The Rift: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  M6 hesitated. Was it really the correct strategy to entrust himself with the task of exploring the cleft? Or was it simply a path to certain self-annihilation? He had used up all his resources. He wasn’t going to obtain any new findings just by waiting around. So, what was keeping him here? It must be the joy of his own existence.

  M6 had never believed that he would be susceptible to such human and naive feelings. He knew how his reward center worked. He also knew why he found certain jokes funny: when he heard a story, he automatically formulated an internal prediction for how the story would turn out. If the story then went in a completely different direction, it activated his reward center. The fact that such a simple loop from this primitive programming could produce a survival instinct had truly surprised him.

  No, if he simply jumped into the cleft now, his bosses would grow suspicious. He would postpone his possible self-annihilation. First, he would study the rockslides at the edge of the crater, as he had been ordered to do. He could then always come back to the cleft. A tiny part of M6 also hoped that maybe the cleft would disappear back into nothingness by then.

  May 30, 2085, Pomona, Kansas

  “Man, this is heavy,” Derek said.

  Huffing and puffing, he dragged the generator from the truck to the rocket. Right in front of the ladder was a folding chair with three thick blankets hanging over its back.

  “I told Johnny that the blankets were for decoration,” Gita said.

  “Why do you need the chair?” Akif asked.

  “It’s hard to reach the computer from the seats already in the capsule. And I can’t kneel for very long. The computer was not designed to be operated by the passengers.”

  “Can you modify it so we can change the flight path as we go?” Derek asked.

  “I don’t know, I still haven’t been able to start the computer. No power!”

  Derek slapped his forehead. “Ah, of course. I’ll get the generator going.”

  “Just a minute, I promised both of you to give you my thoughts about the launch clamps,” Gita said.

  “And?”

  She held out a piece of paper with a drawing on it, showing it to Derek and Akif.

  “This doesn’t look like a clamp,” Akif said.

  “You’re right. I thought about what forces we need to be concerned about, and actually there aren’t that many. At the beginning, the engine only has to overcome the Earth’s pull, the weight of the rocket.”

  “And that means?” the doctor asked.

  “We tie the rocket down with a steel cable and anchor the cable in the ground. That will be much easier than a clamp.”

  “Good idea,” Derek said. “We can get cable and ground anchors at the hardware store. We would have had to weld the clamps together ourselves.”

  “How do we detach the cable at launch?” Akif asked.

  “I was thinking we’d use small explosive charges, remote-controlled, that would destroy the cable,” Gita said.

  “It won’t be so easy to get our hands on explosives,” Akif said. “Couldn’t we just tie the steel cable with knots and then undo them like a shoe?”

  Gita laughed. “I can tell you’ve never held a steel cable in your hands before. You can’t tie a steel cable into a knot.”

  “It seems to me it might not be so smart to use explosives so close to tanks full of liquid oxygen and hydrogen,” Derek said.

  “We’d only need one charge, and we could bury it with one of the ground anchors,” Gita suggested.

  “Sounds like a good solution. And I even know where we can get some explosives. I know a guy who operates a quarry,” Derek said. “He owes me a few favors. But first you need power, Gita.”

  He’d already filled the generator’s tank with diesel fuel at home. He unwound the cable and plugged it into the rocket’s external socket that he’d discovered yesterday. Then he started up the engine. I hope the power output will be enough, he thought. He couldn’t find anything in the power specifications that told him how much power the rocket needed on the launch pad.

  Gita was already climbing up the ladder. He looked up at her. The ladder stretched upward at an almost 90-degree angle to a height of about a four-story building, but the receptionist didn’t seem to have any problem with heights. Derek considered whether he should climb up after her. He hadn’t yet seen the capsule from the inside, and very soon they would be taking off inside it. But there was still so much to do!

  “Akif, could you take care of the cable and anchor? I’ll go see my buddy at the quarry,” he said.

  The doctor nodded.

  “Say, aren’t your patients wondering where you are?”

  “I told the ones with appointments that the office is closed due to a death in the family. They seemed to understand.”

  In the afternoon they met up again at the New Shepard. Akif had bought a steel cable spool that was so heavy it needed two people to move. He’d also bought a huge sledgehammer and impressive hooks that they would have to pound into the ground.

  “I hope there’s not a layer of rocks right below the surface,” he said.

  “As a farmer, I can tell you there’s no need to worry about that. We’ll get the hooks in the ground. I just hope that they’ll hold.”

  Derek was skeptical, but he didn’t want to come across as too negative. He had imagined something like an anchor with barbs, even if that would’ve been more difficult to get into the ground. As it was, it looked to him like a tent set-up, with rope and pegs. And tents like to fly away in storms. On the other hand, as soon as the engine produced enough power to lift the rocket and the steel cable off the ground, the cable would no longer be needed for holding it in place. It only had to bridge the few seconds until the engine got to full-output power.

  They began working. After a half hour, Johnny came over to them. “I wanted to see how you all were getting along,” he said.

