“Good. The rift is bad for the economy. Productivity is declining, we’re slipping into an economic crisis. This thing is hanging over all our heads, and people feel threatened by things they don’t understand completely.”
“Okay, I’ve heard that version before,” Arthur said. “What about the unofficial version?”
“You want to explain it, Maribel?” Glen asked.
Maribel shook her head. “I’d like to hear what George has to say about it.”
“Okay,” Crewmaster answered. “If I start with my idea from before—that the rift is made up of nothing—then there are two possibilities. First, maybe it doesn’t interact with our world at all, but the Hawking radiation at its edges clearly speaks against that possibility. Second, maybe things do fall into it now and then and everything that disappears into the rift is completely erased from our reality. For a couple of air molecules, that wouldn’t be a big deal. But what if a person disappeared into the rift? Then suddenly his children and his children’s children and all memories of him would all be suddenly erased from our world.”
“Wouldn’t we notice that?” Arthur asked. “No, I take that back. We wouldn’t notice anything, because that person is no longer part of our reality. It would be like he never existed.”
“Exactly,” Crewmaster said.
“I’ve got to push back against something you just said, George,” Maribel said. “And that’s about the air molecules. Every individual atom was born in the Big Bang or later in a star. If it were to suddenly disappear into nothing, it would also have to be erased from the entire history of the universe. That could affect the development of all of space. For the solar system to coalesce into a mass, at some point an individual atom must have been the trigger for all that to happen. If that atom were suddenly to be erased from history, the solar system would never have formed.”
“That is good logical reasoning,” Crewmaster said, “but I don’t think it’s relevant. There are simply far too many atoms. The risk that, of all the atoms, the one that was responsible for the creation of our sun would fall into the rift is very, very low.”
“What if it were the atom that later formed the seed for our planet Earth?” Maribel said.
“Same response.”
“It’s okay if the two of you can’t agree,” the journalist said, “but would there be at least some way to prove something disappeared?”
“That would be difficult,” the professor said. “If we throw something into the rift and it disappears, then it was never there, and we also would no longer know that it had ever existed.”
“Maybe that’s also the reason why it seems that nobody has tried to send anything into the rift before,” Maribel said. “The researchers would then simply have no memory of their attempts.”
“Now I’m wondering why I couldn’t find a single rocket anywhere when I wanted to do a test like that,” Glen Sparrow said. “Maybe my colleagues used them all up before me.”
“Or maybe it was even you who did it,” Arthur said.
“Me? No, I doubt it. I would’ve remembered something like that,” Sparrow said with a smirk.
“T minus 60.”
The announcement was now counting down by the passing seconds. Why were they making such a big deal about this anyway? They were in a super-sized version of an elevator, the doors were already closed, and they would start climbing soon. Why all this commotion with the countdown and security and crowds of reporters? Luckily, that was all almost over, and they could finally get to work.
The countdown reached ten. The linear motor behind her seat began to hum.
3, 2, 1, lift-off.
The capsule began to rise very smoothly. Maribel had to concentrate to convince herself that they were off the ground at all.
Soon she was able to tell by looking out the porthole. The people in front of the platform, who had broken out in applause, disappeared from her field of view. She saw trees, a hill, and finally California’s landscape, which was largely brown at this time of year.
“Godspeed,” Glen whispered. He looked stressed.
“Thank you, Glen,” Maribel said. “Without you, there would never have been a space elevator.”
“It’s too early for that. You can thank me when we’re safely back down on the ground again.”
Maribel looked at her colleagues. Arthur was writing something on his phone. George had closed his eyes, his forehead furrowed. If Glen hadn’t been clutching the armrests of his seat with so much tension, she would have felt significantly better.
Her stomach told her that the elevator was accelerating. The motor was also humming more loudly now. She could hardly comprehend it. She was sitting there in a one-ton capsule, rising into the air at an increasing speed. It was as if Rapunzel had let down a single strand of hair and now the prince was climbing it, together with his horse and carriage.
“Status?” Glen asked.
“I’m doing great,” Maribel answered.
Then she noticed that Sparrow was talking to the Flight Director.
“All systems look good,” she heard a female voice respond. “The ascent is going according to plan.”
“The motor sounds like it could handle more speed,” Glen said. “I could...”
“That may be, but we’ll save it for a future test,” the director interrupted him.
“I was just thinking...”
“I’m sorry, Glen, but I’m doing this test run strictly according to specifications. I don’t want to start listing how many standard procedures we’ve already broken with this launch.”
“Ignored, Sammy, ignored, and that’s only because they were meant for rocket launches. Don’t worry, I got all the necessary approvals all the way from the top.”
“I know. I wouldn’t have let this proceed if you hadn’t.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Okay, we’re going to start getting the instruments ready. Sparrow out.”
“Wait a minute, Glen.”
“What is it?”
“Something strange. A military patrol just came in.”
