by Alan Seeger
Graduating high school at age 16 and earning his first undergraduate degree by the time he was 19, Terry had planned to apply to a number of Ivy League schools to do his master’s and doctorate degrees; instead, he was encouraged by a mentor to pursue a degree in electrical engineering at MIT, which he did, coupling it with a second master’s in computer science. He discovered that taking the mathematical concepts or scientific principles that others came up with and translating them into working hardware came naturally to him.
In 2011, he was recruited as the second member of the ChroNova team.
CHAPTER 13
The darkness was utterly complete. This place was no place. There was nothing here. The here didn’t even exist. This wasn’t a place at all. This was nothing, and nowhere. Even the darkness was not really darkness, but simply the lack of existence. Nothing existed here; not even time, nor space.
And then, in the flicker of a moment, something happened.
Somewhere else, somewhere so far away that it wasn’t even remotely related to this non-place — nor, in fact, to our universe — a star died. It was ancient, and had used up its hydrogen fuel some time ago and begun cannibalizing the helium that it had manufactured from the hydrogen over a period of billions of years. It began fusing the helium into carbon atoms, and when the helium ran low, the carbon began to fuse into oxygen, the oxygen to silicon and the silicon to a massive core of iron.
At that point, the fusion process failed. The remnants of the outer layers — the remaining hydrogen, helium, carbon and silicon — continued to burn brightly, but the core of iron continued to grow until it reached a tipping point. The energy output of the star was no longer sufficient to counterbalance its massive gravity, and it exploded, blowing the outer layers out into space.
Not our space.
Not our universe.
The explosion was immense. Had there been any life forms anywhere within a few million light years which had sensory organs capable of detecting visible light or X-rays — and it is not known if there were or not, since this was occurring in another universe entirely — they would have perked up and stared in that direction, awed at the sight.
The star was quite massive. The gravity of the remaining body was so immense that, mere moments after the explosion, the clouds of fluorescent gases and dust immediately began to be drawn back toward the core. In the equivalent of moments on a cosmic scale, much of the original star’s mass had been drawn back to the center. The more it compressed, the denser it became, and the more intense its gravity. It became so powerful that the very atoms that made up the remnant of the star began to collapse. Protons and electrons were crushed into each other, forming neutrons. Denser and denser it became, until after a time, what was left of the original star seemed to implode, as if it were a balloon from which the air had been suddenly released.
In the center of a void in the middle of a wispy cloud of hydrogen and other gases, there suddenly seemed to be nothing where a dying star had been only moments before; a nothing which still had a tremendous gravitational field, about which the cloud of gas swirled.
~~~~~
Simultaneously, somewhere else altogether, in the place-that-was-not-a-place, in the darkness that was nothingness, something happened. In that flicker of a moment, in a fireball that bore the heat of a trillion trillion suns, where there had been nothing, suddenly there was something.
And 13.7 billion years after the supernova in another reality which bred a black hole that gave birth to our universe, the staff of ChroNova were looking through a wormhole into an area of non-space which connected a number of locations, not only in these two universes, but a plethora of others.
CHAPTER 14
They had decided to break for lunch before attempting to send the probe into the vortex for the first time; walking back to the office they were all full of Tex-Mex and Coronas, for which Randall had paid, uncharacteristically, with the corporate credit card. They were all happily anticipating what awaited them in the hours to come.
“So what do you think will happen when we send the probe in?” said Terry.
“I don’t know,” Randall replied. “We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“Three-foot-tall grey aliens will come flooding out, grab Terry and perform an anal probe,” laughed Rick.
Terry glared at Rick, but laughed good-naturedly.
Soon they were all settled back into their respective spots in the control room.
The HOT6 was fired up, and the portal reestablished. The emerald-colored glow flickered across the room like an engraved invitation to Oz.
“All right, ladies and gents. We are go for insertion at fifteen hundred hours,” said Randall.
Rick looked at the large countdown clock on the wall. It read -00:13:17.0610934, the final five digits just a whirring blur of numerals. Just over thirteen minutes remaining.
As the time ticked away, the various junior members of the team scurried around, making last minute adjustments and preparations. The clock continued to count down the minutes. Rick could feel the tension level in the room rising perceptibly.
The probe was on a rolling platform mounted on a pair of rails that led to the portal. The edge of the platform facing away from the portal had a raised side on it which would serve to propel the probe into the portal when the time came. A long pneumatic strut was attached to it which, when activated by the team, would launch the probe through the vortex.
The data connections had already been established; a null report was being received by the ChroNova computers, containing nothing except the time markers.
Five minutes.
There was a hundred feet of quarter-inch braided steel cable, sheathed in high-temp vinyl, tethering the probe to a reinforced concrete pylon rising out of the floor in front of the portal. It would serve to keep the probe from drifting too far away from the entrance, as well as providing a means of extracting the probe from the void when they were finished.
Three minutes.
