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When Pribadium Delgado’s father was seven years old, he was staying with his
grandparents while his parents went on a boring business trip in Iowa. Valde
loved staying over there, especially since they lived two hours away, making
it a rare treat. He was particularly close with his grandfather, because he
was a young soul. One thing they loved to do was have the grandfather hold
Valde’s hands and spin him around like a helicopter. They would do it all
the time in the park across the street. Not everyone was happy about it.
A neighbor was fed up with their fun, so she called family services, citing
the danger. Of course, this did not constitute abuse or neglect, but it
still meant they had to stop, because the grandfather did not want to
antagonize this woman. This saddened Valde, so he begged the grandfather to
do it again. They knew the busybody would be watching, though, so they
decided to give it a shot in the house, and it did not go well.
Their hands slipped from each other, and Valde went flying through the air.
His head slammed against the wall, cracking them both open, and giving Valde
permanent brain damage. He got through it, and ended up having a fairly
happy life, growing up to have a family of his own. He couldn’t be alone
with his own kids until they were old enough to kind of take care of
themselves, but he wasn’t abusive, just easily distracted. The grandfather,
on the other hand, couldn’t deal with the guilt. After years of heavy
drinking, he either fell, or jumped off, a cliff. They were never sure
which.
Pribadium’s mother was an astrophysicist, which was what got
Pribadium interested in science. Her mother always called the tragedy the
three-body problem, likening the grandfather, the grandson, and the
wall to celestial bodies. She noted the wonder in the universe, and used the
story to teach Pribadium a valuable lesson. Well, multiple lessons, really.
The first was social and behavioral, which was obvious. The deeper lesson,
however, was about gravity.
Outer space was monumentally huge. Most of it was made up of dark energy,
which was basically just another word for space. Baryonic matter only took
up a small fraction of the composition, yet...objects struck each other all
the time. Galaxies were literally colliding. Thanks to gravity. Gravity was
responsible for making life possible. It held things together, where
otherwise there would just be a bunch of random particles flying
individually through empty space. But it was still good to have space. If
Valde and his grandfather had been allowed to swing around in the park, they
would not have been so restricted, and Valde would not have crashed into a
wall.
Now Pribaidum was grown up, and had been for centuries. Her parents were
long dead, and she didn’t know where her brother was. She went by Sugar now,
and had an entirely new face, in order to distinguish her from the Pribadium
native to this time. Even though she had all of Pribadium’s memories up to a
point, she sometimes felt like a brand new person. She could be too blunt
about things, and even a little emotionally attached. It wasn’t her fault,
news didn’t surprise her as much as it did to others. And she always
preferred to just get right down to the point.
“A black hole?” Liselot asked. “A stellaris collapsis?”
“No. Planetary-mass; possibly primordial,” Sugar clarified. She had gone
ahead and started constructing the defense platforms to orbit Thālith al
Naʽāmāt Bida, but now she was going to have to halt the process and
reprogram them. The basic design was just fine, but ablation lasers weren’t
going to work for this situation, and they needed a denser solution to the
spherical covering problem; probably dynamic.
“Possibly?” Liselot questioned. “What do you mean? What else would it
be?”
“It could be a Kugelblitz,” Sugar answered. “Have you never heard of them?”
“I’m an astronomer, of course I have. It’s only recently become feasible for
humanity to make one, though. If someone made it, we would have noticed,
because in order for it to be passing through our system right now, it would
have needed to form practically in our backyard. So unless you’re suggesting
aliens are real... Wait, are you suggesting that aliens are real?”
Sugar had to ignore that question. “I need more time to study it. I still
don’t know if it’s charged yet. That will tell me how we deal with it. I
need to get closer.”
Liselot shook her head in disbelief. “Oh yeah, sure. Get closer to the
singularity that just destroyed a moon and a planet in one fell swoop. Have
fun, try not to get spaghettified, don’t forget to bring a towel. Will you
be home in time for dinner?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll stay a couple hundred kilometers out. We’ll park, fire a
few procession probes, and gather the data. Yes, we will be home for this
proverbial dinner.”
“I’m coming with you,” Liselot insisted.
“No, that’s okay,” Sugar offered, knowing that it wasn’t really a request.
Liselot winced. “This is my planet, my responsibility. If you kick me off of
your ship, I’ll just get my own, and pilot fish my way alongside you.
They’re not expensive.”
Van was walking back on the bridge. “Read her in,” he encouraged. “It’s not
illegal for non-travelers to know about this stuff, or I wouldn’t know. Read
her in.”
Sugar breathed through her nose and considered it. Liselot was correct, this
wasn’t their world. They needed help and approval from someone who lived
here, and the Axiom of Astronomy was their best option. It already appeared
like they could trust her. So Sugar nodded and cleared her throat to
be blunt and aggressive again. “Time travel is real. Some people are born
with the neurology necessary to hack the universe to manipulate timespace in
one way or another. Others, like me—and now you—fell into the time traveler
community.”