“Doesn’t sound unusual for a military base.”
“Not the point. They’ve found something, in the woods.”
“It’s a little too early for mushrooms.”
“No, you wiseass, I’m being serious. Hold on... They found two space suits. Wait, here comes a third.”
“Who left space suits lying around in the woods?”
“That’s what everyone here is asking too, Glen. Especially because they seem to be the very latest models. There’s only one mission using those. And that’s yours.”
“You’re telling me somebody hid three of our space suits in the woods? I saw them here in the capsule just last night! Who would do that?”
“I don’t know, Glen. But I’d suggest you check the capsule.”
Maribel felt her level of fear rising as she listened to the conversation. One of the two boxes of suits was behind her seat. The other was behind Arthur’s. She released her belts and stood up. At first, she took steps very carefully, because she was imagining the capsule suspended on a thread and she didn’t want to start it rocking. But it appeared to be attached very securely and rigidly to the cable.
“I’ll check the box over here,” Maribel said.
Arthur was quicker than she was. He had already bent over his box, unlocked the two latches, and swung open the top.
“It’s empty,” he said.
“Holy shit,” Glen commented.
At first, Maribel felt a sense of relief. Without the suits they wouldn’t even have the option of going higher into space. She would keep her promise to her family. Then she bent over her box behind the seat. Both locks were already open. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? Whoever had moved the space suits out of the capsule must’ve forgotten to close the locks again.
She swung the top open and almost had a heart attack from the shock.
Before her was a man, and he was wearing the last of the four
space suits. He had the index finger of his left hand extended in front of his mouth. She should be quiet and not say anything—she understood that well enough. She would do everything the man demanded of her, because in his right hand was a gun that looked damn real to her.
The man sat up. Maribel instinctively took a step back, her heart racing.
“What’s going on, Maribel, are the two other suits still there or not?” asked Glen, who couldn’t see the space behind her seat from his position.
The man lowered the finger that forbade her from talking.
“There was only one suit still in the box,” she said, “but unfortunately someone’s already wearing it.”
She must be crazy. Inside, her mind was yelling warnings at her, and yet that was the response she came up with. She hoped the man wouldn’t be annoyed at her!
“What are you talking about...” Glen said, cutting himself off mid-sentence, because just then the man had moved to stand next to Maribel, pointing his gun at her head. Thoughts were racing around her mind. Should she defend herself and try to take the gun away from him? No, that didn’t seem like a very good idea. Nothing had happened yet. Maybe they could talk to the man. What did he want from them after all? There wasn’t anything here for him to steal, was there?
“Please put the gun down,” George Crewmaster said softly but insistently to the man. “Then we’ll all sit down and talk it all through. Nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re on board a space elevator and we’re currently several hundred meters off the ground.”
“I know,” the man answered. “It was difficult enough just to get in here. I want to go where you want to go, and I have some things to do there. If everyone behaves, nothing will happen to anyone. But if any of you try to stop me, you should know that I was in the Air Force’s special forces for a few years. I know how to kill, even without a gun.”
“We hear and understand you completely,” Glen Sparrow said, “but...”
“Step away from the communication device,” the man said. “I don’t want anything to interrupt the mission. If you all cooperate, this can be a totally normal research mission.”
Maribel saw that Sparrow was trying to retrieve something with his foot. She suddenly got a bad feeling.
“Glen, please stop,” she said firmly.
Sparrow pulled his foot back.
“Let’s be reasonable,” Maribel said finally. “Tell us what you want, and maybe we can even help you.”
“Maribel, this man needs help from a psychiatrist, not from us,” Sparrow said.
“Glen, that’s not going to help anything.”
“My name’s Derek McMaster,” the man began. “There’s no sense keeping it from you. The police will figure it out soon enough. I’m here to bring my wife home.”
June 3, 2085, Ceres
That was it! Over 13 years ago, on April 3, 2072, there was an event that somehow had to be connected to the rift. The date and sequence were absolutely stable in all variants of reality, identical, right down to the second. It had to be some sort of anchor point in history, a point from which the various realities diverged, all leading to the creation of the rift. It was the nail in the wall, holding up the family history. And if he was successful in pulling out the nail, the picture it was currently holding up would have to come crashing down to the floor. The past would have to follow a different course—a course, M6 hoped, without the rift.
But there was a problem. In each of the variant realities, on April 3rd, the Earth was saved from a black hole that was about to annihilate the solar system. If M6 were to somehow simply pull out the nail, he would perhaps save the universe as a whole, but the Earth would vanish down the black hole along with the rest of the solar system.
And there was another problem: he couldn’t simply beam himself back to the year 2072, so that he could change something there. Time travel was impossible. His only option would be to do something in the present that would be the logical consequence of some change in the past. Normally that would also have been impossible—but the rift had opened up a window into the past, and that made it possible. Maybe.
