Proxima Trilogy: Part 1-3: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  April 29, 19

  Eve is startled, causing her to wake up instantly. Something is different now. What’s happened? Then she notices it. The noise is gone. For four weeks she has been sleeping to the sound of steel runners gliding across the ice of the Proxima b ocean. She is no longer used to silence. She realizes this is the third time she has awakened due to the quiet.

  She looks at the time indicated on her universal device. It is shortly after three o’clock. She is awake enough, so she will get up now. Marchenko should be glad about it. She asked him to wait with his examination of the object until she could be with him. He promised to do this, even though it meant having to stand around all night long, doing nothing.

  She runs her hands through her hair. It feels disgusting and really should be washed. If she just didn’t have to wear a helmet all the time. Her scalp is starting to itch the moment she even sees the helmet. The sweat of several weeks is sticking to its inside.

  She rummages through her pocket. There should be a rubber band in there. She finds it and ties her hair into a braid. Brushing teeth, oh well. She reaches for the water bottle in the rear corner of the tent. She uses the water to moisten her toothbrush. Adam swears by ultrasound brushes, but she never liked those.

  Adam. It is terrible he can’t be here with her at this moment. A part of her is missing, and it hurts. Shouldn’t she have noticed sooner when Adam had disappeared from the sled? They really could use his ideas right now. And his enthusiasm, though lately there had been little sign of it. Something must have happened, right before they left the station. Why is she just now making this connection? And is whatever happened somehow related to Adam’s disappearance? She should have asked him then, though she probably would not have received an answer. Still, it might have made a difference. Sometimes just asking can be enough to make someone think twice about life’s happenings.

  She packs her toothbrush. Then she pulls the practical urination bag from its box. She relieves herself and closes the bag. That will have to do for her morning hygiene. It was sufficient for the last four weeks. She puts on her external suit and her helmet, though she feels like holding her nose while doing so. Then she crawls from the tent.

  “Good morning, Marchenko,” she says. J the robot turns around and seems surprised. He obviously did not expect her so early. Has he been watching the alien object all night long?

  “Good morning, Eve. You got up early today,” Marchenko replies.

  “I have something for you.” She hands him the urine bag. Marchenko will recycle it and its contents. The carbon in the plastic might end up in her food, and the salt from the urine will for sure. The fact that Adam is gone makes the lack of supplies less dramatic than expected. Even the darkest cloud has a silver lining, Eve tries to convince herself. “I couldn’t sleep any longer,” she says.

  Marchenko nods. “I was afraid of that. It is a change, as we are no longer traveling. But your body will soon adapt to everything.”

  How would you know? she wants to ask him. Yet she suppresses the impulse. Marchenko does not deserve that. Since Adam has been gone, she sometimes feels the urge to hurt Marchenko. Luckily, she has more self-control than her brother. “What about it, do you have a plan?”

  “Most certainly. I thought about nothing else all night long.”

  “Your plan probably involves a lot of measurements, and my participation is urgently needed.”

  “No—I mean, yes, I really wanted to measure some things, but as far as a specific task for you—”

  “I know that, Marchenko,” she interrupts him. “I would like to take a close look at this object.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She points toward her eyes with her left index finger. “Look. With these here.”

  “I understand,” Marchenko says reluctantly, and Eve knows quite well he does not understand her. But that’s not so bad. Humans, and she counts Marchenko among them, don’t have to understand one another in order to get along well.

  She has only realized this since Adam is gone. No, it strikes her, I have come to realize this right now. Today seems to be a day of insights. She hopes this also applies to the secrets of the strange object out there. “Well, I will be going,” she says.

  “Don’t wander beyond the range of your helmet lamp.”

  “I promise. And thanks for keeping your promise.” Then she jumps from the sled. It is only about a hundred steps. She listens to the sounds her boots make when hitting the ground. It changes the closer she gets to the thing. ‘Thing,’ what a vague word.

  She calls Marchenko via helmet radio. “We should give the thing a name.”

  “Okay, but what?”

  “How about calling it a tower?”

  “We don’t know yet whether it is a tower.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Let’s call it that.” Adam certainly would have liked it.

  “As you wish.”

  Now she is standing in front of the ‘tower,’ although only its top appears to be visible. What she can see looks like a cuboid structure with all kinds of additional elements attached. Perhaps those are later modifications?

  She walks slowly around the tower. It looks slightly different from each side. Symmetry must not have been very important to the inhabitants of this planet when building the tower. Maybe they had different things to worry about while constructing the edifice. Eve turns fully around once. If the tower had been built from here downward, they would have had to dig a pit first. But then there should be piles of debris nearby.

  “Marchenko,” she says, “do you see any mountains or at least hills near us that are newer than their surroundings?”

  “Sorry, there is nothing like that.”

  Eve nods. That is only logical. She still thinks too much in terrestrial terms, even though she only knows Earth from movies. All around her is eternal ice. How do you dig a hole into ice? With heat. Then the ice turns into water, but the water must have to go somewhere.

  “Marchenko, I have to bother you again. Imagine a spring of water, at about the height of the tower, from which water flows for a long time, following the natural slope. Would the current elevation profile of the surroundings fit this idea?”

