Exploration (4 page)

Ben raised a paw. The Bearephant looked at him.

"We helped the others. It was the right thing to do, your test was hurting them."

"And this justified tainting our test?"

As one Sassi, Ben, and Cat responded, "Yes."

Yhsif nodded in a very human gesture.

"You will come with me now." The massive Bearephant turned towards the door.

Cat and the others followed. The halls they were traveling through were unfamiliar. The metal alloy on their surface was a burnished light blue hue. Periodically Yhsif would pause and the Bearephants trunk would reach out and touch a series of buttons on a recessed wall panel. Always, when he did this, a door would open in what had seemed like an otherwise featureless wall.

She watched the symbiote interact with the host. More to the point, she noticed how it didn't interact. There was no movement, no sound, no visible signal of any sort. If Cat had to guess, she would say the tentacles were establishing a direct neural link with the host, the so-called Bearephant.

She wondered how far the connection went.  For example, could the Modos see, hear and feel through the connection? Unfortunately, these were questions for another day. They seemed to be arriving at their destination.

  A final door opened and the briny smell of ocean filled the corridor. The room, if you could call it that, was massive. The floor was covered with a black sand that reminded Cat of some of the beaches in Hawaii. The dimensions were, in a word, astounding. If Cat had to guess, the famous Mall of America could fit within the cavernous void with ample room to spare. Most of the space was filled with the largest artificial ocean Cat had ever seen. There were numerous outcroppings of rocks breaking the surface of water near the shore. Gentle waves lapped the beach.

On each of the rocks were several of the gray-pink Modos. Many were a deeper shade of red. On the earth a number of plants employed photosynthesis based on anthocyanin rather than chlorophyll, which gave the leaves a distinctive reddish-blue color. Cat's enhanced senses and embedded AI did a spectral analysis which confirmed her suspicions. Absorption was occurring in the green and yellow wavebands of light, roughly 500 to 600 nanometers, exactly what one would expect for anthocyanin. It seemed the Modos were capable of photosynthesis.

The sight was amazing but by no means the most amazing. Above the water was an open glass dome. The black of space matched the black of the beach.

Glancing up Cat saw an amazing sight. The ceiling was transparent. A wide expanse of stars was visible. She immediately flagged the GCP via her quantum link. This was the break they were waiting for. The ship was apparently rotating because new stars continuously came into view.

As she watched, an amazing sight appeared. A massive orange accretion disc surrounding a black hole slid into view. All three friends paused to take in the sight. A pair of helical plasma jets streamed from poles at ninety degrees angles to the accretion disc.

Yhsif saw his charges pause and looked up at the view that had captivated the others.

"Ah... I believe your people call this Sagittarius A."

Cat looked at Yhsif. "Sagittarius A is a complex high intensity radio source located near the center of the Milky-way. It involves the remnants of three separate stellar events. This cannot be your destination. No habitable planets could exist anywhere near this area of space." 

"I applaud your deductive skills Number Six... Or should I call you Commodore?"

Cat turned to face another Bearephant symbiote. The host was dressed in a uniform that was far more ornate than Yhsif's.  The voice was completely unfamiliar and rather than coming from the Modos translator amulet they all wore, it was an organically produced sound made by whatever the Bearephant used for a larynx.

"You seem to have me at a disadvantage," Cat said with a hint of a smile.

The Bearephant echoed her smile. Yhsif's host had never given any sign of facial expressions. This was something new.

"Ah... yes. The last time you saw me I was wearing a combat suit. Allow me to introduce ourself. We are Captain Running Stream."

"We?"

The Bearephant's smile deepened. "As you may have noticed, there are two of us here. My language has terms for individuals, pairs, and symbiotic couples that function as one. There are no direct English equivalents."

"I think I understand," Cat said. "We just met a race that formed a hive collective. In that state they functioned as one even though they consisted of billions of sentient individuals. You and your... companion are on the other end of the 'group mind' spectrum. Will you entertain another question?" Before he could answer she waved her hand in an encompassing arc. "This is impressive. I assume there is a purpose for showing us all of this?"

"Indeed. Master Yhsif tells me you are the first to pass our induction exams and that you did it in record time. You will find the Modos can be very accommodating when we have reason to be. All intelligent creatures have some sense of curiosity, therefore we decided to show you where we are...  and where we are going." Running Stream finished with a broad and genuinely warm smile.

Cat was forced to admit the effect was disarming. "I notice your symbiosis seems to  be much more complete than we have seen among the Modos we have been exposed to."

  "Ah..." Running Stream said with a flourish of his trunk.  "I, meaning the Modos partner, have been paired with my big Suhtii friend here for so long that the neural connections are fully integrated. He and I share every thought, every sensory experience. As odd as it must sound to you, together we are one, we function as one... we think as one... and we react as one."

"Fair enough. That being the case,"
and because I find the 'we' confusing
, "I'll refer to you in the singular. Does your 'Suhtii' have its own name?"

