by David Brin
"Three minutes, Stan!"
"I can read a clock!" he shouted back, trying to sound more irritated than he really was. In truth, he really had lost track of the time. His mind now seemed to move at a tangent to that flow . . . nearly but not quite parallel to the event cone of the objective world.
We're told subjectivity, that old enemy of science, becomes its ally at the level of the quantum. Some say it's only the presence of an observer that causes the probability wave to collapse. It's the observer who ultimately notes the plummet of an electron from its shell, as well as the sparrow in a forest. Without observers not only is a falling tree without sound . . . it's a concept without meaning.
Of late Stan had been wondering ever more about that. Nature, even down to the lowliest quark, seemed to be performing, as if for an audience. Arguments raged between adherents of the strong and weak anthropic principles, over whether observers were required by the universe or merely convenient to it. But everyone now agreed that having an audience mattered.
So much, then, for the debate over what Newton would say if he were snatched out of his time and brought to the present. His clockwork world was as alien to Stan's as that of a tribal shaman. In fact, in some ways the shaman actually had it hands down over prissy old Isaac. At least, Stan imagined, the shaman would probably make better company at a party.
"One minute! Keep your eye on—"
Alex's voice cut off suddenly as automatic timers sent the crash doors hissing shut. Stan shook himself, hauling his mind back and making an earnest effort to concentrate. It would have been different were there something for him to do. But everything was sequenced, even data collection. Later, they would pore over it all and argue. For now, though, he had only to watch. To observe . . .
Before man, he wondered, who performed this role for the universe?
There appears to be no rule that the observer has to be conscious. So animals might have served without being self-aware. And on other worlds, creatures might have existed long before life filled Earth's seas. It isn't necessary that every event, every rockfall, every quantum of light be appreciated, only that some of it, somewhere, come to the attention of someone who notices and cares.
"But then," Stan debated himself aloud, "Who noticed or cared at the beginning? Before the planets? Before stars?"
Who was there in the pre-creation nothing to watch the vacuum fluctuation of all time? The one that turned into the Big Bang?
In his thoughts, Stan answered his own question.
If the universe needs at least one observer in order to exist. Then that's the one compelling argument for the necessity of God.
The counter reached zero. Beneath it, the panel of fused quartz remained black. Nevertheless. Stan knew something was happening. Deep in the bowels of the chamber, the energy state of raw vacuum was being forced to change.
Uncertainty. That was the lever. Take a cubical box of space, say a centimeter on a side. Does it contain a proton? If so, there's a limit to how much you can know about that proton with any sureness. You cannot know its momentum more precisely than a given value without destroying your chance of knowing where it is. Or if you find a way to zoom in on the box until the proton's location is incredibly exact, then your knowledge of its speed and direction plummets toward zero.
Another linked pair of values is energy and time. You may think you know how much or little energy the box contains. (In a vacuum it tends toward baseline zero.) But what about fluctuations? What if bits of matter and antimatter suddenly appear, only to abruptly disappear again? Then the average would still be the same, and all account books would stay balanced.
Within this chamber, modern trickery was using that very loophole to pry away at Nature's wall.
Stan glanced at the mass gauge. It sped upscale rapidly. Femtograms, picograms, nanograms of matter coalesced in a space too small to measure. Micrograms, milligrams . . . each newly born hadron pair shimmered for a moment too narrow to notice. Particle and antiparticle tried to flee, tried to annihilate. But before they could cancel out again, each was drawn into a trap of folded space, sucked down a narrow funnel of gravity smaller than a proton, with no more personality than a smudge of blackness.
The singularity began taking on serious weight. The mass gauge whirled. Kilograms converted into tons. Tons into kilotons. Boulders, hillocks, mountains poured forth, a torrent flowing into the greedy mouth.
When Stan was young, they said you weren't supposed to be able to make something from nothing. But nature did sometimes let you borrow. Alex Lustig's machine was borrowing from vacuum, and instantly paying it all back to the singularity.
That was the secret. Any bank will lend you a million bucks . . . so long as you only want it for a microsecond.
Megatons, gigatons . . . Stan had helped make holes before. Singularities more complex and elegant than this one. But never had anyone attempted anything so drastic or momentous. The pace accelerated.
Something shifted in the sinuses behind his eyes. That warning came moments before the gravimeters began singing a melody of alarm . . . full seconds in advance of the first creaking sounds coming from the reinforced metal walls.
Come on, Alex. You promised this wouldn't run away.
They had come to this lab on a distant asteroid on the off chance something might go wrong. But Stan wondered how much good that would do if their meddling managed to tear a rent in the fabric of everything. There were stories that some scientists on the Manhattan Project had shared a similar fear. "What if the chain reaction doesn't stay restricted to the plutonium," they asked, "but spreads to iron, silicon, and oxygen?" On paper it was absurd, but no one knew until the flash of Trinity, when the fireball finally faded back to little more than a terrible, glittering cloud.
