two had ice cream for lunch today?” She tried to give Chen an unhappy look without letting Luisa see it. The kid needed good food to eat, not more sugar.
“Yes, three scoops!” Luisa said and gave her mother a big smile. “It was soooo yummy.”
Maribel couldn’t be angry. Luisa’s joy was contagious. “You two had quite a treat today,” she said.
“Oh yeah, today was so much fun. Then me and Daddy built another spaceship out of Legos.”
“Really? You need to show me.”
“Yay, I’ll get it!” Luisa ran off in the direction of the living room.
“Thanks for everything, Chen,” Maribel said. “I’m sure you can imagine how my day went. The entire world wants answers.”
Her husband rubbed her back gently. “That’s what I figured. And do you have any?”
Maribel shook her head. “Just more and more questions. This rift... it shouldn’t even exist. How did Luisa take it?”
“I don’t think she understands any of it yet. But I think she liked all the chaos and commotion. As a result, she had nearly the entire day free.”
“Then it’s all good. Hopefully the preschool will be open again tomorrow.”
“They said they would call all the parents early tomorrow morning.”
“What? They can’t just close up shop! They’re being paid by the state. It’s not like I have a choice. I have to get up and go to work tomorrow.”
“And I wouldn’t have expected anything else from you, my love, but not everyone is like you.”
“I know, Chen, I know.”
Before Maribel even had time to sigh, Luisa had returned. “Look, Mommy, here’s the spaceship we built.” She held up a model that was about as long as her forearm and reminded Maribel of a boat. In the middle were triangles sticking out from every side. “Those are the sails,” Luisa said. “The ship goes because the sun blows into the sails.”
“Ah, yes, the solar wind. That is very clever,” Maribel said.
“See, Daddy, I knew it would work. Mommy knows more about it than you.”
“I wanted to build conventional rocket engines,” Chen explained with a smile.
“You said you wanted to make nozzles. Nozzles are stupid. The hair dryer has a nozzle in front.”
Oh, of course, thought Maribel, that word would make Luisa think of the hair dryer. Luisa always started to scream whenever anyone wanted to use it to dry her hair.
“That’s true, I did say nozzles,” Chen admitted.
“Maybe we should continue talking in the living room?” Maribel suggested. “I’m really hungry.”
“We thought you might be,” Chen said. “Dinner’s already prepared.”
“What are we having?” Maribel asked, heading toward their dining room table.
“We’ll let it be a surprise,” her husband said.
“Daddy tried to make empanadas,” Luisa whispered, “and he said a lot of bad words, too.”
May 23, 2085, Ceres
It was definitely more enjoyable to move through this majestic landscape on his usual six legs—so much better than only having four! M6 felt well refreshed after the short, four-and-a-half-hour night. He didn’t need to sleep, but taking a break at night was good for him. When he stopped working and remained still for a while, his body could bring itself back into equilibrium. Any component that had gotten hot would cool down and contract to its original size. The batteries distributed throughout his entire body could recharge to full capacity. His sensors could clean their surfaces and recalibrate themselves. A person might say he felt as if he’d been reborn. M6 had this feeling every morning, and he was quite happy about it.
Today he planned to explore the raised area in the center of the crater. He had walked past the site three Earth days ago. In the distance, the dome-shaped mountain was visible rising from the flat bottom of the crater, even though it was not even 500 meters high. There were also some of the bright deposits on its sides, but in smaller amounts than the place where he had extracted the materials for building his new legs.
M6 paused at the base of the central mountain. Where he was standing, a hot saltwater lake might have evaporated 80 million years ago. Shortly after the meteorite’s impact, the crater floor was almost certainly covered by a liquid. At the time, dust, water, and pieces of rocks would have rained down from above. It had certainly never been a paradise. Then part of the liquid had splashed upward again, like after a stone has been thrown into water, and the upraised part had slowly solidified into the dome that he was now climbing.
Impacts like this happen on all asteroids and planets in the solar system—they weren’t anything special. But at the time, Ceres might still have had a liquid ocean under its dry crust. M6 knew the research findings from the Enceladus expedition. Had life formed here, too, in some similar way? Earlier, astrobiologists had been skeptical, but after the additional discoveries on Titan and Io, more of them were wondering if life might have formed on Ceres too. Whatever was in that ocean at the time might have been thrown up to the surface by the impact. M6 merely needed some patience—and that was one thing he had plenty of.
