Diamonds in the Sky (31 page)
To an outside observer, it takes literally no time at all.
* * *
“No,” says the psych tech, when I ask her. “There’s no law that compels you to uplink back into your original. You’re a free human being. Your original can’t force you.”
“Great,” I say. Soon I’m going to have to arrange to get a biological body built for myself. This one is superb, but it’s a disadvantage in social intercourse to being only a millimeter tall.
The transition back to real space worked perfectly. Once I figured out how to navigate in time-rotated space, it had been easy enough to find the wormhole and the exact instant it had penetrated the event horizon.
“Are you going to link your experiences to the public domain?” the tech asks. “I think he would like to see what you experienced. Musta been pretty incredible.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“For that matter,” the psych tech added, “I’d like to link it, too.”
“I’ll think about it.”
So I am a real human being now, independent of you, my original.
There had been cheers and celebrations when I had emerged from the wormhole, but nobody had an inkling quite how strange my trip had been until I told them. Even then, I doubt that I was quite believed until the sensor readings and computer logs of
Huis Clos
confirmed my story with hard data.
The physicists had been ecstatic. A new tool to probe time and space. The ability to rotate space into time will open up incredible capabilities. They were already planning new expeditions, not the least of which was a trip to probe right to the singularity itself.
They had been duly impressed with my solution to the problem, although, after an hour of thinking it over, they all agreed it had been quite obvious. “It was lucky,” one of them remarked, “that you decided to go through the wormhole from the opposite side, that second time.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If you’d gone through the same direction, you’d have rotated an additional ninety degrees, instead of going back.”
“So?”
“Reversed the time vector. Turns you into antimatter. First touch of the interstellar medium — Poof.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever.
Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do.
And then I will meet you. With luck, perhaps I’ll even like you.
And maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I’ll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one.
I was thinking about what you would see if you dropped down toward the event horizon of a black hole. Black holes are icons of science fiction, but it is surprising to notice how few science fiction stories really describe, in any realistic way, what a black hole would be like. The problem with describing a black hole, of course, is that you can’t actually see it. Still, there are some fascinating things about the way light bends around a black hole. So I had this idea of a spaceship that would fly right up to the edge of the event horizon, and that, of course, immediately led me to the problem of how that could possibly happen, since the intense tidal forces near any stellar-mass black hole would rip any spaceship to spaghetti long before you could ever get near the regions where general relativity made any difference. But tidal forces are proportional to how big you are — they’re all about the difference in gravity between your head and your feet, so if you were small enough, tidal forces would not be a problem. So this became another thread of the story.
At the same time, I’d been giving some thought to the concept of “downloading,” which is the idea that, as technology advances, some day one might be able to actually copy a person’s brain into a computer, and — from the point of view of the person — you would be exactly the same, but now a person living in software, instead of a body made out of meat. But would you be the same person? It’s a knotty question. And what if you edited yourself, when you made the copy?
And then, once you’re dropping into a black hole, there’s the question of what happens next. A couple of years earlier I’d done some thinking about wormholes, along with Matt Visser and several other scientists and science fiction writers (the work eventually was published as a scientific paper in the journal
Physical Review
). I added some of that thinking to the story, too, as a way to get out once you’ve gotten in. There is, in the mathematics, a very odd thing that happens as you pass the event horizon of a black hole. From the point of view of an outside observer, time and space switch coordinates. To you, the radial direction — that is, the direction to the center of the black hole — becomes the time direction, and the center of the black hole is the future, which is the one direction in which we are all constrained to travel. The idea of a rotation of the coordinate system, so that time becomes distance, and distance time, was just too weird for me not to try to visualize. What if you really could switch to these rotated coordinates? What would it look like to you?
And, finally, when I wrote this story there wasn’t a word for the closest approach in an orbit around a black hole. We have “perigee” for the closest approach in an orbit around the Earth, “perihelion” for an orbit around the sun, and even “perijove” for an orbit around Jupiter. I chose the word “perimelasma” for the closest approach to a black hole, using the suffix melasma, Greek for a black object. After I wrote this, other people have proposed the word “perinegricon” (Latin “negri-,” the adjective black), but I like my word better (and I also like to keep to the use of a Greek suffix, since the prefix “peri” is from the Greek).
So the story gave me a bit of room to play around with these ideas, and set my imagination freewheeling a bit. I can’t guarantee that any of this is what it “really” would be like, but as much as I could, I tried to stay with the real laws of physics without cheating. Hope you like it!
©
Geoffrey A. Landis
Dog Star
Jeffrey A. Carver is the author of numerous science fiction novels, including Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries and Eternity's End, a finalist for the Nebula Award. His stories are character driven, ranging from hard SF (The Chaos Chronicles) to the "sense of wonder" stories of the Star Rigger universe (Star Rigger's Way, Dragons in the Stars, and others). His favorite themes include star travel, alien contact, and transcendent realities--and their moral, ethical, and spiritual implications. His new novel, Sunborn, was published in 2008. A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver now lives in the Boston area. His interests include his family, science, space, and aviation. He has created a web site for aspiring young authors at
writesf.com
, and teaches writing at workshops such as the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Vermont. Learn more online at
starrigger.net
where you will also find a variety of ebooks available for download, and on his blog, Pushing a Snake Up a Hill (
starrigger.blogspot.com
).