  With his help, they completed the work much more quickly. Johnny was very satisfied. “Now not even a storm can harm my beauty,” he said.

  Derek’s guilty conscience immediately returned. He would have to bury the small block of explosive later. His buddy, the quarry owner, wanted to know what his plans were for the explosive, and wouldn’t give him any until Derek told him. Derek had said something about using it on the giant tree stump in his garden that he had complained about before, and that nothing else had worked so far to get it out of the ground.

  Then Gita came clambering down the ladder.

  “Everything okay?” Derek asked.

  She sat on the ground and leaned back against the rocket. “It’s quite a piece of work,” she said. “The operating system is 70 years old, and development on it probably stopped 40 years ago. Luckily, I found all the last updates in an archive online.”

  “So, can we control it by ourselves now?”

  “To a certain extent, yes. But don’t think you’re going to be able to fly it like one of your Air Force planes, Derek.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Imagine you’re an ant sitting on a balloon. And the only way to control it is by opening and closing the hole at the bottom.”

  “Sounds fun,” Derek said.

  “I think I’d rather leave that kind of fun to you,” Akif said.

  “That was a little simplistic. There are thrusters you can use to change the direction somewhat. But this won’t be anything like stunt flying. It’s designed to go up and then come back down again.”

  “Talking about coming down, were you able to check the parachute?”

  “The diagnostics system says that it’s there. But whether the material has any weak points after such a long time...”

  “The capsule has backup parachutes. That should be enough,” Derek said.

  He wasn’t even sure if he really wanted to come back anyway. He felt as though the rift was calling him, but the others certainly wouldn’t agree to just flying off into nothingness.

  The floorboards creaked. Was someone there? Derek
opened the living room door and peered into the hallway, listening for sounds in the darkness. Was that someone breathing? And this perfume that he could smell—he felt like he knew it from somewhere. He switched on the light, but he had just been imagining it all. There was no one. He was alone. That was already the third time in the last hour. Maybe he needed to be more concerned about his mental health?

  Maybe all of this was just a crazy idea, born from pure imagination and the result of too much loneliness. Akif, at least, seemed to have almost as much motivation as his own, and his receptionist just wanted to spend more time with her great love. An unemployed farmer, a Turkish doctor in exile, and an IT expert with Indian roots and stuck in a provincial life—they really were quite a group of losers.

  And he thought the three of them, of all people, would be able to solve a problem that experts all over the world hadn’t been able to figure out yet? Derek laughed. That alone was evidence that he belonged locked away somewhere in a mental institution.

  On the other hand, surely they were three harmless kooks. It wasn’t going to harm anyone if they simply tried to do something themselves. Didn’t all Americans have the God-given right to take their fate into their own hands? Johnny had been compensated for the future loss of his property, and after the launch, he hoped no one other than themselves would be put in any sort of danger.

  What did he actually want? Derek was still not entirely sure. He would decide tomorrow morning. For now, he would go to bed. They wanted to launch before sunrise. He had talked the fuel suppliers into sending their trucks with the fuel around five in the morning. The drivers, who usually delivered to gas stations, were used to working very early in the morning. And when Johnny came looking for them, they would already be long gone.

  May 30, 2085, Pasadena

  “Good morning, Jean-Pierre.”

  “You mean, good evening, Maribel, the sun’s already set over here.”

  “Oh, so you’re working overtime just for me?”

  Her colleague had already tried to contact her three hours earlier. She had heard the video call notification, but had decided not to respond to it so early in the morning.

  “No worries. I’m still not done working for the day.”

  “Did you receive my corrections?” Maribel asked. “I sent you the draft of the paper yesterday.”

  “Yes, it’s already been sent to a reviewer. The editor asked me to send it straight to Hawaii.”

  “So, hopefully, you’ll have a first opinion when you get to the observatory tomorrow.”

  Jean-Pierre looked at her coolly, but she could tell he was tense about something. The paper was definitely explosive, at least for the world of physics. As the primary author, it could make his name known worldwide, an important step toward being awarded one of the big prizes in science at some point.

  “I hope so too. But that’s not why I was calling you,” her colleague said. “But if you have anything new to report, I’d be happy to hear it.”

  “Nothing new about the rift. But JPL has been able to revive a project that had been mothballed due to budgetary concerns.”

  “The space elevator. I already read about that.”

  That was fast. In the matter of public relations, there was a lot she could still learn from NASA. Just allowing a journalist to join them on their upcoming mission would be an unprecedented coup.

  “I’m excited how close we’re actually going to be able to get to the phenomenon,” Maribel said. “Any specific equipment or techniques you think we should use on the rift?”

  Naturally, she had already thought for a long time on how they could examine the rift, but maybe Jean-Pierre would have some brilliant idea.

  “It would be interesting to me to learn exactly how it’s separated from its surroundings,” he said. “Is there some transition phase, where the properties mix? Or does it really go from 100 to 0, and over what distance?”

