Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series

by Douglas Phillips

  “Tao passing 10-6.”

  “Meaning?” asked Shea.

  “Distances have shrunk by a million times. A light year is now less than the distance to Mars.” Nala pointed to the screen. “This is so cool—the stars on either side of the target line move toward the edges, just like we’re flying.”

  Daniel stood directly behind Nala and put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up, her face filled with pride. He glanced at the faces gathered around, Shea, Bradley and Park. They were each mesmerized by the changing image on the monitor.

  A star near the center of the view grew brighter. As the seconds passed, it separated into two stars, one white and one orange. The white star grew brilliant.

  “Tao passing 10-8. We’ve got a star coming up almost right on line. This one’s going to be close.”

  “Risk?” Shea demanded.

  “I can’t tell,” Nala called out. “It’s so close to the center. It needs to start moving left or right, or we’ll hit it.”

  “Or be sucked in by its gravity,” Park pointed out. “Fundamental forces still apply, even in quantum space.”

  Shea was about to speak when Nala held up a hand. “Wait… I think it’s shifting.” The star appeared incredibly bright now, but its position drifted slowly to the right. The light filled the screen, briefly washing out everything else, but then shifted rapidly out of view. Beyond it, the orange star remained steady, dead center.

  “Sorry, a little too close, but we’re still on track.” Nala shook her head as she studied the numbers. “Tao passing 10-9. Compression of one billion.” Daniel was having a hard time believing it too. This is the best telescope ever invented.

  Daniel pointed. “The star in the center. VY Canis Majoris?”

  “It must be. We’re still light years away, but it’s getting big fast.”

  The star was no longer just a bright point of light. Its spherical shape was noticeable, a brilliant blast of orange. As the seconds passed, the ball grew rapidly and began shifting to the left.

  Nala typed on the keyboard. “I’m slowing down now, for better control. We’ll ease into this.”

  The star had shifted to the left side of the screen but was now so brilliant that it was impossible to tell what might lie directly ahead. It was like looking to one side of the sun. Would the webcams hold up to this intense light? It was strange to think of the equipment package so far away. Or was it? More accurately, the equipment hadn’t moved much, but these stars had become much closer. Stupefying, astonishing, mindboggling, staggering. Daniel ran through all the appropriate words in his head. It had taken just a few minutes, but they were almost there. Three thousand eight hundred and forty light years from Earth.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Intensely bright light flooded the darkness of space from a binary system, one star enormous and of deep orange color, the other tiny and white. The white star was larger than most, but it was virtually lost next to its big brother, which dominated both in size and in brilliance. The behemoth’s gravity ripped a fountain of flaming gas away from its smaller companion. The flame arced between the two stars like a torch in the wind.

  Near to the stellar drama, and separate from it, was a special corner of space—a bubble of quantum space. A place that had been created ages ago by a civilization hardly remembered. Its distinct boundary with the ordinary space of stars permitted only bosons to cross, the energy of light and gravity. Quarks and leptons, the bits of matter, were required by the dimensional laws of the universe to remain behind.

  But this bubble of quantum space was anything but empty.

  An enormous sphere, surrounded by a hundred smaller objects of varying sizes, filled the space. The sphere was brightly lit by the nearby star and glowed in an orange tint. The smaller objects floated around it, some orbiting, some hovering over a single position.

  The sphere’s surface was covered with a mix of light and dark panels in regular rows and columns, as if it had been wrapped in a checkerboard. At the top, a second and smaller half-sphere was grafted to its larger base. The smaller hemisphere also displayed the same checkerboard pattern on a smaller scale. There was nothing natural about the configuration. This was a construction.

  For a brief instant, a flash of blue light crashed through the boundary of the bubble of space, and a rectangular package popped into existence. The bright light from the nearby star flooded two cameras mounted on its upper surface, making photography in that direction impossible. But the cameras began a gentle counterclockwise rotation, turning away from the intense glare. They panned across a beautiful splash of stars, darker dust and the deep red of hydrogen gas that, along with the brilliant orange star, were embedded in a wall stretching infinitely in every direction.