Rick and Randall looked at each other. Randall tilted his head slightly as if to say, “Here goes nothing.” Rick smiled and shrugged.
Ninety seconds.
Sixty.
Thirty.
Ten.
Terry poised his fingers over the red launch button, counting down the last few seconds out loud.
“Nine… eight… seven… six…”
Terry swallowed hard. The probe was his baby, and the failure or success of the entire project hinged on it. Everyone in the room joined in counting down the last few seconds.
“Five… four… three… two… one…”
Randall called out: “Launch!”
Terry depressed the launch button.
CHAPTER 15
As Terry initiated the launch, the pneumatic strut activated and sprang out, propelling the rolling platform forward on its rails toward the portal. It reached the end of the rails and slammed to a stop, and the rectangular aluminum probe flew off the platform toward the swirling green whirlpool.
For a moment Randall had a vision of the probe either passing through the portal as if it were nothing but a hologram and landing with a thump on the floor on the other side, or else somehow bouncing off the portal as if it were a solid brick wall, wrecking the precision equipment inside and falling to the floor below as a useless pile of electronic junk.
Instead, the probe sailed into the portal like a football passing cleanly through the uprights. Terry raised his arms as if he were calling a successful field goal. “Aaaaaand it’s GOOD!” He’d lived in the United States long enough to have the rules of American football down pat.
Laughter and applause broke out around the room.
They peered into the portal, everyone in the room subtly leaning forward as if taking in an engrossing murder mystery.
There, clearly visible in the middle of the whirlpool, was the probe, still attached to its tether. At the point where the steel cable passed into the portal, it had the appearan
ce of being immersed in a vast container of lime gelatin. The probe seemed to float in midair, slowly turning, four and a half feet above the floor. Some of the staff walked around to the back side of the portal. All that was visible there was the swirling green glow; none of the objects inside — at this point, besides the probe, there was a car that appeared to be from the 1940s, a young spotted calf, and a group of half a dozen large sea birds — were visible from the back side of the portal. The junior staff members were busy documenting the event; taking notes, taking readings, taking photographs.
“Any data readings yet?” Randall called out. There was no response from the data technician seated to Terry’s right. Randall looked over at her. “Sarah?”
Sarah Rhodes, the firm’s data specialist, whose assigned task was to monitor the information being transmitted back to ChroNova’s computers by the probe, was seated at her console with a look of bewilderment on her face. She typed a command into her computer’s keyboard.
“Sarah? What’s the matter?” Randall asked.
“It —” she hesitated. “I don’t know what to make of this, Randall.”
“What’s going on?” said Rick.
“It’s just that… well, from the moment of launch, the very moment that the probe went through the portal, I completely lost contact with it,” Sarah responded.
“What?” said Terry. “That’s impossible. It’s right… there.” he gestured toward the probe, apparently floating not twenty feet away within the green pinwheel of the portal.
“I know, Terry, I know. But… as soon as it went into that thing, it’s like… It’s like it doesn’t even exist,” Sarah said. “I’m not even getting the time stamps.”
They all looked at each other, dumbstruck.
“What do you think, Rick?” Randall asked.
“Let’s leave it in there for a while. Half an hour, 45 minutes… then see if we can pull it out. Terry, it records its data locally as well as broadcasting it, right?”
“Yeah. It has an on-board one terabyte solid state drive that should be recording everything its sensors pick up. It’s pretty much state of the art,” said Terry.
“Okay, then,” said Randall. “Let’s go get some coffee. A few of us can stay here and keep an eye on things. In 45 minutes we’ll try to withdraw the probe, and if we succeed, we’ll see if any data was captured locally. Maybe, for whatever reason, we’re just not getting the transmissions.”
CHAPTER 16
An impatient 45 minutes passed. The team drank coffee, ate donuts that had been fresh at six that morning, and puzzled over the conundrum of the probe.
Finally Rick and Randall nodded at each other that it was time. Rick gave the order for extraction, and one of the team members activated the electric cable winch which began whirring, pulling the tether out of the portal. They watched as the probe emerged. Some of them were worried that it would come out changed, somehow; electrified, radioactive, or suddenly sentient and murderously mobile like VGER in that old Star Trek episode. None of these things occurred, however; the team slid the rolling platform forward until it was nearly touching the portal, and the probe came sliding out and dropped onto the platform with a light metallic clank.
They decided to keep the HOT6 on, seeming slightly hypnotized by the emerald swirls.
A moment or two after the probe hit the platform, Sarah called out, “I’m getting data flow again.”
“Any content?” Randall asked her.
“No,” she replied. “It’s as blank as it was initially, apart from the time stamps and the surroundings in this facility.”
“Let me dump the data drive and see if it collected anything while it was in there,” said Terry. He went to the probe and connected a high speed data cable to a port on its side. He nodded to Sarah, who activated an app on her computer.
“Indicating 38.6 gigabytes of data collected, Randall!” she said excitedly.
“Download it to the main computer, please,” he said.
