Memories: First Light
Jack had turned down the cabin lighting, going so far as to switch off the instrument displays and placing the ship under Daisy’s control. Though no longer necessary to adjust his eyes to the dark, it was a deeply ingrained habit as he prepared to search the sky from the observation dome’s cameras. The silence and darkness coalesced into a sensory deprivation experience that left him feeling detached from existence. Alone in his thoughts, he had lost any sense of time.
Daisy’s query startled him, despite their embedded connection. “Are you ready to open the dome?”
“Yeah . . . sorry. Got a little lost in myself. Go ahead, please.”
Four panels of reinforced carbon opened silently outside like flower petals welcoming the sunlight, falling away to expose the observation dome and the stars beyond. Their position in orbit had them facing away from the galactic center, which left him looking out into the depths of the universe. Pinpricks of light from stars, nebulae, and distant galaxies shone in colors that he could have never discerned in the darkest nights on Earth. The faithful little MSEV floated in the periphery of his vision, still safe in its orbit half a kilometer away. “Give me another ten degrees roll, please.” Daisy answered with a short puff of thruster jets outside, aligning the dome to take the distraction out of view. “Much better, thank you.”
They kept the Anomaly centered along the dome’s axis, yet he could still discern nothing. “We’re at the correct orientation, right?”
“We are. I am able to detect an outline in the infrared spectrum.”
Well good for her, he thought. His brain hadn’t yet mastered processing spectra his eyes weren’t naturally equipped to see, and the background was too sparsely populated to pick it out in the visible spectrum. At this distance the mass object at the Anomaly’s center, DMO-1, would have appeared smaller than the Moon as seen from Earth.
It was only as they progressed along their orbit that it eventually drifted into view. As the Milky Way’s center moved into the background, a strange occultation appeared against the river of stars beyond: utterly black, as if space itself had a hole punched through it.
Which was exactly the case, he realized. Despite having the evidence squarely in front of him, it was difficult to process. “My God. There it is. I see it!” he stammered. “Are you getting this, Daisy?”
“Yes, I am recording in visual and infrared.”
Jack could make out the faintest of distortions around the circle of emptiness, seeing for himself the gravitational lensing Daisy had noted days earlier: direct observation of relativity in action. An entire course of study in Einsteinian physics had just been distilled into a single, improbable image. “What’s our status?” he asked rather nervously. “Any perturbations I should know about?”
“Negative. We remain stable in a circular orbit with a period of 5.87 days.”
He perceived a faint glow that began to define the Anomaly’s radius. Were his eyes—or rather, his brain—playing tricks on him? “I think I can see light coming from it. Faint. You said there was more in the infrared spectrum?”
“Correct. There is redshifted light emerging from the throat. It could be a phenomenon consistent with current theories of traversable wormholes.”
The “throat,” she’d said. That painted it in a whole new light—they were staring down the maw of some enigmatic, cosmic beast that no human had ever encountered. For as far as they’d traveled, it was a stark reminder that in celestial terms he was still only swimming in coastal shallows. He’d just made it to the drop-off, and was now peering into the true depths of the ocean.
“Here there be dragons.”