Even if it seemed complicated, it should be a solvable problem. A human, M6 thought, probably wouldn’t be able to do it, given their limited logic routines. But he was a machine, so he didn’t have those limitations.
How could he change something, back then, so that the rift would no longer be created? In 2072, a black hole had formed due to a deficit of information in the universe, and it had threatened the Earth’s existence until an AI had transferred itself into the hole, closing it up and eliminating the threat. But, obviously, something must have gone wrong, and that must have ultimately led to the creation of the rift. Maybe the method they used to close the black hole had left a tiny discontinuity in space, a hole in the fabric of spacetime, which had been smaller than a Planck length, too small to see, but then it had grown undetected over the years until at some point it erupted and formed the rift.
M6 went through all the options. He could determine that many lines of action led to conditions that might possibly avert the danger. One of these strands must lead to events in the present time that he could make sure actually came to pass by using the rift. But he realized he still didn’t have enough information to include in his calculations. M6 needed more data about the incident of 2072. He would have to send a request back to Earth. He hoped it wouldn’t raise any suspicions there—but most likely no one had even considered the rift might have a connection to the events from back then.
The requested data packet had arrived. M6 very quickly sensed that it might provide him the solution. He learned, namely, that the AI called Watson, who had solved the problem in 2072, had taken another AI named Siri under his wing. Each had enhanced the other before Watson had sacrificed himself. But this Siri still existed. She was located aboard a private spaceship named Kiska, and M6 had the ability to contact that ship.
Through his intense collaboration with Siri, M6 reasoned, Watson must have collected many experiences—thus Watson had almost certainly increased his information load. Therefore, if Siri hadn’t existed, Watson’s size—measured in units of self-contained information—surely would have been smaller. In other words, the patch that Watson had used to plug up the hole in space would have had a different size and configuration, and thus might have made a better-fitting patch for the hole, plugging up the hole more cleanly. And thus, maybe the seed for the rift would have disappeared too.
M6 had to admit to himself that his idea was an entirely speculative solution. Nobody today could know the exact size and shape needed for the patch. But the connection between the rescue from the black hole and the creation of the rift seemed rather clear. Maybe he didn’t need to use the right size exactly. Maybe it would be sufficient to use a different patch and thus change the circumstances? And what were the risks in trying? In the worst case, the universe would cease to exist, but it couldn’t get any worse. Maybe the rift would still form, but only after a thousand or a million years. Then he would have given humankind more time to develop means to deal with it. Or, in the best case, he would restore the natural sequence of cause and effect in the macrocosm. The attempt was undoubtedly worth it.
Would it matter, then, which branch of reality he chose to change? Not the universe he had just come from—in any case, there was no way to get back there from here. But according to his data, the triggering event happened identically in all realities. So, if he changed it here, it would only be logical that the change would also propagate through to all the other realities too.
So, it came down to one more task—he would have to convince this Siri AI to sacrifice herself. Technically that wouldn’t be complicated. She merely needed to transfer herself to his memory. Then he would use the rift one more time to disappear from this reality without a trace—this time taking the Siri AI with him.
M6 prepared a message. He explained to Siri what the problem was and how he wanted to resolve it. He was happy tha
t he wouldn’t need to convince any humans. Logic is what counts, he thought. Only another AI would be able to really understand him. If he were to receive such a message, listing all the options, with calculations stating the probabilities, he wouldn’t have any other choice than to agree with the conclusions, and to act accordingly.
He addressed the data packet to the spaceship Kiska. Luckily, he didn’t need to know where the ship was at that moment. The Deep Space Network would find its current location. But, the amount of time for the transmission to reach the Kiska would vary, depending on whether the spaceship was close by or on the other side of the sun. M6 estimated that he would have his answer in a maximum of four hours. And he hoped that the response would already contain the AI itself.
June 3, 2085, Vandenberg Air Force Base
The hours in the storage box had been stressful. The space suit that he had put on didn’t fit him perfectly. He had lain there in the box, slowly growing hungrier and hungrier, and eventually more aware that he also needed to pee.
Now, with him pointing his gun at the four people in their clean, blue suits, he no longer felt hungry. The points where the space suit pressed against his body had shifted. But his bladder still hurt like hell.
It was an absurd situation. He had to show these four NASA people how serious he was about his plan. But at the same time, the thing he most wanted to do right now was to go to some corner and relieve himself. He felt like laughing out loud.
“How do you plan on doing that?” asked the woman, whom the others had called Maribel in their conversations.
“I need to go into the rift,” he answered.
The man in charge, whom they had called Glen, tried again to reach his communicator.
Maribel noticed that Derek was watching Glen. “Glen,” she said, “just stop it. I think we can resolve this civilly, without the Flight Director.”
“Don’t you see the man’s got a gun? You should never negotiate with criminals.”
The Rift: Hard Science Fiction Page 26