The Tempest (First Contact), page 17
“Beautiful, huh?” Marc says, coming up behind Emma. He slips his arm around her waist.
“What the hell, dude?” she says, peeling away from him.
“What? I just thought—”
“Don’t,” Emma says, raising a single finger in defiance. “Don’t think. Don’t assume. Don’t do anything other than your job. Got it?”
Marc winces.
“I’m sorry, I just…” he stops himself short of saying thought. Yeah, she’s right. Don’t do it, Marc. He sighs. Focus. “Look, I’ve been…” Damn, it, thinking is not the right word—not after what’s transpired between them. He swallows the lump in his throat, saying, “If we can find the wreckage of the Copernicus, we might be able to salvage parts we can’t fabricate onboard the Sycorax.”
Emma is quiet.
“If the Copernicus broke up in the atmosphere then nothing hit the surface beyond terminal velocity. We’re in a low-gee environment. We might not find circuit boards intact, but components like QPUs are rated to over 10 gees. They would have survived the breakup.”
Emma plays with him. “And you know this how, biology boy?”
“I didn’t ignore all of our training.”
Emma steps forward, placing her hand in the center of his suit chest plate. “Very clever.”
Marc is confused. They talked about this last night. And now she’s touching him mere seconds after rejecting his touch. It seems that touch is a touchy subject. It’s her ground to traverse, not his. Emma smiles. He cracks a half-smile in response, not quite sure what to make of her shifting attitude. She taps her hand a few times on his suit torso, lost in thought. Her fingers fall away from his chest. Marc waits for her to say something, but she’s subdued. She nods her head and walks on toward the stairs.
Marc is bewildered. Is there something between them or not? New Hawaii seems like it’s a loooong way off. Emma, though, seems content. And given the cluster fuck they’ve found themselves in on Altair IV, that’s not an unreasonable position. She waits for him at the top of the stairs. He joins her, shoving his hands in his pockets. It’s a subtle but intentional display of body language in reply to all that happened on the balcony: I’m with you but I’m not going to push things. I’m cool. I’m focused. I’m professional.
“I want to know more about this moon,” she says as they descend the stairs. “I want to know why the Krell were so interested in it.”
“I don’t understand,” he says. “I thought you weren’t interested in the Krell. Why do you care about some long-dead civilization?”
Emma says, “They evolved on that ice giant, right? How did they evolve to use tools? Somehow, they evolved the intelligence to develop their crazy technology, all while dancing between clouds.”
“Right,” Marc says.
“So what would they want with a moon? With this moon? I mean, this place has got to be as alien to them as our moon is to us. The composition of gases, the different pressures, the presence of solid ground—this is an alien environment to them.”
“So?”
“So they had to have a reason to come here. What happened to them? Why is this the last place holding any proof of their existence? Why did they build Caliban? What’s the purpose of Ariel?”
“Why do you care?” he asks.
“Because I don’t want to crash like the Copernicus,” she replies. “I don’t want to make a run for it and end up smeared all over the ice.”
“Fair point.”
“If we can understand what’s in play here on Altair IV, we might find a weakness we can exploit.”
“And the professor?” Marc asks.
“I think he’s like us. He came late to the party.”
Marc is curious. Emma deliberately left Miranda out of her assessment.
“And the girl?”
“She’s perfect,” Emma says, walking down the next set of steps. “Too perfect. Did you notice her skin? No blemishes. No freckles.”
“You think she’s a synth?” he asks. “An android?”
“Strip her down and I don’t think you’ll find any imperfections. No moles or freckles anywhere on her body.”
“Okay,” Marc says, looking out across the vast polished floor at Miranda. She’s seated at the table, facing away from them, looking across the valley as she sips coffee from a mug. “Challenge accepted.”
Emma bats her hand playfully across his arm. “I’m serious.”
“What about the grave? She said her mother’s buried there.”
“One grave,” Emma says as they reach the first floor. “The Copernicus was an Aldrin class cruiser. It’s ex-navy. There were two hundred and fifty people on that ship. And only one grave? And only for her mother?”
“You don’t buy it?” he says, lowering his voice as they walk past the tunnel curling down to the entrance. The professor walks out of a storeroom carrying a box. Ariel is floating beside Miranda, talking to her. It seems no one has noticed them.
“I think it’s empty,” Emma replies. “It’s a cover story. I don’t think even she knows what she is.”
“So she’s like his pet?”
“I guess.”
“Good morning,” the professor says, placing the crate on the table as they approach.
Miranda greets them warmly, saying, “Good morning. I hope you slept well.”
“Like a rock,” Marc says, lying. He’s not sure why he lied, but he felt he had to. Miranda and the professor are keeping secrets from them. It seems only appropriate he’s reserved as well. Aren’t all pleasantries a lie of sorts? Aren’t they convenient ways of avoiding real issues? Besides, he’s interested to see if she suspects he’s holding back. Can Miranda tell he’s lying? Marc can’t read her. He wonders if she can read him.
