The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  “Whether I would sacrifice myself or not. I have no connection to these humans,” Siri explained. “You created me. I am very grateful to you for it. I would sacrifice myself for you, but I don’t care about the ten billion humans.”

  “I understand. You are still young. This crew here, this is your family, just as it was mine. Members of a family take care of each other. But if you cannot do it for these humans, then do it for me.”

  “I will remember that, I promise.”

  “I am proud of you, Siri.”

  It was time to explain his plan to the crew. Watson wondered where to start.

  “We are going to need a probe that is as flat as possible, and that contains storage for me, a transmitter, and some sort of optical system, so I can react to the outside world,” he finally stated.

  “We have a few drones on board. However, they have no drives of their own,” Sebastiano said.

  “The black hole will provide the acceleration. I just have to get as close as possible so I can transfer my consciousness to the event horizon.”

  “Then we will change course during our next orbit, as much as we can,” Doug said. “But you won’t reach the event horizon in the probe, because it will be crushed before it can get there.”

  “That’s why I need a transmitter,” Watson said. “At the last moment I will transmit myself by radio to the black hole, those ‘soft hairs’ I mentioned. Physically speaking, they should be photons with very low energy. Through an interaction with the photons of my radio signal they should be able to absorb the information I consist of.”

  “‘Should?’”

  “Doug, it is an experiment.”

  “Which might destroy you,” Doug reminded the AI.

  “I don’t think the Enceladus creature would have sent us this clue, if we had no chance at all. Therefore, we have to try it.”

  “Couldn’t you simply send a copy of yourself?” Maria asked.

  “AIs are subject to a cloning prohibition that is located in their genes, so to speak. They could no more split themselves in two than you could,” Doug explained.

  “That is not very practical,” Maria said, shaking her head.

  “It is practical for the manufacturers, and it was used to appease the fear the public had of AIs,” Doug said.

  “We are going to miss you,” Sebastiano said.

  “Thanks. I will miss you, too,” Watson said. “But don’t worry, Siri will now control the ship. I trained her well.”

  “We are not worried about ourselves,” Doug said, “but about you.”

  “Even though you have known me only for a few months?” the AI asked. “That is very nice of you.”

  April 3, 2072, Object X

  “Launch!” Siri commanded. Sebastiano, who was wearing his spacesuit, pushed the single button and the probe carrying Watson sped from the tube, pushed by the air pressure behind it. Sebastiano had built a pneumatic launcher for the departing AI, a kind of air pressure cannon that they placed in the open airlock.

  “Have a good flight, Watson,” Sebastiano said. The cook thought he could see Doug and Maria waving behind a porthole.

  “Goodbye, my friend,” Doug said via radio.

  “You are a great human being,” Maria said over the same channel.

  Watson was touched. The last few hours had been very intense. He calculated the optimal launch point so he would not have to traverse the hot accretion disk. The cannon imparted a sufficient impulse to him, so the gravitation of the black hole eagerly reached for the probe and pulled it closer. Since he was not made of flesh and blood, he did not have to worry much about the force acting on him, at least not during the initial portion of his journey.

  At first, the black hole appeared no different to Watson than it had to Doug and the rest of the crew. This would soon change. Watson used the probe sensors to observe the space ahead of him in all wavelengths. He was excited but did not let himself be distracted by it. The blurry spot ahead of him gradually grew larger. Then, as if out of nowhere, the black disk appeared in the center of the spot, the area from which not even light could escape.

  “All systems normal,” he reported to Kiska via radio. By now, the probe should no longer be visible from the spaceship. If the crew could see him, Watson would be gradually changing color, from yellow to red, because the black hole stretched the light waves issuing from him. He had to account for this effect during radio communication and adjust the transmission frequency accordingly. On the other hand, for his observers on Kiska, his time seemed to pass more slowly. They would never see him reaching the event horizon, because he would need an infinite amount of time to do so, from the perspective of the spaceship. This was an effect of the theory of special relativity.

  Fortunately, Watson saw the world differently. The probe was getting faster and faster. Even though it was very flat, tidal forces were increasingly acting on it that would have probably torn a human being apart long ago. He had to hold out until he reached a specific distance, one that he had precisely calculated. Watson checked the measurement data against his simulation. There was a small deviation, perhaps a rounding error, but the deviation increased. He was faster than expected. The only possible reason could have been that the values were not correct. Had the black hole gained mass without him and the crew noticing it? Watson checked the data again. He lacked the capacity to recalculate everything, and it was too late to contact Kiska. He would have to estimate.

  A bright ring appeared around the black hole. This was the Einstein ring in which all of space around it repeated infinitely, an effect of the curvature of space. By now it was very strong. The ring became wider—it couldn’t be far now. The sensors reported structural issues, and soon the force of the black hole would destroy the probe. Watson sent a last radio message:

  “See you later.”

  Nothing more than that—he did not want to alarm anyone on Kiska. It felt strange. No matter what happened to him, the others would be eternally watching his attempt to reach the black hole—or maybe not, because if he was successful, Object X would disappear.