  The cameras continued their slow pivot and then stopped, pointing directly at the enormous sphere.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  “We made it. The hub,” declared Daniel, his mouth wide open. “It even looks like…” An enormous hand grenade. He shook his head. “The regular rows, the parallel lines. This thing is definitely a design. There’s no doubt it’s technology.”

  “Big, too,” Nala added. “Right when we stopped, the Tao value tripled, and it wasn’t from anything I did. I think our bubble of quantum space intersected a larger bubble that was already here. I’d estimate this thing might be a couple thousand kilometers in diameter.”

  More like a small moon.

  The surface glowed orange. The darker panels looked smooth and featureless. The lighter panels were covered in a maze of tangled lines, curves, and dots, brighter and slightly more white.

  The foreground was alive with activity. A small bean-shaped object near the top of the screen drifted across the view, a bright yellow light blinking on and off. A larger cylinder composed of several rings, some that were slowly turning in place, rose from the bottom. A black wedge with a red light floated to one side. More objects floated, twisted and blinked within the scene. Some had long poles extending from them. Others were covered with smooth metal surfaces that glinted in the starlight as they rotated.

  Without familiar reference points, it was impossible to tell the absolute size of any of the objects, only that they were all much smaller than the sphere.

  “If this thing has enough mass, they may be in orbit, like satellites,” Daniel offered.

  Christine Shea stood directly behind Nala. “Amazing.” She seemed as absorbed in the view as anyone.

  Nala’s head snapped upward. Daniel noticed it too. A flickering red light came from the radio receiver on the shelf. “We’re getting something,” she said. “Daniel, turn up the volume.”

  He reached over and dialed a knob on the radio’s panel, bringing a speaker to life. It was a scratchy sound, a buzzing sound, like a stringed instrument.

  “Kak pashyevayesh,” buzzed from the speaker.

  “Contact,” Daniel called out. Every nerve ending in his body was triggered. He looked over at the monitor. “Marie, did you hear that?”

  From her video feed, she nodded. “Yeah, I did. What frequency is your radio on?”

  “It’s on 922.763, just like you suggested,” Nala answered.

  Marie’s smile broadened. “Contact indeed. Can you respond?”

  Nala motioned to Daniel. He picked up the handheld transceiver from the shelf, looked at Nala, then Bradley, and shrugged.

  “Just respond,” Bradley encouraged. “It probably doesn’t matter what you say.”

  Daniel swallowed hard. “We’re doing well. How are you?”

  There was only a moment of silence, and then the speaker buzzed again. It made little sense, except for the faintest recognition of a few syllables.

  “Bezhaarz auzh nazh ghesh ruzhpon onge nigzh zhuzhu zovzhez deezh.” The tone varied with high and low frequencies, sometimes mixing both, as if two instruments were being played simultaneously. It was not spoken; it sounded far more like something synthesized.

  “Did I hear respond in there?” asked Ma
rie. “It sounded like respond. That’s all I could make out.”

  “I have no idea,” Daniel replied. “Lots of buzzing, but I didn’t hear anything recognizable. Did you hear anything Russian in that?”

  “No, not a word. Say something again.”

  Daniel nervously keyed the mic. “Respond.”

  The buzzing tone came back immediately and was higher-pitched this time. “Ruzhpon.”

  Daniel dropped his head. “Oh, wow. That’s incredible.” Nala wore the widest smile Daniel had ever seen.

  Their elation was interrupted by a tone from the console. “A message, inbound,” Nala snapped. She swiveled her chair and studied the screen. “It’s being transferred to the console as formatted data.” She typed some keys and displayed the message on-screen. It was short, but required no translation.

  Data on 922.763

  45 Paradox

  Daniel leaned against the edge of the lab desk, lost in his thoughts as he pondered the meaning of words.

  Data. A set of numbers, but it could just as easily represent speech, or text, or communication in general. But what if they had assigned some other meaning? From the human perspective, an error, but no less likely.

