The White-Hole Situation

The End is Coming Soon

Roddy was restless and got up. The room was too small, felt cramped. He was so used to being outside all the time that now he was having difficulty breathing. He hadn't been in such close contact with another physical being since his starship days and he hadn't been missing it. Virtual people were much easier to be around. You could turn them off whenever you wanted, and they didn't need anything from you besides your presence. It was odd seeing September looking sleepy. As a visage she was always at her avatar best, fully dressed, wide awake and alert. Here she was the real September in the flesh, wearing some old bathrobe, hair unbrushed if not unwashed, her enormous eyes slightly reddish and her chin, what was it about her chin? It was more pointy than he remembered. How long since they had been together, really been together as people? Had it really been that long?

"All the information and more," young Gerard was saying. "All the data we no longer need? We still have it. We keep it all in cold storage. You never know when you might have to have it. What if the population thins too much? What if we need to bring back the old procreative drive levels? We have it, that DNA is somewhere in the files. It sure solved a lot of problems when we toned it all down, heh," he chuckled. The three real people there exchanged glances.

"And now, now it's too late anyway," he went on. "It's all lost, so why even think about it, why even talk about it? All that work and all that time, for nothing. Well, even the sun is going to explode someday."

"Do you have any idea what he's talking about?" Roddy asked September. He was standing over by the front door, as far away from his dead father as possible without actually leaving the building. "He's been like this for a while now, all moaning and groaning and getting younger and younger. It's beginning to piss me off."

"Gerard?" she asked instead, "when is it going to happen?"

"Tuesday," he said. "And today is Sunday. Did you even know what that means? Do you even keep track of the old days of the week anymore?"

"Tuesday is two dawns from now," Pisco said.

"Correct again!" Gerard said, and added sarcastically, "you really are the winner tonight!"

Pisco frowned. He had other concerns on his mind he thought were more important than being mocked by a machine-generated image, but the image didn't see it that way.

"Your friend Pagan could be the lucky one, on her way to Jessup as we speak. You should leave too. You should all leave. Get out now if you can, though it wouldn't do you much good anyway. Once this planet is history, you won't be protected anymore. No service, no guidance, no chance at all in the known and well-tended space you've come to know. Who's going to save you? Who's going to help you, if not the I.B.U."

"Again," Roddy spoke up, "what is it talking about? When is what going to happen?"

"A big white hole," September said.

"Oh, they come in sizes now?" Roddy sneered.

"All shapes and sizes," his father replied, "and Zeppo, big is not the word you want for the one on Tuesday. Big is not nearly big enough."

"The last one took out New Zealand," September explained to Roddy.

"Dang!" he said, "That was a nice place."

"Especially after we cleared out the last humans," young Gerard said, "and put it back more or less the way it used to be. We didn't bother bringing back the birds, of course, even though they sang so sweetly. You have to draw the line somewhere. There's only so much we can do, compute capacity and all that. Resource limitations. It always comes down to that."

"Then how big?" September asked, trying to get the youth back on the main track.

"Big enough," he said. "It's even more a matter of where. This planet's going to take it in the core, straight to the heart. It'll blow entirely from the inside out. Nothing we can do. It's just too late."

"Wait a minute," Roddy said, walking towards the window and looking suddenly very angry. "You mean that all this time you've been whining you knew there's some huge disaster on its way? How long have you known about this?"

"The white-hole situation is still new," young Gerard said. "I haven't known about it long enough. I've just been learning. If I'd known earlier, if I had more time, maybe I could have done something but now it's just too late. You have no idea. We're all ancient history right now, just history waiting to happen."

"There's got to be something we can do," Pisco spoke up and Gerard laughed out loud.

"Cats can't do homework," he scoffed. "Do you think I don't know what I'm talking about? Do you have any idea how much would have to be done to even move everything off-world? All the nodes, all the storage? And even if we could, where would we put it? There's no suitable environment. We made this world exactly as we needed it. Do you know how long that took? How much work? How much effort? Do you think we can just do it again, practically overnight, on some distant world a thousand light years away? You don't even know. You don't even know the half of it."

"So what's the plan?" September asked. She was up and pacing the room as well by now, nearly bumping into Roddy once per revolution. He retreated to a far wall to keep out of her way. Only Pisco remained where he was. Young Gerard was opening the sliding door and stepping out onto the balcony. He didn't look back when he answered her question.

"There's no plan," he said. "It's all over. The end is coming soon."