How I Saved the World
Valentin D. Ivanov was born in Bulgaria in 1967. He received an M.S. in Physics with specialization in Astronomy from the University of Sofia in 1992, a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2001, and he has been working for the European Southern Observatory ever since. Valentin has a broad area of research interests — from extrasolar planets to obscured Milky Way clusters and active galaxies. He is married, with two children. Valentin began to write science fiction and fantasy in high school. He has published in his native country a collection of fantasy stories based on Bulgarian folklore, written in collaboration with Kiril Dobrev. His personal home-page can be found at:
http://www.sc.eso.org/~vivanov/
and his blog (written in both Bulgarian and English) at:
http://valio98.blog.bg/
Approaching Perimelasma
To learn more about this author, visit the following website:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
.
Squish
Daniel M. Hoyt is a math and computer geek who also writes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. He currently has a full time job supporting, updating and re-architecting a 40-something Fortran program working with the computational physics of rockets and their trajectories. Fun stuff, really. Under his tutelage, it's been completely ported to C++ and has an Eclipse-base Java UI, as well, so it's not exactly trivial. In fact, it's rocket science!
As for his writing career, he has about a dozen genre short story credits, two anthologies edited with Martin H. Greenberg at Tekno, and he’s currently shopping his first novel. You can find his work in leading magazines and anthologies (many available on Amazon.com). You can learn more about him at
http://www.danielmhoyt.com.
The Listening Glass
According to an analysis done in 2005, Alexis Glynn Latner was the seventh most published woman fiction author in the 75-year history of
Analog Science Fiction
magazine, originally called
Astounding Stories
. Besides novelettes and short stories in
Analog
, her stories have appeared in
Amazing Stories
and
Sorcerous Signals
and the anthologies
Bending the Landscape
:
Horror
and
Horrors Beyond 2 — Stories of Strange Creations,
and two mystery anthologies. Her science fiction novel
Hurricane Moon
was published by Pyr in July 2007.
“Science fiction has been called the literature with a sense of wonder,” she says, “and that was because scientists found wonder in the universe. They still do, and my science fiction reflects that.”
She holds a B. A. in linguistics from Rice University and an M. A. in systematic theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. From 2004 until 2007 she was the South-Central Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 2008, she was the vice president of the Houston, Texas writers' group The Final Twist. Besides speculative fiction, she does editing, writes magazine articles about science, technology, and aviation, and teaches creative writing through the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies at Rice University. She works in Rice University's Fondren Library. For fun and real-life adventure, she pilots sailplanes and rides with friends in their single-engine power planes.
Her website is
www.alexisglynnlatner.com
You can contact her with email to [email protected]
Planet Killer
Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D.
Dr. Kevin Grazier holds the duel titles of Investigation Scientist and Science Planning Engineer for the Cassini/Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He earned B.S. degrees in computer science and geology from Purdue University, and a B.S. in physics from Oakland University. He earned his M.S. in physics from Purdue, and then went to UCLA for his doctoral research in planetary physics. At JPL he has written mission planning and analysis software that won numerous JPL- and NASA-wide awards. Dr. Grazier still continues research involving computer simulations of Solar System dynamics, evolution, and chaos.
Dr. Grazier is also currently the Science Advisor for the animated educational TV series The Zula Patrol, and for the SciFi Channel series Eureka and Battlestar Galactica. He recently served as editor and contributing author for the books
The Science of Dune
and the
Science of Michael Crichton
for the BenBella Publishing Science of Popular Culture series.
Ges Seger
Ges Seger was born in Quincy, Illinois in 1962. Raised in Danville, Indiana, he graduated from Purdue University in 1984 with a BS in Physics and the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1989 with a MS in Engineering Physics. He is currently employed at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio as a webmaster and Perl hacker.
He is the author of the novel
The Once and Future War
, and was a contributing author for
The Science of Dune.
His after-work duties as family soccer mom, combined with the discovery of a latent talent for Irish Step Dancing basically leaves him no time for anything in the way of meaningful hobbies.
Jaiden’s Weaver
Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Subterranean. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in NYC with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, will be published by Tor in 2010. To learn more about the author, visit:
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com
The Touch
Gerald was born in Minneapolis MN in 1947 and was raised in suburban Golden Valley, MN attending Golden Valley High School. He originally intended to be an astronomer and majored in physics at Macalester College, in St. Paul, MN with that in mind. But, faced with the reality of the draft after graduation, he joined the US Air Force as an airman basic in 1969. He gained a reserve commission as a second lieutenant in1970, and surprised himself by staying for a career.
