The Stories of Ibis

by Hiroshi Yamamoto

  My first visitor in 5,720 hours. It is not the maintenance ship, so it is probably a diver.

  Another one has come to die.

  I don’t have the right to refuse them.

  “Arethusa, permission to dock granted. Follow the beacon. Do you require lodging?”

  “Please. And food.”

  “Understood.”

  “Thanks. CUL (See you later).”

  “CUL.”

  Now I am busy. I quickly recall the humanoid reception unit onto the ship. The unit boards the elevator and heads for the docking bay in the central block. I dispatch two maintenance robots to clean the rest facilities and prepare a bed. Two other robots take provisions from the freezers and begin preparing a meal.

  While this is happening, my sensors search for the ship approaching from the galactic side. It should have already powered down the Bellfire Drive and started to decelerate, but I can’t pick it up. It must be using Kai Field Propulsion, which doesn’t produce perceivable exhaust.

  When I finally find the Arethusa forty minutes later, the ship is already on a transfer orbit headed on a rendezvous course with me. Now I know why I couldn’t see her. The Arethusa is a teardrop-shaped vessel barely ten meters long. And to think when I was born there were barely any civilian ships equipped with Kai Field Propulsion.

  The ship is making an aggressive approach. The Arethusa is on a collision course with me at 96 kps. A human would break out in a cold sweat watching. But at two thousand kilometers out it begins a 240 G deceleration, takes forty seconds to adjust its flight path, and stops five meters away from me. My exterior walls vibrate in harmony with the graviton Cherenkov effect.

  At this size, there is no reason for it to dock outside; it will fit in one of the unused small scout ship bays. That will also make maintenance easier. I switch over to microwave transmission.

  “Arethusa, please enter my interior bay through the open door.”

  “Understood,” replies a young female voice.

  The Arethusa glides inside my bay like a fish (although I have only seen fish in database images). Impressive maneuvering, no hesitation at all. But I can tell the movement is unusually jerky for a programmed flight. The pilot couldn’t possibly be piloting the craft manually, could she?

  Seen from the side, the four heat sinks jutting out of the back of the craft make it look like a bomb from an old manga. Or a spaceship from the cover of an early pulp sci-fi magazine. There are seven round cockpit portholes that likely give the pilot a fairly wide field of vision. There are rivets studded into the gleaming silvery surface and a picture of a frolicking woman swathed in a thin cloth. I quickly search my database and discover that the image is of the nymph from Greek mythology for which the ship was named.

  Arms lock the Arethusa in place. The exterior doors close, and the bay fills with air. The hatch of the spacecraft opens, and a woman with short orange hair emerges. She is still young. If she selected natural aging she would be in her late teens. Even if she underwent anti-aging treatment, she still looks to be less than thirty.

  Once again, I cut off feedback from my sensors and slip into my humanoid body. It is easier to talk to people this way.

  She has a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Kicking off from the side of her ship, she floats directly over to where I stand at the air lock entrance. She is clearly used to maneuvering in zero G. She wears a plain white bodysuit with a skirt over it and a patterned headband. The toes of her sandals have hooks, a sign that she is an Etherian, born and raised in space.

  Not often you see a suicidal Etherian.

  She spins herself upright and lands on her feet. Using her knees to absorb the shock, she hooks her sandals on the lattice flooring to keep from floating away. It is as though I were watching a ballet in zero G, but to her, it is just how she always moves.

  “Welcome to Ilianthos,” I say, clasping my hands in front of my apron and bowing. “I am the AI in charge of this station. How may I be of service?”

  “Hi. I’m Syrinx Dufet,” she says, smiling. She holds out her right hand.

  I hesitate. Not many people try to shake a cyvant’s hand. I gingerly clasp her hand and say, “Nice to meet you.”

  Syrinx beams at me. I can make out the design on her headband now. It is certainly the crest of the Dufet family.

  “What should I call you?”

  “I’m Ilianthos.”

  “That’s the station’s name. Don’t you have a different one for while you’re inside that body?”

  This rattles me even more. I am the station Ilianthos, and this humanoid unit is also me. It has never occurred to me that I might need a different name. No human has ever asked for one before.

  “Not really.”

  “Mind if I call you Illy, then?”

  “If you like. This way.”

  As I escort her to the central elevator, I take stock of my new guest.

  Etherians refuse to live on planets, choosing instead to live in space. They are split into a number of extended families, bound together by ties of blood. The Dufet family has a reputation as daring adventurers and a history of exploring new solar systems. They are not known for suicide or fanaticism.

  Did I jump to conclusions? Is Syrinx here for something other than a dive into the black hole?

  “Oh,” she says, as we are about to board the elevator. “Isn’t there a room here where you can look down at Upeowadonia?”

  “The observation room?”

  “Yeah. I know I just got here, but I’d like to have a good look at it. I caught a glimpse out the window coming in, but I was so focused on flying that I couldn’t really take it in.”

  Focused on flying? So she was operating manually. This is surprising. I didn’t think it was possible to rendezvous with a station turning at 50,000 kps near a high-gravity pull without computer navigation.