First he climbed halfway up the mountain. It was not particularly strenuous, as the sides were not steep. Then he began to dig into the ground with his front leg. The uppermost layer here was also made from regolith. This solidified dust layer wasn’t of interest to him, but it ha
d proven to be surprisingly hard, so he had mounted a special tool, a drill, on one of his feet. A half hour later, he had reached a depth of one-and-a-half meters. Here, the ground was rich in water ice. He had reached the ejecta from the impact. Immediately he started taking samples every ten centimeters and loading them into the analyzer in his abdomen.
The equipment needed a few minutes each time to spectrometrically determine the composition of the latest sample. The results were interesting right from the start. It found, in addition to the expected salts and water, traces of tholins, a mixture of various hydrocarbons. He could not find out exactly which compounds were present in this first step. But similar tholins had been found on Titan. Such tholins were not proof of the existence of life, but if life had formed here, many such molecules would have been one prerequisite. The deeper he drilled, the higher the percentage of organic compounds became. If these results were representative, the ocean of Ceres would have had excellent conditions for life to arise. Does the ocean still exist?
At four meters, he stopped drilling so that he could initiate the second step.
Seen from the outside, he now looked completely still. But there was a lot of activity in his analyzer. He used the nanofabricators to break down the samples into individual molecules. The micromachines operated purely mechanically, without heat, which preserved the existing structures.
It was monotonous work, since there are seemingly countless molecules in just one gram of matter. So he was grateful for the help from the minuscule machines, just like the doves that had helped Cinderella—one molecule went here, another went over there. From the energy that the nanofabricators had to expend to do the work, he could very easily calculate the masses of the molecules. In the next step, he tested their properties with various chemical reactions, their completion also being monitored by the tiny machines.
Suddenly his instruments went berserk.
M6 felt... dizzy. He had never experienced this before! His operating system immediately ran diagnostics on all his sensors. Something wasn’t right. What his instruments were reporting didn’t fit together. M6 examined the state of his limbs. They were positioned upright and firmly on the ground. That was reassuring. The error diagnostics couldn’t find any faults. Even better! So the problem must be somewhere external to him. M6 viewed the images from his optical system. He saw something that was physically impossible. Through the side of the mountain to the left of him there was a deep, black fissure. At first it looked as if it ended in the side of the mountain.
But that was just an optical illusion. He then recognized that it extended much farther. In the practically non-existent atmosphere, the only reason he noticed that the fissure continued was because of the lack of starlight behind it. The fissure appeared to be stable, even with the weight of the mountain on top of it.
With his laser scanner, M6 sampled the profile of the subsurface. The results were even odder. The fissure had displaced the mountain, had simply raised the mountain by the same amount that the fissure was wide, and it had done this within the span of a microsecond. He went through his log recordings again. The instruments had all gone haywire within an instant. The values had not risen gradually, they had jumped directly to their current numbers, all at once. Every physical process takes time, but apparently whatever had just happened had taken no time. None at all!
M6 immediately aborted the project of searching for traces of prior life on Ceres. The fissure was a much more interesting phenomenon. As far as he could see, it continued straight without any bends. But he could only estimate that for a limited distance, at most about ten kilometers. He was too close to get a complete overview. But nothing would have made him swap his position for someplace else. To be handed such a fascinating research subject right where he was—this was more than he could ever have dreamed of.
He aimed all his measuring instruments at the singularity. M6 began with only passive measurements. Electromagnetic radiation was not being emitted directly from the fissure, but there were indirect emissions. His reward center celebrated—he had just become the first to obtain proof for the existence of Hawking radiation. He would be the first machine to go down in history as a discoverer!
It was fascinating, because the gamma radiation he was measuring was clearly not coming from the fissure, but instead from the areas along its edges. He was essentially seeing particles being created out of nothing. His sensors were recording their energy radiating from the quantum vacuum! But he hadn’t figured out this phenomenon quite yet. Part of the mystery was that these energy quanta were relatively strong. It was high-energy gamma radiation. Hawking radiation produced by black holes was expected to be at lower energy levels. So it appeared that this fissure was not a phenomenon related to black holes. Or was it?
M6 switched to active observation methods. He illuminated the fissure with a high-energy lamp that he could remove from his head. The blackness remained black. The radar showed absolutely no signal—the radar beams were not being reflected. The laser scanner also showed nothing. The black fissure appeared to absorb all radiation.