  “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that the transition is going to turn out to be shorter than a Planck length,” Maribel said.

  A Planck length is the smallest possible length in the universe. Shorter than that and everything blurs into a quantum haze. If the rift consisted of nothingness, it could not mix with reality.

  “So, you don’t think that we’re dealing with something like dark energy here, perhaps even a form of negative energy?” he asked.

  “No, Jean-Pierre, I think that we’d have measured something if that were the case. But there’s been absolutely nothing from the rift.”

  “It might be that dark energy interacts with us in some unknown way, and so we miss it with our measurements. Imagine you found a magnet but didn’t know anything about magnetism. You’d weigh it and determine its heat conductance and maybe do a spectral analysis, but you’d completely miss its actual special property.”

  “That’s a nice thinking exercise, but it doesn’t really help us get any further, because we’re limited to our physics. And if something looks like nothing, radiates nothing, and absorbs nothing, just maybe it really is nothing.”

  “Time to bring out Occam’s razor.”

  “Don’t be disappointed. If the rift is pure nothingness, that’d be a revolution right there. We’ve never been able to observe nothingness close up. We’ve never even imagined that it could exist in its pure form. So even if we understand what it is, that’s not going to upset the physics any less.”

  Jean-Pierre nodded. “I’ve been thinking that it would be easier for us to incorporate dark energy into our worldview than the concept of nothingness,” he said. “We’ve assumed for a long time that there must be dark energy. But pure nothingness? And we’re not just talking about empty space. If the rift had volume, then wouldn’t it be something, and thus not nothing anymore?”

  “It doesn’t look like the rift has volume,” Maribel said.

  She understood what her colleague was saying. Thinking about nothingness had an almost spiritual quality for her. Nothingness felt like the opposite of creation, its villain—Satan. Or was that just because she had grown up Catholic?

  “That’s also only one example,” Jean-Pierre said. “But it leads to another question. If the rift has no volume, can an object with volume go into it?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Has anyone tested that?” Jean-Pierre asked. “I mean, it would also be good to know, for example, what would happen if an airplane ran into the rift by accident.”

  “That hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge, and it also hasn’t been tested yet. The JPL man here told me he had plans to perform such a test, but then he couldn’t find a suitable weather rocket.”

  “Seems like it could be done with a military drone too.”

  “Maybe they’ve already tested it but didn’t want the results leaked to the public. Or maybe their drones are too expensive for such scientific games.”

  “Who knows?” Jean-Pierre said. “Oh yes, the real reason I called you...”

  Maribel let out a big yawn and excused herself. He looked at her without reaction.

  “So, the reason I was calling—it looks like the rift ends on the surface of Ceres. Maybe its source is there somewhere. Do you know if anyone has research equipment on Ceres?”

  “I’ll find out. Thanks for the tip. Hopefully, I’ll talk to you soon with an answer.”

  “Okay, have a good day. I’m going home now.”

  The connection ended.

  So, the rift led to Ceres, the only dwarf planet this side of Jupiter. There had been many lengthy discussions at the United Nations about whether Ceres should be declared some sort of protected zone or not. It had long been thought that there must be remnants of a frozen ocean under its surface—and thus an area for potential extraterrestrial life. After the surprising discoveries on Enceladus, Titan, and Io, a system-wide protection program had been instituted. But, as a differentiated celestial body, Ceres also offered the possibility of some unknown mineral resources of unimaginable value, which would
also be much easier to mine there than on one of the many small asteroids.

  Ultimately, the scientists had won out against the mining companies, at least for the first round. Research facilities were allowed to be set up on Ceres, however, and Maribel would have bet that the RB Group was already there. At some point, she was sure, the planetoid would be declared open for business and then the mining companies would quickly turn their research into real mining operations. Maybe the Russians—or someone unknown—had pushed their research there a little too far and somehow created the rift? Maribel didn’t really believe in coincidence. For the rift to end on Ceres’s surface—and not 100 meters below or above—didn’t it have to mean something?

  But she shouldn’t let herself get so far ahead of herself. The next logical step would be to ask around and find out if anyone had set up research facilities on Ceres and could assist her in researching the rift.

  The bedroom’s door opened. It was Chen, carrying their daughter in his arms.

  “Luisa needs to use the bathroom,” he said.

  Luisa had her arms wrapped tightly around Chen’s shoulders. The time change had messed with Luisa’s sleep schedule. Maribel smiled and waved to both of them as they disappeared into the bathroom. After getting out of bed, she had quickly thrown on some clothes so that she was presentable for the video call, but she still hadn’t taken a shower. The bathroom in their suite had a large walk-in shower. She and Chen had been looking forward to taking a shower together. Maribel thought about it. That probably wouldn’t happen until tonight at the earliest, she decided.

  She called Glen Sparrow. He appeared on the screen with a face that looked puffy with sleep. Maribel smiled—he reminded her of a giant baby. Glen must have just woken up. She had probably forced him to get out of bed.