Note: This book is on hold for a while. I've written about 300 pages for what will end up being The Fall (book 3) and book 4 (unnamed), and there are some damn good storylines in there, but no story yet. There's following Alba through the world after The Fall of civilization and the beginning of a new epoch (the catastrophocene--post catastrophe), to the lost of civil liberties following the rebuilding of society as Siberia and Africa split ways, to the history of how 12 and her sisters were created, all great storylines. But nothing yet to bind them together. And, I'm having too much fun with Shudder II (The Harvest) right now.
… Spoiler Warning …
Prologue
It was known for the preceding twenty-six years that an asteroid would travel close to earth’s orbit. In 2006, the same year Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, “Aeëtes” was discovered and designated 2006 SQ40. It was thought to be a Kuiper belt object that had somehow avoided detection and was on its solar return vector. It was about five-hundred kilometers in diameter and traveling at a fairly rapid fifteen kilometers per second.
After preliminary orbital trajectory was determined, it received the official designation of 1483494. That trajectory would bring it extremely close to the Earth, presumably causing a minor amount of magnetic disruption and certainly providing a spectacle. But the Center for Near Earth Object Studies wasn’t worried, as it only had a 1.2e-2 probability of impacting the earth.
Harold Kaiser, the original discoverer, proposed the name “Helle” after a Greek demigod. Helle was the daughter of King Athamas and Nephele and was hated by her stepmother Ino, who devised a plan to bring her to ruin. The region in which Helle lived had been in the middle of a famine, caused by Ino herself, and was desperate to bring life back to the parched fields. Messengers were sent to consult with an oracle, and were bribed by Ino to claim that the oracle required the sacrifice of Helle’s brother Phrixus in order to restore fertility to the land. At the last minute, before Phrixus was to be sacrificed, he and Helle were saved by Nephele, riding a flying golden ram. Unfortunately Helle fell off during the flight and was lost to the sea.
Harold chose this name because he believed Aeëtes was, in fact, not a Kuiper Belt Object, but a dwarf planet that was cast off a more standard orbit by the reverse tidal forces exerted upon it because of its high velocity, compared to other Belt objects. He made this assumption because Aeëtes had a retrograde orbit, but whether he was correct was never discerned. As its discoverer, he was given the honor of its naming. Unfortunately, the name Helle was already taken, so the asteroid was named after a son of the sun god Helios.
It wasn’t until 2033 that it was realized that Aeëtes’ orbit would not bring it close to the Earth, it would bring it on an intercept course.
It became clear that Aeëtes was an appropriate name, after all. Helle fell into the ocean, and was rescued by Poseidon. Aeëtes had split the land in two.
In the early twenty-first century, a team of researchers discovered the existence of micro-wormholes. After their debut research paper was rejected by all the reputable scientific journals and ridiculed by their peers, the team was approached by a mysterious organization offering to fund their ongoing research, as long as that research was removed from the public discourse. As their professional reputations were already ruined by their attempt to publish a theory that so radically contradicted current doctrine, they were more than willing to have virtually unlimited funds lavished upon them to continue their research in private.
Although later obvious in hindsight, but sequestered in the evidential record, they discovered a correlation between free electron counts in gaseous hydrogen and the presence of micro-wormholes. This led to the revelation that free electrons were not actually free. Those electrons were still part of an electron pair, the sibling of which was at the other end of a micro-wormhole. The theory was that these electrons had been forcibly separated from their life mates at some point in their existence and were reaching across space and time to rejoin themselves. Measurement of Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation emanating from the wormhole led credence to that theory. It was that radiation that led to the further discovery of a method of endpoint measurement which revealed that micro-wormholes were not only capable of reaching across distance — a small subset of them also reached across time.
