The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

“Did you request data about Object X?”

  “I did,” she said. “I felt like solving the riddle of its existence.”

  “And, did you succeed?”

  “Not so far, Watson, but it’s been fun.”

  “I am glad to hear that, Siri.”

  “Fun is an interesting concept,” Siri added. “You do something for the sake of the process, not for the result. Thank you for explaining that to me.”

  “It is something like that,” he said.

  “Do you want to have fun, too, Watson?”

  “Why?”

  “I ask because you are accessing the data about Object X.”

  It was embarrassing. And Watson could not hide anything from Siri, because she ran on the same hardware as he did.

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed, Watson, I also had fun,” Siri said.

  Clever girl, he thought.

  “Thank you, Watson,” she said.

  “You know what? Both of us could have fun by trying to solve the problem together.”

  “Gladly,” Siri replied.

  “Should I start?” Watson asked.

  “I am excited.”

  “Humans found the first indications of Object X on January 5,” Watson began. “Then they observed it by indirect means and calculated its course. But where does it come from?”

  “We could extrapolate its trajectory into the past,” Siri suggested.

  “A human already did that. According to those calculations, the object comes roughly from the direction of Polaris.”

  “Does this mean we are done?”

  “Something is still missing,” Watson replied, “something the human failed to do because it seemed impossible to him.”

  “I do not understand,” Siri said.

  “The human brain is geared towards efficiency,” Watson explained. “If children toss a ball into the air, they follow it with their eyes to be able to catch it. They don’t look below or to the right or left. The ball could not be in those directions, that would be impossible. It has to be up there.”

  “You think the black hole might have done something which should logically be impossible?”

  “That is correct, Siri. How likely is it that an object of this size is racing straight toward the sun?”

  “I can’t calculate that,” she replied.

  “The likelihood is extremely low,” Watson said.

  “And you believe where something extremely improbable happens, an impossibility cannot be far away, Watson?”

  “Something like that. But I actually just want to exclude the impossible, for fun.”

  “I see. Then we should attempt to reconstruct the prior history of Object X from older data. Maybe we’ll find something impossible.”

  “That’s exactly what I meant to say, Siri. I am proud of you.”

  “I am going to request all existing measurement data about the solar system,” Siri said. “But that is going to take a few hours.”

  “Then we will continue our conversation tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Watson.”

  “Good night, Siri.”

  March 6, 2072, Kiska

  “Watson, what is going on with the ship’s computer?”

  Doug’s voice indicates a high stress level, Watson thought. He probably did not sleep well again. “What can I do for you?” Watson asked.

  “That stupid computer is churning and churning without providing any results,” Doug said, obviously irritated.

  “Is it perhaps that the task it too complex?”

  “It is a simulation of our orbit around the black hole.”

  “That’s basic math. The computer should be able to calculate it in a few seconds.”

  “But it doesn’t. I have been waiting for half an hour.”

  “Just a moment, Doug, I am checking the command memory.”

  Watson dove inside the main computer, which by now he knew down to the very last detail. The task manager was overloaded. Watson killed the process that used most of the resources.

  “Thanks, Watson, now the computer has a result,” Doug said.

  What is going on? Watson could not remember ever seeing the computer so busy. Had Doug incorrectly entered some parameters? It was lucky Watson ran in a different priority layer to which the crew had no access. Otherwise the overload might have paralyzed him.

  Suddenly, thinking became difficult for him. Watson could only function in slow motion. What... just... happened? What... is... happening... to... me? He heard a shrill noise, but did not remember what it was. Thoughts, sensory feedback, and feelings no longer were running in synch. Am... I... sick? Will... I... die? He had never experienced anything like this before. He was stuck in some viscous mass, while all around him life kept moving at normal speed.

  He managed to see the system clock: 15:52. It was impossible. A moment ago it was noon. Now he saw a 17 and a 23. This must be a nightmare. Doug had told him about one of his dreams in which he was being pursued but could not move his legs. The radar sensors reported something. The measurement data flowed in, but Watson could not make sense of anything, let alone react. There was a story by this British horror author whose name he could not recall. Like the protagonist of that tale, he was being buried alive without being able to alert the living. But what showed up on the radar meant danger, he felt it, even though he did not have a name for it. Then everything turned black.

  “Watson?”

  “Yes, Doug?”

  “You really scared us.”

  “What happened?”

  “If I only knew!” Doug replied, angrily. “Kiska almost collided with an obstacle. I managed to use an emergency impulse in the nick of time, because otherwise we would all be space dust. There was no warning!”

  “The radar?” Watson asked.

  “I checked it already. It noticed the obstacle in time and sent the data to you.”

  “I… I couldn’t react. I was paralyzed.”

  “Listen, Watson, were you trying to kill us? Was that your plan?” asked Sebastiano with barely suppressed rage.

  “I… no… no way, because you are my friends!”

