Dead End of a Circle

by David Myhro

  The primary language of humankind was something completely new when I came out of the vault—something that did not share in perceivable derivation with any language that I knew of before having gone into the vault—and then that language itself changed completely into a new language a few thousand years later, and then it changed again, and again; in total I had no idea how many languages I had passed through, but I would estimate it to be in the millions.

  Our current currency of words had a term for what had happened to Earth around eighty trillion years ago. The rough translation into English would be something like "inflation of the frog." It is the story of the death of Sol and the burnt earth:

  The dying sun grew much larger, like a frog's vocal sac. At some point, Sol expanded so much that it engulfed Mercury. Mercury's surface was incinerated but the planet itself continued to orbit, clawing its way through the diffuse fog of Sol's atmosphere. Mercury was wounded, its precious inner parts exposed to the world after having been hidden away for so very long, and oceans of molten iron leaked away as it continued its slow spiral into oblivion. The solar friction eventually sapped Mercury's will to drudge on; 18,609,434,112 years after the beginning of time, the bleeding planet fell into the core of Sol.

  Next was Venus. The ambitious frog expanded more and more, and eventually this world needlessly fell into the infernal belly.

  Earth, once called the blue planet, had now turned black and red like a rotten apple as Sol threatened to fill the entire sky. The magnificent oceans were unceremoniously confiscated by the heat of the expanding sun like a disgraced princess being stripped of her violet velvet, and the sky's last trace of blue was lost forever. The burning moon shared Earth's sorrow as the insatiable sun grew ever larger, and Earth's bravest mountains melted into nothing. Every building burned, every flag was forgotten, and every buried skeleton was scorched as the sacred planet accepted its tragic end. The only thing that remains of Earth is its imaginary clock, still ticking.

  Terra 5179816056373094294669421, which was my current residence, was not destined to suffer the same fate since it was the moon of a gas giant that was sufficiently far away from its sun; Terra 5179816056373094294669421's fate will be much more subtle. Eventually, over a span of time that we do not even have words for, the ring dust from the gas giant will disintegrate Terra 5179816056373094294669421 while the tidal forces rip it to pieces.

  I volunteered to station here as an observer of the gas giant since its surface clouds were so volatile and active. There was a constantly rotating crew of humans to help with maintenance of machinery and such, but most of the humans in this dying stellar system were elsewhere.

  (I should probably refer to them as trans-humans since long ago humanity had fully completed this process; they were totally unrecognizable as having originated on Earth.)

  My current sun was the same type that Sol once was. It was an old star, and the universe, as a whole, had begun the stage of death. The era of starlight had passed, and the trans-humans could do nothing but hop from world to world in search of rare warm suns. Long ago I stopped counting the centuries and instead started counting the suns that shined down upon my permanent-home spheres; so far I'd made a home in around a hundred thousand stellar systems of the trillions, both in this galaxy and in others, that the entirety of trans-humanity had colonized.

  Chapter 56

  Resources were becoming scarce because of the heat death of the universe. The intergalactic medium was starting to dominate the galaxies in terms of gravitational influence, and the cosmic background radiation—once an abundant static—was now a weak whisper. Entropy was approaching its asymptotic maximum, galaxies were dimming and stellar formation had ceased due to the hydrogen exhaustion. The universe did not have very long before it would go completely dark and starless.

  Sufficiently sophisticated societies throughout the universe (if they existed) could possibly survive the heat death longer than trans-humanity. With this in mind we had been searching for advanced societies for an extremely long time. Despite our searches, despite having the technology to send a trans-human observer to another galaxy in mere hours by his clock, despite dispersing billions of colonies throughout every galaxy we'd ever visited, we could not find life. Not even simple life. Even Terra 719A barely had any evidence of ruins on it before it was swallowed by its sun. It was a cold, dark, empty universe, and eventually, due to the cosmic expansion, there was a last galaxy that could be touched.

  Most galaxies from your day had, by this time, disappeared completely due to their velocity, relative to us, being greater than c for longer than the travel time of their light to us. And the majority of the galaxies that we could still see were mere illusions, as we could never reach them because their light would disappear before we could get there.

  The phantom galaxies that we could still see but yet never reach had trans-human civilizations there, civilizations that we'd sent long ago, civilizations that were forever cut off from the rest of us. Every once in a while we would send out signals to our companions in another galaxy that was soon to become a phantom galaxy. It was the final farewell, wishing them the very best as their lights go out for the eternal cosmic night.

  I saw it happening once… a phantom galaxy falling off the edge of light. It was facing us at the perfect angle so that its galactic eye was open. Bit by bit, star by star, it disappeared. Every day we looked at it and there was something new that was missing, and after a few centuries it was totally gone. I always wondered if there were eyes in that galaxy that were also watching us disappear forever.