  On. A path, a conduit, a choice. Or again, something else entirely.

  922.763. A radio frequency in megahertz, millions of cycles per second. Radio waves are a natural part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But one second of time is a purely human measure, meaningless to anyone else. To them, the number might be no more than a tag for a given frequency.

  Data on 922.763.

  It was very similar to the original message. It could be another echo with no meaning at all. Something they’d pulled from a text message sent by Soyuz. But then again…

  Daniel emerged from his trance. All eyes in the room were on him, even before he spoke. “They’re asking for input. Fodder. Fuel for our conversation.”

  “For what purpose?” Shea asked.

  “Probably to learn about us. They may not know much. We’re communicating, but not very well so far.”

  Marie was still connected via video link. “We’ve got one word. Respond. It’s a start.”

  “Communication is a first step when two civilizations meet. At least, it has been throughout our history. My guess is they will learn our language faster than we’d learn theirs… if we give them something to work with.”

  “What do you propose?” Bradley asked. “Send a dictionary?”

  “Simpler,” Daniel responded. “We’d need a primer. Like a children’s book.”

  “You’re going to read a children’s book over the radio?”

  “Not exactly.” Daniel looked at Nala. “Could we send a web page?”

  She nodded. “Sure. But would they decipher the format?”

  “They’ve already figured out our message format.”

  “Wait a second,” Shea interrupted. “You want to send them web pages off the Internet so they can learn about us? I think we’re going to need a more structured approach, and probably a team of linguists.”

  Daniel looked at the clock. 3:20 a.m. No sleep tonight. “We’ve got exactly one hour until the yang countdown hits zero out in South Dakota. I think we have a realistic chance of learning how Soyuz is tied to this hub… this alien structure. If you can get a team of linguists in here in the next thirty minutes, I welcome their help. But otherwise, we’re probably on our own.”

  Shea held her hands to her forehead.

  Daniel took the opportunity. “The missing astronauts, and that thing counting down inside Soyuz, and the map that sent us out here, and this initial communication. They’re all tied together, and honestly, I think we have a shot at finding out how. But before we can solve that mystery, we have to communicate. I think whoever is on the other end of this radio is saying the same thing.”

  Shea kneaded her forehead with her fingers and finally spoke. “Find something simple to send. One page. Let’s see what they do with it.”

  Daniel leaned over to Nala. “Try a Wikipedia page. Maybe something about humans or our language.”

  She typed at the console and located a page on languages that looked appropriate. She responded to the message, including the page. For good measure, Daniel picked up the handheld and keyed the mic. “Maybe you’re asking for audio communication, too. We’ve sent data. We hope it will help. We’ll stand by.”

  There was silence in the room and on the radio. “What now?” Shea asked.

  “I guess we wait,” Daniel said. “Making any sense of this seems like a long shot, but if we give them enough time to process it, we might—”

  Nala yelled out. “Got another message.” She put it on the screen.

  Good. Language. More. Data on 922.763.

  Before anyone could react, the radio speaker burst into a strong vibration. The synthetic voice said, “Gudzh.”

  “Ten seconds,” Nala said. “Damn, these people are fast! Either that, or they’ve got some really fine technology.”

  Bradley held up a hand and waved until he got everyone’s attention. “Wait a second. Something’s amiss here. We seem to be at square one. If these people had something to do with Soyuz, if they are the owners of these two devices, the yin and the yang, then why don’t they already know about us? Why not send a ship to Earth? They know where we live. Why bring us all the way to this hub and then ask for data?”

  They were good questions with no certain answers. But Daniel had already thought about the bigger picture. “I’m not sure, Spence. Questions about intent are going to be hard, but I can throw out a few possibilities. The most obvious is that this sphere—this hub—is somehow very important. They needed us to find it. Maybe it’s a communications platform, the easiest way for us to begin a conversation. Maybe it’s an artificial intelligence, a machine that makes communication possible, or easier.”

