The Rift: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  M6 tested the video mode. He had the camera record 20 pictures per second. To see himself replicated on the screen felt very strange, almost as if he had left his body. He had to remember that the camera was not part of himself, but it was its own object equipped with its own, limited intelligence.

  It couldn’t move, but it could convert sunlight into electrical energy and create information—a higher state of order—so the camera decreased the amount of entropy of the system. Isn’t that comparable to the functions of a biological plant? And if it were equipped with wheels, then would it be an animal? No, it lacked the ability to reproduce. Even if it lived forever, it would never have offspring.

  But wasn’t it the same as he was, then? The analyzer was too small to produce a full-sized copy of himself. However, he could manufacture individual parts of himself inside the analyzer and then assemble them together on the platform. Ceres certainly had all the necessary materials. It would be an interesting project—if he had enough time for it. M6 calculated a rough estimate. He had needed one day for the automatic camera, which had a volume of maybe one-hundredth of his own. Thus, to replicate himself, he would need approximately 100 days. That was significantly less time than humans needed for their reproduction. If the copies then made even more copies, he could redouble the number of brothers and sisters every 100 days. After 33 generations, or 3,300 days, there would be over eight billion specimens of himself, and after another 100 days, the number of M6s would surpass the total number of humans.

  It was a strange thought. In practical terms, Ceres would run out of space pretty quickly. The planetoid might also run out of the necessary resources. They would have to alter the designs and use replacement materials. Then not every M6 would be the same—there would be lower-quality and higher-quality specimens.

  No thanks, M6 thought. It was sometimes difficult enough just existing with himself. It would be a comforting thought, however, to not completely disappear from reality due to his experiment. But it likely wouldn’t even help to build a duplicate. As soon as he was no longer part of reality, the copy then also could never have existed. It is what it is, he thought, again wondering which of his makers programmed that line into him. As soon as he entered the rift, everything would change.

  “Start filming,” he commanded the camera.

  He could only hope that his disappearance wouldn’t also affect the camera. He had used an optical module from his internal mechanisms that had been manufactured on Earth. At some point it had probably passed through the hands of some person during quality assurance checks and this person could at least theoretically remember it. Maybe that would preserve the camera as a whole in this version of reality? It was impossible for him to know for sure.

  M6 set himself at the outermost edge of the platform. He aligned himself with the rift. The motion that he would need to execute in order to disappear completely into the rift was already stored in all the relevant memory banks for his extremities. M6 concentrated like never before. Nothing could go wrong. Then he jumped.

  June 1, 2085, Pasadena

  “Mommy, are you coming now?” Luisa asked.

  Maribel turned around. Her daughter stood in the open bathroom door with her backpack on her back, a reproachful expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, but I have more work to do.”

  “You always take so long. Me and Daddy have been waiting forever.”

  She was exaggerating a little bit. Chen had only finished brushing his teeth ten minutes before, and he was still in the bathroom, standing next to her in his underwear.

  “You and Daddy can go without me. I’ll meet you down at the beach.”

  “But I want you to come with us. Other mommies go with their families.”

  Maribel sighed as Chen walked into the bedroom to dress. Did Luisa have the right to demand that her family be just like everyone else’s? She didn’t know, but she also couldn’t change anything. She was now the head of the Astrophysical Institute, and she liked her work. Without her work, she would never have met Chen and there would never have been a Luisa. Someday their daughter would understand that.

  “I’m sorry, Luisa, but I’m not done yet. Either you’ll have to wait another 15 minutes for me to finish or you can start without me.”

  Luisa stomped her foot but didn’t answer. She turned around and slammed the bathroom door shut. Although muffled, Maribel heard what she said to Chen. “Come on, Daddy, Mommy’s going to take forever. Let’s go to the beach. We can have fun without her.”

  That hurt her feelings. Should she say something? No, that was life. She couldn’t just tear herself away. She also didn’t want to go out in public without at least some makeup on. Luisa still needed her, but she wasn’t going to let her completely rule her life. Maribel walked over to the mirror, thought about her work, and then reached for the eyeliner.

  There was a glorious silence in the suite when she came out of the bathroom. She took the white-and-yellow striped dress out of the closet, pulled it on, and then looked for her yellow sandals, finally locating them in her suitcase. All prepared, she sat down on the sofa. There was a pretty view of the ocean from there. The air was somewhat hazy, but it promised to be a beautiful day. Next to the sofa was a wet towel on the floor. Chen had probably dropped it there and then forgotten to pick it up. She leaned over, snatched it up, and carried it to the bathroom.

  The phone rang. Maribel considered whether she should answer it. Luisa would have to wait for her a little longer if she did. But most likely she was already having fun and not thinking about her mother. She accepted the call by pressing the green button on the room phone.

  The face of a blonde woman with strikingly even features was projected onto the wall. “Good morning, my name is Yelena, I’m calling from the Institute for Planetary Science in Novosibirsk,” she said in American-sounding English. Maribel couldn’t detect any underlying accent.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Maribel Pedreira.”