“Downloading,” Sarah replied.
In a couple of minutes the transfer was complete and Terry began the process of analyzing the various pieces of information. The video feed appeared on monitors all over the room. The view was not dissimilar to what they had seen simply looking into the portal, but it was a probe’s-eye view of what was within the strange greenness. They saw the old car float by that they had previously seen; in the distance, another vehicle, this one unfamiliar, sleek and futuristic. Terry switched to a secondary vidfeed, this one from a secondary camera that pointed the opposite direction. There was a collective gasp in the room.
There, not far away from the camera, was a man. More specifically, a man dressed in what seemed to be a Roman soldier’s uniform. His right hand held a short sword, two feet in length; a crested helmet was on his head, nearly hiding his face. There was the form of an eagle on his breastplate, and his legs were bare below the hem of his tunic and the woolen trousers he wore. On his feet were leather sandals. It didn’t appear that he was dead, yet what was visible of his face was void of expression, as though he’d been floating there for a couple thousand years and no mental capacity remained in him. Terry shuddered at the thought.
“Audio?” said Randall.
“Zero dee-bee,” Terry responded. There was no sound at all on the recording, not even background noise.
“Other readings?”
“Radiation levels are nil. No radio waves, no Gamma radiation… nothing.”
“The probe was in there, apparently not even ten feet from six hot sources of radiation, and none of them were registering on the scanners?”
“Yeah. About the only place there’s a significant bump is in the visible light range, at around 500 nanometers,” Terry said.
“Which is…” Rick began.
“Various shades of green,” Terry finished with a grin.
“What about surroundings? Do you read any solid surface, any chamber walls?” Randall asked.
“Apart from the nearby objects, I am not getting a radar return from any part of the surrounding area. We had it in there for about 45 minutes, and…” He punched numbers into a calculator. “Radar travels at the speed of light… 186,272 miles per second… hmm…” He looked up with a blank look on his face. “The lack of any significant radar return after a 45-minute interval suggests no large objects, walls, or even a planetary surface within a distance of more than…” he hit the equals key. “Two hundred and fifty million miles.”
“So not only does it not detect the walls of this room, but… what about the Earth? The Moon? For that matter, the Sun is less than a hundred million miles away,” Rick said.
“Not in there, it’s not,” Terry replied, a note of awe in his voice.
They all stared at each other in silence.
CHAPTER 17
The ChroNova team was meeting in the main conference room. It was the second day since they had opened what they were calling the Green.
“So what does this mean?” said Randall. “We’ve somehow tapped into a… place… that is out in the middle of literally nowhere? How did we manage to do this while we were trying to invent time travel?” There was scattered laughter around the conference room.
“I don’t know,” said Rick, “but our research just took a hell of an interesting turn.”
“The ‘place’ we’re seeing inside the Green doesn’t seem to be a place at all,” said Sarah. “Secondary analysis of the data from the radar seems to show conflicting information — no objects within the 22.5 light-minutes that the radar bounce should have reached, but a faint secondary return that appears to indicate that the probe was completely enclosed in what could be construed as solid rock… although visual observation clearly indicates otherwise.”
They had taken to calling it the Green for lack of a better term. Some thought they should come up with a more elegant term, but that discussion had been put on the back burner for the time being. During a break in the discussion, however, the topic came up.
Rick cocked his head and grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It needs something more marketable, but I don’t really have any ideas.”
“Well, we call the vortex that HOT6 makes by a lot of different names,” said Terry. “Vortex, whirlpool, portal… it keeps occurring to me that it’s a gate. A gate to someplace else, a place that is not even part of our universe, let alone our world. It kinda sounds like those space-time portals that were in that one book that came out last year.”
Randall looked at Terry for a moment, then at Rick. “Gatespace?” he laughed. “It does sound like that. Just like that. Should we make that its official name?”
Rick sat back in his chair. “Sounds good to me.”
Terry laughed softly. “I was listening to the radio on my way to work, and they played that song, ‘The Space Between.’ You remember that one?”
“Dave Matthews,” said Rick.
“Yeah,” said Terry. “And I started thinking of the Green. It’s a space between here and someplace else.”
“A space that isn’t a space,” said Randall.
“Not a space as we understand it,” said Terry, “but I think it’s us that needs to revise our understanding of space… of time and place, for that matter.”
“So it’s a gate to… what?” Randall asked.
“A detailed study of the radar mapping done by the probe showed me what the Gatespace looks like from inside. It’s got a fairly distinctive radar signature, and I was able to find what appear to be hundreds — no, thousands more within the range of the radar scan. There are a few of them visible on the probe video. They look like a negative of what we see from this side… no, not a negative, image, exactly… that’d be a sort of pinkish whirlpool. They look orange, a sort of rusty color, pretty much how that author described them, almost as if he’d encountered one of these things in real life. But that’d be impossible, wouldn’t it? Think of all the hoops we had to jump through before we stumbled across the means to generate the first Gate. And yet…”