The Death of the Universe: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 1)

by Brandon Q Morris

  There didn’t appear to be any danger. The radar had detected solid ground at a depth of 30 centimeters. It would be like wading through tall grass if he wanted to explore the planet. Of course he had to be careful. First impressions could be deceptive. Maybe it was actually a gigantic pelt covering some sort of being lying in wait for a snack like him. But that was very, very unlikely. There didn’t appear to be any other life forms, and if the planet depended on nourishment from space, it wouldn’t be able to survive long.

  No, he had to be careful, but he didn’t need to be afraid. This wasn’t a horror film, it was the exploration of a world about which they had gathered comprehensive information while in orbit.

  But there must be some secret. Zhenyi obviously knew what it was, or she wouldn’t have lured him here. Maybe this secret was also the reason for her disappearance. Kepler released his belt and lifted himself out of the seat.

  It was weird to be standing on a strange planet in a shirt and pants. Kepler felt unprotected, almost naked. But there was really nothing he needed to worry about. The dim lamp in the sky would never be hot enough to burn his skin.

  The storm had completely blown over. Not the slightest breeze remained. A few low clouds could be seen on the horizon. They had landed slightly north of the equator. The sun was almost at the zenith, and it wouldn’t move from there. Kepler took a few steps on the spot. The ground seemed relatively loose. Fertile soil, not rock. The springy ground would be perfect for jogging.

  But one thing was strange. The rocket he’d arrived in had touched down on a jet of fire, with the help of a good old chemical thruster. There was nothing better for landing on a planet with an atmosphere. The hot exhaust gases had scorched the ground to a perimeter of about 50 meters. But there weren’t any burnt plants. Had the automated system instinctively chosen a spot without vegetation?

  Kepler walked slowly to the edge of the circle. Once there he bent down. On this side of the clearly defined line the ground was black. On the other side it was brown. He picked up some soil from both sides with his fingers. Where the fire had scorched it, its texture was like dry sand. On the other side it was fibrous and felt noticeably moist. A slimy residue stuck to his fingers. Kepler smelled it. He should take a sample. The residue was probably full of microorganisms.

  He stood up again. Two meters in front of him was the edge of the green lawn. Kepler looked at the vegetation. There didn’t seem to be any tracks through it. It was uniformly dense everywhere. It was phenomenal. The knee-high grass that stretched to the horizon also appeared to have no competition. That was truly unique. At some point this plant must have overwhelmed all of its competitors. Usually that led to an ecosystem completely collapsing, but obviously not here. Perhaps it was because the planet had the good fortune of circling a boring red dwarf. Nothing had changed here for many gigacycles.

  Kepler sighed. Maybe it had been a mistake to come here. When humankind sets foot on a planet, they inevitably change it. Even just the burnt patch left by the thruster could clear a space for a new species. Small change, massive effect. This ecosystem was not adapted for that. Maybe that was why someone had deleted this planet from the database? What doesn’t exist can’t be destroyed by humans. And then the inquisitive Zhenyi had come and assumed it was a conspiracy. If he left immediately, the planet might still have a chance.

  No. He still knew far too little. If Zhenyi was here, he had to find her and take her home with him.

  Kepler tried to step on the grass, but couldn’t. He lifted his foot, but as soon as he put it down, he found he was standing on bare, brown soil. The vegetation was recoiling from him! He stood still. That was impossible. The grass must sense that something was moving toward it—it must be anticipating the movement and then retreating from the danger. It had maybe two seconds to do it.

  He crouched down and the circle around him widened immediately. He reached for one of the blades of grass with his right hand, but the whole plant escaped him.

  “Shh, shh,” he said softly, as though he was dealing with a timid animal.

  He reached for another plant, but it too was faster than he was.

  “Shh, shh,” he said again. “I don’t want to do anything to you, little ones.”

  His soothing words didn’t help. Every time he tried to touch a plant, it recoiled from him. It appeared to be withdrawing into the soil at lightning speed. But how was it doing that? Who was watching him the whole time? Who was issuing the warning about his movements, and how could a plant react so quickly?

  Because these stems aren’t plants, idiot, he thought. Like a typical human, he had allowed himself to be influenced by outward appearances. He needed to step back from his assumptions. Organisms, yes, that was obvious—it was life, not merely a chemical process. But plant and animal, those were terrestrial distinctions. Kepler stood up. He took a few steps to the south. The green stems were still evading his steps in plenty of time. He tried running, but it made no difference.

  The sun gradually wandered across his field of view to the left. That wasn’t right, it was supposed to stay in the same place. He was obviously not walking in a straight line.

  Kepler stood still and looked back at the rocket. He had left a curved trail behind him. So, the grass stems didn’t repopulate the place they had cleared for him, at least not right away. But why an arc? He hadn’t deliberately walked in a circle! There was a phenomenon by which humans strayed from a straight line when they had no point of orientation. But the sun in the south, that was a pretty clear reference point. And yet the grass had managed to redirect his path.