  “Wonderful. I would like to connect you with the head of the institute, Oleg Tarassov.”

  “Gladly.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The projection now showed the institute’s logo, if Maribel’s rudimentary knowledge of Russian was correct. Then she saw a bald-headed man, who could have passed as Glen Sparrow’s light-skinned twin. Or did all men without hair look the same to her?

  “Good morning, Ms. Pedreira, I’m glad that you have time to talk with me. My name is Oleg Tarassov.”

  “Pleased to meet you. It must be quite late where you are, isn’t it?”

  Tarassov nodded. “But that doesn’t bother me. The message from your colleague, Mr. Sparrow, took a rather circuitous route to get to me. It really took much longer than it should have, so I wanted to call you back right away.”

  “That was very kind of you, thank you. You know why I wanted to talk to you, right? We’ve discovered that the rift ends on Ceres.”

  “Yes, the rift. Actually I’m a little jealous. We don’t see it here in Siberia at all. It’s an extremely interesting phenomenon.”

  “I’ve heard that you have a mobile research unit on Ceres.”

  “That’s correct, I can confirm that. We have an M-series research robot in place on Ceres.”

  “Has it reported to you about the rift already?”

  “No. Strangely enough, it hasn’t reported anything about it yet. But you must understand, this is a locally autonomous AI. In other words, the robot itself decides when and how it will execute its orders, and what and when it will report to us—within certain parameters, of course. Real-time communications are not possible at that distance, so a certain amount of freedom is required. It’s quite possible M6 discovered the rift, but classified it as irrelevant to its work. And it wouldn’t be wrong about that. Who could predict that such a strange phenomenon would appear?”

  “It’s called M6?”

  “Yes, it’s the sixth specimen of the M-series. Its siblings are working
on other celestial bodies. Here at the institute, we evaluate the incoming data and issue new work orders.”

  “Then it would be possible to order M6 to study the rift,” Maribel said.

  “Of course. And for us to do that, it would also be quite helpful if you could provide us with everything you’ve already found out about it.”

  Of course, Comrade Tarassov, you’re curious what we’ve already discovered. And, of course, if she wanted to include M6 in her research of the rift, she’d have to give the Russians what they wanted.

  “I will start on that right away. Then you can tailor your research strategy to what we already know.”

  Tarassov moved away from the camera to press a few buttons, so that the camera now showed more of him. He had significantly wider shoulders than Glen Sparrow. Tarassov looked like he could have been a former pro wrestler.

  “As soon as we have your data, we’ll send some appropriate orders to M6. I will speak to the scientist who is actually responsible for the robot as soon as I can.”

  “When do you think you’ll be able to receive data back, Mr. Tarassov?”

  “Give us two days. M6 might have to go halfway around Ceres. I’ll call you again as soon as I have something.”

  “Thank you. I hope you have a good night.”

  “And I wish you much success on your flight in the space elevator.”

  The connection ended and the Russian’s face disappeared from the wall. News of the space elevator’s launch had reached all the way to Siberia. Not really a surprise, considering the presence of the media everywhere. Maribel walked around the room aimlessly. The yellow sandals were rubbing against her heels, but she didn’t have anything else that matched her dress. She also didn’t want to keep Luisa waiting any longer. She put her phone into her small, yellow leather bag, put the strap over her shoulder, and walked out of the suite.

  June 1, 2085, Ceres

  M6 looked around. His six legs were standing on a platform like the one he had built. The sky was black and full of stars. All around him was a near vacuum. Even the gravity matched that of Ceres. Everything pointed to him being on Ceres. He could still remember his exact trajectory. It matched his planned path exactly. He had moved closer and closer to the cleft. The blackness had looked to him like the quiet surface of a deep ocean. He could detect absolutely no underlying or internal structure.

  Then his front legs had entered the cleft and the strangest part of his experiment had begun. His legs entered at approximately a 30-degree angle, and at the same instant, the legs of another robot had appeared out of the blackness in front of him. In a microsecond-fast measurement, he determined the angle at which they appeared and got an answer of 150 degrees. It was as if the cleft was reflecting him, but his consciousness always remained on this side, while on the other side he saw exactly what had disappeared from this side.

  According to his memory, there was no moment in which he had been completely in the cleft. He had followed the precalculated path exactly and had simply landed back on the platform. But there was one difference—everything had happened in mirror symmetry to his calculations.

  M6 started a self-test. He had a suspicion and he wanted to know whether he was still himself, exactly as he had been before. Because he needed to examine himself at a fundamental, structural level, he set his nanofabricators on the move. He was especially interested in the organic long-term memory banks. They worked on the basis of amino acids, almost like human genes. His nanofabricators would bombard them with photons—particles of light—and he would thus be able to determine their structure.

  The process took a few minutes, mostly because the nanofabricators first had to reach his memory banks. M6 tried to get in contact with Earth, but he couldn’t reach the Ceres satellite at that moment. Then the first measurement data came in. The amino acids in his memory banks were now right-handed. M6 felt like his reward center was going to burst. Right-handed! That was astonishing! Wait until he reported this to Earth—almost all life on Earth was based on left-handed amino acids—even his own design had been built on this variant.