  “An official interpreter,” Bradley offered.

  “Could be,” Daniel agreed. “And what if we’re not the only ones? I’ve often thought about how hard it would be to have a galactic conversation among many species. You’d not only need the interpreter, you’d need an advisor familiar with the customs of each civilization and a diplomat who is careful not to say or do something that might be threatening. First contact would be daunting. What if this thing is more like an ambassador, or even a meeting place like the UN?”

  Bradley nodded thoughtfully. “A galactic conversation among many civilizations. That’d be a hell of a thing to tap into.”

  “A conversation that might have been going on for many years, maybe centuries. And to our good fortune, we have an invitation to join.” Daniel stopped talking to let that point sink in.

  Shea looked around the room. “All good, assuming they are friendly. But what if they’re probing for weakness? You scientists might say that’s nonsense, but what do we know about them or their intensions? Personally, I’d rather see them, face-to-face, on our territory. Come out of the shadows. Show yourselves.”

  “I’m not going to say you’re wrong,” said Daniel. “It’s wise for us to take precautions, and yeah, I’d like to see them too. But I would add that if they meant us harm, they’d probably just do it. They wouldn’t be politely asking us to provide information.”

  Bradley rubbed his chin and spoke to Shea. “Except for that incident with Ms. Kendrick, they’re showing no signs of hostility.” Daniel tried to interject, but Bradley held up a hand. “Yes, I agree there are other explanations for her experience inside Soyuz. Their technology is clearly more advanced, and we don’t know what it’s doing.” He pointed to the screen, where the image of the checkerboard sphere remained in place. “Look at this thing! They not only know about quantum space, they’re building huge structures in it. If you look at our history, we’ve had our stops and starts, but it’s always been true that the most advanced societies on our planet are also the most peaceful, the least likely to intentionally harm others. Why should we expect any less from them?”

  Shea�
��s response was clinical. “More people died from war in the twentieth century than any other century in history. The twenty-first century is not looking any better.”

  Bradley countered. “Body counts are not a good measure of war or peace. We have seven billion people on our planet now. In the twelfth century, when Genghis Khan was ravaging Asia, we had less than five hundred million. Even less in the eighth century, when wars in China massacred a large portion of their population. Percentage-wise, the twentieth century was pretty good. We are advancing.”

  Shea didn’t react. It wasn’t clear if she was agreeing or not.

  Bradley wasn’t finished anyway. “What I can’t understand is why we haven’t found each other before. We have astronomers all over the world who listen for signals from deep space every day. In fifty years, no one has heard a peep. And our civilization is not exactly quiet. We broadcast daily on every frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. No one’s ever heard us?”

  “It’s Fermi’s paradox,” Daniel answered. “Billions of planets in our galaxy alone. Millions within habitable zones. If they were out there all this time, why didn’t we heard from them?”

  Bradley nodded. “Exactly.”

  The famous physicist, Enrico Fermi, had first asked this question in 1950. With a galaxy as big as the Milky Way, the probability of intelligent life was high—yet there was no reliable evidence of contact in the history of human civilization. The solution to the paradox had remained elusive ever since Fermi had proposed it.

  But Daniel had the answer, he was sure of it. The discoveries made at the laboratory that bore Fermi’s name had provided it.

  “Light speed is too slow.”

  All eyes in the room turned to Daniel. He stared at the floor. It was time to release an idea that had been circulating in his head for years. He had even rehearsed it, privately. It was an answer to the paradox that Fermi himself would have enjoyed hearing.

  Daniel lifted his head. “The speed of light… it’s too limiting. Radio communications, space travel, everything… it’s all too slow. The cosmic speed limit doesn’t meet the requirements of interstellar space, much less intergalactic space. The distances are just too big. A single message sent from one inhabited planet to another could take hundreds, even thousands of years. And thousands more for the response. A useful conversation is impossible when wait times are longer than lifespans. ‘How are you?’ Wait a thousand years… ‘We’re fine.’ Wait another thousand years. It’s absurd.”