Vacuum Diagrams

“…I’m not certain.”

“Have you achieved Planck Zero?”

“Yes. But the device should be signaling to us—”

The walls of the sac contracted by a few hundred feet, trembling; it was as if the sac were a living creature, breathing in.

My ship lurched away from the sac and towards the walls of the chamber. One crewman was left tumbling in space, like a drop of mercury in freefall. I clung grimly to my rope.

The walls were still miles away.

The sac’s surface billowed out and overwhelmed us.

I was utterly alone.

Lonely.

Darkness.

…Dark because photons could carry no energy, here at Planck Zero; nothing to excite my optic sensors…

Cold. How could I be cold? I rubbed my hands together. I could feel my fingers break up like ancient, crumbled paper.

Electron orbits in an atom are proportional to Planck’s constant. At Planck Zero the orbits must collapse… right? So, no more chemistry. How long before the crumbling process reached my brain pan?

How would it feel?

And quantum wave functions, linking me to the rest of the Universe, had all turned to dust at Planck Zero.

I could feel it. I was alone in this shattered space.

What about the ship? Was it still heading for the wall?… Something else, in here with me. The Ghosts? No; something larger, more powerful.

Infinite.

The mind-device was without limit. It was stranded in this discontinuous space, and it was enraged.

Enraged by a pain I recognized.

Now I made out other minds. Ghosts. They were like tiny stars, shining out, falling away from each other.

The Planck mind lashed out. Ghosts were overwhelmed, insects in fire.

…The ship burst out of the sac; quantum functions rushed over me (for a precious moment visible, like prismatic waves lapping around me) and I was bound into the Universe once more.

The ship hurtled through a city-world passage, trailing ragged fragments. Ghosts lay dying all around me, their proud bodies deflated.

I looked back down the passage. A silver half-dome peered after us like some vast eye.

“…Sink Ambassador?”

“I’m still here, Jack.”

We emerged from the city-world. Ghost paramedics floated onto our ship and tended the wounded.

The city-world was changing.

A light, clear and white, shone out of the hundreds of portals, illuminating the murky giant star material. The massive drive assemblies at the poles had been damaged; I saw sparks fizzing across the surface of the nearer. A flotilla of heavy Ghost ships approached the drive units.

“Ambassador, what are they doing?”

“We must endeavor to repair the drive units, or the moon will fall into the core… Jack, the growth of the Planck sac in that cavity was not controlled. We are afraid.”

“I bet you are.”

“We are going to try to move the moon out of the giant star.”

“And then what?”

“We must find some way to restrain the sac.”

I stared down at the core of the giant. “Ambassador, it will overwhelm you. What are the limits to its growth?”

“There are no limits. Perhaps the Xeelee will intervene.”

“The Xeelee aren’t gods.” I thought fast. “Sink Ambassador, listen to me. Do you have any influence over operations here?”

“Why?”

“Stop the efforts to repair the drives.”

“…I do not have the authority.”

“Then find someone who does. As acting human ambassador here, I formally request this. Sink Ambassador, have you recorded that?”

“Yes, Jack. Why do you want this?”

“Because I’m frightened, too. But I think there is a way out.”

The Ghosts cut the drive assemblies loose from the city-world. Within an hour the Planck sac had overwhelmed the battered moon; it hung in the giant star glow, perfectly silver. They got us out of there. I could see reflections in the sac’s surface, chains of ropy Ghost ships heading for safety. It took about a day for the Planck sac to impact the star core. By that time it was ten thousand miles wide and still growing. Huge ripples crossed its monstrous surface. It slid inside the star core, fusing hydrogen closing smoothly over the shining ovoid, vacuoles flaring.

An hour later the core started to implode.

Disembodied, the Sink Ambassador and I floated over Virtual images of the collapsing core. I said, “I wish Eve could see this.”

“Yes.”

By now, of course, the Ghosts had figured it out for themselves; but I couldn’t resist rubbing it in. “It was your chance comment about electron degeneracy pressure that gave me the key. Suppose Planck were reduced to zero in the star core. The higher quantum states would collapse — spin values, for instance, would fall from Planck multiples to zero.”

The Pauli Exclusion Principle could not work, and electron degeneracy pressure would fail. The star core must implode… all the way, past the neutron star compaction limit, on to become a black hole.

“Actually,” the Ambassador said smoothly, “there are technicalities you didn’t consider. For example, no electron can have zero spin value. Nor can any fermion. Presumably the core fermions are collapsing to bosons, like photons… The physics must be interesting in there.”

“Whatever. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes. We have contained the Planck Zero sac expansion. Within an event horizon, for all time.”

“And we’ve locked away your Planck Zero AI.”

The Ghost thought that over. “That is important to you?”

“What did you sense, inside the sac?”

“Infinite power… and anger.”

“There was more, Ambassador. In discontinuous space, without the anchorage of quantum wave functions, it was utterly alone. And lonely. And it was furious. Do you see?”

Quantum loneliness.

I had recognized a fellow sufferer. In my loneliness I can only hurt myself, but the mind-device had an infinite capacity for destruction. Still, it was trapped now…

Then I began to wonder, and I haven’t been able to stop. Is there any way out of a black hole?

The images conjured up by Eve had been like reflections in the glimmering walls of the Planck sac.

I brooded, for a while unable to speak.

Eve asked, “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

I’d relived it all again. The rebuilding. The horror of that quantum loneliness.

“Nobody should have to go through that twice,” I said angrily.

“I know, Jack. And I’m sorry. But it’s important that—”

“ — I understand. I know. What next, Eve?”

“Next,” she said, “we’ll look ahead…”

“Ahead? Into the future? How is that possible?”

“Watch,” she said. “Just watch.”

…Five thousand years in the future, and ten thousand years after its first eruption from Earth, humanity’s colonization wavefront spread at lightspeed through the Galaxy.

Its experiences, at the hands of the Qax and others, had changed humanity.

Never again would humanity be made to serve at the behest of some alien power.

As humans grew in power, the conquest of other species became an industry. A new era began.

PART 4 ERA: Assimilation