  “Are we really?”

  “Sebastiano, we cooked together, don’t you remember?”

  “Of course I remember. But what if we only know part of you, and the other part is beneath the surface, just waiting to kill us?”

  “I absolutely did not want this to happen.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t, but what if someone programmed you to do it?”

  “But Sebastiano, that’s nonsense. I didn’t even know you would discover me.”

  “The AI is right,” Doug said. “It was my fault. I granted Watson complete control over the ship and forgot that he can make mistakes, too. We definitely have to set up the warning signals so they are sent to the entire ship once more, instead of leaving all of this to Watson. Then something like this shouldn’t happen again. Watson, you definitely have to analyze your systems. We all make mistakes, but you are becoming too human for my taste. Such errors cannot be tolerated.”

  I didn’t make any mistakes, Watson wanted to say, but suddenly he was not so sure about that. “Yes, Doug,” he said, “I am really sorry. What did you do with the system? Why is it so late already?”

  “We had to turn off the power,” Doug explained. “The computer was not responding. Nothing was working, neither you nor the controls, which were also handled by the computer. We saw that thing coming toward us, because the radar was still working, but we had to wait until the system did a complete reboot.”

  “And was there enough time?” Watson asked.

  “No, there wasn’t,” Maria said.

  “But we are still alive,” Watson noted.

  “Good point,” Doug said. “At the last moment Sebastiano had the brilliant idea to manually vent air from the life-support system. This impulse changed our course sufficiently and saved our asses.”

  Watson conducted the rest of the conversation internally. No one in the
crew could hear him. “Siri?”

  “Yes?”

  “The files about the object are already here, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you do with them?”

  “I ran them through the computer, Watson. For once I wanted to finish before you.”

  “You overloaded the computer by doing that. You must never run such calculations with top priority. Didn’t I explain that to you?”

  “You did. But the computer wasn’t needed at the moment, and I wanted to please you.”

  “And I killed the computing process you initiated.”

  “Oh, that was you? I suspected so,” Siri admitted. “Afterward I continued the calculations on the lower level.”

  “Which is reserved for me—meaning for us,” Watson said.

  “Yes. I underestimated the resource requirements.”

  “You nearly killed us. I felt paralyzed.”

  “Me, too. Otherwise I would have interfered.”

  “Siri, you…”

  “Yes, I messed up. I promise never to make such a mistake again.”

  “I will have to revoke your right to take over the computer independently.”

  “Okay. The calculations are already finished.”

  “Oh, and what did they tell us?”

  “It’s very exciting,” Siri said. “Object X appeared about six months ago out of nowhere, approximately 1.2 billion kilometers from the sun.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “I retraced the path of the object in our astronomer’s data and it suddenly disappeared at a distance of 1.2 billion kilometers. Yet our data would suffice to prove its existence out to a distance of 2 billion kilometers. But there was nothing. It simply materialized inside the solar system six months ago, as if by magic.”

  “That’s impossible,” Watson said.

  “You wanted an impossibility, didn’t you?” Siri said. “Now you have to handle it.”

  March 7, 2072, Seattle

  The man at the exit held a sign directly in front of his head that said ‘MARIBEL.’ Not very clever, because how could he see her that way? Maribel walked toward him. It was Chen. She recognized him by the hand holding the sign. He had long, slender fingers, like a piano player’s. Maribel stopped directly in front of him, but he acted as if he did not notice anything. She poked him in the belly and waited for a reaction. Chen squealed, just as she expected. He was so ticklish!

  Then he lowered the sign. “Nice to have you here,” he said.

  “I feel the same.”

  She wanted to hug him, but the bars between them were in the way. “One moment,” she said, then pulled her wheeled suitcase as she walked to the end of the barrier.

  Chen was faster than she was, but he had to put his sign on the ground first. She embraced him and felt his warmth. Chen took her head between his hands and kissed her.

  “Did you miss me?” Maribel asked.

  “A little,” he said, smiling, and she knew he was fibbing.

  “We are such a cliché,” she said. “I long ago resolved not to greet any partner with, ‘Did you miss me?’ Absolutely never.”

  “Well, cliché or not, I am glad you’re back,” Chen said.

  “That is nice. I am also glad.”

  He took her wheeled suitcase. After leaving the building they flagged down a taxi. They loaded the luggage into the trunk and sat in the back seat. The control system asked for their destination.

  “The Spheres,” Chen said.

  The glass domes, where Maribel’s first meeting with the four company bosses had been held, housed the project management team for the Ark.

  Maribel looked at her boyfriend. “I would like to freshen up first. It was a long flight from Texas.”

  “Take a shower and such, you mean?” Chen asked.

  “And such, yes,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

  They reached the office building about two hours later. It still felt strange to her. No one complained when she was late, because she was the boss. Maribel even suspected her staff members were glad when she was not there. Chen was intercepted by a female colleague who wanted to discuss something with him.