  He compiled his findings, prepared a message, and saved it until the radio relay station would come back into range of his antennas.

  June 2, 2085, Novosibirsk

  “Colleague Tarassov, can I have a quick word?”

  “Of course. Come in, Kirilenko.”

  A scrawny man in a white lab coat stood in the doorway. He tentatively approached the desk.

  What does Kirilenko want with me? wondered Tarassov. Then he remembered. This was the man responsible for all radio contact with the mobile-research robots. “Has another relay failed?” he asked, tapping his fingernails impatiently on the desktop.

  Kirilenko had a way of reporting that really got on his nerves. He talked very slowly, as if he were afraid of each word and had to turn it around in his mouth three times and examine it before letting it out.

  “No, the relays are working very well—at least the ones that we’re in contact with right now.”

  Kirilenko always qualified his responses. It was obvious that he couldn’t say anything about the status of a satellite that was currently unreachable due to being on the far side of the planet, but the man seemed compelled to consider every possibility—a prime quality for a researcher. Apparently, he was unable to limit this trait when making verbal reports.

  “So, what do you want?” The question came out sounding much less friendly than he had intended. Kirilenko flinched, as if he had been hit with a whip. Tarassov felt sorry for the man.

  “I meant to ask, is there a problem?” Tarassov asked, now deliberately sounding friendlier.

  “It’s about M6.”

  Tarassov sat up straight. This was getting interesting. “What about M6?”

  “We’ve lost contact.”

  “What? Just now? And the relay is working, you say?”

  “Yes, it’s sending our commands to him, but the robot is not answering.”

  “Maybe it was hit by an asteroid?” Tarassov knew himself how unlikely that was. There must be some other reason for the loss of the robot—and he was sure that it had to do with the rift.

  “We’re waiting for the pictures from the relay satellite’s camera,” Kirilenko said.

  “I will be very interested to see them. Now back to work!”

  Something buzzed in Kirilenko’s coat pocket. He took out a phone. “It’s my colleague, Ugryumov. Please excuse me.”

  “Yes, of course, I think we’re done.”

  The door had barely closed when there was another knock and the door was reopened. Tarassov was annoyed. “What is it now, Kirilenko?”

  “Interesting news from Ugryumov,” the scrawny scientist said, straightening his glasses.

  “Out with it.”

  “M6 is responding, after all, in some fashion.”

  “What does that mean? ‘In some fashion?’ Can you not express it precisely and scientifically?”

  “It’s unintelligible, but something is being received.”

  “So, radio signals, you mean?”

  “Yes, via radio.”

  “Bring Ugryumov to me right now. I want him to play back the signals for me. I want to see them for myself.”

  “Right away, boss,” Kirilenko answered and hurried from the room without closing the door.

  Tarassov sighed.

  Ten minutes later, Ugryumov and Kirilenko were on the left and right of his desk. They were standing at attention, like two life-size toy soldiers. Was he really such a strict boss? Tarassov couldn’t remember ever standing so rigidly in front of any of his former bosses.

  “Come closer and have a look at the screen with me,” he requested. Then he called up the time plot of the radio signal. “What do we have here?” he muttered while he considered the diagram.

  He hadn’t meant it as an actual question, but Kirilenko answered anyway. “The frequency matches and the signal envelope looks normal,” he said.

  “Yes, bu
t the coding looks completely random to me,” Ugryumov objected.

  Tarassov had the computer calculate the signal’s entropy or information content. It was considerably below the value for random events.

  “See? That’s not random,” he said. “M6 must’ve changed the coding.”

  “Why would he do that? We never gave him an order to change it,” Kirilenko said.

  “If you remember, the robot’s not completely alone up there anymore,” Tarassov said.

  “You mean this has something to do with the rift?”

  “That’s the only explanation I see right now. But let’s look at the signal. I don’t think M6 would have intentionally changed the coding without trying to tell us something. Let’s try to figure out what physical processes he’s been exposed to, and what their effects might be.”

  Ugryumov leaned over him and pressed a few buttons. Tarassov was put off by the man’s strong body odor, but he didn’t comment or move.

  “Look, I can try a few trivial mathematical operations. Shifts, rotations, reflections...” said Ugryumov.

  “Reflections,” Tarassov and Kirilenko said simultaneously.

  Suddenly, the coding made sense again. M6 had modulated his signal according to a simple reflection transformation!

  “That’s it, gentlemen! And now I have two orders for you—ask M6 why he’s sending reflected communications, and give him orders to study the rift. And, I want results in front of me as soon as possible!”

  June 2, 2085, Novosibirsk

  “Colleague Tarassov, may I have a quick word?”

  “Of course, come in, Kirilenko.”

  A scrawny man in a white lab coat stood in the doorway. Tentatively Kirilenko entered and approached his boss’s desk.