  She does not receive an immediate answer. She patiently continues walking around the tower.

  “Yes, that would fit,” Marchenko says five minutes later. “The spring would have to be on the opposite side of the cuboid. Meaning the other side of the tower.”

  “Thanks,” Eve says. Marchenko is still standing by the side of the sled, so she has to turn around one more corner to be opposite him. She shines her light at the area. On the rear wall of the tower, which is invisible from the sled, she discovers a kind of barrel. It does not look like it poses any danger. She gets closer and uses the camera. Then she sends the images to Marchenko.

  “What do you think?”

  “I will have to take a closer look.”

  Eve reaches for the edge of the barrel and tries to move it, but in vain. “It’s frozen in place,” she says. Then she leans over its opening, which has a diameter of approximately one meter. She only sees blackness, so she shines her helmet lamp into it. At a depth of about one meter, the light is reflected, probably by a layer of ice.

  “It’s not an entrance,” she says.

  “Give me a quarter of an hour,” Marchenko asks. “I am still dealing with the scans.”

  Eve glances up. From a close distance the tower looks rather improvised. It looms considerably above her. She touches the material with her gloved hand. It is rough. Her glove does not glide across it, so she has to exert some force. Perhaps this is an effect of the continual soft winds moving ice crystals over the surface?

  Eve wonders how old the tower can be, but cannot find any clues to help answer her question. She slowly continues walking around the tower. When she sees indentations, she reaches inside, always hoping to trigger some mechanism. Shouldn’t there be a way leading inside?

  “Eve? I am fin
ished now,” she hears in her helmet.

  She turns around and walks back to the side where she saw the barrel. Marchenko is already there. He is leaning over the structure. Eve waits patiently.

  “That is no barrel,” he says, “but you probably realized that already.”

  “What is it then?”

  “A pipe. It is almost completely filled with ice. If I see correctly, it leads down several hundred meters.”

  “Very clever. They built from here downward. The tower in fact drilled its own foundation, and they pressed the wastewater upward through the pipe.”

  “I agree with your interpretation,” Marchenko says while he nods knowingly with his large head.

  “But you found out more, didn’t you?”

  “I did. It’s actually all good news, except for one aspect.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “The area up here is hollow. But it is not completely empty. More like a walnut, so there must be cavities, but also sections filled with light materials.”

  Marchenko sends the diagrams to her universal device. She looks at them while he continues.

  “I cannot tell for certain what kind of materials these are, only that the atomic mass values are much lower than in the walls. The walls are made of an alloy containing iron, nickel, titanium, and magnesium, among other things. Nothing unusual here. Iron has the highest percentage, so it is doped steel. The stuff is extremely impact-resistant and tough, and does not become brittle, even at low temperatures. I tried to scrape off a bit, but it took me several minutes to get a few micrograms for an analysis. I estimate that the walls have a thickness of 50 centimeters. So the tower is very stable.”

  “Built to last for millennia,” Eve says.

  “Certainly. This cuboid up here is the end piece. It reaches into the ice for another 40 meters. Then the building widens to a square shape with an edge length of 200 meters. I was surprised the tower only reaches down 400 meters into the ice. Based on the gravitational field analysis I would have estimated it to be much bigger.”

  Eve calculates the volume in her head. “Almost 15 million cubic meters—that is a lot of storage space.”

  “Yes, in principle. But even if it was all filled with lead, which according to my measurements it is not, this does not explain the spike in the gravitational field. The thing—sorry, the tower—would have to weigh three times as much for that. To put it differently, two-thirds of the mass of the tower is missing.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Yes and no. Without this phenomenon we would not have discovered the tower. We would have never put all this effort into it.”

  And we would not have lost Adam, Eve thinks wistfully. But that is not the fault of the tower.

  “I can’t stand puzzles that can’t be solved,” Marchenko continues. “How can I protect you against potential dangers if I don’t know their nature? There is something in this tower we still don’t understand. It scares me.”

  Eve has never considered that Marchenko might be scared. To her, he seems invincible. Yet it is true that he has weak beings of flesh and blood with him, for whom he is responsible. And he already lost Adam. That must be tough.

  “But that wasn’t the bad news, was it?”

  “The bad news is that there really is no entrance up here.”

  “Up here?”

  “The tower must have stood for a long, long time. I suspect the base of the cuboid, where the tower gets wider, was originally on the surface. As time passed, the ice grew over it.”

  “So the entrances were planned to be down there? Why did the builders not take this into account?”

  “I don’t know whether there are entrances down there. But if they designed entrances, they would be there. I’m sure they never expected there would be such a long time without visitors.”

  “Then we just have to dig our way into it.”

  “As I said, there is still a piece of bad news. We simply don’t have enough energy to melt our way through 40 meters of ice.”

  “And what if we drill a hole into this cuboid up here?”

  “That requires even more effort.”

  “So we suffered Adam’s death, 40 days of darkness, ice, and snow, just to stand here in front of a locked door?”

  “We haven’t even achieved that much.”

