Only Watson had continued to observe it. He had a feeling that it might have something to do with his past, and so he had felt some sense of responsibility for it. The rift, as fine as it had looked from his perspective, scared him for some reason. It had appeared to him like a fine crack in a glass bowl that worked its way millimeter by millimeter across its smooth surface.
Watson had tried to repair the crack. He had tried to squeeze it back together with all his force, but with no success. He’d had an infinite amount of time to think about the problem, since he existed outside of the spacetime structure. But that had proved no help to him at all. He had finally realized that his capabilities were limited. He had been downgraded to an observer, and it had become clear to him that the problem could only be solved from within the real world.
So, he had been happy when the rift had proven to exist in the time plane after all. He continued to be happy about it, but it also still caused him to worry, because according to his current experience of existence, everything happened simultaneously, and nothing ever happened. He didn’t think he could stand to be here much longer, even though time played absolutely no role where he was. Watson decided to find his way back.
Author's Note
Welcome back to reality! Do you sometimes wish, as I do, that you could stay in the version of reality created in your mind by the book you’re reading? I think it’s a great thing that our human consciousness is capable of letting us live a different life for a few hours. It’s almost like what the rift does to Derek, except that we can always get back to our one true reality by an act of our will, or thanks to the kids or significant others calling us—or by the cruel intention of the author deciding to finish the book.
Regarding the last of those three, I can tell you that I’m not that cruel sort of author. I never intend to finish a novel I’m writing. It just happens to come to a natural conclusion after about 80,000 words and I’m more or less a witness recording this process. It occurs to me that my protagonists are developing free will. This leads to that—not always to what I expected—and at some point the characters have overcome their great fears, or solved the necessary puzzles, and won their fight.
I’m curious to know: Did you notice the inconsistencies and paradoxes in this book? That’s a slightly silly question, as I’m absolutely sure you must have. The rift causes changes in the flow of time, and this always breaks human logic. If you have seen the Back to the Future movies you know what I mean. This kind of tale can tell us a lot about the importance of our decisions. Some quantum physicists speculate that any decision anyone makes—or, conversely, doesn’t make—will create a new universe, and that these alternative universes all exist at the same time. Personally? I think this could be a wrong presumption, based on a misunderstanding of the true meaning of quantum physics, but yet it is a fascinating idea that’s worth exploring... so I did. I really hope you like the way I did it. If so, please leave me a review at:
hard-sf.com/links/534345
Reviews help make books visible and tempting to other readers, so they can explore what you liked. Except for reading their books, there is nothing that helps your favorite authors more.
Do you remember Marchenko, the doctor... or the AI? In my next book, Proxima Rising, you will meet up with him again. He has a mission that will take him farther than any human being has ever gone. In the beginning, he is all alone—unless you choose to join him? You can pre-order Proxima Rising here:
hard-sf.com/links/610690
Is there anything you would like me to know? I would love to hear from you. Just write to me at [email protected]. Thank you so much!
Because Nothing plays such an important role here, you will find a section below entitled The Nothing – A Guided Tour. If you register at hard-sf.com/subscribe/ you will be notified of any new Hard Science Fiction titles. In addition, you will receive the color PDF version of The Nothing – A Guided Tour.
Also by Brandon Q. Morris
Proxima Rising
Late in the 21st century, Earth receives what looks like an urgent plea for help from planet Proxima Centauri b in the closest star system to the Sun. Astrophysicists suspect a massive solar flare is about to destroy this heretofore-unknown civilization. Earth’s space programs are unequipped to help, but an unscrupulous Russian billionaire launches a secret and highly-specialized spaceship to Proxima b, over four light-years away. The unusual crew faces a Herculean task—should they survive the journey. No one knows what to expect from this alien planet.
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The Hole
A mysterious object threatens to destroy our solar system. The survival of humankind is at risk, but nobody takes the warning of young astrophysicist Maribel Pedreira seriously. At the same time, an exiled crew of outcasts mines for rare minerals on a lone asteroid.
When other scientists finally acknowledge Pedreira’s alarming discovery, it becomes clear that these outcasts are the only ones who may be able to save our world, knowing that The Hole hurtles inexorably toward the sun.
3,99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/527017
Silent Sun
Is our sun behaving differently from other stars? When an amateur astronomer discovers something strange on telescopic solar pictures, an explanation must be found. Is it merely artefact? Or has he found something totally unexpected?
An expert international crew is hastily assembled, a spaceship is speedily repurposed, and the foursome is sent on the ride of their lives. What challenges will they face on this spur-of-the-moment mission to our central star?
What awaits all of them is critical, not only for understanding the past, but even more so for the future of life on Earth.