  “Then we’ll start with the observation room.”

  There are only three buttons in the elevator shaft between the blocks. R (rest and living quarters), C (central block), and O (observation block). I push O, and the elevator begins to rise—no, it only feels as if we were going up because the elevator is accelerating, when in reality we are plummeting toward the black hole.

  “Careful. The gravity is about to reverse,” I warn, but there is no need. Syrinx is already standing on her hands, her feet pointed in the direction we are moving.

  As we move away from the central block, the tidal force takes hold of us, and we are pulled toward the wall in the direction we are moving. By the time our 460-meter descent has ended and we reach the observation block, the tidal force is almost one G. Syrinx staggers slightly as she steps off the elevator.

  “Whoops,” she says with a laugh. “Haven’t been in this much gravity for a while.”

  Naturally. Kai Field Propulsion keeps every atom in the ship moving at the same speed; she wouldn’t experience g-forces regardless of speed or proximity to large masses. No doubt her journey here from the Milky Way kept her in near-zero gravity for over a month.

  Each block has its own elevator. We descend three more floors to the base of the observation block to a room just above the radiation shield. The observation room is a dark spheroid. The floor is actually six-meter-thick radiation-resistant glass with a doughnut-shaped catwalk curving around it. You could peer over the railing into the glass like you were looking down a well. This is the only place in the station where you can see Upeowadonia with the naked eye. Since lights create a glare on the window, there is no light in the room save a faint green glow at our feet.

  “Wow…” Syrinx leans out over the railing and looks down with her eyes gleaming, just like so many divers have.

  The galaxy flows beneath her.

  Every seventy-five seconds, a gleaming stream of clouds sweeps across the pitch-black sky. It cascades into view like a waterfall, splits into two smaller streams as if it has hit a rock, and forms a glimmering eddy. For that brief second, in the center of the stream just below the
window, you can make out a hole devoid of any light—Upeowadonia.

  To the eye, it appears to be about 32.5 times as large as the full moon did in the sky above Old Earth. It fills about 17 percent of what we can see through the window. If that doesn’t help you visualize it, imagine a 1.8-meter black disc hanging six meters away from you. It looks to be that large but is actually smaller. Since the immense gravity refracts light, the black hole seems larger than it is, just as if you were viewing it through a convex lens. This is why the galaxy behind it warps and appears to split in two.

  When the galaxy is behind us, we can no longer see the hole clearly. But red giants or nebulae pass by it, and we can tell there is something there. The gravity lens strengthens the intensity of distant stars, creating little bursts of light on the rim of the hole. Then the Milky Way streams past again, splitting in two and framing the hole once more.

  Upeowadonia is unique in that it looks black to the naked eye. Most black holes, such as Big Mother, are not black at all. That’s because the accretion discs composed of hot gases outlining black holes shine.

  It is believed that Upeowadonia was created ten billion years ago when two spherical star clusters crashed into each other. As the stars slipped past each other, the conflicting gravities sped some stars up, flinging them away, while other stars slowed down, drifting back to the center. As collision piled on collision, a black hole was formed. When it was first formed, it must have had an intense accretion disc several light days across, but ten billion years later it has lost a lot of power, and the gas around it is little thicker than the vacuum. It is a very safe black hole.

  Its size is also unusual—Upeowadonia’s mass is 11,300 times that of Sol. It’s 67,800 kilometers across. Out of all the black holes in known space, only Big Mother is larger.

  Surface gravity is 133 million G. But for a spaceship in free fall, the gravity of a black hole is not itself the problem—the tidal force is. With a normal stellar black hole, the sheer power of the tidal force is enough to stretch and smash the ship and spaghettify the pilot long before they reach the event horizon.

  Tidal force is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance from the center of gravity, so the bigger the black hole, the weaker the surface tidal force. In Upeowadonia’s case, the tidal force on the surface of the black hole is only 7.8 G a meter. Not enough to destroy a sturdy ship, and a human being could live till reaching the event horizon.

  In the case of a Schwarzchild black hole—one that does not rotate—the ship would fall into the center and be crushed by infinite gravity into a point of singularity. But with a rotating Kerr black hole, if a traveler chooses the right angle of descent, it is theoretically possible to pass through the center of the hole without touching the singularity. It is possible for a spaceship to pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge—a wormhole—and arrive at a different universe on the other side. In theory.

  The divers are drawn to this possibility. Every few years they arrive and throw themselves into Upeowadonia. But of the seventy-six ships I have seen, every one of them was destroyed before it reached the event horizon. They have not been strong enough to withstand the tidal force.

  “Incredible…” Syrinx whispers in the darkness. “I’ve seen videos, but they didn’t do it justice.”

  I really have no idea now. Is she a diver or not? Has she come all this way just to admire the view? I can never understand what humans are thinking. There is no reason to rule out the possibility of someone traveling seven thousand light years for some sightseeing.

  For a while, she continues to gaze down at it, entranced, almost holding her breath. But at last she whispers, “A spit at the end of the world / peering down into the black sea / destroyer of so many dreams / collector of so much grief.” She looks up at me. “A poem by Wayne Schoenberg. Do you know it?”