  Eve uses her fist to hit against the wall, of which she knows nothing but that it is made of very tough steel.

  “I cannot accept this,” she whispers, and hits the wall again. For a moment she hopes that a hatch is going to open somewhere, like in a fairy tale. But, except for a dull sound, her blow has no effect except to hurt her hand. She will have to accept it.

  April 30, 19

  We agreed to sleep on the problem. This means Eve sleeps as well as she can, while I try to find a solution. Just like Eve, I cannot imagine us leaving completely empty-handed.

  So what is the problem? Our path is blocked by a thick ice layer, or alternatively, by a steel wall. We basically have a technical solution. Ice melts when you apply heat, and you can use mechanical energy to drill a hole. The heart of the problem is the same in both cases. We don’t have adequate energy! I can generate energy to a limited extent, but not enough. What energy I could generate every day would only melt a little bit of ice, and we would be at it for three months. Drilling an opening large enough for us would take six months. Our supplies will not last that long.

  One option would be that I return Eve to the undersea station. There she could recuperate for half a year, while I open a path for us. I am afraid she might not like this solution. It could be a kind of last resort, though.

  What else is possible? We need an alternative source of energy. Unfortunately, I have no solution. Here, in the center of the hemisphere facing away from the sun, it is dark, dry, and almost windless. While there are temperature differences within the atmosphere, it would be cumbersome to generate electricity from them. The only resource available is ice, and lots of it. I imagine the giant valley formed by a meteorite strike a very long time ago. Back then there was lots of energy available here, so much that a thick part of the ice layer melted. I quickly calculate the chance of such an impact repeating itself. On average we would have to wait a million years before a larger rock once again hits Proxima b.

  That is no option at all. But... could we get a meteorite to do this sooner? During our approach to Proxima b we crossed an asteroid belt, from which we managed to borrow a boulder. I start a comprehensive simulation. Indeed, even a rock with a diameter of two meters would generate enough kinetic energy to melt away more than 50 meters of ice. Due to its thick steel walls, the tower is sturdy enough not to be destroyed during impact. However, we would have to aim very precisely. During my calculations, this turns out to be a real issue. There are so many factors influencing the meteorite’s trajectory that I cannot account for all of them simultaneously. We would need someone to sit on the rock and direct it. While we could get the rock on a collision course, with the help of Messenger, the final flight phase would not allow for any corrections.

  What about Messenger itself? It could use its engines for last-second corrections. We managed a precision landing with the lander module. The orbiter should be able to do this as well, even if we do not decelerate. In addition, we can control the released energy very exactly. Messenger is larger and heavier than needed, but then we simply have it crash more slowly. Thanks to its engines we are not completely at the mercy of gravity. Using Messenger to clear away the ice would be much less risky than dropping a rock from the sky.

  On the other hand, this would deprive us of a quick means of escape. Without Messenger, which would certainly be destroyed in the crash, we would be stuck on this planet for a long time. Moreover, we would lose our eyes and ears in orbit. It would no longer be possible to have Messenger measure the gravitational field variances for us. The orbiter also could no longer warn us of surprise flares. Should we give up all that for the chance of still finding an entrance
to the tower?

  I wake Eve. “I am sorry, but we have to discuss something,” I tell her.

  “What’s up?” Her voice sounds as if she had been lying awake.

  “There is an option to get rid of the ice,” I explain, “one single option. I ran all the calculations.”

  “Yes?”

  “We could deliberately crash Messenger.”

  “That... just a moment.” I hear a rustling sound inside the tent. Eve is probably sitting up, thinking about this.

  “It would make us prisoners of this planet for a long time,” I say.

  “Do you really think we will ever get away from here?”

  That is true, of course. Messenger is much too slow to reach any destination during Eve’s lifetime. That does not apply to me, though. “You certainly won’t,” I answer.

  “I understand,” Eve says. “Then I must let you decide.”

  I have a very good idea what Eve would like. It is on rare occasions such this one that I realize my consciousness is immortal. In light of these facts, priorities would change. I will no longer be able to travel through the universe using Messenger. But in that case I will wait. If no other spaceship appears, I will build one. It poses no problem to generate energy on the bright side of the planet. Given enough time I can build anything I find raw materials for, and there is no shortage of those here.

  “Well, then let’s try it with Messenger. Let’s give it three more orbital revolutions so I have plenty of time to calculate everything.”

  “I will get dressed now,” Eve says. “And I thank you.”

  It takes almost another 12 hours before everything is ready. The trajectory I calculated only strikes the tower tangentially. The goal is to create a valley with its lateral boundary approximately at the tower. When the kinetic energy of the strike melts the ice, which has a temperature of minus 80 degrees, this will reduce its volume. The advantage of our decision to use Messenger is that I can calculate everything very accurately. I know its mass and can regulate its speed precisely. The speed, in turn, determines the kinetic energy which will be turned into heat during impact. How much heat do we need? I start out with the desired effect—access to a platform 40 meters below—and then calculate backward. If everything works well, there will be a bubbling lake next to the tower after the crash. We have to hurry, then, because the volume of the water will increase as it refreezes.