The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  “Sorry. I really am sorry.” Watson’s voice sounded truly contrite, but Doug did not know whether this was an acquired skill or genuine regret.

  “For me it is just a nuisance, but you endanger yourself this way! Shostakovich knows I could never afford an AI,” Doug said. “None of us three human crew members would be able to analyze such amounts of data in such a short time. I need an airtight explanation for Shostakovich. You don’t know this man. He tries to profit from anything he can lay his hands on. A runaway AI guilty of crimes against humans would be a perfect trophy for him.”

  “Even if he were to find out about our new crew member,” Maria said, “you would never hand Watson over to him.”

  You have no idea what Shostakovich is capable of, Doug wanted to reply, but then he just shrugged.

  “Did you two at least find out something?”

  “We certainly did, Doug,” Watson said.

  “And you just became aware of it now?”

  “We have known since the day before yesterday,” Watson replied. “We wanted to tell you about it for quite a while, but something always came up.”

  “You are not serious, Watson, are you?” Doug asked incredulously. “You had no opportunity within 48 hours to inform us of your latest findings?”

  “I am sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Doug sighed loudly. “Never mind. What’s the exciting news?”

  “The black hole is exhibiting a very odd behavior,” Watson said.

  “Well, it is racing toward the sun, we already know that,” Sebastiano interjected.

  “That’s not what I mean. It’s about the past.”

  “You would have been better off focusing on the future!” Doug said angrily.

  “Most human researchers probably made that very same mistake. We didn’t.” This time Doug definitely heard a note of pride in Watson’s voice. “The strange thing is that the black hole comes from exactly nowhere. About six months ago it appeared out of nowhere, at approximately twice the distance from the sun.”

  None of the crew said anything. Doug wondered what this might mean, but he had no clue.

  “What is the probability of that?” he asked.

  “That is a very good question,” Watson said. “It is actually not impossible for something to come from nothing. In fact, it happens all the time.”

  “What about the conservation of energy?” Maria asked.

  “There is no problem, as that is a statistical law,” Watson replied. “As long as the debt is paid off again, everything is fine. And normally that happens in a very short time.”

  “But I have never seen bananas materialize out of nothingness,” Sebastiano said.

  “I would like to have some fresh strawberries,” Maria begged.

  “What appears out of nothing is tiny, minute particles at best, not structures consisting of numerous particles,” Watson explained. “It is impossible that a strawberry should suddenly float in front of your mouth. The idea that all the parts a strawberry consists of should from now on float invisibly in front of your mouth is not quite as impossible, but to be more precise very, very improbable.”

  “So strawberries are too complex,” Maria summarized.

  “You could put it that way, but they are also too heavy. Mass and energy are equivalent. In order to have an entire strawberry appear out of nothing, the universe would have to take on a very high energy debt. That is nearly impossible.”

  “I can see what you are aiming at,” Doug said. “The black hole—our Object X—is a monster compared to a strawberry. The idea of it simply appearing in our world out of nothing is more improbable by several magnitudes than in the case of a strawberry.”

  “But it happened,” Maria said, “which is—unfortunately—not true for the strawberry.”

  “That’s the problem,” Watson said, “and there are two possible answers. Either we accept that it was an extremely improbable event that occurred anyway. ‘Shit happens.’ Or we try to find a mechanism, a cause that would make this event less improbable.”

  Watson was really clever. Not about keeping his existence secret from the world, but definitely when it came to analyzing problems. “Then we’ll choose door number two,” Doug said, “because only that choice preserves the option to change the fate of humanity.”

  “That is my opinion, too,” Watson said, “especially as there are arguments in favor of it. From the perspective of the universe, a black hole is a very simple structure, unlike a strawberry. It possesses a certain mass, an angular momentum or spin, and an electrical charge. Do you notice something?”

  Maria held up her hand like a schoolgirl. “Those are the same qualities that elementary particles have,” she called.

  “If it came into being like an elementary particle,” Doug thought out loud, “then the universe owes a gigantic energy debt which it might be paying back soon.”

  “You might be right concerning the debt,” Watson said, “but I wouldn’t place any great hopes on a repayment. There must be a mechanism preventing it, because otherwise it would have happened long ago. A particle with this gigantic mass should only exist for an extremely short period of time.”

  “Then we have to find the mechanism and use it against the black hole.”

  “Yes, Doug.”

  “So we now have a plan?”

  “Unfortunately I don’t have any idea where to look,” Watson said apologetically.

  “Then you and Siri have to come up with something.”

  “We will do that.”

  “And what do I tell Shostakovich about what we needed those mountains of data for?” Doug asked.

  “You might have come up with the idea of searching for the past of Object X,” Watson offered.

