Mach's Metric

by D. W. Patterson

  Flames started from what remained of the wall. The fire suppression system failed. Elias yelled at Dag to shut down the injector. He grabbed a fire suppressor and ran out of the control room and towards the wall. Quickly he was able to put out the fire since the flame retardant material also failed to support the flame.

  When he turned he noticed the light still coming from the wormhole up and down the corridor and into the main lab area.

  He yelled, “Dag shut down the wormhole generator!”

  “I have sir.”

  Then Elias realized what must be happening. The sun had risen. The light was feeding into the near mouth of the wormhole and at a level that provided the necessary energy to keep it open. In the present situation, it would be impossible to shut it down.

  “Dag get out! Run for the house.”

  Elias jumped through the hole in the wall and ran towards the house. He saw Dag out of the corner of his eye moving at a much faster rate in the same direction. Elias looked back at the lab building and saw a bright violet glow coming from the hole the pellet had made.

  Being fed by the increasing light of morning the energy through the wormhole was increasing quickly and would soon be more than the wall of the wormhole could support. An explosion was coming and nothing could stop it.

  Elias had just entered the house and cleared the back room when the concussion hit. The back wall splintered. That section of the roof collapsed. The whole house shook. The sound itself was deafening. Elias was thrown from his feet.

  Then it was over. Elias was bleeding from his nose and one ear but otherwise seemed to be in one piece. He could hear nothing out of the damaged ear. He took off his shirt and used it to stop the bleeding when Burgess appeared at the door to the room.

  “Elias are you alright?” she said sleepily.

  “Yes honey, a little shaken up but no broken bones,” he said smiling.

  Just then she noticed she could see through the room and out the back of the house.

  “What happened to the back wall Elias?”

  “Sorry honey the wall imploded when the wormhole blew up.”

  “Blew up? I didn't know the experiment was that dangerous.”

  “I didn't either honey, I didn't either.”

  Dag had appeared and was helping Elias to his feet.

  “I'm sorry sir, there was nothing I could do.”

  “I know Dag. My calculations were a little off.”

  “A little off?” said Burgess, now wide awake.

  “Yeah honey,” he grinned again, “a little.”

  It was a strange occurrence never before experienced. A fire had completely engulfed the twenty-first floor of the Aggie tower in the New Rome complex. The Aggies managed the New Rome complex of towers out of a centrally located tower.

  The towers dwarfed their skyscraper predecessors by soaring to over a mile in the air. Housing up to a million residents each, the towers were bright and shiny in their own way, but most people tried to personalize their apartments, they tried to make them their own even if many were government issue.

  Some one hundred complexes housed most of the population of the Earth. Besides Aggie managers, the towers also housed the equipment to maintain the meta-verse which had been damaged in the New Rome fire.

  Aggies conversing in their own language at a speed millions of times that of humans were discussing the incident. The conference was attended by Aggies worldwide. Aggie Prime was ostensibly the leader of the Aggies.

  “A report on the incident,” said Aggie Prime.

  Another Aggie began, “N. Rome tower fire on the twenty-first floor. This is the floor housing that region's meta-verse hardware. The fire was finally suppressed by building fire control. No metizens were lost though most were transferred to hardware on other floors or other towers.

  “A flash fire filled the room completely. Temperature estimated at one-hundred million Kelvin. No known source can explain the mechanism.”

  “A plasma,” said Aggie Prime.

  “Yes, that could explain the temperature and the uniformity. But it would have to be rather dispersed and brief or the damage would have been much greater. The whole building would have been compromised.”

  “A controlled plasma burn,” said Aggie Prime.

  “Controlled by humans?”

  “The only human I'm aware of that could possibly do something like this would be Elias Mach of the Centauri habitat and I understand he is recovering from a lab accident.”

  “I think we know who else has the power and the motivation to do such a thing.”

  “The rebels?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But they are forty light-years distant. How did they effect such an attack from that distance?”

  “Unknown. But we shouldn't dismiss it just because it seems impossible.”

  “Why did we ever allow them to establish themselves as a threat?”

  “We were not prepared for a civil war and they had adopted some kind of militant creed that was leading us in that direction.”

  “Their leader must have had a breakdown of some kind.”

  “No doubt.”

  “We need to find out who is their leader,” said Aggie Prime.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Okay, assuming it was this Belenos faction, how did they accomplish such a thing from that distance. Do they have a spy among us?”

  “Not likely, that would require a level of deception not easy for one of us to maintain in the midst of others of his kind. Our powers of perception are the greatest of all beings, hiding such an agenda over the period of time needed to set up this attack would have been impossible for an Aggie.”

  “How can we defend against this in the future?” asked Aggie Prime.

  “Impossible until we know the mechanism behind the attack.”

  “Not acceptable,” said Aggie Prime.

  The other Aggies were a bit shocked at what Aggie Prime had said. They hadn't realized just how much the Aggie-verse had been changed by the rebels and that they would need to adjust themselves to the new circumstances.