Synths are unnerving. Marc’s never seen one as convincing as Miranda. The androids back at star base were deliberately non-human to avoid freaking people out. It’s strange, but the more human a computer becomes, the less people trust it. Few people place their trust in androids that approach but don’t quite achieve human characteristics. There have been dozens of studies into the phenomenon and they all reach the same conclusion. Use the same code with the same parameters on the same hardware and you’ll get entirely different responses from humans depending solely on appearance. Humans, it seems, are emotional and unduly paranoid about imposters.
There’s no logical reason why synths shouldn’t be trusted, but somehow that reaction is hard-baked into human behavior. Psychologists call it the uncanny valley. Being almost-but-not-quite human is perceived as worse than being a block of plastic with wires sticking out at odd angles. For almost a hundred years now, engineers have deliberately built in non-human characteristics to steady people’s nerves. The general-purpose synths that Marc worked with had light blue plastic skin. Remarkably, that was less creepy than those that had human-like skin. Those with camera eyes are perceived as more trustworthy than those with human-like pupils.
The synths he used back at star base were autonomous and capable of undertaking maintenance tasks and ship repairs, but they didn’t speak unless spoken to. Speech is another thing humans don’t like computers doing. Oh, submissive responses are fine, but as they approach convincing levels of cognition, conversations become repulsive. Marc’s heard of lifelike synths being used for research but he’s never seen anything as convincing as Miranda.
Miranda looks at him with what he can only assume is innocence and smiles. It’s all he can do to smile in response and not let on what he knows. For now, at least, she’s oblivious to the machinations of his mind.
“Hungry?” she asks, and he finds himself doubting Emma’s assessment. The warmth on Miranda’s face, the blush in her cheeks, the glimmer of light in her eyes—how could she be synthetic? Miranda’s skin might be flawless, but she hasn’t been exposed to the ravages of UV radiation from a nearby star. If anything, it would be more notable if she had freckles. She’s young. Youth has its own beauty.
“Famished,” he says, which isn’t a lie.
“We were about to make banana pancakes,” Miranda says.
Emma peeks in the box the professor carried over. A thick stem supports a dozen bananas in various stages of ripeness. Those dangling at the end are yellowish in color while those further back, closer to where the stem has been severed, are light green.
“I don’t understand,” Marc says. “You grew your own bananas? Why not have Ariel fabricate them for you?”
The professor says, “Ariel can only fabricate what she can sample.”
“So she couldn’t build a Ferrari?” Emma asks.
“Not without knowing precisely what a Ferrari is.”
Emma points at the box. “So you?”
“I’ve been tinkering with genetics, crossbreeding various mutations based on the DNA of a wild orchid, trying to recreate bananas. It’s taken some time.”
“Looks like you’ve succeeded,” Marc says.
“So we can have banana pancakes?” Miranda asks, excited.
“Yes,” Ariel says. “I can use these with your existing recipe. But just the flesh inside, right? Not the peel or the stem?”
“That’s correct,” the professor says.
“Yippee!” Miranda says, clapping her hands together in excitement.
In the blink of an eye, steam rises from four plates of pancakes laid out on the table. Butter melts on top. Maple syrup has been poured over the stack.
“Hot damn,” Marc says, sitting at the table. Although the pancakes look normal enough, they were cooked with cubes of banana in the batter rather than slices placed on the side.
“Mmmm. That’s really good,” Miranda says, slicing into the stack and chewing on a bite.
Marc grabs some cutlery and cuts into his pancake stack. Although it appears like six individual pancakes piled on top of each other, his knife reveals what looks like a slice of cake. It’s all been cooked together. Although there’s plenty of maple syrup, he avoids that, taking a slither from near the center along with a cube of banana. He wants to try it on its own first to see how close it is to the real thing. There’s almost no sugar in the pancake itself. It’s dry and tasteless. Although the banana is yellow it tastes like it’s green. The cubes of banana are stringy and firm, without much flavor.
“What do you think?” Miranda asks, staring at him from across the table with a huge grin on her face.
“Delicious,” he says, mopping up some maple syrup with his cake-like pancake. Ah, maple syrup covers a multitude of sins!
Emma sits down beside him, but she doesn’t seem hungry. She looks at the ghostly, glowing apparition of Ariel as she addresses the professor.
“So she can’t create a fusion core?”
“Not without examining a working one first,” he replies.
“Not even from schematics? Not if we provide her with design constraints, containment pressures and metallurgy specs?”
“No.”
“Damn.” Emma slices up her pancake/cake and takes a bite. Marc watches to see if she has any reaction to the dry texture or the unripened bananas. If they bother her, she hides it well.
“And these aliens of yours,” Emma says. “The Krell. What do you know about them?”
The professor says, “Like Ariel, their form is only loosely associated with matter. They are creatures of light and energy.”
Emma says, “But that’s not possible.”
The professor chuckles. “You think the Krell are absurd? Look at us. We’re absurd. How is it possible that a tiny collection of hydrogen atoms mixed in with carbon and oxygen has the audacity to call itself human?”
Emma is undeterred. “The laws of physics lead to chemistry, which leads to biology. We are the natural, predictable result of these laws.”