  “He is never going to believe me, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  March 9, 2072, Kiska

  Once again nothing was going right, and Watson was annoyed. He just could not manage to crack this nut. ‘Pride goes before a fall,’ the humans said, and it looked he had too much pride. He had thought he could easily solve a problem the best physicists on Earth had been trying to tackle for over a century—the question of what happened inside a black hole. Obviously this was not a question that could be solved by sheer computing power. The AI tried all existing approaches, but each of them only covered a part of the issue and did not get him closer to solving a very special problem. How could you make a black hole with the mass of Jupiter—and which had appeared out of nothing—disappear?

  “Doug, I am sorry to bother you, but we need help,” Watson said.

  “So you are stuck?” Doug asked.

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Well, I didn’t believe you could come up with a theory of everything at a moment’s notice.”

  That had, in actuality, been Watson’s goal, but he had to agree with Doug. It had really been damned arrogant of the AI to think otherwise. He was, after all, nothing more than a product of the human mind.

  “Do you know anyone we can trust? Meaning someone I could speak to as Watson?”

  Doug did not reply immediately. Watson saw him rubbing his freshly sprouted beard. “We definitely cannot use the normal channels. Shostakovich is much too curious.”

  “I can encrypt a message in such a way that even experts would consider it harmless.”

  “But the person we want to reach wouldn’t know about that, Watson,” Doug said. “That person would delete the message instead of decrypting the attachment.”

  “Do you have someone you trust sufficiently?”

  “I don’t have friends back on Earth anymore. But this Spanish woman who is leading the Ark project seems to behave with integrity. The fact that she managed to exclude any privilege in the selection of passengers was a great achievement. I did not expect that of her. At first I thought she was the perfect token woman for the super-rich people running the project, and that was probably what they planned.”

  “Then we should try to contact
her,” Watson advised.

  “I have an idea,” Doug said. “We are not going to hide our request in the message, but somewhere else. Could you integrate a specific configuration error in the appropriate program?”

  “That is my specialty.”

  “The software has to send error messages, but in a rhythm that only Maribel Pedreira recognizes as a message.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, we hope, she will try to contact us.”

  March 10, 2072, Seattle

  It was incredible how quickly things returned to their routine. Maribel just gotten rid of a journalist who had far exceeded the time allotted for his interview. Today there were two more meetings, and she had to go over the launch schedules for the passengers. She felt like the boss of a moving company. It was all about logistics—no time left for visionary thinking or research. Maribel longingly recalled her trip into space. Even though she had only been a tourist it had been an unforgettable experience.

  Maribel looked at the clock. Okay, she had half an hour to go through her messages. She almost always discarded invitations to social events, rather wanting to spent her time with Chen. She passed requests for interviews to the press department, which had been informed to not permit more than one media contact per day. A research assistant sent her information about exciting research projects that might be marginally connected with Object X, and sometimes she even read the article in question. She frequently received messages from ordinary people. Most received a standardized reply, as she could only send personal answers to very few.

  Today Maribel discovered an unusual number of error messages. She looked at the source code of one of these messages, and it appeared that someone in Siberia had misconfigured his email outbox. This was annoying. She briefly wondered whether she should alert the responsible system administrator. It was strange, though, that all the messages arrived at very specific times: 12:03, 12:05, 12:08 and 12:14 hours. Then they repeated an hour later, on the dot, plus the minute numbers always stayed the same. Well, into the trash with them, she decided.

  Shortly before 16:00, Maribel sat in front of her computer again. Four new error messages had arrived during her meeting that had begun at 15:00. She waited for 16:03, figuring if this pattern repeated once more, she would write the administrator. But then nothing happened. The chain of messages ended all by itself. Maribel looked at the contents of her trash folder. All the spam and the error messages were neatly sorted: 3, 5, 8 and 14, or: C, E, H and N, if you interpreted the numbers as letters of the Latin alphabet. Could it be a code? She switched the second and third number. CHEN. What a strange coincidence! Of course the public knew by now who her boyfriend was, because something like that would not stay hidden from the media.

  “Alexa, locate Karl Freitag,” Maribel instructed the AI. “I would like to talk with him.”

  There was a knock at her office door three minutes later. Her security director entered. Today, his handshake did not feel so cold, and he smelled of some old-fashioned cologne.

  “Karl, do you know your way around messaging systems?” Maribel asked.

  “Very well, actually,” he replied.

  She showed him the error messages.

  “Hmm, that’s really odd,” Karl confirmed and sat down in her chair. “I have to take a closer look. Five minutes?”

  “Okay,” she said and went to her outer office. There were a few forms there she had to fill out, anyway.

  She returned three minutes later. “Very interesting,” Karl said. “The messages have attachments. That’s normal, and the attachments often repeat the message in a different format.”

  “But not in this case,” Maribel suddenly guessed.

  “They do repeat it, but there is more. There is also a comments field, where the sender entered an unencrypted text.”

  “What is the content?”

