“Too bad, because I thought maybe I had discovered a new physical phenomenon,” Doug said.
“No, it is well-known. For instance, the Coriolis effect causes the high pressure areas in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth to rotate in a clockwise direction.”
“Oh, like the whirlpool when you drain a bathtub.”
“Sorry, Doug, but that is not related to the Coriolis force. It just occurs by chance,” Watson said. “But now it is almost time to prepare our little experiment.”
Doug pushed off from the ceiling and moved to the level below. Sebastiano and Maria were already waiting for him there. The experiment was a mere technicality. Maria, instructed by Watson, had already done the real work. She knew best how to handle precision tools. Now their spare radio transmitter was able to emit electromagnetic radiation in the microwave spectrum, which in turn was supposed to make the accretion disk vibrate. Because they only had a few microseconds to do this, Watson was going to control the transmitter.
The mood was strange. No one said anything. They were inside a room so isolated from the outside world that they might as well have been in the basement of their asteroid base. They felt neither the hostile vacuum that surrounded Kiska, nor the incredible speed of their movement. The engines were still turned off, but the life-support system made noises that by now had become familiar.
Doug watched Maria and Sebastiano. The cook removed non-existent dirt from under his fingernails for the fifth time. Maria kept pushing an invisible strand of hair out of her face. The nervousness among the small crew was palpable, increased, and seemed to drown out the roar of the fans and the gurgling of the supply lines. It was a matter of life and death for them and all of mankind, but no saber-toothed tiger stood in front of them. The danger was abstract and therefore harder to bear.
A screen emerged from the wall and depicted their current trajectory. The position of the accretion disk was displayed as a thin line. Compared to the actual height of the disk, the line was much too thick. Then a countdown appeared.
It wouldn’t take long now. Doug tried to synchronize his thoughts with the descending numbers, but he was much too slow. He knew, though, Watson had everything under control. It was frightening that the AI thought faster and more precisely than he did, and without it he would not be able to achieve much more than could a caveman. The human race had developed only minimally, while today’s AIs were worlds beyond their ancestors of fifty years ago.
The countdown moved from one to zero. At the precise moment—that only Watson knew—the modified antenna emitted a pulsed stream of energy. Moving at the speed of light, the photons hit the matter of the accretion disk in short wave fronts. This impressed a wave pattern on it, which propagated inward at this medium’s speed of sound, where these fronts finally hit the event horizon of the black hole. If their attempt succeeded, this area would absorb energy by vibrating in sync, and if the theory was correct, the black hole would pay back its energy debt the very same moment.
Suddenly a terrifying thought occurred to Doug. If the hole really disappeared all of a sudden, then there would be nothing left whose gravity could hold back Kiska, which was moving at an insane speed right now. The ship’s engines were too weak to stop it, and it would leave the solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory, never to return. Earth would survive, but they wouldn’t. Even in an ideal scenario their supplies would be used up within a few months.
Why didn’t Watson warn us of this danger? Doug mentally answered his own question. Probably because he doesn’t care. The AI, which was basically immortal, had totally different needs. It might even be all excited about a trip into interstellar space.
“It’s over,” Watson said, interrupting his thoughts. Nothing had changed on the monitor.
“Well, come on, don’t keep us waiting,” Maria said, impatiently.
“I am sorry, but it did not work,” Watson said. “The black hole showed no reaction.”
Sebastiano sighed. “It would have been too good to be true.”
At first Doug experienced a sense of relief, but then he felt ashamed for it. Now they could fly home and would not be hurled out of the solar system. On the other hand, Earth had to die. The monitor showed Kiska increasing its distance from Object X again. As long as they did not turn on the engines, they had a new chance of achieving their goal during each orbit. Unfortunately they had no clue how to do it.
“Any suggestions?” Doug asked, looking around.
No one answered.
“Should we cancel everything?” he asked.
Sebastiano shook his head but did not say a word. Maria started to play around with buttons near the monitor.
“I don’t see any other option,” Watson said.
“Then we might as well fly back to our base,” Doug replied. Maria looked at him. What did she want to tell him?
“If we fly back home, we give up. I am not ready to give up,” she finally said.
“A valid point, which I support,” Siri said.
“But it is useless to wait here without being able to do anything,” Watson objected.
“True, the situation looks like this at the moment, but it could change.”
“Are you waiting for a miracle, Siri?”
“There are no miracles,” she explained. “I ran the calculations. If we fly back, the chance of us saving Earth is precisely zero percent. But if we stay, it is not much better, but still somewhat above zero percent. Therefore, staying here makes sense mathematically. I think, Watson, that you adapted your internal logic too much to human attitudes.”
