by Adam Roberts
— And now you’re going to tell me, said the older man, speaking expansively, a voice expressive of confidence, that the vacuum of space neutralises the effect. It just burns itself out up there.
— See, said the younger man, leaning forward, we wondered about that. One S-bomb theory was that, without matter to, to unpick, then it would just putt-putt and out. But the way it’s turned out - no. It’s expanding explosively. Faster than any chemical explosion, expanding really very quickly. But not so quickly as we are moving away from it, in our solar and Galactic trajectories, so in that sense we’re safe.
— So what’s the odds that our planet will swing round on its orbit into this expanding explosion, this time next year?
A weird little trembly high-pitched laugh.
— Man, no. What, the sun, you see. Is moving relative to the galaxy. And the galaxy is . . . anyway, it’s a complex spirograph tracery, our passage through spacetime. So we’re leaving it pretty far behind us, a spoor of vacuum-vacuum, unstitching the poor fourfold house in which we live. Like the wake of a boat. Or, from its point of view, we’re skimming away as it swells.
~ * ~
— Now you’re sure, said the old man, as he got to his feet, that it’s a real effect?
— It’s real, said the younger man. You know what? I’ll level with you. We calculated a forty-sixty possibility that something like this would happen. Something like this. That’s why we detonated it high in the air, so that the world would spin us away, day by day, and leave the detonation footprint behind in the vacuum. We figured, it is vacuum! What can happen? But it turns out, more than you’d think.
— So?
— Light propagates across a vacuum. Various electromagnetic radiations propagate across a vacuum. But none of them can propagate across the null space.
— Rubble can?
— What?
— You said, ‘Blow it under Tehran, Tehran falls into the hole’.
— Well, yes. Because the earth swings away from it, leaves it behind. But, actually, weird things happen to the equations when you shuffle core assumptions about, you know, the fundamental premises of things. Atoms may tumble into null-space, but they get. . . churned. Or to be more exact: the Earth moves away, into a new baseline, and away from the detonation footprint, and then matter can move into the tunnel dug out by the S-bomb. But they don’t seem to, you know, stick as well as they ought. Particles. They seem to slide about more than you might think. But, anyway, at the point of the continuing detonation, evidently, electro-magnetic waves aren’t able to cross the null.
— So, said the older man, who is no fool, the black blotch in the sky. And all the bother in the media.
— And that’s going to get worse. Nothing we can do about it. More and more stars are going to get blanked out by the phenomenon, in the northern hemisphere at least, in the backwash of the earth’s passage through galactic space. Or actually the sun’s, you see what I mean.
— OK, said the general. Long as it stays out there.
This is what he was thinking: biggest act of vandalism in human history. He’s thinking: but leastways it’s not pissing direct into our own pool. And as he extricates himself from the table his military mind is running through possible strategic uses, from attacking orbital platforms to high-altitude bombers, to maybe developing smaller or shorter-lived devices that could be used lower down. He can’t help thinking that way. He’s a soldier.
— I had better go report right now, he said. My bosses will want to know this right away. Then, as an afterthought, I’ll tell you what the S stands for.
— What?
— Starsucker. Starblotter. Or something (for he’s never been very deft with a punchline) about stars. And he was at the door, and looking through the glass into the unseasonably windy weather. Go back to the institute, he said. Go back, and we’ll contact you in due course.
~ * ~
This string, this one line out of which everything is spun, is broken; and the moment (the infinitesimal fractional moment) when that could have been repaired has long gone. Momentum works in strange ways in ten dimensions. Unspooling, unstitching, unpicking the tapestry of matter takes longer than unpicking the tapestry of vacuum. They slip free of their weave. The two whip-snapping ends of the superstring are acquiring more and more hyper-momentum. What does the S stand for again? Severed. Say-your-prayers. Stop.
~ * ~
Time continues applying its pressure and forcing the other three dimensions along its relentless and irrevocable line. For six months the coffee shop does its regular business, and customers come in sluggish and drink and go off joyously agitated. There is a relatively high turnover of serving staff, for the pay is poor and the work onerous, but the two men who served behind the coffee shop bar during the conversation reported above are still there post six months on. Six months on is when the whole story breaks to the media: this cornpone country, its tiny research budget, its speculative endeavour, its helium-balloon-detonated-device unsanctioned by any international organisation or superpower government. This devastation wreaked on the night sky (for the northern hemisphere night sky is now a third blotted out by this spreading squid-ink), this hideous destructive power. Worse than atomics. The most massy of mass destructive possibilities. S for shock. Oh, the outrage.
The s-for-shit hits the f-for-fan. The government collapses. The country wilts under the censure of the international community. There’s all that.
