The fracture was incomprehensibly massive. The gash was V-shaped, as if a giant had taken a razor blade to reality and torn a laceration through space. And it glowed, gently, with the colors of a sunset, orange-red spilling over purple.
Our mission aboard Atropos: map the anomaly.
It had taken us five years to reach it while we did other science stuff en route, but it was worth it. For five years, we'd watched the fracture grow in the distance from a faint point into a glowing behemoth.
Now we were three light-minutes from the anomaly. My cat and I admired the monolith from our starboard quarters, which took up the entire view. It reminded me of an acrylic pour painting.
My Siamese cat, Mitzi, who usually loved space, hissed out the window. She poofed up and zipped around my quarters, as if to find an escape.
"Whatcha doin', ya silly goose?" I said.
Three seconds later, the ship shuddered under my feet. It groaned with a horrible, deep metallic sound so loud that I could feel the vibration in my chest. I covered my ears. My poor cat. I'd never heard something so loud in space before.
I ran to the main area of our ship, where everyone was scrambling around, trying to keep the ship in one piece. The entire ship vibrated so hard I could see it. Emergency sirens blared, which was unnecessary.
Technicians yelled information at the captain as it came in. "The anomaly bombarded us with high-energy radiation!"
"Why?" Captain Menseh said.
"Unknown!"
Radiation came in increasing bursts, like something was escalating an attack. The first had been two bursts. Now it was three, then five, then seven.
Bharadwaj leapt with excitement when it sent eleven our way. She exclaimed, "Primes! It's telling us prime numbers!"
"Maybe it's sentient," said Fedorov, our xenobiologist.
Another bombardment. Our ship began an uncontrolled yaw. The metallic grinding sound keened at a higher pitch.
"Then can it please tell us the prime numbers without destroying our ship!" I hollered from the back, as fire exploded from Engine 3. There were other problems too-the chaos on the ship could attest to that-but the fire had given me tunnel vision.
"Chronions!" Chen yelled. "The radiation is chronionic!"
Well, that was bad. Chronions were stable in intraspace, but when they interacted with matter in normal space, they caused all kinds of problems. So many problems, in fact, that chronionic weapons had been outlawed for 181 years.
After a lot of yelling and putting out fires (both literal and metaphorical), the ship was back in a minimum working order. The ship stopped making weird sounds. Someone figured out how to turn the sirens off.
The anomaly had stopped firing chronions beams at us, but I knew that wouldn't be the end of our woes.
After we reported to the medical bay for examination, we gathered in the conference room for a debrief.
"The anomaly could be a peaceful, living creature," insisted Fedorov as wiring from the ship's busted systems sparked. "We've never witnessed a species like this."
"We don't know for sure if it's alive," I argued. "And if it is, what good does that do us? It's hurting us. Can't we tell it to stop?"
Captain Menseh turned to Bharadwaj, the resident xenolinguistics expert. "What do you think?"
"The primes make me think it's peaceful. Because of its composition, it may not have realized that chronions are harmful to us. Asking it to stop would require theory of mind, a common language, an understanding of physics..." Bharadwaj frowned. "In short, it would require communication. And if its communication is hurting us, then maybe we shouldn't communicate."
I could tell that the recommendation gutted her. Bharadwaj loved untangling xenolinguistics problems.
Captain Menseh turned to astrophysicist Sofía Allende. "What is its composition, anyway?"
Allende explained that typically intraspace is tangent to normal space (if you view three-dimensional space itself as a vector field tangent to the three-dimensional intraspace field; I think it's a controversial idea, but I digress). Somehow, within the anomalous region, intraspace had been laid parallel to normal space...and it was highly stable.
(Usually something like that would destroy intraspace and warp normal spacetime into a wormhole, or something. Also, the anomaly had high mass and should have collapsed into a black hole, but it hadn't. That was another mystery.)
"We need a closer look to understand the anomaly," Allende concluded.
"Could it be artificial?" I asked.
"Yes," said Allende. "If there's an alien species that's mastered intraspace-space dynamics, then they might have created this region. Also, if they're indigenous to intraspace, then it's possible that they'd communicate via chronionic waves instead of radio waves. Although you'd think they could find something with a longer wavelength..."
"Maybe we are hurting them in ways that we can't understand," Fedorov speculated. "Maybe their message is, 'We are sentient, please go away.'"
"Then maybe we should go away," Chen Mei said. "Speculation aside, it's the most prudent option anyway. The engines are busted. We're out of fire suppressant. Plus, the radiation's done invisible damage. It'll take weeks to survey all the damage. Not to mention the medical problems we'll face. Let's get repairs, get some medicine, file a report, and come back later."
"It'll take eleven years to leave and return," said Captain Menseh. "Are the repairs worth it?"
"Are thirty-seven souls worth it?" Chen fired back.
Ouch.
"Chronions cause rapid aging," said our medical officer, Doctor Siqiniq, quietly. "Chronions breached the protective plating because of our proximity to the source. Based on the results of my examinations, we may not even have another year."
Ouch, again.
I worried about my poor kitty. I should never have brought Mitzi into space, no matter how much she loved it. I'd be upset if she died.