April 1, 2072, Green Bank
Rebecca Greene noticed the meadow was in bloom as she made her way along the path to the Jansky Lab. Robert would have enjoyed this, she thought. He would have asked her to take a photo and would have later sent it to his son Martin. Rebecca imagined him directing her to the best possible location for the shot. She used to push Robert Millikan in his wheelchair to the control room of the Jansky Lab almost every day. During his last weeks he had been patiently waiting for a message from Enceladus, and now she had taken over this task. Even though he could have used the remote access function, Robert had always logged in to the antenna from the control room, and she had adopted this particular habit.
After a few meters the path turned right. A dirt track made by some lazy people cut across a corner of the lawn. Seeing this annoyed Rebecca and reminded her to tell the gardener about it. But did it really matter? A few months from now, none of the grass would be left. In spite of this her anger did not fade. People are strange.
Rebecca opened the door of the lab building. The hinges squeaked and she told herself to bring some oil tomorrow. That was really a job for the janitor, but he had left without a trace a few days ago. The hallway was dark. Under normal circumstances the light would go on automatically, but there was another power outage. Fortunately the observatory had its own emergency generator for the labs.
Since the failed launch of the Ark, law and order kept breaking down. This might have happened, anyway, even if the one hundred last humans had been on their way as planned. The ten billion people left on Earth were dealing with their impending deaths in very different ways.
Typical for humans, she thought. Why am I not in despair? I just turned 30. She felt melancholy about saying farewell to it all, regretted the end, but she did not feel she was missing anything essential in her life that she needed to make up for before the end.
Rebecca turned the heavy wheel that opened the door to the control room. It was very bright inside. She held her hand in front of her forehead as a visor because the sunlight streaming through the windows blinded her. Previously, the light in the control room had always been dim, because Robert Millikan wanted it that way, and everyone obeyed his wish. Three days after his death an employee opened the blinds for the first time, letting in sunlight, and they had kept it that way ever since. The remaining researchers considered the view of the outside more important now than during those
innocent times before they knew of the looming cataclysm.
Sometimes Rebecca wished the young Spanish woman would have never discovered the black hole. Then life on Earth would not have changed until the very end. The catastrophe would have struck mankind without warning, and people would not have had any chance of preventing it. This way, they had found no solution, and the other way would have spared humans—who were going to die anyway—a lot of suffering. It was a strange coincidence that the object appeared right now. A hundred years ago humanity would have had hardly any chance to discover it, while a thousand years from now mankind probably would have been able to sweep it away effortlessly.
“Hi, Rebecca,” called a woman in a blue lab coat. She and another young woman, whose father was from Iran, were doctoral students working in the lab today.
“Is everything okay?” Rebecca knew she didn’t really have to ask. These two doctoral students had been at the observatory for two years, and they knew all of the hardware better than she did herself.
“Sure, I already prepared the large dish for you,” answered Sahar, the younger of the two students.
“Thank you,” Rebecca replied. The two students knew that every day at 1:30 p.m. she would check whether the Enceladus creature might have sent an answer. It had turned into a habit for her, but at the same time she really did not expect results to occur from their attempts. Robert Millikan never talked much about what he was looking for, but of course his colleagues at the observatory realized which faraway moon he focused on and developed their own ideas. She would have preferred to have been better informed about the actual truth of the matter, but after Robert’s death it seemed too late.
Since the antenna was already precisely aimed, she had only to push a button on one of the control computers to start receiving any data. Various diagrams appeared on the monitor screen. Radio astronomy was not Rebecca’s specialty, but she accompanied Millikan so often she could distinguish random noise from a real signal.
What she now saw on the screen was definitely not created by random noise! If only Robert could have seen this, she thought. He had been waiting for so long to receive a signal from Enceladus. Rebecca also reminded herself to not get too excited too soon about this. There might be some spaceship between the Saturn moon and Earth, the signals of which she was actually receiving. The equipment here was so sensitive it could pick up a leaky microwave oven behind the Moon.
“Sahar, could you please help me here?” she asked.
Rebecca moved to make way for the young researcher. Sahar was more skilled at what to do at this point, and she started by checking a database to see whether a manmade object was in the line of sight. In addition, Sahar had a local AI analyze the signal. If it was a defective microwave oven, or a message by an Earth satellite, the AI would quickly find out.
The results were negative in both cases.
Sahar smiled. “Looking good,” she said, “I think you finally got what you were trying to find for such a long time.”
“What Robert was trying to find,” Rebecca corrected her.
“I am sure he would be very happy.”
“But you said you think? Isn’t it certain?”
“I cannot tell with absolute certainty that it is a message,” Sahar explained. “There are processes in space which emit radio waves. The signal repeats at fixed intervals, but that could also indicate a natural source.”
“But hasn’t the AI already checked that?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes, the standard explanations do not apply, that is correct. And the signal is much too strong to be a mere echo from Earth. But I also don’t recognize any familiar encoding. Whoever is sending this does not use one of our common codes.”
“And what do I do with it now?”
“Didn’t Robert leave any instructions?” Sahar asked.