  “The text—or rather the texts, as they are different—don’t make any sense by themselves,” Karl explained. “But, just a moment… Yes, the number of characters creates a code. Let me start with the first message: 196-256-200-3-5-8-1, then it repeats. Does this mean anything to you?”

  “Why don’t you enter it into a search engine?”

  Maribel stood behind her security director and watched him type in the numbers.

  (196256) 2003 EH1 was displayed on the screen, together with text explaining this was an asteroid with a high orbital inclination, discovered in 2003.

  “Well, does this mean anything to you?” her security director asked.

  “Thank you, Karl,” Maribel answered. “Yes, this is very helpful.”

  “Do you need me any further?”

  “Not today.”

  “Good, then I’ll call it a day, because my partner is already griping about my late work hours.”

  “Get home soon, Karl, otherwise he might get jealous.”

  Almost a month ago Zetschewitz, Maribel’s former boss, told her the Russians had a crew on the asteroid 2003 EH1. She took another look at the error messages. The address stamp did indeed show them coming from Akademgorodok. Still, it was possible they had traveled a longer way and only reached the public net at Shostakovich’s headquarters. Perhaps the Russians had less control over the crew than they thought—someone related to 2003 EH1 seemed intent on contacting her. And whatever he or she wanted was not meant to be public. It could not be Shostakovich, since he could simply reach her via an encrypted channel. No, it really looked like someone was trying to bypass the Russian billionaire’s scrutiny.

  Later that night Maribel discussed the issue with Chen.

  “How nice they used my name to catch your attention,” he said.

  Maribel caressed his head and said, “It worked.”

  “I hope it’s not a trap,” Chen said.

  “What kind of trap could it be? I think it is simply a secret attempt to contact me.”

  “You want to reply?”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Then you should also avoid the official channels. Obviously, they don’t want Shostakovich to notice.”

  “That is true,” she said.

  “You could try using the Green Bank telescope. While we couldn’t establish contact with Enceladus, the crew on 2003 EH1 might be waiting for your call.”

  “They are no longer on the asteroid, remember? They are currently traveling by ship toward Object X,” Maribel reminded him.

  “That might make a conversation with them even more interesting,” Chen said. “But we’ll deal with the rest tomorrow.”

  Maribel felt his fingers at the clasp of her bra and let herself fall backward.

  March 11, 2072, Seattle

  Maribel set the alarm for 6 a.m. so she could reach Robert Millikan in the morning, despite the three hour time difference to the East Coast. Chen was still asleep. She envied him. She quickly downed a cup of coffee and bit into a stale croissant. Then she attempted to establish a connection from the living room.

  Nobody answered at Millikan’s home number, so she looked for the contact data of the receptionist for the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. A young woman appeared on the monitor screen. Maribel did not recall having seen her during their previous visit there.

  “My name is Maribel Pedreira. May I speak to Robert Millikan, please? I am acquaintance of his and have an urgent request. So if you could…”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Pedreira,” the receptionist said, solemnly. “Unfortunately Mr. Millikan died a week ago. But I have an encrypted message I am supposed to give to you.”

  “Wait—what did you just say? Millikan did what?” Maribel could not believe it. They had just talked to him! How long ago was it—two days, a week? She calculated. February 11. She saw him a month ago, and he had so much zest for life then, despite his illness.

  “It was the cancer in its final stage, nothing could be done,” the receptionist continued. “He fell asleep after he was given morphine, and passed very peacefully.”

  “But why was I n
ot informed?” Maribel asked.

  “That was his request. He probably was worried it would distract you from your important work. I was ordered to give you the message only when you yourself called.”

  Maribel had not even had the chance to say goodbye to him properly. She pressed her fingernails tightly into her palm, to keep herself from breaking into tears.

  “Has… has he been buried already?” she asked.

  “The memorial service will be on March 22nd,” the observatory receptionist informed her. “Would you like to come? I can send you all the details.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Maribel said. “And I’d also like to express my condolences.”

  “Thank you. We all miss him a lot. He was kind of the good spirit of this place. Did you know that without him the observatory would have become a museum long ago?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. He was very open-hearted, I noticed that right away.”

  “Then I hope to be able to welcome you here on the 22nd. You will receive Robert’s message and the information about the memorial service in a moment. Instead of wreaths or flowers, he asked for donations to the local children’s home.”

  After the image faded, Maribel collapsed on the sofa until she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “What are you doing, sweetheart? What happened?” Chen stared at her with big eyes.

  “Millikan is dead… his cancer,” Maribel said quietly.

  “Oh,” he said. “I am sorry. But it was to be expected.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t really say goodbye to him.”

  “That is not your fault. We thought we would see him again the following day.”

  “Still, as you said, it was obvious he only had a short time left,” she said.

  “I think he was glad he could still be useful,” Chen said. “We made that day exciting for him. Do you know what will happen to our attempt to contact the asteroid?”

  “Millikan is dead, and you think of work?”