As the others panicked about the parents and children and siblings they'd left behind, I realized how sad it was that I'd first thought of my cat. Oh well.
We argued some more, but we didn't reach reconciliation.
Captain Menseh dismissed everyone except the doctor. She needed to weigh our advice before proceeding with a plan. I did not envy her.
As we left, she stared at her folded hands, weighing what to do with our limited time.
~~~
When I returned to my quarters, Mitzi greeted me with her tail up, in the shape of a question mark. She said, "Prrrrrtp."
I sat in my favorite chair and Mitzi hopped in my lap. She immediately went to sleep, purring loudly. I was glad that she seemed to have recovered.
I sent a brief message to my extended family to let them know what had happened, aware it might be the last contact I had with them. Not that I had been good at extended familial communication anyway.
I glanced at the technical information on the anomaly that I hadn't learned yet.
"Learning is such a strange experience," I said, petting Mitzi. My comments felt like a non sequitur, but I was glad for the distraction. "The more I learn, the more I see that I didn't know existed before."
~~~
The next morning, I rolled out of bed with the naïve hope that the previous day's events had been a bad dream.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I was confused for a moment because I thought I was looking at one of my parents. The rapid aging had...
I went to the all-crew meeting with some trepidation. What if I was the only one who'd aged so much? What if I'd just woken up from a coma?
The technicians, who also looked noticeably older, reported that their robots had scrubbed as much remaining radiation as possible from the ship. Low-level chronic exposure would have accelerated our symptoms after the high-level acute exposure we'd all had.
Doctor Siqiniq spoke. She seemed tired. She explained the rate of rapid aging was somewhat unpredictable on any given day, in any given individual, but that in a population, over a period of weeks, average life expectancy was predictable. The rate of aging would slow down, but there was no turning back our biological clocks.
Siqiniq estimated we had, on average, three months left to live. Maybe five for the youngest crewmembers, if they'd been portside during the bombardment.
Five months. We would not be able to return to an inhabited planet in that time. Even if there had been enough time, there was no cure for old age.
Captain Mensah gave us a day to think about what we wanted to do. We spoke among ourselves, but we felt trapped. One by one, we cast our votes.
~~~
"What if we bombarded ourselves with antichron radiation?" I asked Allende during our lunch break. I thought I'd heard of antichronions before. I felt like a genius for asking. I expected her to smack her forehead, like, Why didn't I think of that! and It's the fountain of youth!
"We'd die," said Allende without hesitation. "Matter and antimatter annihilate each other."
"But antichronion's stable in intraspace," I said.
"Yeah, so we'd super die."
The feeling wore off.
~~~
Dr. Mensah called another meeting to announce the results. I was strangely anxious.
"The votes have been counted. We will complete our mission," she said. "We will map the anomaly."
Coming from her, it sounded noble.
Mensah continued, "But first, we need to play defense."
~~~
I had to dig around the oldest classified files that we had onboard, but I knew that we had the information on our computer. Somewhere.
I looked at an old scan of a science notebook, without much optimism.
On the inside cover, someone had taped an old pressure cooker recipe.
ENS. P'S KIMCHI SOUP
Serves 5.
Ingredients:
2 cups kimchi
1/3 cup wakame seaweed, dried
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup dried shiitake mushrooms
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce*
1 tablespoon gochugaru
1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups water
1/2 cup chopped green onions
7 oz. firm tofu, diced
Instructions:
1. In the pressure cooker, combine kimchi, seaweed, onion, mushrooms, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, dark soy sauce, gochugaru, sugar, salt, and water.
2. Secure lid on pot. DYLAN, CLOSE PRESSURE-RELEASE VALVE!!!!
3. Select [MANUAL] and set the pot on [HIGH] pressure for 3 minutes.
4. DYLAN, REMEMBER TO QUICK-RELEASE PRESSURE BEFORE OPENING!
5. Stir in green onions and tofu. Serve immediately.
I got sucked into a Dylan-Ensign P research vortex. Initially I thought it would serve as a self-contained little diversion during my lunch break, but Dylan's inability to use a pressure cooker was the least interesting part. Their relationship involved a civil war, 521 letters between them, and arms control legislation.
Their letters went like this (edited for brevity):
Ensign P: Every person is a universe; the loss of anyone is a tragedy.
Dylan: A universe? To who, their gut bacteria?
Ensign P: To whom.
Dylan: Shut up.
I did not learn how to control antichronions, but I did learn that kimchi soup recipes had a defiant, anti-Dylan edge.
Anyway, I scrolled through the rest of the file. I found what I was looking for on page 47:
ANTICHRONIONS (DANGER)
In the unlikely event of a chronion attack, antichronions may be deployed to destroy chronions. There is no other legitimate use for antichronions. Antichronions should only be handled by trained personnel. NEVER STOCKPILE. Antichronions pose a Class 2 radiological hazard.
Only Class 2? That was interesting, but I didn't have time to look into it.
~~~
If you're a trained professional (and you know what you're doing), you can use the ship's spare parts to build a particle accelerator in a 5 micron intraspace field. Then you can synthesize and stockpile antichronions.