The Bearephant rocked back and forth on its two massive hind legs. Cat became concerned that she had somehow given offense. She would later learn that among the coupled Modos, the rocking was a form of silent laughter.

"Delightful! I can't remember the last time someone cared to ask," Running Stream roared. "The Suhtii's don't think of names in the same way as you and I. His name is more of a purpose. In your language it would be 'He-who-speaks.' His spouse is called 'she-who-pours.'"

Gesturing towards the clear dome above them, Running Stream continued. "In answer to your first question, Sagittarius A is a door, not a destination.

***

"What do you mean, 'They disappeared?'" Admiral Faragon yelled the moment he walked onto the bridge of the
GCP Yorktown
.

Captain Ruck swiveled his command chair to face the admiral. His hands worked a holographic 3D display that floated in front on him and rotated with the seat as he turned.

"We were tracking them via their commlinks. Cat and Ben managed to get us a beautiful scan of Sagittarius A. I immediately dispatched two cloaked pinnaces, per our plan. Commander Kirkland's cloaked pinnace, the
GCP Esperance
arrived first and force-docked onto the Modos slaver near what we are assuming is a shuttle port. The active nanite skin carried out a perfect ship-to-ship dock and overrode the
Bluefin's
sensors. Captain Valen's
Honey Dipper
stood off ten kilometers and remained cloaked."

"So what happened?"

"Well there was no indication that they were detected, if that is your question. At 16:47 the
Bluefin
maneuvered near to a group of asteroids and latched onto a massive forty-eight ton iron-nickel rock. Ricky pulled the
Honey Dipper
in to a distance of three kilometers to try and get a better view of what was going on with the
Bluefin
. As he got close, the Modos ship created the largest hyperfield envelope I've ever seen right on top of the Black hole's event horizon. When the three ships jumped we lost contact."

"How is that possible?"

Captain Ruck swiped a hand across the holographic display to dismiss it. His brown eyes met the admiral's. "Sir, the signal was lost instantaneously from all three ships. They were either all vaporized in exactly the same moment, or..."

"Or what, Captain?"

"Or they jumped into a parallel universe. A universe from which our entangled quantum pairs are no longer entangled."

The Admiral rocked back on the heels of his feet.
Cat and the others were on their own. God help them
.

***

Admiral Faragon set his coffee down. He was in the Captain's mess with a collection of electronic tablets scattered across the table. He shuffled them about with his hand, looking for one he had been reading a few moments before. He was trying to make sense of what had happened to his officers. The Ship's sentient AI had confirmed the likelihood of a jump between universes. As a result the admiral had spent the last day reading everything he could find on the subject.

It seemed the theory had first been proposed by a big brain type from MIT in the early 1980s.  A physicist by the name of Alan Guth came up with the idea of parallel universes in a theory which, to the admiral's way of thinking, sounded more like a discussion of economics than cutting edge physics.  The formal name of his theoretical work was the 'inflationary universe theory.' Apparently it opened the door to a whole host of things, including parallel universes as well as the doctoral work Cat Kimbridge had done on hyperfield dynamics.

Shortly after Dr. Guth's first paper on the subject, a Russian scientist by the name of Andrei Linde extended the theory by proposing that inflationary universes might exist within coherent bubbles. The current thinking was that when bubbles touched each other it could become possible to jump between them, across the joint membrane, using a hyperfield conduit. There was a potential problem, however. In classical physics a black hole compresses down to a singularity. 

Admiral Faragon knew this was problematic in that anything approaching the singularity would be torn apart by unbounded tidal forces. Fortunately, early in the twenty-first century a new understanding of the physics that was involved resulted in theory called loop quantum gravity. LQG combined Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics.  The result was an understanding of space-time visualized as a web of indivisible chunks.  Gravity in this model does not produce a singularity, but rather approaches an inflection point that confirms an inflationary model.

A massive gravitational body would weaken the fabric of space-time and greatly reduce the energy required to make a jump across an inflationary boundary. This would explain the need to utilize the gravity well of a massive black hole along the lines of Sagittarius A.

The real question was, armed with this knowledge and an understanding of what had happened, was there anything that the Admiral or the GCP could do to aid Cat? The only answer he could come up with was a very dissatisfying 'no.' 

***

Ricky Valen whistled softly while looking out the nanite-infused transparent aluminum view-screen. Normally he would simply have pulled up a visual of the ship's exterior on a high-definition video display, but certain sights needed to be seen with the naked eye. This was one such sight.

An undulating light display surrounded the ship. He could see the massive Modos craft called the
Bluefin
just ahead. The colors swirled and shifted from rutty reds through painfully bright violets and everything in between. He had been maneuvering the
Honey Dipper
closer to the
Bluefin
to get a better sense of why it had latched onto that asteroid when a supermassive hyperfield surrounded all of them.