3,99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/527020
The Rift
There is a huge, bold black streak in the sky. Branches appear out of nowhere over North America, Southern Europe, and Central Africa. People who live beneath The Rift can see it. But scientists worldwide are distressed—their equipment cannot pick up any type of signal from it.
The rift appears to consist of nothing. Literally. Nothing. Nada. Niente. Most people are curious but not overly concerned. The phenomenon seems to pose no danger. It is just there.
Then something jolts the most hardened naysayers, and surpasses the worst nightmares of the world’s greatest scientists—and rocks their understanding of the universe.
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The Enceladus Mission (Ice Moon 1)
In the year 2031, a robot probe detects traces of biological activity on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. This sensational discovery shows that there is indeed evidence of extraterrestrial life. Fifteen years later, a hurriedly built spacecraft sets out on the long journey to the ringed planet and its moon.
The international crew is not just facing a difficult twenty-seven months: if the spacecraft manages to make it to Enceladus without incident it must use a drillship to penetrate the kilometer-thick sheet of ice that entombs the moon. If life does indeed exist on Enceladus, it could only be at the bottom of the salty, ice covered ocean, which formed billions of years ago.
However, shortly after takeoff disaster strikes the mission, and the chances of the crew making it to Enceladus, let alone back home, look grim.
2,99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/526999
The Titan Probe (Ice Moon 2)
In 2005, the robotic probe “Huygens” lands on Saturn’s moon Titan. 40 years later, a radio telescope receives signals from the far away moon that can only come from the long forgotten lander.
At the same time, an expedition returns from neighbouring moon Enceladus. The crew lands on Titan and finds a dangerous secret that risks their return to Earth. Meanwhile, on Enceladus a deathly race has started that nobody thought was possible. And its outcome can only be decided by the
astronauts that are stuck on Titan.
3,99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/527000
The Io Encounter (Ice Moon 3)
; Jupiter’s moon Io has an extremely hostile environment. There are hot lava streams, seas of boiling sulfur, and frequent volcanic eruptions straight from Dante’s Inferno, in addition to constant radiation bombardment and a surface temperature hovering at minus 180 degrees Celsius.
Is it really home to a great danger that threatens all of humanity? That’s what a surprise message from the life form discovered on Enceladus seems to indicate.
The crew of ILSE, the International Life Search Expedition, finally on their longed-for return to Earth, reluctantly chooses to accept a diversion to Io, only to discover that an enemy from within is about to destroy all their hopes of ever going home.
3,99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/527008
Return to Enceladus (Ice Moon 4)
Russian billionaire Nikolai Shostakovitch makes an offer to the former crew of the spaceship ILSE. He will finance a return voyage to the icy moon Enceladus. The offer is too good to refuse—the expedition would give them the unique opportunity to recover the body of their doctor, Dimitri Marchenko.
Everyone on board knows that their benefactor acts out of purely personal motivations… but the true interests of the tycoon and the dangers that he conjures up are beyond anyone’s imagination.
3,99 € – hard-sf.com/links/527011
The Nothing – A Guided Tour
The heroes of this novel speculate that the rift is made up of nothing. In the course of the story, nobody seems to understand what to make of it. Even the scientists aren’t very smart when it comes to the rift. That’s no accident, because nothingness is an abstract, philosophical concept. Here, it describes the opposite of or the absence of being. Nothingness does not actually exist, so, of course, it can’t have a history and thus it has no biography.
Good, then I can stop this tour of nothing right now and let you go off and do whatever you want—or maybe even nothing at all. That would be a bit premature, and a pity too. Because—even if nothing doesn’t actually exist—paradoxically, it can still be described in different ways or from different aspects. I will attempt to do so on the following pages.
The end of nothing
The standard cosmological model assumes that our universe has only existed for 13.8 billion years—before that there was neither time nor space, that is, ‘nothing’ in the broader sense. Then some event that we cannot yet imagine caused an explosion that broke up the dominance of nothing.
Whether there was a single true beginning of space and time is unclear. Maybe the universe also changes in cycles of birth and death. Maybe our four-dimensional cosmos was born in the Big Bang only when certain structures, so-called branes, clashed and collided in a higher-dimensional universe.
It might also be possible that nothing in the broader sense, that is, the absence of all existence, has never really existed. A physicist might even insist upon this, because if the Big Bang really was a single event that created the universe ‘out of nothing,’ this nothing is not a physical reality. Instead, it is just a term for everyday speech that our human sanity and reason requires to conceive of the following two facts:
•Before the creation of the universe, there was nothing.
•Out beyond the universe, there is nothing.
But nothing, nonetheless, has an important function—its end marks the beginning of everything.
