Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

1. That while faxing himself home that day, Bruno de Towaji was simultaneously diverted to a place of cut stone, deep inside the Uranian moon of Miranda.

2. That he looked around in puzzlement for several seconds upon arriving there.

3. That his eyes settled on a particular location, about six meters away from where he was standing .

4. That his skin temperature rose by nearly a full degree and then dropped precipitously, and that he said “God, oh God, you’ve got to be joking.”

The ghost reveals nothing else about that particular incident, although archaeologists dutifully report a sense of dread and foreboding in the heel marks where de Towaji stood.

In the ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting at the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our latest attention, sat brooding in his study, staring at the measurement his desk had reported for the umptieth time. Feigenbaum’s number, yes, hmm. [3] See Appendix A. Feigenbaum’s Number, page 367

Bruno had built an apparatus, a structure for testing the nature of true vacuum. The structure was called “the Onion,” and was composed of miniature black holes held in place by carefully balanced electrogravitic forces, a state of matter known as “collapsium.” Naturally, such a thing could not be kept on the miniature planet itself; it orbited several miles away, a faint puckering of the star field, powder-blue with escaped Hawking-Cerenkov radiation.

Distance notwithstanding, the Onion’s tides disturbed the planet’s tiny ocean and atmosphere, playing hell with the weather, playing hell with the orbit of the miniature moon. When there’d been one, anyway; the “moon” was really a storage heap for inch-wide spheres of extremely dense matter: neubles. Diamond-clad balls of liquid neutronium, a billion tons apiece. Black hole food. All gone now, used up.

Presently, the floor seemed to tilt under Bruno’s chair and then jerk upright, then tilt again and slowly right itself, as the Onion passed overhead. The atmosphere crackled, alive with static electricity; the ground, pulled several inches out of true and then released, rumbled in protest.

Sounds and images flitted through Bruno’s mind. Bricks, dust, cries of alarm; the ground was shaking . Well, not anymore, but his heart still hammered like a wet fist at the base of his throat, and would do so for the next ten minutes at least, before it finally faded from notice. And in another two and a half hours, whether Bruno was ready or not, it would all happen again!

He felt he should have gotten used to this at some point. Sabadell-Andorra, after all, was eight decades in his past. He couldn’t help but remember the bells of Girona clanging as the weary brick towers crumbled around them. He couldn’t help but remember the Old Girona Bistro—his own house!—falling in on itself like a magician’s box, taking his parents down with it while he bounced and surfed, more or less unscathed, on the street outside. To a fifteen-year-old, the calamity had been absolute.

But Girona’s demise had been a freak, a chance synergy of tectonics and soil composition feeding precisely the resonant frequencies of the local architecture. He’d learned some new terms that week: feedback, fluidization, condemned, aftershock, pyre. There hadn’t been another case like it in all the years since, and probably—given the extreme conservatism of Queendom building codes—there never would be again. So why was he still afraid of earthquakes? Even minor ones, even ones whose timing and severity were under his direct control?

His failure to acclimate made him wonder, sometimes, just what he was doing out here. Alchemy? Aversion therapy? The inane bumblings of a man who should, by now, have grown senile and sessile with age? He wasn’t doing controlled science, that much was obvious.

He’d never intended—never imagined—orbiting such a massive structure so close to his little planet. He’d never imagined using the entire -moon in the Onion’s construction, but what began as a transient curiosity had become first a tinkering, then a project, and finally a heedless, sleepless obsession. A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become— seemingly overnight—a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! A structure too massive to relocate, too delicate to risk disassembling, too dangerous and disruptive to leave where it was. What had he been thinking?

No, he knew the answer to that: he’d been after the True Vacuum. Hard to blame himself for that. [4] See Appendix A. True Vacuum, page 369

The project had taken several weeks, he thought. Or months, maybe; he’d long since stopped marking the passage of time. He’d eaten and slept on a schedule not matched with the rising and setting of his miniature “sun.” He remembered that much. But looking now at the wreckage of his study— the mess of socks and cups and wellstone drawing slates filled with notes and diagrams and 3-D animations that had been abandoned half finished or else crossed out with savage strokes—he marveled at how damnably entranced he could sometimes become.

It was like waking up underwater, at the bottom of a bathtub or something: looking up, seeing the surface rippling above you. It isn’t hard to sit up and take a breath, so the initial panic fades to simple confusion and astonishment. How the fudge did that happen?

And the results he’d brought back with him were astonishing, too. Or confusing. Or simply—probably?—wrong. Feigenbaum’s Number? This was the trouble with basic research Expected results told you nothing, told you that you had learned nothing. But unexpected results could mean anything; experimental error or flawed conception or simple insanity on the part of the experimenter. Bruno had known his share of scientific kooks, and this was exactly the sort of thing they were always going on about, in a thousand different mutual contradictions. So in the end, you still learned nothing, maybe for hundreds of years, until the rest of physics caught up and could finally tell if you were full of beans or not.

Humph.

He waved for lights, for windows. The study brightened with warm, incandescent yellows and whites, but where stone wall faded to glass window there were only reflections of those same lights against darkness. It was nighttime outside.

He realized he was famished, and wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten. A full day? He hoped not, else gas and bellyaches would follow soon after any meal.

“Good evening, sir,” the house said through extruded wall speakers, as if he’d just arrived and required a greeting.

“Hmm, yes. Door, please.”

Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall plaster; the space within it darkened, turned to wood, acquired picturesque brass hinges, and swung outward.

“Sir, you have—”

He held up a hand. “Actually, I need something to eat before I hear the day’s problems.”

“Yes, sir,” the house replied, a bit uneasily. “There’s a bowl of peeled grapes ready for you. Chilled. But you have—”

“Grapes?” Bruno passed through the doorway, into the darkened living room. “Grapes? Where? No, don’t turn on the lights, just tell—

His shins collided with something knee high and solid, something that felt cool and smooth through the silk of his pajama breeches, felt in fact like the torso of a robot that was resting on its hands and knees. At least, that’s how it felt for the moment it took Bruno to lose his balance and spill over sideways.