After a while, M6 noticed something else that surprised him even more. Normally, his active instruments consumed energy. The headlamp, for example, had an output power of 120 watts. He switched it on again and pointed it at the mountain. A bright spot appeared on the side of the mountain and simultaneously the battery lost energy, exactly 120 watt-seconds per second. That was normal and expected. Then M6 shined the light onto the fissure. Immediately the power consumption decreased drastically. It now fluctuated between three and four watts.
Maybe this small amount of power consumption was due to losses from the wiring and the scattering of the light. The light beam dispersed somewhat on its path to the fissure, and the very thin atmosphere would also absorb a tiny amount of the light. But nothing of the light that seemed to reach the black fissure showed up in the power-balance calculations. It was as if the light hitting the fissure was being completely absorbed, and then magically being returned to the battery as electrical energy.
M6 repeated the test with his laser scanner and radar. For the radar, which emitted omnidirectionally into space, the energy gain was proportional to the width of the fissure. The laser scanner’s beam, generated by an especially-efficient LED laser, appeared to be recycled up to 99.8% by the fissure.
M6 was confused and elated at the same time. For the sake of certainty, he calibrated all his instruments again. Maybe he had lost his sanity. If he were to send these results to Earth, the scientists there would think he was crazy. Or—even worse—defective. He could not let that happen, because that could trigger his shutdown. He decided to transmit his observations at a later time. As an autonomous entity, he had that right.
What now? Thus far, he had been examining the fissure from a distance. He walked a little closer. The fissure was now above him. Or at least it should have been, but from below there was absolutely nothing to see. The fissure appeared to have no spatial depth. It existed only as a two-dimensional surface. What was going on inside it? If it was infinitely thin, how could it absorb everything that M6 threw at it, and apparently at the same time return the energy? Where had he come across something like this before? M6 quickly programmed a filter and let it run over his memory contents. He was looking for images in his memory that had certain similarities—above all, a change in dimensionality.
The results were surprisingly simple. A piece of paper with a tear in it appeared in his imagination. The sheet of paper was the universe. The paper universe was inhabited by an ant that was looking at the tear rather skeptically. In its two-dimensional world, that is, the sheet of paper, the tear represented a one-dimensional obstacle. It could walk around it. But if it jumped in, it would fall downward and never be able to reach its world—the sheet of paper—again.
The fissure that had appeared on Ceres reminded him a great deal of this mental image. But then it also wasn’t a fissure. Consequently, he decided to call the phenomenon a clef
t from then on. M6 didn’t believe that he had figured out what was going on. Too much still didn’t make any sense—for example, the fact that his battery was magically recharged. It was as if the cleft refused to absorb the energy content of the light beam. A refusal, which would indicate an intentional behavior? That was going too far for him.
It would be time to make radio contact with Earth the next time the sun rose. M6 looked for the blue planet and directed his high-gain antenna towards it. Conversations weren’t possible due to the signal propagation time. At the planned time, he sent the analyses of the bright mineral spots. Then he waited for new orders that should also be transmitted at a set time. But the planned time passed without him receiving a transmission. Apparently, nobody wanted to know anything from him at that time. Good, M6 thought, at least now I’ll have sufficient time to study this strange fissure—no, this cleft, he corrected himself.
May 24, 2085, Pomona, Kansas
“Good morning, Mary!”
Derek sat at the round table in the dining room. He’d been the one to prepare breakfast. Last night he had tossed and turned for a long time in bed. He’d been thinking about his life and his marriage. His life had stopped when he had settled down here for Mary’s sake. The missions with the soldiers on his team in the special forces, that had been his life. But when Mary had gotten pregnant with Elizabeth, he had felt obligated to settle down. His grandfather and his father had been farmers, so he had made the decision that this down-to-earth profession might be right for him too. But because he had never gotten along with his father, they had ended up on this farm in Kansas, far away from any relatives.
It was okay being a farmer. It was a demanding job that left him little time to think about anything else. But it had never felt like his own life. It always seemed like someone else’s. He had always let Mary know that he felt that way, and that was why they had drifted apart, like inner tubes tossed into the sea. Or two empty bottles—maybe that was more fitting.
The Rift: Hard Science Fiction Page 5