The object is a perfect sphere of silver grey. It is the size of a small house and hangs perfectly at the centre of gravity of the asteroid twenty metres beneath Lisa Durnau’s faceplate. It gives off a steady, dull, metallic light. As her eyes become accustomed to the chromium glow she becomes aware of variations, ripples of chiaroscuro on the surface. The effect is subtle but once she has the eye for it, she can see patterns of waves clashing and merging and throwing off new diffraction patterns, grey on grey.
“What happens if I drop something into it?” Lisa Durnau asks.
“Everyone asks that one,” says Sam Rainey in her ear.
“Well, what does happen?”
“Try it and find out.”
The only safely removable object Lisa Durnau can find is one of her nametags. She unvelcroes it from the breast of her suit, drops it through the web. She had imagined it would flutter. It falls straight and true through the tight vacuum inside Darnley 285. The tag is a brief silhouette against the light, then it vanishes into the grey shimmer like a coin into water. Ripples race away across the surface to clash and meld and whirl off brief vortices and spirals. It fell faster than it should, she thinks. Another thing she noticed: it did not pass through. It was annihilated as it intersected the surface. Taken apart.
“The gravity increases all the way down,” she observes.
“At the surface it’s about fifty gees. It’s like a black hole. Except…”
“It’s not black. So. stupid obvious question here. what is it?”
She can hear Sam’s intake of breath through his teeth on her suitcom.
“Well, it gives off EM in the visible spectrum, but that’s the only information we get from it. Any remote sensing scans we perform just die. Apart from this light, in every other respect, it is a black hole. A light black hole.”
Except it isn’t, Lisa Durnau realises. It does to your radar and X-rays what it did to my name. It takes them apart and annihilates them. But into what? Then she becomes aware of a small, beautiful nausea in her belly. It isn’t the embrace of gravity or the worm of claustrophobia or the intellectual fear of the alien and unknown. It’s the feeling she remembers from the women’s washroom in Paddington Station: the conception of an idea. The morning sickness of original thought.
“Can I get a closer look at it?” Lisa Durnau asks.
Sam Rainey rolls across the mesh of webbing to the technicians huddled together in a rickety nest of old flight chairs and impact strapping around battered instrument cases. A figure with a woman’s shoulders and the name Daen on an androgynous breast passes an image amplifier to Director Sam. He hooks it over Lisa Durnau’s helmet and shows her how to thumb up the tricky little controls. Lisa’s brain reels as she zooms in and out, in and out. There’s nothing to focus on here. Then it swims into vision. The skin of the Tabernacle fizzes with activity. Lisa remembers elementary school lessons where you popped a slide of pond water under the video camera and it was abuzz with microbeasts. She ratchets up the scale until the jittering, Brownian motion resolves into pattern and action. The silver is the newsprint grey of atoms of black and white, constantly changing from one to the other. The surface of the Tabernacle is a boil of patterns on fractal scales, from slow wave-trains to fleeting formations that scuttle together and annihilate each other or merge into larger, briefer forms that decay like trails in a bubble chamber into exotic and unpredictable fragments.
Lisa Durnau ratchets the vernier up until the graphic display says X1000. The grainy blur expands into a dazzle of black and white, flickering furiously, throwing off patterns like flames hundreds of times a second. The resolution is maddeningly short of clarity but Lisa knows what she would find at the base of it if she could go all the way in; a grid of simple black and white squares, changing from one to the other.
“Cellular automata,” whispers Lisa Durnau, suspended above the fractal swirls of patterns and waves and demons like Michelangelo in the Sistine, inverted. Life, as Thomas Lull would know it.
Lisa Durnau has lived most of her life in the flickering black and white world of cellular automata. Her Grandpa Mac—geneful of Scots-Irish contrariness—had been the one to first awaken her to the complexities that lay in a simple pattern of counters across an Othello board. A few basic rules for colour conversion based on the numbers of adjacent black and white tokens and she had baroque filigree patterns awaken and grow across her board.
On-line she discovered entire bestiaries of black-on-white forms that crawled, swam, swooped, swarmed, over her flatscreen in eerie mimicry of living creatures. Downstairs in his study lined with theological volumes, Pastor David G. Durnau constructed sermons proving the earth was eight thousand years old and that the Grand Canyon was carved by waters from the Flood.
In her final High School year, while girlfriends deserted her for Abercrombie, Fitch and skaterboyz, she concealed her social gawkiness behind glitterball walls of three-dimensional cellular automata. Her end-of-year project relating the delicate forms in her computer to the baroque glass shells of microscopic diatoms had boggled even her math teacher. It got her the university course she wanted. So she was a nerd. But she could run fast.
By her second year she was running ten kay a day and probing beneath the surface dazzle of her black-and-white virtual world to the bass-line funk of the rules. Simple programmes giving rise to complex behaviour was the core of the Wolfram/Friedkin conjecture. She had no doubt the universe communicated with itself but she needed to know what it was in the fabric of space-time and energy that called the counterpoint. She wanted to eavesdrop on the Chinese whisper of God. The search spun her off the chequerboard of Artificial Life into airy, dragon-haunted realms: cosmology, topology, M-theory and its heir, M-Star theory. She held universes of thought in either hand, brought them together, and watched them arc and burn.
Life. The game.
“We’ve got a few theories,” Sam Rainey says. Thirty-six hours of drugged sleep later, Lisa Durnau is back on ISS. She, Sam, and G-woman Daley form a neat, polite trefoil up in the free-gee, an unconscious recapitulation of the steel symbol pointing the way to the heart of Darnley 285. “Remember when you dropped your name badge.”
“It’s a perfect recording medium,” Lisa says. “Anything it interacts with physically is digitised to pure information.” Her name is now part of it. She isn’t sure how she feels about that. “So, it takes stuff in; has it ever given anything out? Any kind of transmission or signal?”
She catches a transmission or signal between Sam and Daley. Daley says, “I will address that momentarily, but first Sam will brief you on the historical perspective.”
Sam says, “She says historical; it’s actually archaeological. In fact even that’s not close. It’s the cosmological perspective. We’ve done isotope tests.”
“I know palaeontology, you won’t blind me with science.”
“Our table of U238 decay products gives it an age of seven billion years.”
Lisa Durnau’s a clergy child who doesn’t like to take the Lord’s name in vane but she says a simple, reverent, “Jesus.” Alterre’s aeons that pass like an evening gone have given here a feel for Deep Time. But the decay of radioactive isotopes opens on the deepest time of all, an abyss of past and future. Darnley 285 is older than the solar system. Suddenly Lisa Durnau is very aware that she is a mere chew of gristle and nerve rattling round inside a coffee can in the middle of nothing.
“What is it,” Lisa Durnau says carefully, “that you wanted me to know this before?”
Daley Suarez-Martin and Sam Rainey look at each other and Lisa Durnau realises that these are the people her country must rely on in its first meeting with the alien. Not super-heroes, not super-scientists, not super-managers. Not super-anything. Workaday scientists and civil servants. Working through, making it up as they go along. The ultimate human resource: the ability to improvise.