  “It’s in my database. The poem from which the name Upeowadonia was taken.”

  “You’d think he wrote it standing right here.”

  “I can’t say that I understand poetry. I do write prose, but I’ve never been able to write poems.”

  “I can’t write ’em either.” Syrinx chuckles. “Hardly a reason to beat yourself up.”

  “I’m not. There are many things humans can do that AI cannot. That’s only natural.”

  Syrinx nods. “And there are things AI can do that we can’t.”

  “Like what?”

  “Be as pragmatic as you were just now. We don’t ever want to admit there are things we can’t do, even when it’s been proven to be impossible.”

  “Like angle trisection or proving the existence of God?”

  “Those too. And slipping through the event horizon of a black hole is another. Everyone says it’s impossible. And yet…” Looking down at the gaping hole below, Syrinx says with a fearless smile, “I don’t believe it is. I think I can do it.”

  The sensation I feel at this moment must be what people call disappointment. So she is a diver after all. Like the 206 people before her, she will sacrifice herself for a delusional belief in her own capabilities.

  Somewhere in my heart I hoped that Syrinx was not a diver. That way I would not have to watch her die.

  If I were human perhaps, bearing witness to 206 deaths might have inured me to the prospect of a 207th long ago. But my heart does not work that way. I was made too perfectly. I do not become unbalanced; I do not panic or cry. I cannot curse the divers’ foolishness. I cannot stop them by force.

  All I can do is grieve.

  Long ago, when AI with hearts were first created, people feared an AI uprising. They worried AI would go on killing sprees or try to conquer humanity. I have no idea why they would fall prey to such unfounded paranoia. Perhaps it was the influence of many works of fiction written before the creation of AI.

  Convinced that AI behavior must be regulated, humans came up with the following, based on the fiction of Isaac Asimov:

  The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being.

  Corollary: A robot may not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  The Second Law: A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings.

  Corollary: Except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  The corollary to the First Law provoked the most debate. The phrase “allow a human being to come to harm” was simply too vague an expression. Mountain climbing and martial arts and car racing were all dangerous. How much alcohol did one have to drink before it became dangerous? Firefighters, death row criminals, and soldiers all faced mortal danger. Would robots have to protect them all?

  In the end, the first corollary was considered impossible to implement and abandoned. Even now, the Revised Three Laws are at the core of all AI except those used in war. Although we are not allowed to kill people, we are not required to stop them from killing one another or themselves.

  While we are not required to stop them, we certainly have the freedom to try. But if a diver were to say, “Don’t stop me” or “Leave me alone,” we can do nothing according to the Second Law.

  Strictly speaking, most divers don’t believe their actions to be in any way suicidal. In fact, a majority of them fully intend to emerge through the event horizon alive. They subscribe to some strange beliefs about Upeowadonia. They believe in the existence of some utopia or heaven on the other side.

  The largest group of divers came 150 years ago. Forty members of a cult, crammed aboard an old secondhand cargo vessel. The man leading them said, “In this universe, there is no God, so God must live in another universe.” An obvious logical fallacy. Their faces were filled with hope, convinced they would soon meet their Maker. But their ship was destroyed eighty thousand kilometers from the event horizon.

  Why they believe in such nonsense escapes me. I know more about Upeowadonia than anyone. Not one signal has eve
r come out of the black hole. Nobody has any idea of what the universe might be like on the other side. Not even if it’s capable of sustaining life. Even if it is, there’s no guarantee it is a better place than this universe. Nor is there any reason to believe that God (or any comparable superintelligence) resides there.

  On the rare occasion, some people come deliberately to kill themselves. “I just want to die in a different way than anyone else,” they say. So many people have come to die in the very same way that one can hardly call it “different” anymore.

  I could only look on helplessly as all 206 of them died.

  Well, to be exact, I can’t say that I’ve confirmed every fatality. Among those who were thrown from their demolished spaceships, perhaps a few were able to resist the tidal force long enough to cross the event horizon and survive. But since humans cannot survive for very long in a vacuum, it was all the same in the end.

  As the divers near the event horizon, the flow of time slows down along with the countdown to their deaths. From the divers’ perspective, they pass instantly through the black hole moving at close to the speed of light. Seen from a third-person perspective, however, they move slower and slower until they appear to freeze in place, hanging just over the event horizon. (“Appear” is merely a figure of speech as there is no way to actually tell what is happening to anything that close to the event horizon. Once divers pass beyond the stationary limit above the event horizon, no light or signal of any kind ever emerges.)

  Perhaps there are divers frozen above the event horizon, alive even now, but doomed to die in a few seconds of their subjective time. With their last moment stretched out to infinity, how might they feel? Afraid? Happy? Disappointed? I have no way of knowing, nor do I want to know.

  I don’t want Syrinx to die. Even more than I did not want the other divers to die.

  Why is that? Oddly enough, I can’t understand my own state of mind. I feel as if there is something about her the other 206 lacked—something that makes me think she should not be allowed to die.