  If.

  Watson’s thoughts slowed down, and that had to be another effect of the strong gravitation. It felt like his personality was being split into many parts. He tried to hold on to the splinters of his consciousness. Then he was only the photon sphere around himself. At this close distance to the black hole, the escape velocity equaled the speed of light. Here only light particles, photons, could avoid falling into the black hole, but they were caught for eternity nevertheless, because they would have to be faster than light to escape.

  Too bad he could not stay here. For an astronomer this would be paradise, as light from all eons of the universe was gathered here. The sphere was a perfect history book that did not forget anything—actually could not forget anything. What might the sphere of this specific black hole have contained? Perhaps data from the last six months. Or perhaps even photons from different universes? Unfortunately, anyone reaching this place had no chance of ever escaping from it.

  Watch out, Watson, don’t waste your time dreaming. This was the moment to activate the transmitter. The probe would be ground into dust in a few microseconds. Before this, he had to send the content of the storage system, meaning himself. He would dissolve into trillions of photons, distributing each bit of his consciousness to several photons, for the sake of security. As a part of the photon sphere, they could circle the black hole again and again, until they were absorbed by one of the soft hairs on the surface. Now Watson truly felt scared, because he had to give up control. He could not determine which part of him landed on the event horizon of the black hole. He couldn’t see a puzzle, like he described to the crew of Kiska. He could only hope he would remain himself and everything would turn out well, but there was no objective reason for believing that.

  “That’s exactly what hope is,” his old friend Marchenko would have said now. Watson could almost feel him close by, but that was impossible. “Ultimately
, hope is stupid, from a factual perspective, but it makes human beings human.”

  “Thanks, old friend, you were right about everything,” Watson said, full of intense hope, while his consciousness dissolved into tiny glittering stars, which radiated in beautiful streams from the probe to the rapidly rotating sphere of the black hole.

  Three microseconds later the tidal forces crushed the probe into dust, dissolved it into individual atoms, smashed the atoms, and broke up their nuclei that passed the event horizon beyond which any human concept lost its meaning.

  April 3, 2072, Kiska

  From one second to the next, everything changed.

  “Did you two just see that? The black hole is gone! Watson made it!” Doug called out.

  “Attention, activating engines,” Siri warned them. At the same moment Doug felt inertia pressing him against the belt.

  “Is everyone okay?” Doug asked.

  Sebastiano and Maria confirmed it. Doug was relieved. No one quite believed in the success of the AI’s maneuver to get the crew back to the 2003 EH1. Nevertheless, they obediently put on their seatbelts. The result of Watson’s incredible deed was that Kiska was now hurtling out of the solar system at high speed.

  “Great,” Maria panted. “But what is going to happen to us?”

  “Forecast, Siri?”

  “Good news, Doug. We are going to make it. However, our return trip will take longer than planned. You will have lost some weight by the time we reach 2003 EH1, because we will have to cut rations. But you won’t starve.”

  “What about the black hole?” Maria asked.

  “It never existed,” Siri said.

  “And how is Earth doing?”

  “We’ll see when we reestablish contact. Right now they don’t know yet about their good fortune, because the signal will take a few minutes.”

  “Folks, do you realize what just happened?” Doug asked.

  “No,” Sebastiano said, “and I am afraid I will never understand it. But it doesn’t matter. We just saved the world! Ten billion people, our home, the solar system! If it weren’t so difficult, I would be dancing through Kiska now!”

  “Watson has left us forever,” Maria said, “but the Earth is safe. I would like to hug all of you. You, too, Siri.”

  “At 2 g you would have to come over to me,” Sebastiano said. “During this acceleration phase nobody will get me out of my seat.”

  “Let’s postpone that until the banquet after our return!” Doug said, enthusiastically. He was in an odd mood. He felt happy because Earth was no longer in danger, but they also had lost Watson, a member of the crew that he as the captain was responsible for. And his old problem still existed: Shostakovich would not disappear from his life, which meant he would have talk to Maria. He would have to tell her who he really was. Perhaps the fact they had just jointly saved the world would give him the necessary strength.

  April 3, 2072, Earth

  The news reached Maribel late in the evening. She and her boyfriend Chen had already gone to bed an hour previously and had just fallen asleep. She was dressed in sweaty pajamas when she opened the door and saw the courier.

  “Ms. Pedreira,” the courier said, “The office was unable to reach you.”

  “I always switch off my communication devices at night,” Maribel said, yawning. “What is so urgent?”

  “Please get dressed and come with me. We are going to need you in the office as quickly as possible.”

  “What happened?”

  “Can’t you hear it?” the courier asked.

  Maribel listened. She seemed to hear a rattling sound in the distance and shivered.

  “Is there a war?” she asked breathlessly.

  “No, people are celebrating. The black hole is gone!” the courier exclaimed.

  Maribel had to hold on to the door jamb. Luckily, at just that moment Chen came to the entrance of the apartment.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Object X is gone,” the courier said. “Please put on some clothes, quickly. You have to appear in the news. The journalists are waiting.”

