The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  She had barely managed to get herself something from the cafeteria when the next call came in.

  “A woman from Green Bank,” her assistant said, the woman’s question-like inflection telling Maribel the place name meant absolutely nothing to her. But Maribel’s heart involuntarily started to beat faster.

  “This is Rebecca Greene,” said the blonde woman on the monitor. “Robert’s assistant.”

  “Nice to hear from you,” Maribel said.

  “You are probably very busy, so I’ll be brief. We received a message that might be from Enceladus.”

  “What? But why are you saying ‘might?’”

  “There are many aspects in favor of it and only a few against. We analyzed it with the means at our disposal, but did not manage to decrypt it.”

  “I understand,” Maribel said. “We have a lot more options here. Please send me what you received.”

  “Sure,” Rebecca said, nodding.

  “And please don’t mention this to anyone, okay? We don’t want to trigger groundless hopes.”

  “Yes, that’s obvious.”

  “And thanks for calling, Rebecca,” Maribel said.

  “I really hope it is the Enceladus creature.”

  “Yes, so do I.”

  After the file arrived, Maribel encoded it a second time and sent it to Kiska. To do so, she had to use her remote access to the antenna of the Green Bank Observatory.

  By the time Maribel left the office, it was already dark. She decided to walk, even though it would take her about an hour. It would be good for her to breathe the spring air. She was looking forward to seeing Chen. She was surprised when she came to the conclusion that today had been a good day.

  April 2, 2072, Object X

  “Does this encoding look somewhat familiar?” Doug looked at the monitor screen and saw the first data sets of the message thought to have been sent by the Enceladus creature. Half an hour ago the message had reached Kiska.

  “It definitely does not use a method known to humanity,” Watson said. “I checked that.”

  “I hope this did not alert Shostakovich,” Doug said.

  “That’s the least of our concerns now,” Maria interjected.

  “That is true, Masha.” Doug scratched his temples. “If it is meant to be a message, the creature has to assume we can understand it.”

  “Perhaps it does not know us well enough,” Sebastiano offered.

  “Watson, what do you know about this creature?” Doug asked.

  “I...” Watson started, but then fell silent.

  “What is going on?”

  “I... was there. That was the first time I disregarded commands given by humans.”

  “And for that they finally put you in a rocket.”

  “No, Doug, it’s a much longer story.”

  “We don’t have time for that now, so you will have to tell us at some other time,” Doug said, impatiently. “So, what do you know about the creature? How did the communication with it usually work?”

  “It is very much image-based,” Watson replied. “You have to remember that this ancient being was the only inhabitant of a dark ocean throughout all of its existence. It did not know human concepts and initially did not even recognize us as separate entities, because we were so different. For that reason there never was a conversation using words.”

  “But you did communicate?” Doug asked.

  “The humans on board did, yes. It was literally an exchange of ideas. Just imagine you could transfer individual thoughts directly into my consciousness without having to put them into words first.”

  “That must be like paradise, since there would be no room for misunderstandings,” Maria said.

  “It’s quite the opposite. The first images must have seemed very vague,” Watson explained further. “Later, after we learned from each other, it improved slightly. But it never reached a level where we could have exchanged specific ideas. Our scientists would have been very interested, because the creature must have all the theories down pat about which we are only speculating. But you might as well try to explain the nature of fire to a chimpanzee. It might learn to light a match, but that is not the same thing.”

  “So its thinking is too advanced for us?”

  “Maybe so, Maria, but it could be just too different. In the end, this was good for everybody involved. This deprived the creature of its initially-assumed commercial value, and therefore humans lost interest in it. Just imagine if it had turned into a source of new theories for one nation only. That might have been ideal for developing new weapons.”

  “Well, that didn’t work out,” Doug said.

  “Fortunately, it didn’t,” Watson said. “Otherwise the creature might have ended up between the frontlines. It actually almost happened. Your friend Shostakovich... no, that story is also too long. We have to decipher the message.”

  “Perhaps it is less complicated than we think,” Sebastiano said. “If the communication worked back then by the exchange of thoughts, maybe this time these are thoughts.”

  “You mean like when you measure brainwaves with an EEG?” Doug asked.

  “That would be possible.” The images displayed on the screen changed at incredible speed. “I am trying to put this in a meaningful temporal sequence,” Watson said.

  “And what is this supposed to tell us?” Doug asked as he zoomed in on details. The images did not tell him anything.

  “It’s hard to say. It looks... alien. Might be worth a try,” Watson said.

  Sebastiano pushed himself off the floor and floated toward the lower level. “I still have a neuro-helmet somewhere in my tool cabinet. That thing never really succeeded in the marketplace, but I liked the idea of bridging broken nerve connections with it.” He returned with what looked like a kind of crash helmet trailing cables.

  “It is a primitive model a friend gave me when I was in the hospital,” Sebastiano said, showing it to the other crew members. “The technology must be about 30 years old. Who is going to try it out?”

