Memories: The Discovery
Meant for short-range excursions, the Manned Space Exploration Vehicle was comparable in size and shape to an Earthbound delivery van. Taking it from their orbit to close with the Anomaly was a three-day journey, so for its jaunt to observe the mysterious “planet,” Jack and Daisy had taken turns remotely piloting the MSEV into a closer orbit. As the little craft’s distance from them increased with each passing hour, his near-instantaneous ability to manipulate its controls from Magellan was continually degraded by the signal lag: Send a command, wait an agonizing two whole seconds to find out if it had worked. It offered a greater appreciation of the patience an AI like Daisy showed when dealing with such painfully slow humans.
“We are approaching the next correction burn,” Daisy informed him. “Do you wish to continue on the current trajectory? I have calculated several options for different orbits.”
“I’m not in enough of a hurry to expend any more propellant. It took us this long to get here, I can wait another few hours.” There could be other equally mysterious objects to investigate, and having two independent vehicles orbiting the Anomaly doubled the amount of data points streaming in. “What about our dark matter object?” he asked, using the term they’d settled on over the intervening days. “Can you tell anything about it now?”
“DMO-1 remains unobservable, though I have been able to infer some properties based on our respective orbits and propellant use. The MSEV’s radius will be thirty-eight thousand kilometers from predicted barycenter. The gravity field is consistent with an object of 9.86 Earth masses.”
“That’d be close to geosynchronous orbit at Earth. For that kind of mass, a thirty-eight-thousand kilometer radius should put the MSEV close to the surface. Yet we still can’t see anything.”
“That assumes density comparable to a rocky planet like Earth. If that were the case here, it would occult the background stars. DMO-1 appears to have considerably greater density.”
“How much?”
“I have been able to detect gravitational lensing of the stellar background along DMO-1’s periphery.”
Now that was a surprise—if not quite the same as direct imaging, it was pretty darn close. He’d been too focused on their probe to look for those kinds of secondary clues himself. “You been holding out on me, Daisy?”
“Not at all. You were busy with the spacecraft. I am informing you now that we have more reliable data.”
“I’ve gotten much better at multitasking of late, thanks to you. Show me what you’ve got.”
A star chart appeared, generated by Daisy from Magellan’s catalog and indexed to the MSEV’s relative position—in other words, presenting what they should expect to see were they aboard the craft itself and looking toward the object it was orbiting. Soon after, an overlay appeared of the images taken from the little ship’s wide-field cameras. Around a small circular area in the center, the star’s positions had shifted in a way that would have been imperceptible to the unaided eye.
“That’s . . . incredible. Why couldn’t we see this before?”
“We weren’t looking for it. I began compiling the imagery after the MSEV’s insertion burn, when we could be certain of its orbit.”
Jack zoomed in on the image, hoping to tease out more detail. A time stamp scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the MSEV drifted along, the stellar background slowly moving with it as the craft’s perspective changed. As it did, more stars appeared to shift as they passed near the center of whatever DMO-1 was.
He felt a visceral excitement for the first time since his awakening, momentarily forgetting all that had transpired before now. The object they’d spent these last few years racing toward was finally—sort of—in view. “That’s enough to give us a rough outline. It’s small,” he said as he mentally processed this new evidence. “Density would have to be—”
“Ten thousand kilograms per cubic meter,” Daisy said. That was approaching white dwarf densities, giving credence to his earlier speculation that it could be the remnant of an ancient star. Were it not for the Anomaly’s transparency, he’d have settled for that explanation. The faintest cinder of a star that had flared and burned out back at the beginning of the universe would have at least reflected energy from elsewhere.
“Not enough for a black hole,” he concluded with relief. “But still . . . it’s got to be dark matter. Right?” He could barely believe it himself. First hypothesized as a necessary byproduct of General Relativity, dark matter had been the best way to fill in the theoretical holes left by a universe expanding in ways mathematics—which so far had been right about everything else—could not model without it. There had to be more mass in the universe than had been observed, otherwise all other predictions failed. That they had not, and had in fact been repeatedly confirmed by observations, only added to the certainty that there was indeed some unseen form of matter lurking out there.
And here they were with the evidence staring them in the face—sort of. It was still elusive, like the light from a distant star that could only be seen by indirect viewing: Try to center your vision on it, and it disappeared. Yet there it was, only evident by the faintest distortion of starlight around it as they moved through space.
“You understand how significant this is? This is Nobel Prize stuff, Daisy.”
“I doubt the committee would consider awarding their prize to an artificial intelligence.”
“An unfortunate prejudice which they may have to reconsider,” he said, beginning to grasp the enormity of it all—the discovery itself, and how it had been arrived at. He wondered if the qualifier “artificial” was still appropriate. “Synthetic” intelligence was beginning to feel more apt. “You’re the one who got suspicious, took the initiative, and did the investigative work. I’m just a dumbass flight engineer.”
“That is not a term one typically equates with engineers.”
“You haven’t met enough of us. Being able to do the math or memorize material properties doesn’t necessarily equate with being smart.” He paused again, scrolling back to the beginning of Daisy’s images to watch them unfold at higher speed; the lensing effect then became as undeniable as a sunrise. “Anything else? Spectrography, now that we’ve had a closer look?”
“The DMO-1 anomaly remains electromagnetically transparent. It is not emitting or reflecting energy. It is truly dark.” Daisy paused. “However, there is more.”
“How so, if there’s no detectable energy?”
“Our focus on the mass concentration at the center of the Anomaly may be misplaced. The phenomenon we are observing is much larger than DMO-1 itself. In addition to gravitational lensing, there are anisotropic variations in the background radiation which I cannot account for.”
Following Daisy’s lead, Jack called up their ongoing observations of the space around the dark matter object. The changes were subtle, only detectable over time as Magellan traveled along its orbit with its microwave receivers pointed at the Anomaly’s center. “I see what you mean now. It’s like we’re not looking at the same region of space. That’s not attributable to gravitational lensing, is it?”
“Lensing would explain variations in the immediate vicinity of the object. It does not explain all of them, however. There are faint infrared and microwave emissions consistent with cosmic background radiation, though they appear gravitationally redshifted.”
“Now you’re hurting my brain. You mean it’s all coming from the wrong direction, like DMO-1 is funneling background radiation from somewhere else?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “It is like an opening, allowing in radiation from a different region of space.”
An opening. That was when he knew. He was aware of the theories, had read papers on the subject, but he also knew the limits of his personal understanding. That would need to change, because if what he suspected was true then they had just stumbled into something perhaps more significant than dark matter. His mind raced through what he could remember of Lorentz equations, Einstein–Rosen bridges, Hawking radiation . . . it was all a jumble of disconnected knowledge which he was suddenly in a hurry to sort through, aided by whatever information he could access aboard Magellan. He was about to get a self-directed doctorate in weird physics.
Jack knew instinctively that he and Daisy had arrived at the same conclusions; in fact he suspected she’d figured it out some time ago and had been waiting for him to catch up. While confirming some esoteric theories, their discovery also had the potential to blow up the accepted model of the universe.
Accepting it for himself was another matter. Once he’d realized where the evidence was leading, Jack felt surprisingly at ease with it. “Well. At least we finally have some idea of what we’re looking at.”
“Agreed. We are looking at a wormhole.”