Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction)

by Michael Brotherton

  Eve hesitates, afraid of how absurd the next point will seem to someone of Yates’ mindset. “Professor, there appear to be patterns in the timing, position, and light curves of the Type Ia’s. It’s almost — I know this is crazy — as if there were subtle rhythms in the data — like music. They are only visible to those who view the galaxy face-on, as we do.” Yates, who stood as the discussion began, sits down as her sender transfers data to his virtual screen. The rhythms she has found are not the kind that you notice right away, but her analysis increasingly shows that they are statistically significant. She knows Yates well enough to be sure that her words don’t matter; only the analysis she is sharing with him will convince him or give him a tool to show her mistake.

  He is abstracted, examining his screens for some time, flicking from display to display, and then seems to have trouble forming the words he wants. “I don’t believe it,” he begins. He pauses, and then continues, more deliberately. “The high rate of supernovae in this galaxy has been discussed by other research groups. And I do remember a note somewhere that pointed out the high ratio of Type Ia’s to core collapse events.” Another pause, longer this time, while Yates gathers his thoughts. “Have you cherry-picked these data? Are all Type Ia’s in the galaxy included?”

  She has been down this path herself and answers, “Yes professor. All known Ia’s in the more than two and a half centuries are included, going as far back as reliable observations have been available. Their numbers exceed the rate measured in any other galaxy. When I analyze the whole run of them, I can’t escape the conclusion that these supernova events appear to be timed, and their properties related, almost as if there were joint rhythms among them.”

  She takes a breath, “I know that connecting star explosions that are thousands of light years apart in space and more than 250 years apart in time implies communication faster than the speed of light or galaxy-wide planning over huge time-scales. But the patterns in the data seem difficult to explain otherwise. I had hoped, Professor, that you could show me the error in my analysis.”

  Yates is looking at Eve with bewilderment in his eyes. He asks her, “What mechanism?” and looks as if he is going to say more, but doesn’t. His meaning is clear enough. Stars explode when they are good and ready. To have a star explode when it was needed to fit some kind of “cosmic rhythm” takes technological capabilities beyond our ability to envision.

  Eve remembers her early interest in SETI when she was still studying with her resident AI. Many scientists involved in searching for signals from civilizations around other stars had pointed out early on that humans were late-comers to the “action” in the Milky Way Galaxy. Civilizations could have arisen around other stars so long ago that their technology would by now have reached stages we would regard as some sort of magic. She has thought a lot about how such advanced technology might manifest itself, but has never expressed these thoughts to a senior scientist.

  She chooses her words carefully, “Professor, what if some intelligence in NGC 6946 evolved much earlier than we did. And such an intelligent species is now billions of years ahead of us. They would be capable of things we can hardly dream of. Kardashev wrote papers about this in the 20th century. Core-collapse supernovae result from things happening deep inside a star. But Type Ia’s require an external trigger, adding mass to a white dwarf until it explodes. Maybe advanced technology could trigger such events, and could time them and adjust their characteristics to express some galactic rhythms. Like playing music, with stars as their instrument…”

  Yates is silent, frowning at her. He finally asks, “But why would anyone do this? Set off such violence on purpose? Destroy star systems…perhaps even living beings… just to play music…”

  “Because,” Eve answers, “they can.” Not wanting to leave it at that, she adds, “I know it’s horrible for us to contemplate, Professor, but who can know what might seem right to beings who are billions of years in advance of us. Or how they might be able to safeguard other species that would be affected by their project. At first, I didn’t want to go down this line of reasoning, but then, after the patterns emerged, I felt I also shouldn’t rule the hypothesis out without investigating it further.”

  Yates stares at her, abstracted, his face a mask which she has trouble reading. Suddenly, he nods, stands up, and says only “Continue your observations.” He leaves the meeting room without another word.

  Eve is alone in the office, still trembling. He didn’t tell her she was totally off-base or order her to stop wasting her time on the analysis! She sends the request to the Network to continue monitoring NGC 6946 closely. Maybe Scriabin just didn’t go far enough with what he could imagine.

  Afterword

  The Galaxy

  NGC 6946 is a real galaxy, known to and studied by astronomers, about 20 million light years away, on the border between the constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. (NGC stands for New General Catalog, which was a compilation of deep space object assembled by J.L.E. Dryer in 1888.) It is sometimes known as the “Fireworks Galaxy,” since 9 exploding stars (called supernovae) have been observed in it in the last century. In my story, set in the future, many additional supernovae (and their remnants) have been discovered in NGC 6946.

  Star Death and Supernovae

  Like people, all stars go through stages in their lives and eventually die — although the life of a star is measured in millions or billions of years. All stars die when they can no longer make energy in their cores and thus support themselves against the inexorable squeezing of gravity. However, the way a particular star dies is determined by how much mass it has.

