Max turned from the screen and sat on the corner of Sarah’s tiny desk. “Maybe it’s just that single trap. The others are working fine. We could bring it back inside, strip it down, run tests...”
“We’d have to empty the liquid helium and warm it up before we could bring the trap inside. You know the rules. And we’d still have to do a full purge and restart afterwards.”
Max turned back to the workstation, calling up the schematics and test history of the offending device, looking through screen after screen of results. Sarah sat, gazing out of the office window, staring at the bleak, lifeless lunar surface, pondering what to do next. The last person she’d seen doing this had been Petra at the startup party. Maybe Petra’s interest in the detectors had been something more than envy at Sarah’s success.
“I can’t see anything wrong,” said Max. “The test results on this trap are as good as the others, if not better. And instrument health monitoring says everything’s just fine.”
“Something must have broken!”
“What if the results are right?” asked Max.
Sarah rubbed her close-cropped hair. For a few moments she took Max’s suggestion seriously, but then shook her head. “That’s impossible. It would mean we have a tiny chunk of neutron star in the trap, a few hundred thousand nucleons in size. Something that small with so many neutrons wouldn’t be stable.”
“How would we tell?” asked Max.
Sarah thought for a few moments. “We couldn’t with the trap’s on board instruments, but there’s stuff here, inside Moonbase, that could do the tests.”
“Pity we can’t bring any active traps inside thanks to safety regs.”
Sarah looked at Max, still perched on the edge of her desk. “That’s it for tonight,” she said.
“What?” Max consulted his watch. “It’s an hour until the canteen opens.”
“You need to get some rest. Sit somewhere visible.”
Max’s mouth opened in surprise. “What?”
The only sound was her breathing, and occasional gurgles from the suit’s cooling system. Sarah was breaking every rule in the book by going onto the lunar surface on her own. There would be a severe reprimand if she were caught, but she’d taken the necessary precautions. Her suit radio was off, its transponders silenced, and she had glitched the airlock and suit locker logs with a piece of software that was trivially easy to acquire.
If her suspicions weren’t confirmed, what she was planning to do was worse than a solo trip on the surface; she would be breaking many more rules before the end of the night.
Slowly and carefully Sarah made her way from the control room’s airlock, across the soft regolith, towards the scattered array of cold traps. To allay her suspicions, she had to examine every single cold trap in the array. Moonbase Three was well into lunar night, but the Earth hung in the sky, far brighter than a full moon, providing most of the light she needed.
She was halfway through her tour of the array when she spotted an odd shadow by one of the traps, a hint of light and movement where there should be none. Sarah hoped it was a gas leak, a blown compressor or some other technical failure. She didn’t want to have to think that someone was actively working against her.
But, as she got closer, her suspicions were confirmed. A figure, wearing a suit identical to her own, was bending over the trap. She couldn’t see exactly what they were doing, but she was sure it was an act of sabotage. And she had a pretty good idea who it was.
She turned her helmet lights off and worked her way closer, hidden in the shadows of the lunar night and the silence of vacuum. Then, just a few paces away, she activated the suit’s recorder, opened a hailing channel, and set her lights to full power.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?”
The stranger jerked in surprise, rising half a metre in the low lunar gravity, and losing their balance as they drifted back to the ground. Sarah would have laughed if she hadn’t been so angry.
The figure flailed uncontrollably and landed on their back, revealing the ID tag on the front of the suit.
Petra.
“Jesus,” said Sarah. “I know you’re desperate, but sabotaging my experiment to get your funding back? That’s low.”
“What?” Petra was panting with the effort of standing up. The suits were awkward in the low gravity. “Aren’t you going to help me?”
“Why, when you’re the bitch screwing up my work?”
“Screw... You think I am sabotaging?” Petra’s panicked flailing subsided. She rolled to one side, getting her left arm and leg beneath her.
“Why else would you be out here, on your own, in the middle of my array?”
Petra pushed herself partially upright, gloves sinking slightly into the regolith. Her suit was now covered by smears of the dark lunar soil. “It is your cold traps.”
“I know what they are.”
“They are brilliant. I wanted to copy the design.”
“What?” Sarah wanted to believe it wasn’t sabotage, that there was still some honour among her colleagues, but she had to be sure. “Stand away from the trap.”
Petra moved back a pace.
“Further,” said Sarah, “and stay where I can see you.”
Petra complied.
Sarah bent down, keeping Petra visible in the corner of her eye, and inspected the trap.
Its surface was intact. The hard yellow casing unblemished, inspection hatches still sealed. On the ground lay a standard scanning device that Petra had dropped. Sarah picked it up and checked the readouts. It showed Petra had been scanning the trap to examine its internal structure. A non-invasive probe, nothing that would cause any damage.
Sarah tossed the scanner to Petra.
“I might believe you, if you explain why.”
Petra caught the scanner. “Applications. Your traps have a larger, more stable cold space than anything used in nanotech. They could solve many of my problems, but I need the design.”
“You could have asked.”