  Kepler started out again. He closed his eyes. He was walking in a straight line. He opened his eyes only to find that he had walked in a circle again. Obviously the stems were moving out of his path in such a way that they formed an imperceptible curve. The grass was playing with him! This time he gave in to it. Where would it lead him? Kepler walked for ten minutes at a comfortable pace across the strange planet. Then he reached the spacecraft again. The grass had led him back. Was this just a politely formulated way of saying, ‘Piss off?’

  But he wasn’t going to make it so easy for the planet. The psychological trick itself showed that he was onto something. He wasn’t about to just fly away. This must be the planet that Zhenyi had meant.

  For the second attempt, Kepler didn’t rely on his own senses. He had brought a broad-spectrum scanning device outside with him. It consisted of a multi-eyed camera head and a tripod. He placed the tripod at the edge of the scorched soil and mounted the camera head. The scanner would observe him in all wavelengths. That was how he would see through the ploys of this exotic grass.

  Kepler activated the equipment. The camera focused automatically and continuously followed his movements. He positioned himself in front of the grass and lifted his foot in slow motion, as though he was about to take a step. The grass didn’t react right away. At first nothing happened. When his foot was twenty centimeters above the ground, the stems directly in front of him disappeared. He stood on one leg. It was lucky no one was watching him right now. Then he stretched his leg out, first in front of him, then to the left and finally to the right. The grass directly below his leg responded and disappeared.

  You don’t want to take any risks, he thought. That’s clever. And what does the camera have to say about it? He ended his little performance and went over to the measuring equipment. The cameras hadn’t captured anything on any wavelength beyond what he had seen himself. Hmm. He was disappointed. Then he noticed the microphone. He played the audio recording. There was a noisy hiss. But there was no wind, and the microphone was well protected. There shouldn’t be any noise.

  He cut out the lower frequencies. The sound became clearer. He played back the audio more slowly. Was that still hissing, or was there a structure to it? He slowed it down even more. And then it was clear. The hissing was a quick sequence of the most varied sounds! He equalized the recording a bit. Were those voices? It sounded to him like a flock of
birds communicating, but with much deeper cries than sparrows or titmice.

  He sent the recordings to the spaceship in orbit and had the ship’s AI search for patterns and meaning. If those really were voices, there must be discernable information contained in them. The analysis would take at least half a day.

  Kepler took the camera head off the tripod and put it on the ground right in front of the grass. Then he zoomed in as far as he could. He wanted to know where the sounds originated. The stems didn’t seem to have any vocal organs. He held his arm above the grass several times and provoked a reaction. Then he looked at the camera images. It was fascinating.

  The stems didn’t have much in common with terrestrial grass—that was particularly apparent close up. They weren’t flat, but cylindrical, and they were amazingly flexible in every direction. To Kepler they looked more like a bunch of snakes. But he couldn’t detect any internal structure. The stems had roughly the same diameter right up to the tip, and then they ended abruptly, almost as if they had been cut off by a huge harvesting machine. The ‘cut’ surface was flat and didn’t have any visible signs of damage.

  Kepler enlarged the image further and analyzed it over time. He compensated for the swaying of the stems. Then he saw it. The flat surfaces on the top were vibrating, only visible at the highest zoom. When they did, they produced the sounds he had analyzed. Kepler took a step back. Each of these stems had a kind of mouth on its tip, with which it could speak to the others. What he had assumed to be grass could be a planet-spanning colony of beings that cooperatively nourished themselves with the abundantly available energy.

  But how did they detect his approach? Did they somehow sense his presence? Kepler went through all the data once more. No, there was nothing. Except... the fact that each speaker could also be a microphone. The mouths must not only be able to speak, but they obviously sensed what was happening around them too. They must be enormously sensitive. Whenever he moved an arm or a leg he nudged a few air molecules. In a dense atmosphere like this one you couldn’t move soundlessly. The changes in air pressure were probably being registered by the sensitive organs on the tips of the stems, so that the organism could react.

  This was really exciting, and enough of a reason for Zhenyi to have brought him here, although he was no biologist. It was likely the most complex life form discovered by humans in their many gigacycles of existence. Life had proved to be a surprisingly—and disappointingly—rare phenomenon.

  But his discovery prompted even more thrilling questions. What proportion of the organism was made up of the grass stems he could see? Were there roots, or something else, in the soil—or were the stems only the tip of the iceberg? And even more importantly, how did the organisms process the knowledge they acquired? Why did the stem on the right decide it was best to disappear, while the stem next to it remained standing? And who had the great idea of leading him back to his ship through psychological trickery? Or was he just a victim of his own psychosis causing him to see laws in what were really just coincidences?

  He decided to call it a day. He needed to come up with some ideas about how to get to the bottom of these central questions.

  Cycle ZB2.5, unknown system

  Kepler would have appreciated an intelligent conversation partner right now. The ship’s AI was limited to its low level—it answered either in single syllables or with counter-questions. It would certainly never pass a Turing test.

  The butler was currently in orbit around the third planet. The signal transmission time was seven minutes. That made conversations proceed very arduously.

  “How’s it going for you?” asked Kepler.

  Waiting. He stood up, walked around the seat, sat back down. Waiting.