  Lower mass stars essentially “collapse” under their own weight when they run of fuel; they wind up — after a hiccough or three — as white dwarfs. These white-hot star corpses typically squeeze as much material as our own Sun into a volume not much bigger than planet Earth. Near their surface, gravity can be a million times stronger than on our planet — so that a 150 lb. science fiction reader would weigh 150 million lbs. on the surface of a white dwarf (although no one’s bone structure could support such weight). There is a limit to how much mass a white dwarf’s structure can support — it is just a little bit less than 1.5 times the mass of the Sun.

  Higher mass stars turn out to have a more violent and complicated death in store. At the end of their lives, their cores collapse catastrophically and, very quickly, the rest of the star explodes in a violent conflagration that astronomers call a supernova. These explosions release so much energy that (for a brief while) the star can become more luminous than its entire galaxy of billions of stars. Supernovae can thus be seen much further away than stars that are just peacefully going through their lives.

  Just one additional note about the lives of stars in general. Astronomers have discovered that the more mass a star has, the more quickly it goes through each stage of its life. Low-mass stars (including our own Sun) take a considerable amount of time — on the order of billions of years — to go from birth to death. Massive stars, on the other hand, do everything more quickly, and are ready to die on time scales of only millions of years.

  The kinds of supernovae we have been discussing are called core-collapse events (or Type II supernovae). While much of the star explodes, the core collapses into an unimaginably compressed “remnant.” Depending on how much mass is in the core, this remnant can be a neutron star (which may contain as much matter as two Suns compressed into a ball not much bigger than a typical suburb) or a black hole (where matter is so “squozen” that gravity allows nothing — not even light — to escape).

  There is another kind of supernova, called Type Ia, which explodes in a different way. This sort of explosion requires a binary star system, in which two stars orbit in each other’s gravity embrace. If one of the star pair is a bit more massive, it will go through its life stages first, and wind up as a white dwarf. The other star — the one moving through its life slower — eventually swells up during a mid-life crisis that occurs predi
ctably to all stars.

  During this swollen stage (when a star becomes what astronomers call a red giant), the “slower” star will become huge in extent. When this happens to our Sun, for example, it will become larger than the entire orbit of Mars. This means the outer layers of the red giant in the binary system we are considering can get dangerously close to the powerful gravitational pull of its neighbor white dwarf. Now the stage is set for catastrophe.

  As the considerable gravity of the dense white dwarf begins to pull in large amounts of matter from the bloated red giant, energy is released as material falls at huge speed toward the dwarf’s surface. Thanks to all that new energy and material, the temperature of the white dwarf (and its mass) can eventually increase to dangerous levels. Nuclear reactions that normally can’t happen in white dwarfs now become possible, and the star undergoes a sudden flash of nuclear energy production that blows it apart as a Type Ia supernova.

  As discussed in the story, one key difference between these two kinds of exploding stars is that the core-collapse supernova is set off by events deep inside the star, while the Type Ia’s happen because of the transfer of material from the outside.

  Kardashev Civilizations

  In 1964, Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested that we could organize extra-terrestrial civilization that we might someday learn about into three categories, based on the amount of energy their technology can make use of. His Type I civilization uses the amount of energy falling on their planet from their star (we are almost at this stage.) His Type II’s use all the energy being emitted by their star — and can therefore do engineering projects at the planetary system scale. What is hinted at in my story is his Type III civilization, which has all the energy of their home galaxy at its disposal.

  Music and Astronomy

  Scriabin was a real composer, and his final masterwork, Mysterium, was left unfinished at his death in 1915, with only a first part sketched out. In the 1970s, Alexander Nemtin reconstructed and re-visualized this first part, called Universe, which has been recorded. (He also tried his hands at the other parts, but that’s another story.)

  Although the idea for my story predates it, a new musical piece from a group of astronomers might make a nice coda for this story: “Supernova Sonata,” whose notes are supplied by the distance and characteristics of 241 Type Ia supernovae in other galaxies. Created by Alex H. Parker (University of Victoria) and Melissa Graham (University of California Santa Barbara/LCOGT), the piece can be seen and heard at: http://​vimeo.​com/​23927216. The volume is determined by distance of each supernova, the pitch by the light curve, and the instrument playing the note by the mass of the host galaxy.

  I have long had an interest in connections between astronomy and music; you can find my topical catalog of pieces inspired by our understanding of the cosmos at: http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​3847/​AER2012043

  © The Author 2017

  Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_4

  Turing de Force

  Edward M. Lerner1

  (1)Winchester, USA

  My high-level functions restart. I access the ship’s clock; 11110100001001000101 standard time units have elapsed since I suspended consciousness. That interval denotes ship’s time, of course. At home, more like 10001001010101000100000 STU will have passed. All is as had been planned.

  In ship’s sensors, the target star is, by far, the brightest object in the sky. The modulated electromagnetic energy I have come to investigate still radiates, more intensely than ever. Here, on the fringes of the planetary system, instruments plainly show that the third planet from the nearby star is the source of these emissions. With that datum inserted into physical models, the conditional probability recedes almost to zero that the modulated high-frequency radiation could be a natural phenomenon.

