My daughter, the wrinkled and dying woman lying in front of me, was the
oldest-looking human on the entire planet. Yet, to the rest of the world, she was
leaving us the youngest, as the new humans her age looked like they’d just
passed puberty.
The med-unit hummed solemnly. Hope felt my presence and opened her
eyes, a tired look but the same as her mother’s, Laura.
She didn’t have much hair anymore, and it had long since lost its ebony
beauty. My heart shrunk in pain. How many times had I watched the people I
loved the most leave me? It hurt more each time; there’s no drill and no training
to teach one’s heart how to bear the loss of another. My heart grew colder and
harder with each death.
“Dad.” Hope greeted me with a broken voice.
I thought I would have been strong, that the Palladium made me stronger.
How wrong I was. I’d already lost my wife Mary, and Laura, then my first
daughter, Annah, and now Hope’s life was vanishing before me and I couldn’t
do anything about it. With all my resilience, strength, and inhuman capabilities,
there I was…a broken father watching his little girl dying. What a cruel destiny
the Moîrai had imposed on us Selected.
“How are you?”
“I’m tired.” She sighed. “But I’m ready.”
I took a deep breath and walked up to her. Unable to say anything, I
stepped to her bedside and took that bony hand.
She smiled. “Your hand is warm, and I’m so cold…”
My eyes looked for the nurse. “I’ll tell the doctors to raise the temperature.”
Hope shook her head. “Inside…”
At those words, my eyes filled with tears. “Darling…”
“Dad…” she whispered. “I want my bed.”
I managed to collect some air and sound calm. “You won’t last an hour in
your bed, sweetie.”
“I know.” Hope let go a long sigh. “Would you do something for me?”
“Anything.” I looked at her, eager to do whatever she needed. My heart
hung to her lips and I bent forward.
Her eyes mocked me. “I know where I am.”
Befuddled, I probed her mind. “How?” I started.
“Am I not your daughter?”
I blushed. “Hope, I didn’t want you to—” I glanced down as she squeezed
my hand to interrupt me.
With an effort, she raised her head. “Shhhh. It’s okay, Dad. Let everyone
watch if they need to, but let me watch everyone, too.”
My voice cracked. “You’ll never be forgotten.” My eyes held hers. “I love
you so much.”
“I know, Dad.” Her hand squeezed mine again. “Please, let me see, let me
start the new beginning.”
I didn’t know then, but those words put the seed of revenge in my heart
and found fertile ground.
Wormholes…
…or the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
In 1963, Roy Kerr found that if a black hole is rotating it creates a space time
singularity in the form of a ring, not a point, and that in principle a particle may
be able to fall through the hole instead; the particle may not be lost forever.
When this was published, black holes were not believed to exist and therefore
the Kerr solution only really developed in the 1970s, after astronomers
discovered what seem to be real black holes. – Hawking 1988 and John Gribbin
Homepage
There’s no empirical proof that a wormhole can hold its promises, and a
computer simulations run in 1998 raised doubts in that the simulation couldn’t
find conditions to keep the wormhole stable, i.e., open.
Less than a year after Einstein had formulated his equations of the general
theory, the Austrian Ludwig Flamm realised that a solution to Einstein’s
equations described a wormhole connecting two regions of flat spacetime; two
universes, or two parts of the same universe. Could, thus, these bridges be used
for interstellar travels?
Indeed, Einstein himself, working at Princeton with Nathan Rosen in the
1930s, discovered that the equations represent a black hole as a bridge
between two regions of flat space-time, the phenomenon known since then as
the “Einstein-Rosen bridge”. Another property of black holes, ignored by
everyone except very few top level mathematicians and physicists, is that a
black hole always has two “ends”, a black one and a white one, the exit side
into another (location of the) universe.
Another problem that the computer simulation revealed is that in order to
traverse an Einstein-Rosen bridge from one universe to the other, a traveller
would have to move faster than light at some stage of the journey, and that
would violate one Einstein himself, unless…
Two researchers at CalTec, Yurtsever and Thorne, found that the equations
dictate that in order for an artificial wormhole to be held open, its throat must
be threaded by some form of matter, or some form of field, that exerts negative
pressure, and antigravity associated with it.
Richard F. Holman, professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon, explained this in
an interview with Scientific American. In order to stabilise wormholes
opening, quantum fluctuations in various fields might be able to just do that.
And the work of many others on the behaviour of quantized fields
demonstrated that quantum field effects could indeed hold open a macroscopic
wormhole.
Large enough to have a spaceship travel through? It depends; it depends on the
amount of energy achievable to create the bridge.
And this closes the loop, as a
rotating Kerr black hole might actually be the source.
A vision from 1933 brought the Daimones to visit, study, and decide about
the future of the race of men.