  “This planet is not our destination,” said the butler. “The surface no longer has an atmosphere, which is actually unusual, because this distance from the sun is safer than where you are. I’ll take a look at the last planet, but I suspect the events that prompted Zhenyi to send us here will play out where you are. What impressions have you gathered?”

  “I have some fascinating results,” declared Kepler. “This surface is covered in a kind of grass with interesting properties. I’ll send you my observations. But they lead me to two questions.”

  He formulated the questions and pressed the send button. Now he’d have to wait again. Kepler stood up and walked around his seat. Then he pulled up the enlarged image on the screen and saw it quite clearly—the top of the stems functioned like a drum and a microphone. Nature really did come up with some clever techniques. How could something like this remain hidden for so many gigacycles? Or was it deliberate that no one knew about it?

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  “This is phenomenal. There’s nothing comparable in the universe,” replied the butler. “I’ve checked my local database. This is different from any life form humans have ever found anywhere, including all those they later exterminated, or which didn’t survive the explosion of a star. Basically, I could spare myself further exploration here. But for the sake of thoroughness I’ll continue. I’ve understood the questions, they’re quite intuitive, but I don’t have answers to them. I would advocate for capturing a sample. If the stems’ senses function acoustically, then laser pincers would guarantee success.”

  Of course. Acoustic vibrations traveled at the speed of sound. If he wanted to outsmart the plants, he simply had to be faster than they were. Laser pincers should afford him that advantage. It was always worthwhile speaking to the butler. In a short time, Puppy had become his second favorite conversation partner—second only to himself.

  The air was much more pleasant out here than it was in the spacecraft. When he found Zhenyi, he’d have to convince her to relocate her base here from K2-288Bb. They would be able to eat breakfast outdoors, install a pool, make love in the warm water... But maybe he should worry about finding her first. Oddly, Kepler was sure that his experiments would help with this. Why, though? He hadn’t found the slightest trace of her. Zhenyi could just as easily be drifting between the stars with a defective drive.

  He took the laser pincers out of their receptacle. They didn’t look anything like normal pincers. The device was reminiscent of a thick pipe or a pocket flashlight. At the end were three small laser eyes that could beam concentrated light in a selected frequency. The three beams could be focused together on a single point.

  In his case, they would simply be used to cut through a stem so he could examine it more closely.

  Kepler approached the border. Nothing was left from yesterday’s experiments. That meant that, after a certain amount of time, the stems must repopulate the surface they had vacated. It was the same with the ring they had formed around the ship. Today the only empty space was where the thruster had scorched the soil.

  He knelt down, taking care not to get too close to the grass. He wanted to surprise the stems. Kepler took the pipe in his hand and adjusted the convergence point. It was now about three centimeters from the end of the pipe. Then he aimed the pipe at one of the stems in the front line.

  Could the grass read his thoughts? Apparently not, because it was standing there quite serenely. A light breeze caused it to sway back and forth. It had no idea what was coming. It couldn’t sense the photons that were rushing toward it at light speed. Kepler pressed the trigger of the laser pincers, and the top of the stem fell off. Now the other stems around it reacted. They hid themselves in the soil. But this stem could no longer defend itself. Kepler picked it up carefully. The bottom half of the plant just stood stiffly, as though it didn’t know what had happened. In fact it probably didn’t, because the pressure sensor was on the end he’d removed. He grasped the bottom half with his left hand and pulled on it. Suddenly he thought he could hear whistling, an increasing pitch that made his spine tingle. Was the stem now calling for help, or was it just a cry of pain?

  Kepler let go of the piece that was still in the ground. He could take care of that later. First he would analyze t
he sample he’d captured.

  The air in the ship was truly stale. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? He lay the piece of stem on the analyzer. The machine needed about three minutes to examine it. Kepler kneaded his fingers. There was no point climbing back outside for such a short time. The results would be available soon.

  The analyzer reported that its work was finished. Kepler lay back in his seat and displayed the results on the main screen. This life form was carbon-based. That wasn’t surprising. Humans had so far found only carbon-based life. Starches, proteins, sugar. The connections were similar to terrestrial life. He could even make a salad out of the stems and be able to tolerate it. Other than that, there were a few essential oils that were similar to camphor. So a stem salad wouldn’t taste particularly good. But the oils could be removed by heating.

  He switched to the structural data. In this respect, there were no longer any parallels to terrestrial life. The same organic molecules the stem was made of existed in his body, but they were bound together in a completely different way here. For example, there was no recognizable cellular structure. Sure, there were functional units. The outside of the stem was covered in tiny power plants that converted sunlight into energy. The molecules here were similar to the chlorophyll in terrestrial plants.

  But there were other units in which ring molecules were duplicated. Kepler would have bet on them being responsible for the stability of the stem. But the various components weren’t discrete. There were no cell walls that had to be overcome to transport matter or energy. That probably made this creature more efficient. Perhaps that was how it was able to assert itself above the competition that had doubtless once existed—cooperation instead of conflict. Kepler imagined the distant ancestors of the grass stems coming together at some point and discovering that they harmonized perfectly with one another. This planet appeared to be some kind of primitive paradise.