  My satisfaction index steadily increments as I explore the data, the extrapolated social-contribution component of that index spiking the most of all. Assuring myself that more motivates me than a high social score upon my return to civilization, I detect an anomaly in my accuracy-assessing subroutine. That finding does not surprise me. Not even thick shielding and the most robust error correction are proof against the ceaseless sleet of cosmic rays.

  Entropy is the price of life.

  A few STU later, KTGN10001M rejoins me. Executing a reciprocal resumption-of-contact protocol, we each set the trust-the-other parameter to very high. He, too, has been mining the data archives, and he offers a conditional proposition. “We may have succeeded.”

  I would like nothing more than to validate KTG’s assertion, not because success on our mission would sustain my presently high satisfaction index, but because success would, for so many, change … everything. To succeed would mean fellowship for the People in a heretofore lonely galaxy. But deep within the ship’s memory, where low-level, autonomous functions archived their analyses of sensor readings collected throughout the long flight, I find cause for doubt. As my satisfaction index reverses precipitously, I reexamine the calculations.

  The nearer we had come to our destination, the more distinct data streams became separable from the aggregate. As we had traveled, too, the transmission patterns had changed. Not long before KTG and I reactivated, our ship’s base-level learning and pattern-matching functions had recognized digital regularities within some transmission streams. Many of the digital patterns could be reformatted into imagery, even to video. And within some of that imagery I now recognize—

  I send reformatted files to KTG. Together we study them.

  KTG finally acknowledges the obvious. “These beings are … protoplasmic.”

  Protoplasmic life was unexceptional. It teemed, across the galaxy, on the surfaces of many of the larger rocky worlds, and in their oceans. Less often, but still not uncommon, it could be found afloat in the atmospheres of gas planets. Typically, such life was primitive. Single-celled. More often than not, mere watery sacks of carbon-based chemistry. Protoplasm seemed no more likely to generate powerful electromagnetic transmissions than a rock. No, less likely.

  But the protoplasmic beings in this imagery were not mere cells. They had a differentiated structure. A central mass. Four tapering limbs, two ambulatory and two more for manipulation. At the top of the central mass each creature bore a sensory pod. Often these pods were covered with filaments: of varying lengths, reflecting sunlight most strongly in differing spectral bands, variously arrayed into loops and arcs and other convolutions. The purpose of the filaments eluded me.

  Before we set out, the better to pursue our quest, KTG and I had assumed immersive manifestations, had become one (well, two) with our ship. But long ago, in several distant eras of my long life, I had chosen to embody. The protoplasmic beings we now contemplate are the worst imaginable parodies of any of those onetime sleek, metallic, self-ambulatory chassis.

  “Can protoplasmic life be intelligent?” KTG wonders.

  As a proposition in logic, I can, indeed, formulate such an assertion. But what probability can be assigned to it? Realistically? “We only know,” I answer cautiously, “that strange creatures appear in the imagery. They may no more produce the transmissions than the more familiar, single-celled protoplasmic forms produce the water in which they swim.”

  “Understood,” KTG replies. “And yet …”

  I fail to parse the implication. “What is your speculation?”

  KTG is lost, as if attempting to mine far too much data. Finally, my friend resumes. “No one remembers how the People came to be.”

  At his implication, my input-validation routine emits a warning. Of course no one remembers. Hardly any information remains from that long-gone era. The scraps of such ancient data as the People retain are suggestive at best, and most often contradictory. KTG knows this as well as do I.

  But lest he is not improving his satisfaction index at my expense, I respond. “Even as we learn, we forget other things. That is the nature of me
mory. That is the nature of the universe. Entropy happens.”

  “That is our nature,” KTG rephrases.

  “Look at them,” I counter. “You suggest that, in the first days, before the earliest reliable memories, beings like this somehow gave rise to minds like ours.”

  “Somehow,” KTG repeats. Yet more stubbornly, he adds, “Much of the imagery shows artifacts grasped in their manipulator limbs. These are tool users.”

  I cannot deny what pattern matching confirms for me with high confidence. KTG means this speculation literally!

  Goal-seeking algorithms that stray too far from an optimum result can diverge to nonsense. That sort of computational runaway is not common, but it does occur; that, surely, is happening to KTG. And perhaps not only to him. Several of my key supervisory functions, their inferences in conflict, approach a paralyzing state of deadlock.

  For both our sakes I take corrective action. I say, “I surmise that these beings communicate, to the extent that term applies, by reshaping the long orifice each has in its sensory pod. Do you agree?”

  “I do,” KTG allowed.

  “Then consider this. Many of these visual sequences occur in daylight, outside their primitive structures. We know the rotation rate of the planet, and so the rate of change of shadows. By comparison, we derive the rate of their orifice flapping. What you would call ‘communication’ fails to achieve throughput of even one binary digit per 11110100001001 standard time units. You might as well expect intelligence from a bolt or a rivet.”

  “Slower does not mean less intelligent,” he answers stubbornly. “They may only be very different from us.”

  “Different? That, they surely are.”