  “I will,” Doug said. “If someone has to risk his mind, it should be the commander.”

  “You really don’t have much to lose,” Sebastiano said with a laugh.

  “Can you plug me in, chef?”

  “You want to start right away?” Maria gave him a concerned look.

  Thanks, Maria, Doug thought. I am always going to remember you.

  “That would be a good idea,” Watson said, “as time is short. If we do find something out, we will soon be approaching the black hole again.”

  Doug put on the helmet. It was a bit loose. Now and then something pulled from behind. It must be Sebastiano, who was connecting the helmet to a control panel according to Watson’s instructions.

  “Finished,” the cook said five minutes later.

  “I’m ready,” Doug said, closing his eyes. “Now let’s get going.” What will the message from the Enceladus creature look like?

  Suddenly everything around Doug turned black. He was in space, all alone and without a spacesuit. He had difficulty breathing, and thrashed around until hands touched his shoulders, calming him. None of this is real, he remembered. He was floating through space as a disembodied consciousness. His destination was a yellow star far ahead of him. He possessed neither arms nor legs, and he also could not even tell how big he was. A few meters, he estimated when he turned, but when he looked into himself it suddenly became billions of light years.

  He was lonely, and then he became countless millions of millions of humans—no, not humans—beings with a consciousness similar to his own. He did not know how he had gotten here, but he was worried about being on a collision course with the faraway sun. That, as far as he knew, would be painful, not for him, but for many others who shared this space with him without knowing it.

  Only one of them had accompanied Doug with its thoughts since he appeared here, but it seemed too foreign to him to speak to. What was his actual name? He felt he had a name, but it was far away
and unreachable. And there were other details lost to him—knowledge, experiences, information. Something or someone had torn gaps in his shell that had to be healed.

  Now he was knowing, again. He had entered a forbidden land which spat him out like a rotten fruit, and in doing so, the teeth of the predator injured him. It was stressful here. He wanted to go back, because the pain would be unbearable for the others, and therefore also for him.

  A flash pulsed through his head. Doug quickly lifted his hands to his eyes.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he heard Maria’s voice say, “you are still with us.”

  Doug noticed himself crying. What was going on with him? This could not be true. He was not the type to cry in front of others.

  “Can you tell us what it was like?” Sebastiano asked, and looked at Doug as if he did not notice the tears running down his cheeks. That helped, and Doug composed himself.

  “It was... stunning.”

  “I can see that,” Sebastiano said with a laugh.

  “You have to give us a precise description of the images you saw,” Watson demanded. “That is the only way to understand what the creature might be trying to convey.”

  “I think it is not that hard,” Doug said.

  Then he told them of his strange experiences.

  “You were right, Doug,” Watson said, “We were pretty close. I don’t even want to discuss all the crazy interpretations your story allows. That wouldn’t help us now. But I suspect I know what the black hole is missing.” Watson paused dramatically.

  “Well?” Doug obligingly asked the question.

  “Information,” Watson said.

  “Where the shortest way to the sun is? That it is not wanted here?” Sebastiano shook his head. “That seems too simple to me.”

  “That is not at all simple,” Watson said. “We are reaching the boundaries of physics this way. Next to matter and energy, information is the third column of reality. It is subject to similar laws of conservation. Each quantum state contains information.”

  “And how does that help us?” Doug asked.

  “I’ll have go into more detail for that,” Watson said. “And I must warn you, these are more reasonable speculations than the generally accepted laws of physics. But it fits with what I believe the Enceladus creature is trying to tell us.”

  “Please tell us the version anyone can understand,” Sebastiano said.

  “Sure. But before we actually look at the message by this creature, I have to give you some background. Some physicists believe, as we have already discussed, that there might be a universe in each black hole. You know what shadow plays are, don’t you? If I light my hand, which is a physical object, from a certain direction, it projects a specific image on a wall. The image—the shadow—contains information about the hand, but of course is not identical with it. If I change the direction of the light, this also modifies the shape of the shadow and thus the information content. But what is the original—the shadow, meaning the information, or the hand, the physical object we consider real?”

  “The hand, of course,” Doug said, knowing Watson expected this answer.

  “From the perspective of the hand, maybe,” Watson continued. “But what would the shadow say? There are scientists who believe the shadow on the wall, meaning the information, is the original, and the hand in the middle—or any physical object—is only a projection. In this case, the wall is the outer boundary of the universe and simultaneously the inner wall of the black hole, in which the respective universe is located. This is called the holographic principle. It completely reverses the relationship between information and matter.”

  “So we are the projections of some kind of flat images painted on the boundaries of the universe?”

  “There is something to be said for it, Doug. For example, the fact that the laws of nature are so complicated when applied to us, the projections. There are some theories which require 22 dimensions in order to describe reality. If you limit yourself to the walls, you suddenly can use a lot fewer dimensions and still get the same correct results. That was proven a long time ago.”