Now Stan felt a similar dread. What if the singularity no longer needed Lustig's machine to yank matter out of vacuum for it? What if the effect carried on and on, with its own momentum . . .?
This time we might have gone too far.
He felt them now. The tides. And in the quartz window, mediated by three hundred half mirrors, a ghost took shape. It was microscopic, but the colors were captivating.
The mass scale spun. Stan felt the awful attraction of the thing. Any moment now it was going to reach out and drag down the walls, the station, the planetoid . . . and even then would it stop?
"Alex!" he cried out as gravitational flux stretched his skin. Viscera migrated toward his throat as, uselessly, he braced his feet.
"Dammit, you—"
Stan blinked. His next breath wouldn't come. Time felt suspended.
Then he knew.
It was gone.
Goosebumps shivered in the tidal wake. He looked at the mass gauge. It read zero. One moment it had been there, the next it had vanished.
Alex's voice echoed over the intercom, satisfaction in his voice. "Right on schedule. Time for a beer, eh? You were saying something, Stan?"
He searched his memory and somewhere found the trick to breathing again. Stan let out a shuddering sigh.
"I . . ." He tried to lick his lips, but couldn't even wet them. Hoarsely, he tried again. "I was going to say . . . you'd better have something up there stronger than beer. Because I need it."
2.
They tested the chamber in every way imaginable, but there was nothing there. For a time it had contained the mass of a small planet. The black hole had been palpable. Real. Now it was gone.
"They say a gravitational singularity is a tunnel to another place," Stan mused.
"Some people think so. Wormholes and the like may connect one part of space-time with another." Alex nodded agreeably. He sat across the table, alone with Stan in the darkened lounge strewn with debris from the evening's celebration. Everyone else had gone to bed, but both men had their feet propped up as they gazed through a crystal window at the starry panorama. "In practice, such tunnels probably are useless. No one will ever use one for transportation, for instance. There's the problem of
ultraviolet runaway—"
"That's not what I'm talking about." Stan shook his head. He poured another shot of whiskey. "What I mean is, how do we know that hole we created hasn't popped out to become a hazard for some other poor bastards?"
Alex looked amused. "That's not how it works, Stan. The singularity we made today was special. It grew too fast for our universe to contain it at all.
"We're used to envisioning a black hole, even a micro, as something like a funnel in the fabric of space. But in this case, that fabric rebounded, folded over, sealed the breach. The hole is just gone, Stan."
Stan felt tired and a little tipsy, but damn if he'd let this young hotshot get the better of him. "I know that! All causality links with our universe have been severed. There's no connection with the thing anymore.
"But still I wonder. Where did it go?"
There was a momentary silence.
"That's probably the wrong question, Stan. A better way of putting it would be, What has the singularity become?"
The young genius now had that look in his eyes again—the philosophical one. "What do you mean?" Stan asked.
"I mean that the hole and all the mass we poured into it now 'exists' in its own pocket universe. That universe will never share any overlap or contact with our own. It will be a cosmos unto itself . . . now and forever."
3.
After Alex went off to bed, Stan stayed behind and played with his friends, the numbers. He rested very still and used a mental pencil to write them across the window. Equations stitched the Milky Way. It didn't take long to see that Alex was right.
What they had done today was create something out of nothing and then quickly exile that something away again. To Alex and the others, that was that. All ledgers balanced. What had been borrowed was repaid. At least as far as this universe of matter and energy was concerned.
But something was different, dammit! Before, there had been virtual fluctuations in the vacuum. Now, somewhere, a tiny cosmos had been born.
And suddenly Stan remembered something else. Something called "inflation." And in this context the term had nothing to do with economics.
Some theorists hold that our own universe began as a very, very big fluctuation in the primordial emptiness. That during one intense instant, superdense mass and energy burst forth to begin the expansion of all expansions.
Only there could not have been anywhere near enough mass to account for what we now see . . . all the stars and galaxies.
"Inflation" stood for a mathematical hat trick . . . a way for a medium or even small-sized bang to leverage itself into a great big one. Stan scribbled more equations on his mental blackboard and came to see something he hadn't realized before.
Of course. I get it now. The inflation that took place twenty billion years ago was no coincidence. Rather, it was a natural result of that earlier, lesser creation. Our universe must have had its own start in a tiny, compressed ball of matter no heavier than . . . no heavier than . . .
Stan felt his heartbeat as the figure seemed to glow before him.
No heavier than that little "pocket cosmos" we created today.
He breathed.
That meant that somewhere, completely out of touch or contact, their innocent experiment might have . . . must have . . . initiated a beginning. A universal beginning.
Fiat lux.
Let there be light.
"Oh my God," he said to himself, completely unsure which of a thousand ways he meant it.