The beginning of everything
Scientists today still don’t know with certainty what took place at the beginning of time, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. All the matter in the universe today, 1053 kilograms, was located at that moment within a point, a singularity, where none of today’s fundamental laws of nature had any effect. You can imagine a kind of infinitely-dense proto-soup consisting of particles no longer known today. A single force, the primordial force, described the movements of these particles. The temperature of the proto-soup, if the term temperature even makes any sense in this context, must have been around 1032 degrees. There were neither electrons nor photons, so there was also no light. If there had been outside observers—but remember, all that was lurking around outside this soup was just nothing—they wouldn’t have noticed that anything at all was happening.
This ultra-hot something was under tremendous pressure—and the cosmos expanded. The length of this time period is given from known laws of nature: it is known as the Planck time, that is, the time that light needs to cover a distance equal to a Planck length. That equals 10-43 seconds. However, at this pinpoint of time, time itself didn’t yet exist. And, words are unable—unavailable—to accurately portray the paradoxes.
So, 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang is the first chance we have to use physics for studying the universe. The minuscule bits of matter are still under an unbelievable amount of pressure. But it has grown a little bit colder, because of the expansion. The first fundamental force to break free from the primordial force is the gravitational force that acts, as a force of attraction, against the expansion of the universe.
However, it is much weaker than the pressure of the Big Bang—so the universe continues to expand at a rapid pace. Because the average energy density of the proto-soup continues to decrease, it contains fewer and fewer exotic particles from the very beginning. After 10-38 seconds has elapsed, the strong nuclear force and the electroweak force split off of the primordial force.
Then comes a phase, the so-called inflation phase, in which the universe expands by a factor between 1030 and 1050. At the start of this phase it is still the size of a proton, but at the end, it is about as large as a soccer ball. This inflation, which scientists place between 10-38 and 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang, needs so-called inflatons to form an explanation that is reasonable (that is, one that fits into the cosmological world view). These particles, which never appear again, are not attracted to each other by gravity, they are instead repelled.
Only in this way could the universe have grown so much in such a short time period. The argument that this explanation is not so far-fetched is that it also provides a good explanation for other phenomena observed in the universe today, for example, the homogeneity and low curvature of the universe.
The density of the universe—at an incredibly short 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang— has already expanded to the point where particles that are known today can be formed: electrons and positrons, quarks—which later combine to form protons and neutrons—and antiquarks, neutrinos—the precursors of photons—as well as gluons, which are responsible for transmitting the strong nuclear force.
Particles and antiparticles are present in equal numbers. When particles and antiparticles meet, they annihilate each other. There is a constant coming and going. Newly formed particles behave normally under the influence of gravity—they attract each other, which somewhat slows down the expansion of the universe. At this time, a quark-gluon plasma is dominant, which can be simulated today, at least in a computer.
Scientists have not yet reached a consensus, but if the laws of nature are subject to supersymmetry, this process is now broken. The theory of supersymmetry assumes that for each known particle, there is a super-partner that differs by a half spin. Supersymmetry would elegantly unify particles and force particles, which transmit the known interactions.
Such super-partners would have to be so heavy that they could only exist at the start of the universe. Today, however, we only observe conventional particles—supersymmetry is broken. At the moment supersymmetry was broken, it is conjectured that mass was imparted to the particles via the Higgs boson, which was confirmed in 2012.
Approximately 10-10 seconds after the Big Bang, the last two of the forces known today arise, the weak nuclear force, which plays a crucial role in nuclear fusion, and the electromagnetic force. Somewhat later, space has cooled to just two trillion degrees, so that quarks no longer have to be alone, so that protons, neutrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons coalesce. Gluons act as the bonding agent.
Matter and antimatter continue to be in balance. But this situation doesn’t last much longer. Particles
and antiparticles annihilate each other, forming photons, and the universe noticeably empties. It is already 10 trillion kilometers wide, approximately one light-year, and has further cooled to one trillion degrees,. The fact that we exist, nevertheless, we owe to a small excess of matter. For every billion particle-antiparticle pairs, there resulted in an excess of one particle that wasn’t annihilated. So far there are only theories for where this asymmetry came from. Obviously, the laws of nature do not act symmetrically in every respect.
One-fifth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe is already 500 trillion kilometers wide, or roughly 50 light-years. It has cooled to 20 billion degrees. Now it’s time for neutrons and electrons to feel the heat. Unstable neutrons in a free state are torn apart by the weak nuclear force, releasing an electron, a proton, and a neutrino. Electrons and positrons annihilate each other. Here, the excess of matter wins the day again.
Due to the now large distances of the cosmos, approximately one second after the Big Bang, the weak interaction is no longer strong enough to produce interactions between neutrinos and conventional matter. Since then, the neutrinos released at that time have been rushing around the universe as a measurable, constant neutrino background without almost any interactions.
The Rift: Hard Science Fiction Page 29