  The universe was dying and the use of the time machine—despite the fact that its success would send me to time and location unknown—was my best choice for self-preservation: after the last sun dies out, after the trans-humans have burned up all of their stored energy, there will be only one place left in each galaxy that's still warm. Trans-humanity, despite all its splendor, will one day have to resort to refuge inside the enormous, devouring hole at the center of a given galaxy, that old, bottomless pit of destruction where things of substance are crushed into things of shadow. There, underneath the event horizon of the supermassive black hole, dead stars will swirl into the insatiable galactic mouth and the stellar friction of these shredded stars will provide the final haven of warmth. And that is a place where I would never, ever follow mankind.

  It is interesting to consider that the universe is, was, and always will be tending with strong bias toward the completely opposite state in comparison to its conditions "before" the Big Bang. At that time—if I can say such a thing—the universe was a system with only one possible state. And then something happened and the universe has ever since been approaching the opposite state: an unbounded amount of space and time instead of none at all. The end will be as cold as the beginning was hot, and the end will be as gradual as the beginning was sudden—it will be so gradual that I won't even be able to discern it if I'm still here to watch. Things will unfold so slowly that I won't even notice when the last speck of light is gone and everything has faded to black, and the subtlety of the transition might leave me wondering if anything ever actually happened at all… maybe I would eventually come to believe that the era of starlight was just a dream.

  And so, after all things in the universe succumb to their final fate, I will have nothing but my insanity to keep me company for all eternity. There is no doubt that Padempire will be awaiting my return, waiting for me with his devilishly grinning eyes of darkness. Only the time machine would spare me from this hell.

  The trans-humans knew that they would drain resources in the making and operation of the time machine, and they knew that they would be doing so when the resources were more scarce than ever. They also knew that they'd get very little out of the experiment, even if it worked—the only thing their investments would buy them would be to see me vanish. But to them, to these altruistic knowledge seekers, the only thing that mattered was to send an observe
r back so that he could solve the last mystery, even if they themselves would never know the answer.

  Chapter 57

  I promised an engineer's description of the time machine and so here it is, from the inside out:

  The components of the time machine were the pod (I would be inside this), the accelerator arms, the engines to power the accelerator arms, and the observers.

  The pod was uniformly made of a homogeneous mixture—a super-strong material having a composition that does not concern a twenty-first century reader. The pod was spherical, and in the middle there was something that looked like an exotic dancer's pole. It ran along the diameter and it was fixed in its position simply by being cast from the one and only mold that was used to make the whole pod; the pole's role was that of structural integrity.

  There were only two moving parts in the pod: at two opposite ends of the sphere there were simple trapdoor mechanisms. I would only need one entrance, of course, but there were identical mechanisms on the two opposite sides because of the need for symmetry. The accelerator arms, which I will describe shortly, will apply pressure to the pod and so it was very important that there could be no weakest point. It would have been quite a bit easier to design a pod with no weakest point if it had no entry hatches, but then that would have required us to make the pod with me in it from the start; the engineers didn't want to cast the mold of the pod with me inside it because the interior surface needed to be designed and developed in a special way so as to deter deformation that would result from the exertion of my relativistic body upon the material.

  The exterior of the pod was scarred with specially placed lines and grooves all over. They were there to guide the accelerator arms, which will glide all over the pod like a bow on a violin, giving the pod spinning acceleration. The spherical shape of the pod was purposeful in maintaining its structural integrity while being chewed by the accelerator arms.

  Those accelerator arms, powered by enormous, planet-sized engines deep underground, will move faster and faster and faster, spinning the pod into a blur that no camera could ever photograph clearly. The arms were constructed out of a new special crystal that would not scratch the particular material constituting the pod.

  The accelerator arms looked very much like the forelegs of a praying mantis—crooked, evil, and with lots of spikes on the under parts. The spikes were actually more like very long (horizontally) and short (vertically) dorsal fins, and their purpose had to do with the very brief moment of locking an accelerator arm in place within a groove on the pod.

  When footage from the half-speed test runs was slowed down I could perceive the motion of the accelerator arms. They looked like the hind legs of a spider busily wrapping its prey in silk. They moved smoothly in some constant and yet unpredictable gesture, endlessly twirling around and around; the purpose of their movement was to produce perpetual acceleration in a particular way that would make the observers' difficult task a bit easier, and also to avoid certain weak structural areas on the surface of the pod so that the pod, in effect, would have no weakest point (so I would have been more accurate if I had said earlier that the whole time machine system—not just the pod itself—was designed to have no weakest point).

  If your thinking is anything like mine, then you're wondering why we would be using this strange spin method rather than a particle accelerator. Or perhaps you're wondering why we can't just use the diametric pole as an axel that could protrude from the pod and be spun by simple machines. The problem is an issue of frames of reference. If the pod were to just spin about an axel, then, as a result of relativistic length contraction, it will, from the observers' frame of reference, contract into something like a string. This was unacceptable because I needed to be moving away from all observers in a 360°×360° sphere around myself, and therefore I needed to become something more of a point instead of a string; neither an axel nor a particle accelerator could produce this effect. The system of accelerator arms, however, was not restricted to a single plane of motion, and it could spin the pod in a complicated precession so that I would, upon the application of relativistic length contraction, be observed as the desired point.