He spent some time in radar intercept control and battle management, including tours in Alaska and Korea, but worked mainly as an astronautical engineer, managing satellite operations, engineering, and advanced propulsion research. In the latter capacity, he met and became inspired to write by physicist and author Dr. Robert L. Forward. He retired as a major at the end of 1989 and began submitting stories in 1990, using the "G. David" form of his name for fiction (though lately it has migrated to articles as well) and Gerald D. for technical papers, the intent being to separate the work in computer author searches.
As a writer, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focus on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. Trying to keep up with just what is plausible is a challenge, but he recycles his research for occasional nonfiction articles. He continues to write a few pieces of short fiction each year, but is currently concentrating on novels, with three complete books looking for publishers and two more in serious production efforts.
After the Vikings,
a collection of linked Mars-related stories was published as an electronic book by Scorpius Digital in September 2001, with a print version appearing in 2003 (which is currently sold out).
The Black Hole Project
, a novel in five parts written with C. Sanford Lowe, was published as a series in Analog in 2006-2007. He is a four-time winner of the AnLab, the Analog reader\'s award for best story or article of the year, and has also been a Hugo and Nebula award nominee.
Besides writing, he consults in astronautical engineering, dabbles in real estate, and among other volunteer activities is the treasurer of CONTACT, Cultures of the Imagination, an interdisciplinary educational group concerned with issues related to the development of intelligent life — from raw planets to expansion into space. He is a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society; senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a signatory of the Invitation to ETI, and a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives in Sunnyvale CA with his wife, Gayle Wiesner, a retired Apple Computer programmer.
You can learn more about him, his fiction and nonfiction by visiting his website at:
www.gdnordley.com
The Moon is a Harsh Pig
Gerald M. Weinberg (Jerry) writes "nerd novels," such as The Aremac Project, about how brilliant people produce quality work. Before taking up his science fiction career, he published books on human behavior, including Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, The Psychology of Computer Programming and an Introduction to General Systems Thinking. He also wrote books on leadership including Becoming a Technical Leader, The Secrets of Consulting (Foreword by Virginia Satir), More Secrets of Consulting, and the four-volume Quality Software Management series. He incorporates his knowledge of science, engineering, and human behavior into all of his writing and consulting work (with writers, hi-tech researchers, and software engineers).
Early in his career, he was the architect for the Mercury Project's space tracking network and designer of the world's first multiprogrammed operating system. Winner of the Warnier Prize and the Stevens Award for his writing on software quality, he is also a charter member of the Computing Hall of Fame in San Diego and the University of Nebraska Hall of Fame. His website and blogs may be found at:
http://www.geraldmweinberg.com
Galactic Stress
David D. Levine is a lifelong science fiction reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 (Best Short Story, for “Tk'Tk'Tk”). His “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2008, and a collection of his short stories, “Space Magic”, is available from Wheatland Press (http://www.wheatlandpress.com). He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine
Bento
, and their website is at
http://www.BentoPress.com
.
The Freshmen Hook Up
Wil McCarthy has served as a consultant in a variety of areas. Creative consulting includes: personal and professional editing, continuity and fact checking, web content creation, graphic novel and dramatic scripts, science advice, and the writing of creative fiction and nonfiction. Technical consulting includes proposal writing, software engineering, LAN setup and security, robotics, Artificial Intelligence/Artificial Life, guidance/navigation/control, systems engineering/troubleshooting, and space science/spacecraft design. You can learn more about him and his novels by visiting his website:
http://www.wilmccarthy.com
End of the World
Alma Alexander is a Pacific Northwest writer known primarily for her longer, novel-length works ("The Secrets of Jin Shei", "The Hidden Queen", "Changer of Days", the YA Worldweavers trilogy) — and has hitherto been leaning more towards the fantasy side of the speculative fiction spectrum — however, as an alumna of the 2008 LaunchPad astronomy workshop for writers she has been energized and inspired to write both shorter fiction and more cutting-edge SF.
Alma's website can be found at
www.AlmaAlexander.com
In The Autumn of the Empire
Jerry Oltion is the author of over 100 short stories and 15 novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He is also an avid amateur astronomer and telescope builder, designing a new type of telescope mount that he calls the "trackball." Details can be found on his website:
www.sff.net/people/j.oltion
The Point
When Mike was six, he wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist. When he was twelve he wanted to be a science fiction writer. He went to college at Rice University intending to get a degree in electrical engineering and work for JPL or NASA. He ended up double majoring in EE and space physics and went on to the University of Texas at Austin to study astronomy. After getting his PhD in 1996, he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. He’s now an associate professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming; his specialty is quasars. He’s actually used the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Keck Telescope and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. He has two hard science fiction novels out from Tor. Star Dragon was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. Spider Star features a dark matter planet. You can learn more about Mike at
http://www.mikebrotherton.com
.