The whole story comes out. All the members of the eight-strong research team had been holding their peace under the most alarming threats from the security services; as had the dozen or so high-clearance security officials ‘handling’ the case. But one succumbs, and defects, and reveals all; and then, one by one, so do the others. Some scurry up their local equivalents of Harrowdown Hill; some try and tease wealth from the media to tell their unvarnished tales.
For a brief period the coffee shop becomes a place of celebrity pilgrimage: it was in this very establishment, at this very table, that the scientific team first confessed their crime (and this is the term everybody is using now) to a security official. This is where the governmental cover-up began. Journalists, and rubberneckers, and oddballs, swarmed to the shop. The two men who had been on duty that day sold their stories; but their stories didn’t amount to very much, and didn’t earn them very much money.
But it is the nature of events that they entail consequences over a much longer timescale than people realise. The scientific community remains divided as to whether the unusually severe atmospheric storms are caused by the continuing action of the null-corridor, or whether the null-corridor has long since dissipated, and these storms are merely the long tail of the jolt which the chaotic weather system received from its initial carving.
~ * ~
And six months after that, the shop is empty. Things went badly, for the small country that had produced this enormous device has been repudiated by many of the world’s nations. There were economic sanctions in place, public shaming. It has offered up dozens of its official personnel, including all the remaining scientists on the team, to public trials and imprisonment.
— Why were you so secretive? Why didn’t you share the theoretical underpinnings of the technology you were developing?
— We were a small group, working well within the budget for our team. The technology isn’t expensive. The most expensive part of our equipment, in fact, was the balloon to lift it up for its trial detonation.
— But why the S-for-Secrecy?
— We figured we were like the Manhattan Project.
But, no! no! That doesn’t wash. That doesn’t wash.
— The Manhattan Project was a wartime project. The secrecy was governmentally sanctioned, and a necessary component of the prosecution of the war. You were working during peacetime. You brought this horror on the world for no reason.
— Not Manhattan Project in the sense of wartime, but Manhattan Project in the
sense of knowing that we had a potentially catastrophically destructive technology on our hands. The last thing we wanted was for this to leak out. Our secrecy was motivated by a desire to protect humanity from the—
But it’s no good. To prison they all go, for the term of their naturals, and the new government, and then the one that comes into power after that, falls, makes repeated obeisance to the international community. And although some of its allies stand by it, the sanctions of others do bite. Its economy turns down. People lose their jobs. Poverty increases. It’s all bad news.
Another government tumbles, tripped over by this immoveable object, this S-bomb. Life gets harder still, and fewer and fewer people are in the position to afford frivolities like expensive coffee-shop steam-filtered coffee. The journalists are no longer interested. The ordinary disaster-tourists and rubberneckers don’t call by any more. Only the weirdos keep coming - and here’s a truth about weirdoes - they’re generally too parsimonious actually to buy the damn coffee. More often than not they come in, sit at The Table and run peculiar home-made Heath-Robinson handheld devices over it, up and down its legs, as if looking for something. Aluminium foil and cardboard and glued-on circuit boards and things like that, wielded as if the table could, if plumbed correctly, reveal something about the way an S-Bomb is constructed, or about the fundamental nature of reality, or things along that axis of thought.
~ * ~
The nations of the world, the ones that excoriate as much as those that stand by, of course institute their own programmes to uncover the technology at the heart of the S-Bomb. And it’s not difficult, once you grasp a few general premises. Within the year there are a dozen functioning S-Bombs, none of which are publicly acknowledged. A year after that there are hundreds. There are different modalities and strengths of the device.
Does this sound like a stable situation to you? And yet another year slowly passes, and another, and another, without the world coming to an end.
The coffee-shop, to stay financially afloat, has rethought its business-plan to concentrate on cheap food, alcohol and all-night opening. The expensive dark-wood fittings and chunky chairs are starting to show wear and tear; and the clientele now mostly consists of people in cheap clothing who buy the cheapest soup on the menu, grab three bread rolls from the bread roll basket (despite the sign that says ‘one bread roll per soup please’), cache two in their coat pockets, and then sit for hours and hours at their laptops trying to scratch together e-work. Thin chance of that, these days, friend. Hard times at the mill. They complain that the heating is turned down too low. The new manager stands firm. From next week, he decides, he’s moving the bread-roll basket behind the till. Customers will be issued with one roll when they have paid for the soup, no discussion, no argument.
But here’s an old friend; looking no older. Close-cropped white hair, whorled and scored skin. And with him, looking much reduced, the younger guy: thinner, raccoon-eyed, with a timid body language and a tendency to hang his head forward. And a third person: armed, e-tooled up with a head-sieve and fancy shades. The finest private bodyguard money can buy. He gives them privacy; checks out the space; waits by the door.