Based on three indpendent calculations, we'd survive 197 chronion bursts with our antichron stockpile, equivalent to a wave of the seventh (17) through thirteenth (37) prime numbers.
Chronion-antichronion annihilation would create X-rays, which were slightly less dangerous. If the alien(s) decided to show off more prime numbers, though, we'd die.
~~~
The strange thing about three months is that it's an incredibly short amount of time. But it's also a weirdly long time to spend with death.
We entered the anomaly at the base of the V.
From my tactical station where I'd brought her, Mitzi hissed.
Mensah said, "Fire."
I released seventeen bursts of antichronitons and turned our shields to maximum. We detected seventeen bursts of X-rays. We'd annihilated an attempted signal.
We waited for another bombardment that never came.
As we moved, the bright clouds swallowed us. It was a strange sight to behold. Instead of the black void of space, pricked by distant stars, we were completely surrounded by red-orange and purple clouds. The clouds cast an eerie, even orange light on the inside of the ship.
Instead of reaching the surface, as we expected, the mass of glowing gases unfurled beneath us.
If I chose any two points that I thought connected into a straight line, we'd approach it and find more patterns: whorls, forests, seahorses, stripes, spiral galaxies, and wheels.
We found blue details that we couldn't see before. As we approached, we realized that the blue detail was a huge world unto itself. As we got closer, the blue color, too, engulfed us, and we observed yellow-white details in the distance.
"Just how big is this place?" said Chen Mei in disbelief.
"I thought we were a lot closer to the surface than we were," admitted Captain Mensah.
Allende looked up from her calculations. "The detail is incredibly intricate. The clouds are too complex to be considered two-dimensional, but not complex enough to be three-dimensional."
We traveled in flabbergasted silence for a few hours, watching as once-tiny details far ahead engulfed us, revealing more intricate details.
"Look," said Bharadwaj, pointing. "That region in 47-Alpha...it's V-shaped, like the anomaly was in the first place."
I had to narrow my eyes to see it, but there was a tiny V in the distance, as if a tiny sea snail had torn a yellow laceration through the ocean.
The V grew into a familiar monolith as we approached. As the V swallowed our puny ship, we observed identical patterns, in different colors, as when we'd first entered the anomaly.
I thought about how learning revealed questions.
"The patterns are repeating. We could be in a fractal," I speculated. "It has finite volume but...maybe...infinite surface area."
"And we'll never reach the surface. If there's just an infinite level of detail that's revealed once we get close..." said Allende.
"Then we might never map it," Fedorov said. He looked helplessly at Captain Mensah.
"Captain," said Allende urgently. "My calculations indicate that the time dimension becomes more unstable the farther we go. Space is stable because time is not."
"Could it undo the effects of our biological aging?" the captain asked hopefully.
"No. It would make it worse."
"Are we in an unstable region?"
"Not yet."
"Return to the first iteration," Mensah ordered. "We will map as much of this place as possible under the assumption that it is recursive. Once we observe an identical area, we'll turn back to find a new pattern."
Even though we were now constrained to a much smaller infinite region, we mapped huge areas of the anomaly in the following days.
We discovered places that were dark, places that were light, regions that had formed unlikely gaseous cubes or flowers or cardioids with deep craters.
"I like to imagine this place was created by an ancient civilization," Fedorov told me during our lunch break. "They learned everything about their universe, so they created a new one to explore."
We ate Ensign P's kimchi soup. It was pretty good. Federov's imagining was pleasant; I held on to it.
Weeks passed as we continued mapping the anomaly. We mourned the people who passed. I found my first gray hair. Then my second. I kept re-evaluating my life priorities, but there were few other paths ahead of me.
I felt myself more introspective and grateful for things that I might not have noticed before. Things as minor as, like, there was ornamentation on the hallway ceiling. There was no need for that. Someone had put a bit of an artistic creativity into the construction of a ship. It made my fleeting days slightly better.
My back craned. My hair turned snow white. It was difficult to see. I used a cane to move about the ship. I lost weight.
We discovered areas that looked like coastlines, areas that looked like underwater shoals, areas that looked like infinitely repeating skylines. We found regions that looked boring in visible light but exciting in ultraviolet or infrared or microwave. I felt grateful for these areas in their infinite complexity and infinite beauty.
I noticed my hands shook when I ate with a fork. Remembering simple things became more difficult. I spent more time in my quarters.
Irritatingly, Mitzi had also aged, but she seemed a lot farther from death than I felt. Did cats hold the key to surviving just a little longer? I knew it was a question that I didn't have the time or capacity to solve.
As another new region unfurled outside our window-iridescent spirals this time-I wondered what questions future generations would discover.
~~~
A/N:
Kimchi soup recipe adapted from "Kimchi Stew," on page 79 (coincidentally, a prime number) of Instant Pot Vegetarian Cookbook: More Than 100 Easy Meatless Meals For Your Favorite Kitchen Device by Urvashi Pitre. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
If Pitre doesn't mind, then Ensign P was named for her, the author! Unless she does mind, in which case the P stands for...um, the fictional Ensign Park.