  The point was that we were trying to create a barrier in causality between myself and the rest of the universe, and to do this we would mimic a known instance of such an occurrence. This happens, as I mentioned earlier, with galaxies—when a galaxy slips off the event horizon, into the world of the half-real between the event horizon and the light horizon, it becomes causally isolated from us. But if, instead of retreating beyond the event horizon, the galaxy were to jump backward in time, then this would be, in every practical and functional sense, physically indistinguishable—while we can still see the incidental light that was emitted before the galaxy had fallen away forever, this old, dead light reveals nothing; there is indeed no measurement or method of detection that could correct one who believes that a causally isolated galaxy goes backward in time rather than beyond a horizon. Equivalently, we would be able to visit a causally isolated galaxy if we first chose to perform one of two impossible tasks: either traveling beyond the event horizon, or traveling backward in time—again, this suggests that the two are physically indistinguishable, that the one is a characterization of the other.

  There is, along with our hypothetical, causally isolated galaxy, an entire universe on the other side of the event horizon, a universe spanning to the light horizon and beyond. But if we could somehow wrap the event horizon around the galaxy, then it would be causally isolated from the entire universe, which is to say that it would be sent backward through time. And that is what they were going to do with me—they were going to wrap an event horizon around me, creating a bubble in causality.

  And so it was a bit strange to think that I, a mere particle, the smallest of all things, would become like a galaxy, a stellar hive, the largest of all things. But indeed I would become just like the distant galaxies because I was going to shrink into a small dot until disappearing forever off of the horizon of reality, exceeding c and never being seen again.

  Chapter 58

  In order to surpass the speed of light I needed to first approach it. And I certainly agree with your preemptive objection—that it is not possible to directly accelerate up to or beyond c. But before proceeding to address this problem I should first call attention to the fact that the engineers who designed the time machine did so with technology and scientific wizardry that was limited only by that which was physically possible (our technology was actually equal with our theory at this point—not an unreasonable thing to believe given that, by this time, it had been over eighty trillion years since the invention of the wheel), and that the machine was powerful enough to propel me to one indivisible unit of speed shy of the speed of light—having no wave properties I was, quite uniquely, not subject to the uncertainty principle, and so the naïve description above requires no refinement because we were fairly sure from empirical observations that a physical infinity could not exist in this universe.

  Therefore it would certainly follow that there exists—at least, for me—some well-defined, physically attainable velocity, v=c–ε, such that there exists no well-defined, physically attainable velocity between v and c. If you now acknowledge that the metric of space is expanding in a way that is irreverent to the perceived rules of space and time, then you must see the possibility for the metric of space to expand in such a way so as to produce an effect equivalent to the distance between myself and my observers being increased by two or more quanta at the exact moment when my relative velocity will be just one quantum short of c—giving me a net velocity of, at minimum, c+ε.

  Now, of course, a project like this is going to come with a long list of obstacles and problems. One such problem was the issue of wiggling: I will fit into the time machine pod like a fetus in a womb, and the pod will spin to produce the velocity that the observers will see; the amount of wiggle room that I will have while in the pod will be a critical variabl
e because even a few inches of slippage or physical indentation into the material of the pod (produced by my footholds and other areas of pressure that I will be exerting on the pod) would alter the location of my center of mass and ruin everything (my center of mass is what will remain to be observed after the process of relativistic length contraction has asserted itself).

  But I shall once more call attention to the date, reminding you of both the current technological prowess and also the current rate of expansion of space—a rate that has been accelerating since the beginning of time—and simply assert, without any reasonable refutation available to you, that the bounded range of the permitted negotiation of my position could be sufficiently small so the net difference between it and the predicted increase in distance between myself and the observers due to metric expansion will be in favor of the latter while my reasonably certain velocity is c–ε for our sufficiently small ε.

  (While the scale of metric expansion is certainly more dominant in the voids between the galaxies, the stuff of space is exactly the same regardless of if it is a particle of space comprising one of these intergalactic voids or if it is a particle of space inside an atom. That being said, I will reveal now that we were actually arranging this experiment in a vast intergalactic supervoid on an artificial planet that we had created and then shepherded away from the clutches of its stellar nursery. It is true that the planet itself will exert modest gravity to inhibit the expansion of space-time, but there will be no ambient gravitational expanse to exacerbate this.)

  And so, as I approach the speed of light, the observers will occasionally peek at my velocity—although, in this context, "occasionally" might mean 1045 times per second. The observers, as I described earlier, would be placed on the surface of an imaginary sphere centered around me; the radius of the sphere, being a bit larger than that of the planet we were on, was optimally determined by the radius of my revolution, the speed of my revolution, and the rate of the metric expansion. The sphere was profoundly dense in terms of observers per square Planck length: there was in fact an oversaturation—more observers than the required amount to obtain the best measurements physically possible.