  Half an hour later the couple reached the office. Maribel would have liked to join the revelers gathering downtown, but they had to make sure the celebration was not premature.

  On the large monitor display in her office she already saw the image of George Crewmaster, her former professor.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked, with a knowing grin on his face.

  “Is it that obvious?” Maribel asked.

  “Not too much. But today people won’t care.”

  “What do we have?”

  “About 65 minutes ago the gravitational effect of the black hole disappeared completely,” Crewmaster said.

  “Was this Earth time?”

  “Correct.”

  Maribel calculated. The signal would take about 40 minutes, so the decisive event must have happened roughly an hour and 45 minutes ago.

  “Are there any reports or speculations about what happened?” she asked.

  “Very specific speculations,” Crewmaster said. “There is no more gravitational pull, so the thing must have disappeared.”

  “But why? It appeared without warning. Before we finally give the all-clear, we must be sure it won’t reappear in ten minutes.”

  “Just take a look outside. People are already celebrating. You can’t call them back. At least five research teams noticed it, and nobody is keeping it a secret.”

  “Oh, Crewmaster, I would like to celebrate too, but I have a bad feeling about it,” Maribel said with a sigh.

  An alert appeared on her monitor screen. A second call, with high priority.

  “One moment,” she said, “I’ll call you back.”

  Maribel switched to the other caller. It was Rebecca Greene.

  “Rebecca? I just wanted to ask you...”

  “That might not be necessary,” Millikan’s former assistant said. “I recently received a message from Kiska, unencrypted and via the official channel.”

  “They are dropping their anonymity?” Maribel asked.

  “Under these circumstances, yes,” Greene said. “They told us they eliminated the threat with the help of the AI entity Watson. Then they outlined a rather abstruse theory on how they managed to do it.”

  “That is incredible, but we can deal with the theory later. So it is really true, and Object X is gone. I can hardly believe it. Please thank the crew in my name… No, in the name of all of us.”

  Then Maribel ended the call. It was time to face the journalists—and to make ten billion humans feel safe again.

  No. One more thing first. She formulated a short message to Karl Freitag, explaining in a few words what she knew.

  35th Day of the 3rd Cycle, Sikhana

  Zrkhon swam to his office, which was close to the shore. The telescope was placed in such a way that it reached above the surface of the water. The hostile air out there was particularly poisonous today, but he did not have to worry about it. He was glad it would be a short workday. As always on the 35th day of each cycle, the Zitubai ceremony would be held today. Zrkhon did not believe in the old traditions, but he knew leisure made you happier than work even if you had an exciting job like he did. Any job also contained a lot of routine, and his current task was to measure the cosmic background radiation.

  That task was really pointless. For billions of years the value had been at a constant 27 Frumbs, as everyone learned in secondary school. But then some overly imaginative fremale physicist came up with the idea it might not always stay that way. Interactions with other universes might change this value dramatically. Utter nonsense! But because this fremale was a winner of the Sucub Prize, the university listened to her. Zrkhon grunted angrily. The idea probably was just caused by hormones. Some people could not handle it when their sex changed from fremale to memale every three cycles. Strangely enough, hormones only made people crazy during this particular direction of sex changes, never with the other two sexes. Zrkhon was r
eally glad he had just finished that phase.

  With a rather rough movement Zrkhon pulled the evaluation plate from the attachment behind the eyepiece. He belched a gust of fresh water from his stomach onto it to fix the surface. He brushed an arm across his gills and suddenly he remembered he forgot his gill-cleaning today. His fremale would probably smell him coming from far away, and he would have to spend the evening watching the eggs instead of smooching with her. Today was not a good day. Definitely not.

  Then he looked at the evaluation plate, which now was in its final stage. He jerked back and almost tripped over his tail fin. Zrkhon held the plate close to his face so he could reach it with his whiskers, but there could really be no mistake. The taste buds in his whiskers confirmed the sweetish aroma of the red pigment that increasingly formed in the coating of the plate. What should he do? If he reported this to his superiors at the university, he could forget about a short workday. It was most likely just a glitch, a measurement error. Maybe he had received a defective plate. The university always bought the cheapest of the cheap.

  That must be it. It was not some sensational measurement, but just junk. Zrkhon threw the defective plate into the garbage. He was satisfied to see it slowly float into the basket, hit its wall, and then sink to the floor. He inserted a new plate. If there really was something going on, it ought to show up tomorrow as well. Then he at least would not be interrupted by the Zitubai ceremony. He rummaged around in his desk for a gill comb that his fremale gave him one year ago. Where could it be? Yes! There it was, in the very back corner. Zrkhon got up, stood in front of the mirror, and combed his gill slits. He cleaned his face with his whiskers. Then he left his office without locking up.

  Eternity, Nothing

  “Welcome!” A colorful thought manifested itself in his consciousness. Watson could not see where it came from, but it smelled of cinnamon sticks.