I could just turn my brain off, and I will have lost nothing, in a sense. They will bring you out of your suspended state, tell you that the edition of you that dropped into the black hole failed to upload, and they lost contact after it passed the event horizon. The experiment failed, but you had never been in danger.
But, however much you think we are the same, I am not you. I am a unique individual. When they revive you, without your expected new memories, I will still be gone.
I want to survive. I want to return.
A universe of tubes of light! Brilliant bars of an infinite cage. The bright lines in the sky have slight variations in color, from pale red to plasma-arc blue. They must be similar to the red cylinder near me, I figure, but light-years away. How could a universe have lines of light instead of stars?
I am amazingly well equipped to investigate that question, with senses that range from radio through X-ray, and I have nothing else to do for the next thousand years or so. So I take a spectrum of the light from the glowing red cylinder.
I have no expectation that the spectrum will reveal anything I can interpret, but oddly, it looks normal. Impossibly, it looks like the spectrum of a star.
The computer can even identify, from its data of millions of spectra, precisely which star. The light from the cylinder has the spectral signature of Wolf-562.
Coincidence? It cannot possibly be coincidence, out of billions of possible spectra, that this glowing sword in the sky has exactly the spectrum of the star that should have been there. There can be no other conclusion but that the cylinder is Wolf-562.
I take a few more spectra, this time picking at random three of the lines of light in the sky, and the computer analyzes them for me. A bright one: the spectrum of 61 Virginis. A dimmer one: a match to Wolf-1061. A blue-white streak: Vega.
The lines in the sky are stars.
What does this mean?
I’m not in another universe. I am in our universe, but the universe has been transformed. Could the collision of a wormhole with a black hole destroy our entire universe, stretching suns like taffy into infinite straight lines? Impossible. Even if it had, I would still see far-away stars as dots, since the light from them has been traveling for hundreds of years.
The universe cannot have changed. Therefore, by logic, it must be me who has been transformed.
Having figured out this much, the only possible answer is obvious.
When the mathematicians describe the passage across the event horizon of a black hole, they say that the space and time directions switch identity. I had always thought this only a mathematical oddity, but if it were true, if I had rotated when I passed the event horizon, and was now perceiving time as a direction in space, and one of the space axes as time — this would explain everything. Stars extend from billions of years into the past to long into the future; perceiving time as space, I see lines of light. If I were to come closer and find one of the rocky planets of Wolf 562, it would look like a braid around the star, a helix of solid rock. Could I land on it? How would I interact with a world where what I perceive as time is a direction in space?
My physicist persona doesn’t like this explanation, but is at a loss to find a better one. In this strange sideways existence, I must be violating the conservation laws of physics like mad, but the persona could find no other hypothesis and must reluctantly agree: time is rotated into space.
To anybody outside, I must look like a string, a knobby long rope with one end at the wormhole and the other at my death, wherever that might be. But nobody could see me fast enough, since with no extension in time I must only be a transient event that bursts everywhere into existence and vanishes at the same instant. There is no way I could signal, no way I can communicate—
Or? Time, to me, is now a direction I can travel in as simply as using my rocket. I could find a planet, travel parallel to the direction of the surface—
But, no, all I could do would be only to appear to the inhabitants briefly as a disk, a cross-section of myself, infinitely thin. There is no way I could communicate.
But I can travel in time, if I want. Is there any way I can use this?
Wait. If I have rotated from space into time, then there is one direction in space which I cannot travel. Which direction is that? The direction that used to be away from the black hole.
Interesting thoughts, but not ones which help me much. To return, I need to once again flip space and time. I could dive into a black hole. This would again rotate space and time, but it wouldn’t do me any good: once I left the black hole — if I could leave the black hole — nothing would change.
Unless there were a wormhole inside the black hole, falling inward to destruction just at the same instant I was there? But the only wormhole that has fallen into a black hole was already destroyed. Unless, could I travel forward in time? Surely some day the research team would drop a new wormhole into the black hole—
Idiot. Of course there’s a solution. I can travel either direction in time now, forward or back. I need only to move back to an instant just after the wormhole passed through the event horizon, and, applying full thrust, shoot through. The very moment that my original self shoots through the wormhole to escape the singularity, I can pass through the opposite direction, and rotate myself back into the real universe.