“Oh, she’s being modest,” Van says. “Sugar here invented her own, unique
form of time travel. It’s entirely incompatible with how everyone else does
it. Which means it’s protected from their vulnerabilities.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Sugar argued. “I...my brain connected to a
primordial knowledge floating around the universe, from a
different universe. It’s like—that’s what the cosmic microwave
background radiation is. Someone else invented it, I found it.”
“Like transcendentalism?” Liselot asks. “You know that Bidans are
essentially transcendentalists, right? We worship knowledge and science.”
“I didn’t give it much thought,” Sugar replied. “I try to stay away from
religion.” She paused in a brief silence. “So you’re not freaking about
learning the truth about reality. Do you just not believe it?”
Liselot smiled softly. “Many in our culture suspect that it’s real. In the
year 2400, the collective knowledge of the known galaxy exploded
unpredictably. I mean, just look at how fast a new substrate can be built on
Castlebourne, and the artificial gravity on The Tangent. Actually, it must
be the reason for the artificial gravity on our planet. Time travel
would explain a ton of these leaps in understanding, wouldn’t it? It
vindicated a lot of our beliefs about secret a priori knowledge, and now
I’m in the inner circle.”
“Hm,” Van says. “I think she’s all right with it.”
“This is what you were afraid to tell me?” Liselot questions. “I’m sure if
you spent time in Victorian England, you might be afraid to out yourself,
but I think you’ll find if you’re honest with people in the modern world,
they’ll be more receptive and calm.”
“It’s more complicated than that. Telling one person isn’t illegal,” Sugar
explained. “Telling everyone is, because it’s a unilateral decision
which robs others of consent. There’s a prison. If I were to make a
broadcast announcement, they would undo that, throw me in prison, and
potentially never let me out. I don’t even have to be the one to make that
announcement if there’s a risk that you will, or if you go blabbing
to your therapist, and they do it.”
“I understand, I know how to keep a secret,” Liselot assured them. “I’m sure
there’s a lot more to know, but I’m guessing you needed to quote-unquote
read me in because you’re not just gonna throw procession probes at the
singularity.”
“Uh, no,” Sugar confirmed. “We’re gonna get a lot closer than I said. This
ship was built with transdimensional shielding, which will protect us from
the dangers of high gravity, though we could end up experiencing
minor time dilation.”
“I’ve experienced relativistic dilation before,” Liselot says. “I went on a
cruise around H-Gimura-11 in my youth. Lost eleven years.”
Sugar smirked. “I personally know Hokusai Gimura, from before she discovered
HG-11. She was my mentor; introduced me to all of this.”
“Small world,” Liselot decided. “So are we going?”
Sugar looked over at Vantu and nodded lightly.
He teleported the ship away. “Now orbiting S-Delgado-1.”
Sugar rolled her eyes. “We are not calling it that.”
“We have to,” Van reasoned. “You discovered it.”
“If it’s a Kugelblitz,” Sugar argued as she was calibrating the sensors,
“That means they discovered it.”
“I don’t see them here,” Van fired back. “We’ve still not proved it yet
anyway.”
Sugar shook her head. “Would you just open the exterior spectrometers?”
They ran the sensors and gathered the data, ultimately confirming that it
was indeed Kugelblitz. They didn’t know who made it, or where it came from,
but now Sugar knew how to deflect it. Unless it was sent here intentionally
as a weapon, they could fire ionic pulses at it, and get it to move out of
the system. It only took a few weeks to complete the array, and that was all
they did. They scrapped the full orbital defense complement, which was
something this planet should have had the whole time. A Kugelblitz black
hole was more dangerous than a primordial one. They didn’t have time to
protect the globe against all threats. They needed to be offensive, and
concentrate their efforts in one spot on the celestial firmament.
It took a couple of days for Sugar to be confident that they had pushed the
object clear, so it didn’t cause further damage. If they had shot the black
hole head on, each shot would have taken an immense amount of energy to make
it reverse directions. By constantly striking it on the edge, they conserved
that energy, and used it more wisely. They just wanted to change its course
enough so that it moved out of Tau Ceti space. Now that that was done, they
could focus on the debris from Qishra. That was their ongoing, long term
problem, but it was possible to keep them at bay, especially once they did
finally cover the sky in those defenses.
The world rejoiced and partied, and Sugar was happy for them, but then
something new came up on their sensors. “This is impossible.”
“What is it?” Van asked.
“It’s the black hole. It’s...back.”
“So it is a weapon,” Van determined. “Someone’s controlling it.”
“I don’t see how,” Sugar argued. “We should be able to detect them,
and what would be the motive?”
“Should we call Liselot?”
Sugar sighed. “She has a right to know. Just give me one moment to check
something.” She frowned at the screens as she waited for her long-range
sensors to respond. Her eyes widened when the information came in.
“What? I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”
Sugar looked up at Van hovering over her shoulder. “That’s what you called
S-Delgado-1.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It’s moving away.”
“Oh, so false alarm. We’re good.”
While still staring at him, Sugar reached up and tapped the screen to switch
to a different readout. “If we’re sticking with the same naming convention,
we might have to name this one S-Delgado-2.”
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