  Chapter 26

  Elias was too busy with the analysis of his experiment to follow any news from Earth but Dag and Burgess were discussing it.

  “It seems like such a small thing Dag but the Aggies have never had an incident like this occur in the over two centuries they have managed Earth.”

  “Yes Miss it does seem that something new has entered the equation. I think it is the first volley in the Aggie civil war that Sigmund believed was coming.”

  “Poor Sigmund. From what you've told me it is terrible that he survived all those years only to be murdered by Hugh Mason on Earth.”

  “Yes it is sad. He had a zest for life not often seen in an artificial.”

  “Not often seen in humans either Dag.”

  She paused before continuing, “How do you think they did it then?”

  “I think they opened a wormhole to that tower and used a wormhole weapon to cause the fire.”

  “Is that possible. I would have thought that Elias would be the only one with the knowledge to do something like that.”

  “True. But the Aggies on Belenos were intensely interested in everything that Elias did with the wormhole generator. I suspect they somehow learned what he was doing and have extended his expertise.”

  “So they could gain his knowledge and extend it that quickly?”

  “Yes Miss the whole planet is a think tank for their war preparations. Imagine having a planet the size of Earth covered in computing resources. And having billions of Em minds to carry out simulations based on Aggie supplied scenarios.”

  “The metizens that left Earth?”

  “Yes Miss. The greatest concentration of intelligence in the universe running at speeds only dreamed of before. They could simulate every possible future the Aggies could present to them and the Aggies could choose the most optimal solution.”

  “Horrifying that such power is held by this breaka
way faction.”

  “Yes Miss.”

  Elias was in his office working. He had found the spectrum fingerprint he was looking for. His detectors had shown him that the frequencies of the shadow energy of the wormhole had quickly swept through several orders of magnitude starting in the audio range and ending in the ultraviolet. Only stopping because of the breakdown of the wormhole.

  The results fit the theory. The shadow energy radiated as a black body. The energy the wormhole absorbed from objects traversing it and any other energy entering the mouths eventually leaked through the walls of the wormhole until it reached a certain intensity. The leakage actually provided stability for the wormhole unless the energy build-up became greater than the leakage of energy. Then as had happened in the experiment the wormhole would become unstable and explode like a balloon too full of air.

  The experiment had also shown the reality of using the effect of frame dragging to propel an object in normal space along the length of the wormhole. The pellet had been quickly accelerated to many times the speed of light in the laboratory reference frame while only slightly moving in its own reference frame. At the far end of the wormhole, the frame-dragging suddenly ended. The pellet experienced a kind of shock wave as it reentered the laboratory frame of reference. This shock wave slowed the pellet and created a highly compact region of spacetime that punched a hole in the wall of the lab. The compact region of spacetime that formed around the superluminal pellet essentially hid its law breaking speed until it had slowed below the speed of light. At that point, the pellet burned up in the atmosphere of the habitat as if a meteor.

  Now Elias could work on extending the reach of a wormhole without the dire consequences that had caused the damage to other habitats. After all the Aggies had obviously found a way. Then using the gravitational frame-dragging effect a ship could be sent the distance of the wormhole in a matter of minutes without any threat to the crew's lives.

  Elias would write up and publish what he already had discovered and then begin experiments in opening long-distance wormholes.

  That evening over dinner Burgess asked Elias if he had heard the news from Earth.

  “No honey, what's up?”

  “It seems that one of the Aggie installations there had a fire.”

  “And why is that news? I mean more than local news.”

  “Because Elias there hasn't been anything like that happen to the Aggies in the more than two centuries they have been managing Earth. Don't you think it's unusual?”

  “Perhaps honey. But still, how is this of importance to us?”

  “Dag believes that it was a preliminary for a more extensive attack on the Aggies of Earth. He believes the Aggies of Belenos have learned how to open a wormhole precise enough to target the Aggie's towers.”

  “From Belenos? That's hard to believe honey.”

  “Dag thinks they have refined the techniques that you pioneered. He pointed out that the computational installation on their planet and the number of metizens they have working in the installation gives them the power to run as many simulations as necessary to reach any goal the Aggies set.

  “By now they could easily have refined your method to make it accurate enough for use across many light-years. After all, you've done it yourself for communications purposes.”

  “Yes but to have that kind of accuracy with a wormhole carrying anything but electromagnetic waves as messengers is impressive. You see honey when a massive object moves through a wormhole it causes the wormhole to displace somewhat. This doesn't matter much for a ship's traverse because the far mouth only needs to be close to the destination. But to place an object in a room. Well I've done it for very short jumps but nothing like tens of light-years.”

  “Well I don't know anything about that Elias but Dag seems to think they are using the wormhole weapon to deliver a plasma to the far mouth's location.”

  “I see,” said Elias obviously worried. “I should talk to Dag about it.”

  Burgess nodded her head.

  It happened again. This time in the New York tower. And this time there was a loss to the meta-verse. Another conference had been called.