“What? Here, where everything is commercial? You signed over the design the moment they accepted your proposal. There is no way I can afford what the lunar authorities would charge.”
Sarah shook her head, though Petra couldn’t see inside her helmet. “I have spares. You could have used one.”
“But we are in competition. If I get a breakthrough they will cut your funding. Why help me?”
Sarah sighed. “Gods, you must have been here too long. Has it ever occurred to you that working together, sharing results and technology, is the right thing to do, no matter what the Director and management say?”
“But that’s forbidden. I couldn’t pay...”
“Do I look as if I care about the Director’s rules?”
“Oh scheisse,” said Petra. “I’ve been an idiot. And now you won’t lend me anything. I’ll probably have to pack my bags.” She looked around. “Who else did our dear Director send with you?”
Sarah shook her head.
“You’re on your own?”
“Yes. You heard what I said about rules. And it’s worse than that. I want to bring one of these traps inside.”
It took them an hour of hard work to prepare the offending trap for its illicit trip back inside Moonbase. Sarah was also careful to replace it with one of the spare traps so that a cursory inspection would find the array unchanged. Once that was done, and she was sure everything was running properly, they took a few moments rest.
“It’s good to be outside,” said Petra, looking at the sky. She brought her gloves to her helmet, shading her eyes from her helmet lamps so she could see the stars. “A glorious sky but nobody to share it with.”
Sarah shivered, hearing Petra echo her own thoughts the last time she was on the surface.
“Are we unique?” Petra persisted. “And what would that mean?”
“We might just be lucky – a series of double sixes in the casino of life.”
“Doesn’t seem likely.”
“If we weren’t lucky, we wouldn’t be here to have this conversation.”
“You’re an anthropic?” Petra was referring to the old idea that, for some reason, the universe needed at least one form of intelligent life in it.
“Nah,” said Sarah. “It’s a philosophy, not a science, and not a very helpful one. There are plenty of other possibilities. Perhaps there’s a cosmic weed-whacker that gets rid of potential competition. Or maybe intelligent life doesn’t last – we could still wipe ourselves out after all. Or maybe everyone uploads to supercomputers and disappears from the real world.”
“Singularitarianism? I can’t say that looks likely given my own work.”
“So you’ve not invented computronium yet?”
Petra chuckled. “No, not yet.”
“Okay,” said Sarah. “Time to get this trap back inside.”
The yellow box sat in the centre of the lab, challenging them to solve its mystery.
Sarah stared at the trap and tapped her finger on the desk. “Your neutral and electron beams are our best bet.”
“About time I found a use for that stuff; they’re just hand-me-downs from cancelled projects.”
They started working together, connecting beamlines to various ports, attaching cables and fibres to provide control signals and readouts.
“You are sure this is not some kind of instrumental glitch?” asked Petra.
“I’ve spent ages ruling that out. Whatever’s inside is way heavier than a uranium nucleus, moderately charged and...” She shrugged. She suspected more, but it would sound crazy. “That’s most of what I know, apart from the fact that it’s real, and entered the cold trap from the scoops.”
“You’re sure it’s just one particle?”
“That’s what Max asked, but the charge-to-mass ratio is all wrong.”
Petra looked around. “Where is Max?”
“Given all the rules we’re breaking, I wanted to keep him well away. The less he knows about this the less harm it’ll do him if the Director finds out.”
Petra nodded, and continued to align the first set of electron beams as the feed lines were pumped down to vacuum. “This should give us a better idea of the structure of whatever is in there.” She nodded at the experimental rig they’d hacked together in just half an hour. There, that should do it.” The machine fired a beam of high energy electrons into the cold trap, to bounce off whatever lurked inside.
“Wow,” said Petra as she looked at the results. “Even the most complex nucleus is not that complex.” She leaned forward to make some adjustments. “This is not a simple shell structure or liquid drop.”
“Somehow, I’m not surprised,” said Sarah.
“Something you’re not telling me?”
“No! At least nothing concrete.”
Petra stared at Sarah for a moment, then ran another scan. “Odd,” she said, looking at the results. The old and new scans were radically different. “Could it be spinning? Something spinning and asymmetric could explain this.”
Sarah shook her head. “No. The temperature inside is too low to excite any spinning modes.”
“The electron beam?”
“Not enough momentum for that to do anything.”
Petra nodded. “So either we have excited a substructure, or whatever this is too big to be an atomic nucleus! This – thing – maybe it’s changing structure on its own!”
Sarah sighed with relief. “At least it’s not just me.”
Petra tilted her head querulously.
“Some of the internal tests in the trap produced something similar, but the results weren’t good enough to be sure.”
Petra nodded. “I’ll do a time series at higher energy. Maybe that will give us enough resolution to see what’s going on.”
She set up the experiment and they moved to the kitchenette on the far side of the lab to await the results. “Tell me what you suspect,” said Petra as she passed Sarah a bulb of coffee.
Sarah took a long, slow swig, giving herself time to think. She didn’t want to sound like a lunatic, but she owed Petra an explanation given their collusion. She put down the bulb and, refusing to meet Petra’s eyes, said, “This is going to sound mad.”