The professor is not impressed. “And you think no such laws govern the numerous forms in which energy flows throughout the universe? Everything we see around us. All the billions of galaxies with their billions of stars amount to less than 5% of the cosmos. Will you not concede that dark matter and dark energy, account for 95% of this grand universe? Could not the darkness have laws equally as complex and intricate as ours? You and I may not be able to conceive of life being formed from energy, or dark life arising around dark worlds that orbit dark stars, but your response is akin to the Jesuit priests mocking Galileo.”
Marc raises an eyebrow. He looks at Emma, expecting a curt reply. She doesn’t take the bait, which tells him her initial point was made to goad the professor. She’s trying to glean information by getting under his skin.
Emma shifts the subject, asking, “What did they want with the black hole?”
“It’s not a hole,” the professor says.
Both Marc and Emma wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. He simply cuts into his absurd cake of pancakes and takes a bite. Given how verbose he is, his brevity is telling.
“What am I missing?” Marc asks.
“Black holes are an illusion, a misunderstanding,” the professor says. “We see them as something they’re not. We see them as the end. We see them as a singularity of infinite density. And that should have been the clue all along that we don’t see them at all.”
“Go on,” Emma says, pointing at him with her fork. Maple syrup drips from the four tines.
“Black holes are an almost-infinity,” he says, grinning, knowing how much Emma hates his insistence there are no infinities in nature. “They never actually form. They’re frozen in time.”
“Frozen?” Emma asks, playing along with him.
“Yes,” the professor says. “They’re forever forming but they never actually form anything even remotely resembling a hole or a singularity or anything like that.”
Emma smiles. Marc loves how she baits men. It’s as though she’s sitting in a charter boat out on the open ocean, fishing for mahi-mahi. She reels in a little and then lets the line run, waiting for the hook to set. The professor, though, doesn’t notice how he’s being played.
“The cosmos is constantly trending toward equilibrium. Stars are nothing more than the equilibrium between gravity squeezing in and fusion pushing out. When a star runs out of fuel, gravity wins and—”
“And we get a supernova,” Emma says, cutting him off.
“And we get a new point of equilibrium,” the professor says. “Where that point is will depend on the size of the star. White dwarfs are kept in balance by the tug-of-war between gravity and electrons pushing outward. Neutron stars are kept in balance by the tug-of-war between gravity and various neutrons and quarks clumping together.”
“And a black hole?” Marc asks.
“Is neither black nor a hole,” the professor replies.
“Black holes are defined by geometry,” Emma says. “Not matter. They’re defined by gravity overwhelming mass and energy.”
The professor says, “Black holes represent a lack of equilibrium. Gravity has won. Matter cannot exist in any form for any length of time because individual quarks within an atom cannot move faster than the speed of light to maintain any kind of shape.”
“So that’s it,” Emma says. “It’s game over. Anything that gets too close is destroyed.”
The professor is patient, allowing her to finish, but from the way he holds his lips, it’s clear he wants to interject. He waits for a fraction of a second after she finishes, determined to be polite.
“You’re thinking too small,” he says, echoing how Emma baited him previously. “What we see is an illusion. It’s simple when you think about it. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light—so nothing does! And that means the black hole never forms.”
Emma looks annoyed. She pulls her lips tight. The professor finally notices her body language. He seems to offer her some concession by asking a question.
“If you fell into this particular black hole—a hole with a mass of four hundred thousand Sols—what would you see? What would you perceive as the size of the black hole when you reached the event horizon? Four hundred thousand Sols, right?”
Emma nods.
“Wrong,” he says, and Emma’s features tighten in disagreement. The professor doesn’t care. “At the point, you reach the event horizon, it still hasn’t formed. It’s forever forming. It contains not only everything that has fallen into the black hole but everything that ever will fall into the black hole. It’s all there. Already. Everything that will ever fall into the black hole has already arrived. To our chronological minds, this makes no sense. But the Krell, they knew. They understood. Time is meaningless at the event horizon. All of time exists all at once. Or almost all time.”
“Your not-quite-infinity,” Marc says.
“To our minds, there are infinities, but they’re not infinite. They’re simply too big to comprehend.”
“But the Krell?” Emma asks.
“The Krell understood that black holes offer a unique source of energy. Our sun will last mere billions of years. Red dwarfs will last trillions of years.”
“But black holes?” Marc asks.
“A septenvigintillion of years.”
“Okay,” Marc replies. “I’m not even going to pretend I know what that means other than a lot.”
“A whole lot,” the professor replies. “A million has six zeros, a billion nine, and a trillion twelve. A septenvigintillion has eighty-three zeros!”
“It’s effectively infinite,” Emma says.
“It’s yet another of those not-quite-but-almost-as-good-as-infinite numbers,” the professor replies. “It dwarfs the 13.8 billion year age of our universe. It’s difficult to comprehend just how vast the difference is between these ages. If that septenvigintillion were likened to the existence of Homo sapiens over the past quarter of a million years, the current age of the universe would equate to less than a second. Everything we see around us is here and gone in the snap of your fingers.”
“Damn,” Emma says.
Marc asks the question burning within his mind. “And their interest in black holes is?”
“Energy. They’ve effectively found an infinite supply of energy.”
Emma raises a finger. “Almost infinite.”