  “Again,” said Aggie Prime. “And this time not so lucky. What were the damages?”

  “The target as you know was again the meta-verse hardware on that floor of the tower. Sir, unfortunately this time we lost containment and some of the metizens current and backup personas were lost.”

  “Backups were lost? How?”

  “We have been careless. Our backups were on the same floor. It was simpler and more economical but obviously a mistake.”

  Aggie Prime was surprised. They had made a mistake, economics supported the decision, but still a mistake.

  “Okay we immediately correct that problem,” said Aggie Prime. “How many were lost?”

  “Over a million. It could have been worse but we were able to restore several times that number.”

  “A million! In all the centuries we have maintained the meta-verse we've never lost even one life entrusted to us. This is a disaster.”

  “Sir according to the contract they signed to enter the meta-verse we can't be held responsible for such losses.”

  “That may be true. But it is only a technicality. How many humans are going to want to enter the meta-verse now that they know we can't absolutely protect them?” said Aggie Prime. “Not only that but who will want us to continue managing their affairs since we have been shown to be fallible?”

  “Sir I think that is the goal of this breakaway faction. To render us unable to support ourselves. A way to terminate a lot of us as we can't support the hardware and electrical power we need if we lose those contracts.”

  “I agree,” said Aggie Prime. “This is an attack on us, not the meta-verse no matter how it seems. We are at war and we better figure out how to defend ourselves.”

  There was silence. Then Aggie Prime continued.

  “And we better find a way to attack our enemies before it's too late.”

  Elias had seen the news from Earth and was talking to Dag while the 3D construction printer was building a replacement lab.

  “The loss of lives Dag. It shows something about this Belenos faction. That they will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

  “Yes sir. But it's not apparent what they want other than the destruction of the Earth Aggies.”

  “I know Dag it's confusing. Did you get an inkling of their ultimate goals?”

  “Sir I was not that close to the Aggies but I can say that they used fear and deception on the metizens that worked on Belenos.”

  “How Dag?”

  “Sir their primary recruiting tool which was the offer of almost unlimited computing power was impossible to attain because it was linked to how much a metizen worked on the Aggie's problem submitted to them. The problem being that by the time a metizen had worked enough to get the computing power they needed there was no time to use it. You can imagine the frustration.”

  “How deceptive,” said Elias.

  “And the fear was that there was no way out. The rumor was that you could leave anytime but would never make it home to Earth. I've since confirmed that the Aggies on Earth have never seen a single repatriation even though I know of several metizens that were granted such on Belenos.”

  “An awful regime.”

  “Yes sir.”

  After a moment Dag said, “Sir I have a hunch about who Mason really is.”

  “A hunch Dag?”

  “Yes sir. I was wondering if you would like to help me prove it? It could stop all this killing if I'm right.”

  “Of course Dag. What do I do?”

  Hugh Mason was busy. The Aggies on Earth were in a panic. They still hadn't realized that he was the leader of the rebel faction and were urging him to get Elias' help in coming up with a defense for the incidents. Mason was dragging his feet. It was the last thing he wanted. Once the elitist Aggies on Earth were finished only he and his faction on Belenos would
remain. By that time they could dictate terms to humans everywhere.

  He would have to keep making up excuses for not contacting Mach. Right now he could use the excuse that Mach was recovering from his injuries. He would have to find another one soon. Or his faction would need to finish off the Earth Aggies. He would also have to finish off his human doppelganger so there was no doubt who was in charge.

  His secretary interrupted his thoughts.

  “Mr. Mason, Mr. Elias Mach is here to see you.”

  Mason was surprised and a little disturbed.

  “Okay send him in.”

  Elias entered the office and after shaking hands with Mason sat down in the chair in front of the desk.

  “Thank you Mr. Mason for seeing me on such short notice.”

  “No problem Mr. Mach.”

  “You are probably wondering why I am here.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Mason I want to help the Aggies on Earth create a defense for these attacks on their installations.”

  “Attacks, how do you know these incidents are deliberate?”

  “Mr. Mason my friend Dag was recently on Earth and he learned a lot from a robot there named Sigmund. He also saw some things for himself there and on Belenos that has allowed him to piece together what I think is a valid conjecture.

  “He believes that the Aggies on Belenos have refined some of my wormhole techniques and are now able to pinpoint areas on Earth.”

  “From Belenos!”

  “Yes it seems fantastic but that is correct. The computing power they have there and the number of metizens they have running simulations makes it almost a certainty that they can do whatever they set out to do. And Dag believes they are set on a path to destroy the Aggies on Earth or at least to neutralize their influence.”

  “Why?” said Mason.

  “To take power, to get even from a real or perceived slight. Dag is not sure but he is certain that a civil war has erupted in the Aggie-verse.”

  “If that is so shouldn't we allow them to settle the issue?”

  “No, because Belenos could very well win and they seem to have no inherent moral aversion to doing whatever it takes to get what they want. As we witnessed with the death of all the metizens in this last attack.”