“Did you watch it all?” Abby asked Laszlo about his goals to get through every Star Trek episode from every related series, along with all of the full length feature films, within an hour.
“Sure did. You’ve seen it all, right?”
“Of course, who hasn’t. I was concerned that if anyone knew you hadn’t, it would ruin my reputation. You know, dating such a moron.”
“Haha. You know, after watching Next Generation I realized, we are like the Borg in some ways.”
“I have considered that. But, I think it’s a little different. Each one of us is like the Borg since we have our own connected replicates. But the collective aspect amongst all of us does not control us. We are more like a society and we all have free will.”
“I can see that. And the good news is we don’t kidnap people and upgrade their body parts. Then turn them into zombies. We can each make our own collective from scratch.”
“Some of the stuff was way off but that’s like more than four hundred years ago. They got subspace communication right.”
“Warp speed was a myth. So was the replicator and artificial gravity. But great imagination.”
“I always thought it was odd that they could beam people around, which is highly advanced, yet when the explorers are on some new planet, they don’t even have visual images going back to the ship. That’s weak.”
Who is your favorite character?”
Kirk, of course. He’s such an emotional dude. Hilarious.”
“I like Data.”
“Whaaaat? Data’s a machine.”
“I don’t care. He’s sweet and he’s not really a machine, anymore than you or I. You should identify more with him than a biological human at this point.”
“No way. I believe the most important part is the origin of our consciousness. We have colleagues even now, that are like Data, spawned as protohumans. They are definitely off compared to us earthers.”
“True. One of them was trying to hit on me. It was hilarious. A little creepy too.”
“Hey, I wanted to ask you. We have been together long enough. Do you mind if we use nicknames? Is that too soon?”
“No, it’s ok. I don’t mind.”
“Great, so what it your nickname?”
“Abby.”
“Ha. Serious? What was it originally? Like, Abigail, or abracadabra?”
“No, always just Abby.”
“Well then you do need a nickname. How about Abs?”
“I do have great abs.”
“Who doesn’t? I mean, everyone projects their own vision of a perfect body. Me? I stay ripped. But sometimes I even go a little Schwarzenegger if I want to stand up to some of these big egos. So, it’s Abs?”
“OK, sure. I can’t think of anything for Laszlo offhand, but I will make my proposal soon.”
“Thanks, Abs,” answered Laszlo, trying it out. “Talk to you after the briefing.”
They were in the lecture hall/briefing room of the ship. This was a mission summary and checklist to make sure everyone was clear on their individual tasks as their position closed-in on the event horizon. They had been decelerating steadily for several years and were currently winding down their speed to reach the planned observation point, somewhere comfortably outside the horizon. While cruising at near light speed for most of the journey, their energy consumption had dramatically slowed the operating rate of the matter from which they were composed. It was an interesting dynamic that they commonly faced as they spread across the cosmos. Sub vacuum communication was swift, but replicates that travelled at near light speed were subjected to energy constraints and consequently experienced severe time dilation.
Ahmad Badi was the mission leader and he was also the chief scientist for black hole physics. He walked to the front of the simulated briefing room and everyone quieted and focused on him.
“This is it folks. We have finally arrived. This is one of the most anticipated explorations humanity has ever launched and all eyes are upon us. I want to summarize black hole physics, the current state of our understanding. This is not new information for most of you but it’s a good idea to quickly go through it. After that, Lola will walk us through the logistics of what to do, once we arrive at the event horizon.”
An image appeared and floated in three dimensions in front of the audience. It was an image of the universe. It rotated to offer perspective from different viewpoints. For the most part, the universe appeared uniform, but there was one striking feature about it, which was the distribution of matter. There was clearly a gradient of light that was brightest in the center and attenuated with distance from the center. This whole universe map had been constructed with a high degree of accuracy, based on the multitude of survey missions over the past century. It was still being enhanced realtime, but at this point, the picture was not expected to change appreciably.
The Quarkians themselves were oblivious to this macro picture, despite having had the wherewithal to determine this fact. Each Quarkian, in knowing their positions in the universe, relative to one another, should have teased out this fact of the universe quite easily. But they did not. This boosted Humanity’s stature and understanding of their importance to discovery and it also clarified to the Quarkians that the evolution of humanity had been the correct path forward. In the early stages, it was considered an unknown or at least a low probability path to new discovery. But as humanity started to deliver results, one by one, the probabilities corrected upward rapidly and the real cooperation began to take shape.
The new view of the universe was like a giant, spherical galaxy and it evoked an ancient theory first put forth by Abel Jennings centuries ago. Jennings would never know the brilliance of his insights, based on a plausible and compelling thought experiment. He proposed that since space was now known to have a very dynamic nature, we were again faced with a relativistic dilemma.
Are we moving through space? Or, is space moving through us? For distant stars, whose red shifts indicate runaway expansion of the universe, it might equally be the case that those stars are not in motion relative to us, and what we observe is the flow of space toward us. This would be consistent with a universe in which we lie near the center, and whose density of matter is higher in the center and lower in the extremities. Based on our understanding, this type of universe would draw space inward, in the same way the we now understand to be the mechanism of gravity. It is genuinely possible that in our current fundamental assumptions regarding cosmological observations, we are completely mistaken. This possibility also gives rise to the notion that perhaps space, with its life giving energy, is supplied from beyond our universe.