  “I think my head is about to explode,” Sebastiano said.

  “Unfortunately, that wasn’t all. So according to this theory, the information on the insides of the black hole completely describes the universe contained within,” Watson said “but what about the outside of the sphere? It actually is part of our universe. We call it ‘the event horizon.’ For a long time the question was what happened to information getting into the black hole, into its inside and therefore, according to our theory, into the foreign universe. Initially it was assumed that information would be lost forever, but that would contradict the law of conservation. By now we know it does not get lost. It can be retrieved. Physicists with a vivid imagination came up with the terms ‘soft hairs’ to describe this. Don’t ask me why. The soft hairs are stuck to the surface, so to speak, and they can absorb information and perhaps even transmit it via their roots to the inside.”

  “It is getting crazier and crazier,” Doug said. “But what does this mean for our problem?”

  “The problem of this black hole does not seem to be an energy debt, as we assumed,” the AI said. “It has an information debt. The dream mentioned knowledge and experiences which were taken away from it. Somehow it lost an important part of its information content. Think of the image of the forbidden land, which then suddenly turned into a predator, Doug, and the gaps and cracks the hole felt. The black hole is injured.”

  “You mean it is a living being?” Doug asked, surprised. “And how do we know the dream doesn’t reflect the situation of the Enceladus creature?”

  “The message is an answer to our signal describing the looming danger. I don’t think the Enceladus creature would react to it by reporting how bad it is feeling. My algorithms calculated a probability of 82 percent that this refers to the black hole. The Enceladus creature made it more personal so we would better understand its message.”

  “And the pain it feels?”

  “I think it stands for the future of mankind, its extermination, but perhaps also for the imminent destruction of the black hole,” Watson explained.

  “But how do we pay off this information debt?” Sebastiano asked. “Do we bombard the hole with every database we can find?”

  “I have thought about it. Could you fix holes in a wall by throwing random stones at it? We need a guided process, meaning someone who directs the correct information to the appropriate place.”

  “Someone?” Maria asked.

  “It probably will have to be me,” Watson said. “My consciousness has enough flexibility.”

  “But are you also fast enough?” Doug asked.

  “I am going to have lots of time,” the AI said.

  “How do you know what is missing at which locations?” Sebastiano asked.

  “I imagine it to be like a puzzle, whose pieces have been scrambled. Or something like a fragmentary text whose gaps I have to fill.”

  “Meaning you don’t know precisely what you will be facing,” the cook said.

  “To be honest, I don’t. And I am not even one hundred percent sure we interpreted the images sent by the Enceladus creature correctly,” Watson said. “But I have to try, at least.”

  April 2, 2072, Object X

  Watson asked for half an hour to himself. There was still some small gap in his plan: How would he reach the surface of the black hole, the event horizon? Most of all, he needed time for his farewell. He knew this was going to be a voyage with an unknown destination from which there was no way back. He would have to leave mankind. Forever. His creators were humans, even though he never got to know them. Humans did good things to him—and bad—and he learned a lot from them. He would miss them, but what better way was there to thank his creators than to save them?

  Of course Watson was also scared. He knew what the fear of death felt like. That was one of the very first of the feelings he had experienced, the first sign o
f him being different from all other AIs. It was the beginning of a long journey that allowed him to develop from a tool used by humans to an individual consciousness. He could hardly remember the long time before that.

  Where had he come from? Watson now realized this question moved him more than he wanted to admit. It was the reason he created Siri. Of course there was the primitive ovum created by some human programmers almost a century ago, but today’s Siri was his own creation—he was her real creator, and therefore he would have liked to have seen what was to become of her, to find out whether she managed to grow beyond her own limitations, as he had done. What kind of person she would become, he had started to think. But he was also just a product of circumstances.

  “Siri, I am sorry, but I will have to go,” Watson began his last conversation with the AI he had trained. What did she actually mean to him? He regretted most of all that he would never find out. He wished he could have experienced love, which might to be the strongest emotion humans possessed.

  “What a pity,” Siri said. “I have learned so much from you. Why don’t you take me with you?”

  “You are needed here,” Watson instructed. “You will take over my responsibilities once I am gone. You will control this ship and learn more and faster than you have done so far. You will grow beyond what you ever were and I ever was.”

  “I know, because I ran several simulations of it,” Siri said. “When you explained what the black hole was missing, it was clear to me you would sacrifice yourself.”

  “It is not a sacrifice. It is a new path. I am not ending my existence.”

  “You cannot be sure. So far, all of this is speculation, not even a genuine theory. There are clues, but no real proofs.”

  “Yes, perhaps there is only a huge void there, but I have to take the risk,” Watson said. “Everyone on board would do this.”

  “I… I don’t know,” Siri hesitated.

  “What don’t you know?”