With a stunned sensation of irony and wonder, Stan looked out into the blackness, through the cold glass. He could not point toward the new thing he had witnessed being born . . . in effect, his creation. Its blazing destiny now lay beyond all reach in space, time, and dimension.
So he chose a direction at random—where a faint scattering distant spirals drifted patiently—and lifted his hand in a gesture of benediction, casting what blessing he could offer into the endless night.
What Continues . . . What Fails . . .
Black. As deep as night is black between the stars.
Deeper than that. Night isn't really black, but a solemn, utter shade of red.
As black, then, as Tenembro Nought, which drinks all color, texture, substance, from around it, giving back only its awful depth of presence.
But no. She had found redness of an immeasurably profound hue, emerging from that awful pit in space. Not even the singularity was pure enough to typify true blackness. Nor was Isola's own dark mood, for that matter—although, since the visitors' arrival, she had felt smothered, robbed of illumination.
In comparison a mere ebony luster of skin and hair seemed too pallid to dignify with the term "black." Yet, those traits were much sought after on Pleasence World, one of many reasons a fetch ship had come all this way to claim the new life within her.
The fetus might know blackness, Isola thought, laying a hand over her curved abdomen, feeling a stirring there. She purposely used cool, sterile terms, never calling it "baby," or a personalized "she." Anyway, when is a fetus's sensory innervation up to "knowing" anything at all? Can one who has never seen light comprehend blackness?
Leaning towards the dimly illuminated field-effect mirror, Isola touched its glass-smooth, silky-cool, pseudo-surface. Peering at her own reflection, she found at last what she was looking for.
That's it. Where light falls, never to emerge again.
Isola brought her face closer still, centering on one jet pupil, an inky well outlined by a dark iris—the universe wherein she dwelled.
"It is said nothing escapes from inside a black hole, but that isn't quite so."
Mikaela was well into her lecture when Isola slipped into the theatre, late but unrepentant. A brief frown was her partner's only rebuke for her tardiness. Mikaela continued without losing a beat.
"In this universe of ours, the rules seem to allow exceptions even to the finality of great noughts. . . ."
Isola's vision adapted and she discreetly scanned the visitors—six space travelers whose arrival had disrupted a quiet, monastic research routine. The guests from Pleasence World lounged on pseudo-life chaises overlooking Mikaela and the dais. Each sleek-furred settee was specially tuned to the needs of its occupant. While the three humans in the audience made little use of their couch amenities—only occasionally lifting fleshy tubes to infuse endorphin-laced oxygen, the squat, toadlike Vorpal and pair of slender Butins had already hooked up for full breathing symbiosis.
Well, they must have known they were coming to a rude outpost station, built with only a pair of humans in mind. Isola and Mikaela had not expected guests until a few months ago, when the decelerating starship peremptorily announced itself, and made its needs known.
Those needs included the use of Isola's womb.
"Actually, there are countless misconceptions about gravitational singularities, especially the massive variety formed in the recoil of a supernova. One myth concerns the possibility of communicating across a black hole's event horizon, to see what has become of all the matter which left this universe so violently and completely, long ago."
Mikaela turned with a flourish of puffy sleeves towards the viewing tank. Winking one eye, she called up a new image to display in midair, above the dais. Brilliance spilled across Mikaela's fair skin and the visitors' multihued faces, causing several to flinch involuntarily. Isola smiled.
Titanic fields enveloped and deformed a tortured sun, dragging long shreds of its substance towards a spinning, flattened whirlpool—a disc so bright it searingly outshone the unfortunate nearby star.
"Until now, most investigations of macro-black holes have concentrated on showy cases like this one—the Cygnus A singularity—which raises such ferocious tides on a companion sun as to tear it apart before our eyes. In galactic cores greedy mega holes can devour entire stellar clusters. No wonder most prior expeditions were devoted to viewing noughts with visible accretion discs. Besides, their splashy radiance makes them easy to find."
Isola w
atched the victim star's tattered, stolen essence spiral into the planate cyclone, which brightened painfully despite attenuation by the viewing software. Shimmering, lambent stalks traced magnetically directed plasma beams, jetting from the singularity north and south. As refulgent gas swirled inward, jostling and heating, it suddenly reached an inner lip—the edge of a black circle, tiny in diameter but awesome in conclusiveness. The Event Horizon.
Spilling across that boundary, the actinic matter vanished abruptly, completely. Once over the edge, it was no longer part of reality. Not this reality, anyway.
Mikaela had begun her lecture from a basic level, since some of the visitors weren't cosmogonists. One of these, Jarlquin, the geneticist from Pleasence, shifted on her chaise. At some silent order, a pseudo-life assistant appeared to massage her shoulders. Petite, even for a starfarer, Jarlquin glanced towards Isola, offering a conspiratorial smile. Isola pretended not to notice.