The two old friends can’t sit at the table, since it was long since sold on i-Bay, but they buy some coffee and sit at a table, and that suits them just fine.
And for a while they simply sit there.
Eventually the younger one, his eyes on the tabletop and his manner subdued, speaks.
— You taking me back, after this?
— Consider it your parole.
The younger man digests this fact.
— Not going back?
— No.
— I could tell you my opinion on the Antarctic business, he offers. This whirl-tempest thing. I have been thinking about it.
— We’ve got people on staff who have been offering expert opinions on that.
This seems to pique the young man.
— I tried to keep up, he says, much as I could, as was possible within the confines of. . . But my internet access was severely, I mean severely, restricted.
— Really ? In prison, says the older man. Who’d think it?
— What I’m saying (eyes still on the tabletop) is, I recognise that there will be people who have kept up with all the science better than I’ve been able.
— You’re not out, says the older man, so that we can tap into your scientific expertise. That’s not why you’re out.
The obvious next question would be: then why am I out? But the young man has got out of the habit of interrogating others. So he just sits there. He keeps looking up at the bodyguard, flicking his eyes at the man’s impassive face, stealing glances at the chunky stock of his Glock.
— Here’s one thing, says the older man, you’ll maybe have seen. Or heard about. The Chinese were trying to splice out a whole section of string. Best as I understand it, it would involve a double cut, liberating a continuous section, with the very rapid gluing-together of the remaining sections before they shoot off to space forever at twenty-seven klicks a second. But the liberated section is carried along with us, apparently.
This gets the younger man agitated, although in a semi-contained, rather strangulated manner.
— See, this talking of splicing is a lie. You can’t splice the string. The best you could do would be a temporary field-hold, and the equations include chaotic elements when you try and work out how long the hold is going to last. Not that you could do anything after the fact. If it breaks it’ll be millions of kilometres away by the time it does.
He dries up, glances at the dour face of the older man, and then back at the table.
— Anyway, he says, in a gloomy voice. If you cut the string twice you’ll get a continuous section. You just won’t be able to say how long. It loops through ten dimensions, don’t forget. It passes through six dimensions we can’t even see. It might be a few metres long, or thousands of light years.
— A continuous whole section of that length, says the older man, drily, wouldn’t be much use to us.
— But because it loops through so many dimensions . . .
— You think I don’t know all this?
The young man looks up again, alarmed. Then, eyes down, he picks up his coffee and slurps it.
— This is the weave underlying everything, says the older man. We’ve all become pretty expert in this subject. This is the ground, the paper upon which the ink of reality is laid down, against which it is readable. Not only our world, but the whole cosmos, all matter and all vacuum, it all rolls itself along this endless medium; and without this medium it wouldn’t exist as cosmos, matter and vacuum. Everything material is relative, but this — this is absolute.
— I give the world, says the young man, one year. I’m amazed it’s lasted as long as it has. This south polar sea incident - that shows you something. That shows you that S-Bombs will continue to be detonated. They’ll be set off, by governments or terrorists, rogue states and idiots, and each one will knock another hole in the reality upon which we depend. Soon there will be hundreds of loose ends in the superstring. It will unspool more and more rapidly. It’ll fray more and more.
— As I say, says the older man. We got brighter and better informed experts working for us now. Brighter than you, and better informed than you.
The younger man takes this in his stride, as how could he not? Seven years of prison are enough to break most people. He even nods.
— Let’s say, the older man continues, that the Chinese have achieved this thing. We’re not sure if by luck or judgment; but say they cut loose a segment of the unitary superstring. Say they unlaced it from ten dimensions into one dimension. One of ours.
— You mean, two?
— Just length. As breadthless and depthless as it is timeless. Or, let me be more precise. When it’s looped about itself or knotted, then effects of breadth and depth and time and other stuff are measurable. It’s the proximity of one length
of string to another length, and the precise pattern, or orientation, of that proximity. One portion lying close alongside another, and you’ve breadth. Lying alongside another at a different orientation and you’ve time, and so on.
— They can manipulate it?
— So it seems.
— How? How can they? How?
— Their glue is better than our glue, I guess. They haven’t created a discernible breach, for instance, so we think that they’ve found a way of holding the two severed ends of string in something approximating stability. They’re in orbit, by the way, so maybe that helps. But our sources suggest they’ve got a separated out, whole, workable two-metre piece of string.
— That’s very, says the young man, and he means to add, impressive, but the words dry in his throat.