“What you’ve got in that trap is mad!”
Sarah nodded. “I know.” She looked up. “You were talking about extraterrestrial intelligence before we brought it inside.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Sarah played with her coffee bulb. “I think it’s a message.”
“What?”
It was out. Now she had to give Petra the whole story. “If intelligence is out there, it’ll want to communicate. But we’ve found nothing in the radio, optical, any wavelength we’ve looked at. And nothing in gravity waves or neutrinos. But what about messages in bottles? Something more physical, like a tiny, tiny hard drive filled with data.”
“Accelerated to nearly the speed of light and fired at the recipient?” said Petra, her eyes narrowing in thought.
Sarah nodded. “And sometimes they go astray, caught up in magnetic turbulence, say, thrown off course.”
“And eventually into your cold traps.” Petra sat back and sucked her own bulb of coffee. “Quite an idea. You’d have to be very lucky to catch one.”
“Unless there are a hell of a lot of them.”
Petra drank some more coffee. “If this were a storage device it would explain the complexity. But why does it keep changing?”
Sarah shook her head. “No idea. Maybe it’s more active than a message, like a hard drive needing constant refreshing.”
Petra frowned. “There’s another possibility.” She stood, strode to the experiment and switched the electron beams off.
“Is it done?”
Petra shook her head. “Where could you make something like this?”
“A big nuclear collider?”
“No. It would need precision construction. We can’t manage that even at an atomic level. I know. I have been trying. But this thing is on much smaller scales, down at the nuclear level. There’s only one place that would be the natural scale for such work.”
Sarah thought for a moment. “A neutron star?”
Petra nodded. “Have you heard of strangelets?”
Sarah shook her head.
“There was a panic about them in the late twentieth century. The idea there might be a lower energy state for nuclear material than the nuclei we’re familiar with, involving strange quarks. If a bit of it came into contact with normal matter it would be converted. You’d get more strange matter which would convert more normal matter – and hard radiation of course.”
“Producing a runaway reaction killing everything.”
Petra nodded.
“Couldn’t happen,” said Sarah. “High energy cosmic rays hit the Earth all the time. If your strangelets existed, we’d have been hit by one billions of years ago. Everything would already be over.”
“Yes,” said Petra, “if the strangelets were natural. Out there you mentioned the cosmic weed whacker. Maybe that’s what this is, nuclear scale grey goo, sent by neutron star life to wipe out any competition.”
Sarah sat with her mouth open for a few moments, then she laughed. “Okay – you win. You’re madder than I am!”
Petra nodded and smiled. “Makes you think though.”
The radiation alarm caught them halfway through dinner.
Everyone knew what to do – head to the storm shelter, the deepest part of Moonbase Three, dug metres into the regolith and surrounded by the base water reservoir. With that much shielding they could survive the worst solar storm. It was also where the base had its hydroponic garden, so even if the surface facilities were damaged or dangerously irradiated, the crew could hide underground, with food, water and oxygen made by the plants, to await rescue.
As the shelter door sealed behind them, Sarah and Petra looked at each other, sharing the unspoken question: Was that us?
“If it was,” m
uttered Sarah as they moved through a crowd of their colleagues, “we should be back in the lab, fixing it before it gets worse.”
“But if it is a flare we’d be dead,” countered Petra. She had already sat out some bad solar storms.
Max came up to Sarah, looking dishevelled. “I was asleep,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“No idea,” said Sarah. “Let’s find the Director.”
When they found him, he was surrounded by several engineers. “How bad is it?” asked Petra.
He looked up from the tablet he was studying. “Odd. Solar wind is up, but below dangerous levels, yet we’re getting radiation alerts. From your lab. What are you up to?”
“Shit,” said Sarah.
“We were in the canteen,” said Petra, treading on Sarah’s foot to keep her silent.
The Director turned to Sarah in exasperation. “What’s your involvement?”
His interrogation was cut short by an engineer. “Radiation’s dropping. Nearly back to normal.” He looked at Petra. “Even in her lab.”
“Right,” said Pierre curtly. “Time for you to sort out whatever you’ve cooked up in there.” He turned to the engineer. “Go with them. Once that’s done we’re going to have a serious conversation.”
He turned to the rest of the assembled crew and announced the all clear.
Max burst through the door of Petra’s lab a few moments after the Director and two other members of the safety team arrived. The engineer had called them.
Max saw stony faces all round, the room filled by a hostile silence. Everyone turned to look at him.
“The last conspirator,” said the Director.
“What?” said Max.
“He’s got nothing to do with this,” said Sarah. She turned to Max. “This is down to me. Go back to your room and I’ll talk to you when everything is sorted out.”
The Director turned to him. “Leave this lab, young man, and you’ll be on the next shuttle back to Earth, sitting next to these two.”
Max was confused. “What?” He turned to Sarah, then caught sight of the cold trap sitting in the middle of the lab. “Hey, what’s one of our spares doing here?”
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 3