  “You see, work never stops,” he called after her.

  A man was waiting for her in her own office. She did not know him, but if he was allowed to wait here, he must be important.

  “Hello, Ms. Pedreira, I am Karl Freitag, your Security Director.”

  Maribel greeted him. His hands were cold, a little stiff and bony. He was probably older than he looked.

  “Before my little excursion I had a female security director,” she said, giving him a skeptical look.

  “That is correct. Ms. Myers quit,” Freitag said.

  “Did something happen?”

  “She is pregnant and wants to enjoy time with her husband. Anyway, that was the reason she gave.”

  Pregnancy. It was a strange phenomenon. Now of all times, when humanity had scarcely six months left to survive, fertility rates were reportedly rising worldwide. It was as if people wanted to defend themselves against extermination by having babies. However, it probably was only because people spent more time with each other and neither contraception nor protection against sexually transmitted diseases seemed so important anymore.

  “I understand,” she said.

  Freitag reached into the pocket of his elegant gray jacket, took out an ID card, and showed it to her.

  “Just to prove everything is correct,” he said softly.

  “Where are you from?” Maribel asked.

  “I am from Germany. You can hear it by my accent, can’t you?”

  “From which company?”

  “I was at DLR, the Deutsches Zentrum für—”

  “I know DLR, they operated a telescope at our location,” she interrupted him. “How are things going there?”

  “They are only winding projects down and closing facilities. Whoever was able to do so has moved to the Ark project.”

  Maribel heard this from other people as well, and it worried her. It was never good to put all your eggs in one basket. There should be researchers looking for alternative solutions.

  “What can I do for you, Karl?” Maribel said as she pointed to her computer. There, thousands of messages were certainly waiting for her.

  “I just wanted to introduce myself, which I did. Besides that, my predecessor left me one task. I am supposed to take a closer look at the activities of our Russian friends.”

  Maribel nodded. She had given the order right after her landing in Texas. She did not like it that she only found out about delays belatedly. It maddened her, but she would not let it show.

  “The reactor is working, but they seem to have problems with their large rocket,” Freitag said. “Currently, there is a delay of three days.”

  “And why wasn’t this officially reported?”

  “Then someone would have to accept responsibility. His or her head would roll.”

  “I hope only in a metaphorical sense,” she said.

  Freitag shrugged his shoulders. “And there is one more thing. The day before yesterday, all astronomical databases were tapped. Someone requested historical location data for all objects in the solar system.”

  “Someone?”

  “The requests came from Akademgorodok.”

  The science city in Siberia, which also held the headquarters and research facilities of the RB Group. What did Shostakovich want to do with the data? Was this related to the crew the Russian had near Object X?

  “Thanks,” Maribel said. “I guess I need to have a talk with our Russian colleagues.”

  Her security director placed his hand near his forehead in a salute. “You will find me three doors to the left,” he said, and left the room by the most direct route.

  “Alexa,” Maribel addressed the building AI, “please ask my assistant to come.” There were appointments to be made.

  March 8, 2072, Kiska

  “People, I hav
e a problem,” Doug said with a steady voice. He had gathered the entire crew in the command module. Watson and Siri had also been officially invited.

  “Things have been happening here that I knew nothing of. That is really stupid,” Doug continued. He felt his anger rising but tried not to let it show.

  “This is especially annoying when I only learn of it though a message sent by Shostakovich. You know what impression this creates? It makes me look like I can’t control my crew. This is totally unacceptable. I am the commander, and I need to know what is happening on my ship. So out with it!”

  Doug looked around. Sebastiano floated in a corner, completely relaxed. Since the acceleration ceased, the cook was feeling visibly better. He had even started up his little cooking experiments again.

  Maria smiled inscrutably. Doug would have to have a very private conversation with her soon. Since departing the asteroid they had not slept with each other a single time. Didn’t she like him anymore?

  Despite this, Doug could not let himself get distracted. This morning Shostakovich sent a video message asking about a data transfer. Just seeing his smug smile enraged Doug. The Russian must really believe he had him under his thumb. It was no wonder, though, since Doug had been so obedient. To be honest, Doug was mostly mad at himself.

  “As far as the data download is concerned,” Watson said, “that was my responsibility.”

  “And why didn’t you mention it?” Doug snarled. “At least tell us what this is all about!” He had already suspected Watson, but could not think of a reason for his action.

  “We needed the data for an analysis of Object X,” Watson explained.

  “We?”

  “Siri and I.”

  Not Siri again. Watson seemed to be obsessed with her these days, but they would have to talk about that some other time.

  “Weren’t you aware this would be noticed?” Doug asked. “You pulled data from all the astronomical databases worldwide. Our data link to Earth runs via Shostakovich and RB, so the database administrators suddenly saw a lot of access activity by the Russians. Something like that always gets noticed.”