At the time of his paper on the subject, there was so much going on that creative ideas were aplenty, mostly passed over and then largely forgotten. In this particular insight, there was a major assumption - that matter was not uniformly distributed throughout the universe. With limited range, cosmological observation in those days suggested otherwise. That was, until the the transcendence and the ability of humans to expand their observations and also cultivate and consider many more topics. Abby and Laszlo were among many that were fascinated by this subject and they met while working together on simulations related to this old theory of space, now resurrected based on a new perspective of the universe. Most intriguing to them was the question of whether adjacent universes were supplying space to our universe, where was it occurring and by what mechanism. This expedition was one of dozens that probed this question among others.
Ahmad Badi began his briefing. “Rarefaction is seemingly beyond question at this point. But based on the Jennings model of electromagnetic relativity, we can not separate the rarefaction into the component caused by the mass in motion and the component caused by the flow of space.” There was silence. This was just a comforting opener. There wasn’t a person listening that was in anyway unfamiliar with this quandary. “The hypothesis is that space is flowing in. But, at any normal boundary we have probed, there has not been a measurable inflow. By heading straight into the boundary at near light speed, a so called headwind of incoming space would create an effectively higher relative speed and more time dilation, as compared to slow moving reference observers. But we haven’t seen it.”
Badi paused and then started again, this time a bit more excited. “Our recent deceleration and subsequent time calibration tests over the sub vacuum suggest that on our approach to this black hole, we have seen negative time dilation! This is the other signature of moving space, but in this case it is moving away from us. We can think of no other cause.” Many in attendance already knew these latest facts, as the communication and collaboration among this team of eighty was very effective and immediate. But for many, it was new news and there was suddenly a buzz of excitement. “Now. This is normal behavior for a black hole, as we know. But this black hole, straddling the universal boundary will allow us to see if it behaves like a normal black hole, or differently.”
“What we are looking for is the infamous “through hole.” An object that appears like a black hole, but instead of its mass drawing in space, it is a pin prick in the boundary, allowing space to flow through. A leak in our balloon. It is theorized and now considered highly probable, that an overall inflow would consist of fluctuations. Some boundary areas would have inflows and others outflows, as the boundary is pushed and pulled and adjusts to find its equilibrium. On the whole, we expect the inflows to exceed the outflows. Some of you are part of the other through hole mission to the white hole sitting on the boundary. Together, these studies will reveal new truths.”
Badi elaborated on his remarks with diagrams, formulas and measurements, and eventually reached his closing statement. “Those of you going in, I congratulate you on your good fortune and adventurous spirits. The rest of us will remain here and process the data you collect inside. Now I will hand it over to Lola, who will lead the away team.”
With all eighty members of the expedition having enough replicates to make the journey across the event horizon, one might think that all of them would participate. But it was still true that protohumans could not do too many things at once. Which meant that there was a need for multiple assignments and different specializations. Laszlo and Abby were among the more adventurous and they sought to experience the black hole, first hand.
Lola, the eldest among all Protohumans, still struck a pose looking twenty something and somehow always a bit more fashionable than anyone else. It was hard to put a finger on it. Was it simply a hack that subliminally convinced everyone that she was the queen, the goddess, the one sitting above all others? Maybe the hack wasn’t necessary. Maybe everyone just felt that way about her naturally - the one who saved humanity. Whatever the truth, Lola was the one person who could silence a room instantly, all eyes and ears ready to receive whatever message it was that she cared to convey.
“Thirty six hours, on the dot. Polish up your best cubes, twenty of them. Unlike past hole dives, this one we will go single file, following precisely a straight line. I will go first and here is the order.” A list of sixty names came up on the big screen. “We will go one each in this order, spaced at 1 hour intervals, then repeat twenty times. I will set the velocity at point zero five, and start the sub vacuum transmission. I will also speed up the transmission intervals as we go, to normalize the output rate for time dilation.”
The audience was riveted on acquiring all of this critical content, some of which was new information, and questions started to form as Lola continued in her typical rapid fire manner. In these types of forums, everyone kept much of their thought channels public which allowed Lola to perceive questions or concerns real-time and she immediately knocked them off as fast as they appeared.
“Rather than send in planar waves, we want to use our numbers and the speed of the sub vacuum communication to measure precise gradients of space density as we go. But to do this, we need to keep a very precise, equal spacing between us. This is the first time we have done it this way. We realized that we don’t need to to maintain the pattern as a method of redundancy. There are no particles that will collide with us, as everything is moving together in the same direction.”
Prior hole dives had revealed a number of interesting observations. Chief among them was the fact that time dilation outside the event horizon, was similar to the time dilation inside the event horizon. The relativistic notions of ever increasing warped space and a singularity, were merely mathematical conclusions trying to deal in territories beyond their useful purpose. The reality was that a normal black hole was quark soup, ever hungry, starving for energy. But the event horizon was that point, where the inflow of space matched the speed of light. The speed of the medium matched the speed of the waves it carried. Beyond the event horizon, the speed of the electromagnetic particles of space itself simply traveled at the speed of light, and bolted toward their hungry captors, the quarks.
That was the normal case of a normal black hole. This expedition was looking for something different, a bottomless hole, a so called, through hole, one that would spit them out into the unknown.
“We have some theoretical support to expect that we can survive on the other side. But no one knows for sure. Another good reason to go single file. We can adapt as we go. If we are in a through hole and lose communication once passing into the neighboring universe, you know the instructions. Assuming we survive, we will look for galaxies, stars and ultimately planets upon which we can replicate. You have the coordinates for the white hole experiment. Our mission is to replicate near there, go to the white hole, which will likely appear as a black hole in the other universe, go through and meet the other research team on the other side. Good luck to us all. We will start queuing up at T minus four hours.”
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