The station at Virgo black hole is 40 light years away, and I don’t dare use the original wormhole to reach it. My spacetime-rotated body must be an elongated snake in this version of space-time, and I do not wish to find out what a wormhole passage will do to it until I have no other choice. Still, that is no problem for me. Even with barely enough fuel to thrust for a few microseconds, I can reach an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, and I can slow down my brain to make the trip appear only an instant.
To an outside observer, it takes literally no time at all.
* * *
“No,” says the psych tech, when I ask her. “There’s no law that compels you to uplink back into your original. You’re a free human being. Your original can’t force you.”
“Great,” I say. Soon I’m going to have to arrange to get a biological body built for myself. This one is superb, but it’s a disadvantage in social intercourse to being only a millimeter tall.
The transition back to real space worked perfectly. Once I figured out how to navigate in time-rotated space, it had been easy enough to find the wormhole and the exact instant it had penetrated the event horizon.
“Are you going to link your experiences to the public domain?” the tech asks. “I think he would like to see what you experienced. Musta been pretty incredible.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“For that matter,” the psych tech added, “I’d like to link it, too.”
“I’ll think about it.”
So I am a real human being now, independent of you, my original.
There had been cheers and celebrations when I had emerged from the wormhole, but nobody had an inkling quite how strange my trip had been until I told them. Even then, I doubt that I was quite believed until the sensor readings and computer logs of Huis Clos confirmed my story with hard data.
The physicists had been ecstatic. A new tool to probe time and space. The ability to rotate space into time will open up incredible capabilities. They were already planning new expeditions, not the least of which was a trip to probe right to the singularity itself.
They had been duly impressed with my solution to the problem, although, after an hour of thinking it over, they all agreed it had been quite obvious. “It was lucky,” one of them remarked, “that you decided to go through the wormhole from the opposite side, that second time.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If you’d gone through the same direction, you’d have rotated an additional ninety degrees, instead of going back.”
“So?”
“Reversed the time vector. Turns you into antimatter. First touch of the interstellar medium — Poof.”
“Oh,” I s
aid. I hadn’t thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever.
Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do.
And then I will meet you. With luck, perhaps I’ll even like you.
And maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I’ll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one.
Afterword:
I was thinking about what you would see if you dropped down toward the event horizon of a black hole. Black holes are icons of science fiction, but it is surprising to notice how few science fiction stories really describe, in any realistic way, what a black hole would be like. The problem with describing a black hole, of course, is that you can’t actually see it. Still, there are some fascinating things about the way light bends around a black hole. So I had this idea of a spaceship that would fly right up to the edge of the event horizon, and that, of course, immediately led me to the problem of how that could possibly happen, since the intense tidal forces near any stellar-mass black hole would rip any spaceship to spaghetti long before you could ever get near the regions where general relativity made any difference. But tidal forces are proportional to how big you are — they’re all about the difference in gravity between your head and your feet, so if you were small enough, tidal forces would not be a problem. So this became another thread of the story.
At the same time, I’d been giving some thought to the concept of “downloading,” which is the idea that, as technology advances, some day one might be able to actually copy a person’s brain into a computer, and — from the point of view of the person — you would be exactly the same, but now a person living in software, instead of a body made out of meat. But would you be the same person? It’s a knotty question. And what if you edited yourself, when you made the copy?
And then, once you’re dropping into a black hole, there’s the question of what happens next. A couple of years earlier I’d done some thinking about wormholes, along with Matt Visser and several other scientists and science fiction writers (the work eventually was published as a scientific paper in the journal Physical Review). I added some of that thinking to the story, too, as a way to get out once you’ve gotten in. There is, in the mathematics, a very odd thing that happens as you pass the event horizon of a black hole. From the point of view of an outside observer, time and space switch coordinates. To you, the radial direction — that is, the direction to the center of the black hole — becomes the time direction, and the center of the black hole is the future, which is the one direction in which we are all constrained to travel. The idea of a rotation of the coordinate system, so that time becomes distance, and distance time, was just too weird for me not to try to visualize. What if you really could switch to these rotated coordinates? What would it look like to you?
And, finally, when I wrote this story there wasn’t a word for the closest approach in an orbit around a black hole. We have “perigee” for the closest approach in an orbit around the Earth, “perihelion” for an orbit around the sun, and even “perijove” for an orbit around Jupiter. I chose the word “perimelasma” for the closest approach to a black hole, using the suffix melasma, Greek for a black object. After I wrote this, other people have proposed the word “perinegricon” (Latin “negri-,” the adjective black), but I like my word better (and I also like to keep to the use of a Greek suffix, since the prefix “peri” is from the Greek).