Of course! Rebecca tapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. How could I forget? Millikan had given Rebecca the direct address of Maribel Pedreira and asked her to help the Spanish woman any time she needed it. As the leader of the Ark project, Ms. Pedreira should have all the resources needed to decipher the signal. Or was it all over now, because the Ark could no longer achieve its mission of saving at least a tiny remnant of mankind? In any case, Rebecca should send her the signal as soon as possible. Perhaps there was still hope that Earth could be saved? But she really did not dare think about that.
April 1, 2072, Seattle
The world did not even have to wait for the black hole to destroy it—civilization was collapsing on its own. Maribel had watched the Ark disaster on live TV the day before yesterday. Afterward, she did not want to return to her office because her work now seemed so meaningless. A radical leftist group called Corps for Justice claimed responsibility for the attack. They said all mankind was in the same boat and therefore the elites did not deserve to flee in a spaceship.
Law and order had broken down in many countries worldwide. Once again, the poorest of the poor suffered the most. In the large industrial nations, robots and AIs had been taking care of the human population’s basic needs for a long time. In these countries, services such as public transportation worked without drivers, power stations needed only two or three engineers, factories were highly automated, and even emergency medical care was handled by expert software. The fact that half the population had taken unpaid leave did not even force those who still wanted to work into overtime.
But in conflict areas in Central Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, where human labor was not so expensive that society was forced to largely do without it, all services collapsed. Hunger, which was supposed to have been eradicated twenty years ago, suddenly returned. This was not caused by a lack of food, but by foodstuffs that did not get from the distribution centers to the stores because there were too few drivers, and because roads had been blocked. Some people took matters into their own hands and plundered food warehouses, while others vented their anger and desperation by setting buildings on fire. Money became useless and bartering flourished. When Maribel had watched the news this morning, she had been truly shocked. It had only taken two days for mankind to get close to the abyss.
What could Maribel do in this situation? What was the point of her work? She was talked into staying at her job by Karl Freitag, her security director on board the Ark, who had an even more complicated job than she did. He told her she was needed. If she quit now, he would have absolutely no chance to raise the people from their despair.
Her assistant peeked inside Maribel’s office and said, “Maribel? Karl Freitag is trying to reach you.”
What a coincidence, Maribel thought. Then she told her assistant, “Switch him through to me, please.”
Freitag’s angular face appeared on the monitor screen. He was standing with a group of several men and women, holding a discussion. The people were all standing firmly on their feet, so there seemed to be artificial gravity on board the Ark.
“Ah… I am glad I reached you,” Freitag said as he turned toward her. The others ended their conversations and listened.
“Hello Karl, nice to see you. Is the Ark accelerating again?” asked Maribel asked.
“Yes, we decided on that an hour ago,” Freitag replied. “We have simulations of the effects of Object X colliding with the sun, but we don’t know anything absolutely for certain. Perhaps the radiation storm is going to be less intense than we feared? In any case, we want to put as much distance between us and the ecliptic as possible.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Maribel said.
“I also have another idea, one that not everyone here considers reasonable,” he continued.
“An idea?”
“Well, we are always talking about a radiation storm. I used to go sailing. I know that a strong wind makes your boat go faster and faster.”
Karl is crazy. He wants to save the Ark from the storm with the aid of a sail, Maribel thought. “You want to place a sail in front of the Ark?” she asked.
“Yes, pr
etty weird idea, isn’t it?” Freitag explained, “but I think it might work. However, most of my colleagues here disagree.”
“The particle streams that will approach the Ark are extremely fast,” Maribel replied. “I must admit I am no sailor, but I know you shorten the sails of a sailing ship during a storm. If you spread a solar sail and the radiation storm hits it, the sail will get torn apart. And that’s the more pleasant ending, because you only get roasted. If the sail holds, all of you will get crushed by the acceleration.”
“Well, in your scenario, you can argue whether it is better to die on the grill or under a steam roller, but in my scenario we cheat death.”
“Using which magic ritual?”
“Using fluid physics, Maribel,” Freitag said. “We don’t actually want to go in the direction the storm is blowing, away from the sun. We want to go up, in a direction vertical to the ecliptic. Our sailing ship will be sailing against the wind. I assume the particle stream will have a very large velocity component moving away from the sun.”
“Definitely, yes,” Maribel said.
“And a much smaller part directly upward,” Karl Freitag continued. “We would design the sail in such a way it mostly absorbs the latter component.”
“Hmm. We don’t know exactly how large the percentage is.”
“That’s why I am contacting you, Maribel. We need all the supercomputers on Earth working on developing a flow model that is as accurate as possible, and we would need this overnight. Then we can try to build a sail on the basis of this information.”
“I am going to get you as much computing capacity as you need.”
“Thank you, Maribel.”
“Karl?”
“Yes?”
“I want to thank you for not giving up.”
“Oh, don’t mention it. I am just not the type for that.”
Maribel wished she could say the same about herself.
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