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Memories: Space Oddity


Jack had spent the next several days absorbed in study, digesting every academic paper in the ship’s electronic library on Lorentzian wormholes as Daisy patiently continued gathering data and refining their observations.

He often found himself dismayed by his ignorance—astronauts were supposed to be smart. He’d first been a military linguist, then an engineer, and had in fact been selected for their mission precisely for that unlikely combination of skills. His natural curiosity about Earth and its cosmic neighborhood had led him into the space program, though his expertise was decidedly more practical than theoretic. Now he was confronted by the disparities between the two and was struggling to resolve them.

“It looks like Einstein was right again. I should’ve taken more physics.”

“I am learning a great deal myself. The theories can be counterintuitive.”

“Not to your average astrophysicist, I’d bet. Their minds work on a whole different plane than the rest of us. Kind of makes you wonder about how much of our brains we actually use.”

“I am curious about that as well. Monitoring yours during hibernation raised many questions. I would like to explore them with you sometime.”

He was amused by the idea. “You think you can make me smarter if I go back under?”

“That is in fact a possibility. Opening up unused neural pathways may allow you to make connections that were not attainable before. The neurolink implants offer several—”

“Let’s table that idea for now,” he interrupted. “It’s a little creepy.”

“I did not intend to disturb you. I am interested in discussing it as an intellectual exercise.”

“No apologies necessary. Understand that there’s a fine line between brilliant and crazy. Extremely smart people tend to be socially awkward, and some of them are just plain weird. Your average person thinks astronauts are all super-geniuses. If they only knew what rock-apes we really are.”

“You should not belittle yourself. We have made an unprecedented discovery which will take time to fully understand.”

He admired how Daisy subtly steered their conversation back to the subject at hand, in what would have been second nature for a human. Once again, she made him question the presumed limits of “artificial” intelligence. “Okay, you win. Guess I needed to get my head out of this for a few minutes. What can you tell me so far?”

“There remains no discernible event horizon. I have continued to observe redshifted light emerging from the anomaly.”

“Good news,” he said with relief, wondering if she’d purposefully avoided describing it as a “throat” for his sake. “That also implies no singularity.”

“I was about to make that same point. Dark matter appears to be evenly distributed around the observable radius, though it does not account for the detected mass.”

“By that, you mean gravity. There’s not enough here to account for the ‘Planet Nine’ theory.”

“Not localized, no. Though over greater distances, it could show similar effects.”

“So it might still account for the perturbed Kuiper Belt objects that pointed us this way.” That reminded him of something. Jack scrolled back through an earlier paper he’d read. “Yes,” he said, finding a specific passage. “That was one hypothesized effect of a large Lorentzian wormhole. They require exotic matter to remain open. Matter has mass, and mass means gravity.”

Daisy quickly accessed the same paper. “It also posits no singularity or associated event horizon, as we have observed.”

“Get this: it should be ‘fully traversable in both directions,’ and ‘possesses no crushing gravitational tidal forces.’ So we’ve got that going for us.”

Daisy paused a microsecond. “What are you suggesting?”

What was he suggesting, he wondered? “Just curious.”


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Framed