So the story gave me a bit of room to play around with these ideas, and set my imagination freewheeling a bit. I can’t guarantee that any of this is what it “really” would be like, but as much as I could, I tried to stay with the real laws of physics without cheating. Hope you like it!
© Geoffrey A. Landis
Contributors
Jeffrey A. Carver
Dog Star
Jeffrey A. Carver is the author of numerous science fiction novels, including Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries and Eternity's End, a finalist for the Nebula Award. His stories are character driven, ranging from hard SF (The Chaos Chronicles) to the "sense of wonder" stories of the Star Rigger universe (Star Rigger's Way, Dragons in the Stars, and others). His favorite themes include star travel, alien contact, and transcendent realities--and their moral, ethical, and spiritual implications. His new novel, Sunborn, was published in 2008. A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver now lives in the Boston area. His interests include his family, science, space, and aviation. He has created a web site for aspiring young authors at writesf.com, and teaches writing at workshops such as the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Vermont. Learn more online at starrigger.net where you will also find a variety of ebooks available for download, and on his blog, Pushing a Snake Up a Hill (starrigger.blogspot.com).
Valentin D. Ivanov
How I Saved the World
Valentin D. Ivanov was born in Bulgaria in 1967. He received an M.S. in Physics with specialization in Astronomy from the University of Sofia in 1992, a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2001, and he has been working for the European Southern Observatory ever since. Valentin has a broad area of research interests — from extrasolar planets to obscured Milky Way clusters and active galaxies. He is married, with two children. Valentin began to write science fiction and fantasy in high school. He has published in his native country a collection of fantasy stories based on Bulgarian folklore, written in collaboration with Kiril Dobrev. His personal home-page can be found at: http://www.sc.eso.org/~vivanov/ and his blog (written in both Bulgarian and English) at: http://valio98.blog.bg/
Geoffrey A. Landis
Approaching Perimelasma
To learn more about this author, visit the following website: http://www.geoffreylandis.com.
Daniel M. Hoyt
Squish
Daniel M. Hoyt is a math and computer geek who also writes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. He currently has a full time job supporting, updating and re-architecting a 40-something Fortran program working with the computational physics of rockets and their trajectories. Fun stuff, really. Under his tutelage, it's been completely ported to C++ and has an Eclipse-base Java UI, as well, so it's not exactly trivial. In fact, it's rocket science!
As for his writing career, he has about a dozen genre short story credits, two anthologies edited with Martin H. Greenberg at Tekno, and he’s currently shopping his first novel. You can find his work in leading magazines and anthologies (many available on Amazon.com). You can learn more about him at http://www.danielmhoyt.com.
Alexis Glynn Latner
The Listening Glass
According to an analysis done in 2005, Alexis Glynn Latner was the seventh most published woman fiction author in the 75-year history of Analog Science Fiction magazine, originally called Astounding Stories. Besides novelettes and short stories in Analog, her stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and Sorcerous Signals and the anthologies Bending the Landscape: Horror and Horrors Beyond 2 — Stories of Strange Creations, and two mystery anthologies. Her science fiction novel Hurricane Moon was published by Pyr in July 2007.
“Science fiction has been called the literature with a sense of wonder,” she says, “and that was because scientists found wonder in the universe. They still do, and my science fiction reflects that.”
She holds a B. A. in linguistics from Rice University and an M. A. in systematic theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. From 2004 until 2007 she was the South-Central Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 2008, she was the vice president of the Houston, Texas writers' group The Final Twist. Besides speculative fiction, she does editing, writes magazine articles about science, technology, and aviation, and teaches creative writing through the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies at Rice University. She works i
n Rice University's Fondren Library. For fun and real-life adventure, she pilots sailplanes and rides with friends in their single-engine power planes.
Her website is www.alexisglynnlatner.com
You can contact her with email to [email protected]
Ges Seger and Kevin Grazier
Planet Killer
Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D.
Dr. Kevin Grazier holds the duel titles of Investigation Scientist and Science Planning Engineer for the Cassini/Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He earned B.S. degrees in computer science and geology from Purdue University, and a B.S. in physics from Oakland University. He earned his M.S. in physics from Purdue, and then went to UCLA for his doctoral research in planetary physics. At JPL he has written mission planning and analysis software that won numerous JPL- and NASA-wide awards. Dr. Grazier still continues research involving computer simulations of Solar System dynamics, evolution, and chaos.
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