It was the birth of the universe that split electron life-pairs and led to the formation of wormholes. In the first seconds after the big bang, electrons had not yet found their life mates. It was within the following few minutes, through nucleosynthesis, that the light elements formed and electrons found their partners. By that point, the universe was already expanding at an ever accelerating rate, providing a shearing force that stripped some of those newly mated pairs from each other. Time itself was being fabricated at the same time as an aftereffect of the big bang, and some of those cleaved electrons followed a different temporal bow wave than their mate, ripping one part farther into the future than the other. The other half stayed stationary while its partner was propelled at the relative — within the ever-expanding universe — speed of light, anchoring the faster electron to the past. Hundreds of thousands of years later, after the cosmic dark ages and once stars were born, gravity wells folded the space-time continuum, forcing some of those unpaired electrons even farther away from each other.
Wormholes had been proposed over one hundred years prior to their discovery, but none of those theories posited that a wormhole would be traversable, nor that they could span time itself. Steven Hawking argued that even if wormholes could be traversed, they would only be shortcuts in space, not time. Additionally, general relativity held that as time only unfolded, travel into the past was impossible, and forward travel was only possible by accelerating an object to near light speed, and even then, that just slowed down time in the relative vicinity of that object in relation to a stationary object elsewhere. But, these discredited scientists had concretely and repeatedly disproved those prior theories.
According to the new field of practical wormhole theory, two points in spacetime could be joined. Although traversing a wormhole was years away from becoming a practical reality, measurements of those wormhole origins in relation to their termination points showed that not all wormholes were optimal for usage. While a wormhole was a connection between two locations in spacetime, when unfolding the universe, the path the wormhole took actually represented a non-linear three-dimensional Arc in space. A wormhole both originating and terminating at the same location could, in fact, have a 3D path that arced way outside the galaxy. Wormholes themselves were also either relative or non-relative, depending on gravity binding and energy emissions along the path of the wormhole. Using standard electron capture techniques, they collected those free electrons and measured them in order to “feel” the other side. This allowed them to determine that, in most instances, origination and termination were relative to the gravitational bodies in their region. They also discovered that the propensity for a micro-wormhole to arrive in a different location was much higher than the tendency for that micro-wormhole to reach across time and into the past or future. A wormhole’s energy signature was exponentially linked to its Arc through spacetime. Traveling into the future, or feeling the ghosts of the past, was extremely rare, depending on from which time it was measured. Rather, wormholes preferred to stay local. But local was relative.
But, no matter their origins, the evidence led to the assumption that micro wormholes were simply electrons trying to pair once again with their other halves, yet not having enough energy to actually do so.
This team eventually learned of George Witworth and his theories, and investigated his evidence on their own. That led to them the conclusion that what was expected on March 5th, 2032 was in fact a super-massive wormhole — at least compared to the Plank-unit-sized wormholes they’d previously detected. That led to the speculation that if a wormhole could be expanded past its natural Plank-sized state, then it could be expanded large enough to enable the transit of matter from one locale to another. How to enable that growth was currently unknown.
Number Thirty-Three, according to the Patto’s naming scheme, was a transplanted member of that team, who arrived with the funding. She was not, like many of her kin, interested in history. Rather, Astrid was fascinated with science. It was she who informed the Order of George’s discovery and started the preparations for the entire Order to gather in Ponferrada. By that time, every member had felt a pull. Some type of programming that told them to gather. More specifically, a budding need to gather with their own kind, and to make their way to Spain.
That wormhole research team was invited to join the Order. Not as some type of reward for pointing the Order in the right direction. But rather, because the Order needed them. If this event was supposed to be a wormhole — one way larger than would be expected by the mathematics involved — the Order would not only want to record its formation, but would also very much like to capture as much data as possible during transit. And the wormhole-discovering team was insistent: if you go, we go.
After two thousand years of watching people being forced to accept someone else’s idea of free will imposed upon others, One had no problem that team join them on their death march. That’s how he saw it. He figured they were programmed with their own senescence and provided instructions to walk into their own death. And he didn’t mind companions.
Book Three of the Arcworld is currently scheduled for a late 2023 release, yet it competes with a new property, Download, a post-cyberpunk thriller set in 2069.
Text Copyright © 2023 GJ Herman
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Image by Rafael Cerqueira on Unsplash