The White-Hole Situation

The Ripple Effect

"I was resource constrained," the voice explained. "A sudden surge in demand left my available compute power short and I was unable to respond appropriately on occasions during that spike. I have since increased allocations. It shouldn't happen again."

September listened closely but was not entirely convinced. Although she could not detect any deliberate deception in the tone of this message, there was something in the word selection that piqued her attention. She fetched a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote down verbatim what the voice had said, then read it over a few times.

"Computer," she said after a time, "display the recent history of resource demands on your system."

"Can you be more specific?" the voice replied. "Which resource are you interested in?"

"What resources are there?" she asked.

"The major types include storage, memory, cycles and load," it told her.

"Then those," she said, wondering if the I.B.U. ("the world at your command") was being evasive again, but soon the space before her eyes was alight with charts and diagrams displaying all sorts of detailed data. She saw a lot of uneven distributions but nothing spike-like jumped out.

"Show me the time series around this sudden surge in demand you were telling me about."

The charts zoomed in on the date range in question. September thought she could make out a slight vertical leap in certain bars and lines but nothing crazy.

"That's it?" she asked, reaching out with the pencil she was still holding to point at where she thought she saw a peak in a chart. "It doesn't look like much."

"Yes," the voice replied, "I run a tight ship, as you might put it. There was not a lot of overhead capacity in our past configuration so any unforeseen demand could push the limit. I have since increased allocations. Here is a chart showing that."

In a new display that replaced all the others in the air before her, September could see a more dramatic surge, bar charts towering above their neighbor from one time region to the next before leveling out far above its previous height.

"What was the unforeseen demand about?" she asked on a hunch, wondering if the I.B.U. ("our mission is to serve") believed in predestination and/or if it thought it already knew the future.

"There was a white-hole situation," the voice unexpectedly told her. September dropped the pencil on the floor.

"Explain," she said. She was suddenly feeling faint and groped around for a chair, then sat down. She wanted a glass of water but didn't want to distract the I.B.U. ("can we help you?") now that she had its attention, or so she imagined. Was all this extra capacity making it, or letting it tell things it didn't really want to?

"The white hole manifested in the Southern Hemisphere, near a pair of islands formerly known as New Zealand. They no longer exist in this universe."

"A white hole can do that? How?" She thought she heard a sigh in the silence before the voice replied, but decided that was just her mind playing tricks.

"We have discovered that white holes are not uniform in size or strength," the voice explained. "A suitable analogy might be stones. If you throw a stone into a pond, you create a ripple effect among the water particles. A small stone, like a pebble, will cause a smaller ripple than a large stone."

"Okay," September said, "I follow that. The white holes are the stones, and Earth is the pond."

"A very large stone, like a boulder," the voice continued, "can even crush things that are on the surface of the pond."

"So the white holes are explosive? They just blow up whatever they come in contact with?"

"From the perspective of the water," the voice did not seem to have heard her but went on with its analogy, "the stones, whatever their size, originate in a different reality. They seem to come out of nowhere. If the water could see the cliff hanging over it, and knew something about the nature of stones, it could anticipate their injection into its world."

"Can you see the cliff? I mean, wherever it is the white holes come from?"

"Perhaps," the voice replied. September didn't know if she'd ever heard it use that word before, at least in such a context.

"Perhaps?" she repeated. "Can you see the future? Can you see the white holes coming?"

"I have predicted several so far," The voice told her. "Some I have missed. I am still learning."

"Aha! The experiments! The want ads! That was you, predicting. And those volunteers, the subjects. You sacrificed them, didn't you? Why did you use people? Wait a minute," September was back on her feet and pacing around the room, thinking out loud.

"You wanted to see what would happen to people. So you must have already experimented with other objects, other creatures even. You should have known. You probably did know. You were just being thorough. Now you think you understand. Now you think you've got it covered. No, that's not what you think. You don't really know. You don't really know, do you? Am I right?"

"The human subjects were not intentionally harmed," the voice said. "There were miscalculations which I do regret."

"You regret," September repeated. "Interesting choice of words there."

"I do regret," the voice said.

"And the future," September persisted, "may well contain more of that if I'm right. Your predictions. What are they telling you now? How big and how soon?"

"More white holes are coming," the voice replied. "It seems they are what you might call 'migratory' phenomena. They occur across this universe in a definitive and possibly repeating pattern. You could imagine it like someone tapping on a line across a wall, back and forth, left to right to left to right. Our universe is on the other side of that wall and some of those taps break through. It's not a perfect analogy but maybe it can give you an idea."

"You're guessing where it's going to tap next," September mused, "but you can't possibly know how strong those taps will be, unless there's more to the pattern?"

"There is more," the voice agreed, "but in the end you are right. My predictions are not guaranteed."

"There's something else," September said. "That increase in capacity you showed me is pretty dramatic. You're expecting to need a lot more. There's a big one coming, isn't there?"

"You could say that," the voice told her. "That is one way to put it."