The White Singularity: A Choose Your Own Adventure

Chapter 7. An Unexpected Reading

"Let's check if the systems are working at this depth," you decide. "Start with comms."

"Roger that." Zell turns off her monitors and extraneous running programs. It's essential that she do this since activating your tachyon emitters drains your batteries more than the generator can compensate for at any one time. She could lose a lot of data if her programs suddenly shut down.

"Ready," she tells you.

"Okay. Sending message." You push several buttons, and a microphone telescopes out of the panel in front of you.

"This is the White Singularity," you say, over-enunciating a little. "Come in, Penance. NESCA, can you hear me?"

An endless second of  silence.

Then, excitingly, a quick burst of static. "White Singularity, this is the Penance." NESCA's precise, unruffled voice issues crystal-clear from the speakers, almost as if she's standing right beside us. "Congratulations, Dr. Phillips, your emitters work just as advertised."

"Excellent," you reply, thrilled. You glance at Zell.

"One percent drain per minute," she tells you as she looks over the power readings. "A significant amount, but it's manageable as long as we don't blabber. We should be able to regenerate the present loss in an hour."

"Alright, that's what we needed to know. We can't hold a long conversation, but at least we can check in now and then." You check that the record toggle—a physical one, which was deliberate—is flipped on to ensure that everything--depth, temperature, pressure, etc.--is being recorded and sent in pulses every five minutes to make sure that no data is lost, even if something happens to you. "We can infer our limits from here. Anything else that you want to say, NESCA?"

"Just good luck, Doctor."

"Thanks. Let's hope we won't need it. Singularity out."

You deactivate the emitters, and the microphone vanishes back into its port.

Zell looks over the controls.  "What do you want to test now?"

"Let's test her heart."

Your wife glances at you from the corner of her eye.  "Are you sure?"

You shrug.  "We might as well find out right away if we can take her to the Core.  That's why we're down here."

"You're the boss."

 You push several keys in quick succession. Several small panels retract, revealing a single red button marked Antigravity. You pose a finger above it, feeling nervous and excited at the same time.

"Testing...now."

The whole ship seems to shudder slightly. Your internal lights flicker. Somewhere within the ship's bowels, held fast by powerful magnetic fields, a microscopic reverse singularity is being formed by the forced implosion of antimatter. As it comes into being and distorts the space-time continuum around it, it starts to push everything away unstoppably, a force that your ship harnesses and channels around your ship, encasing it in an impenetrable bubble.

So suddenly Zell almost falls off her chair, the portholes go completely black. And it isn't anything like the living darkness of the abyss; it's the unnatural, tear-inducing, pitch blackness of the absolute absence of light.

The phenomenon should be enough to convince you that the experiment is successful, but you want to make sure. You toggle on the sensors briefly, looking for a key parameter. You find it immediately. An area up to three meters from the outside surface of the White Singularity shows up on the surface as an empty void. There's no water, no air, nothing but a perfect vacuum. Compared to this, space would be considered crowded.