The Dark Spring: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  The buzzer on his belt vibrated. That must be Jenna. KK had bought them all unlimited data transmission so that they could communicate with Earth at any time. He encouraged them to. He wanted as many people as possible to hear about the voyage. There was a 30-minute live stream every day on the website set up especially for the flight. Brandon wasn’t quite sure of its purpose.

  But the difference between the two of them was that KK wanted to prepare humanity for its role as a space-traveling civilization—a noble vision. Brandon simply wanted to sell more stories about people in space.

  The buzzer vibrated again. He’d been daydreaming once more. Brandon pushed off from the hatch and drifted back to his seat. He unclipped the Kleenex-sized communicator from its bracket and selected Jenna’s number.

  His girlfriend answered.

  “Oh, there you are. Were you asleep?”

  She was breathing fast. He could see blue sky behind her. He ignored her question—that was never a problem with Jenna.

  “Are you on your bike?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Great weather today. I’m meeting a friend at the reservoir. And you?”

  Brandon swiveled the communicator so that the camera provided a view of the cabin. Then he pushed himself backward and floated across the room.

  “Whoa, it makes me dizzy just watching.”

  He reached the outer wall and held the camera up to one of the portholes.

  “Ah, the SS2. The biggest gas tank in the world,” said Jenna.

  She might be right—9 meters in diameter, 50 meters long, 1,250 tons of fuel.

  “How long have you been refueling?” Jenna asked.

  “About two hours.”

  “Are you still bored?”

  “Kind of. But the painter isn’t as bad as I thought.”

  Sophie seemed to be the only person on board with whom he could have long conversations because she was genuinely interested in physics. He hadn’t expected that.

  “Brandon.”

  “Sorry.” Jenna was one of the few people who noticed when he drifted off.

  “Call me again before you leave orbit.”

  “I will. Have fun at the reservoir.”

  “Dear friends,” said KK a few hours later, “while we’re waiting for the SS2 to refuel us, I’d like to talk to you about the next few days.”

  “Just a moment,” said Vyacheslav. “There’s something else first.” KK straightened his glasses and looked around in irritation. “Yunus, please,” said the Belarusian.

  Yunus reached under his seat. Something crackled. Then a bouquet of flowers appeared, wrapped in cellophane. “Voilà,” said Yunus, giving the bouquet a nudge.

  The flowers sailed toward KK. He caught them and smiled.

  “On behalf of our group, I’d like to express our heartfelt thanks for the invitation to be here,” said Vyacheslav.

  Brandon was surprised. They hadn’t let him in on it. But he didn’t care and just played along.

  “We’re hoping for a creative voyage,” said Yunus, “that allows us to bring back inspiration to those who had to stay behind.”

  Blah, blah, blah. This trip would have achieved more for humanity if KK had donated the money to UNICEF. But Brandon wasn’t complaining. After all, he’d soon be among the few people who’d seen the dark side of the moon—although the club would lose its exclusivity with the expansion of the Lunar Gateway. A few days earlier, another human-crewed Orion capsule had docked at the moon station.

  “Thank you very much, friends,” said KK. “What a nice surprise. But now, about our plan. As you know, we’ll be underway for about five days altogether. That hasn’t changed.”

  That hasn’t changed? Did that mean something else had? Did it have to? Brandon hated when plans changed. His neck muscles tensed.

  “You may have wondered why we’ve been fully fueled. We don’t need that much fuel for a single orbit of the moon. But we do for two orbits.”

  Vyacheslav and Yunus applauded. Okay, two orbits around the moon instead of one, that was a change he could live with. Brandon relaxed.

  “And why are we flying twice around the moon?” continued KK. “It has to do with the contents of our cargo bay. I managed to buy one of Blue Destination’s two moon landers.”

  Well, wasn’t that something? Blue Destination—James Bonner’s space exploration company—was the fiercest competitor of Ihab Chatterjee, whose company had built SpaceShip 1 and SapceShip 2. The news that an Alpha Omega ship was transporting one of Blue Destination’s landers was enough to upset the global stock exchange. Blue Destination had sold the second lander to NASA. It was still waiting to be transported to the Lunar Gateway.

  “Unfortunately, I have to ask you not to pass on this information. I’m sure you wouldn’t dream of it, but for the sake of transparency, I must point out that if you do, you risk a contractual penalty equal to the ticket price.”

  That was why KK had only promised to cover their tickets contingent upon a successful landing. If someone didn’t dance to his tune, he could send them a bill for a few million dollars at any time.

  “We’ll use the lander when we reach the far side of the moon. What we’ll use it for is clear from the name. Not all of us will be able to land. I’ll let you know, in good time, who I’d like to have with me for the moon landing.”

  KK was keeping them on their toes. Yunus had probably gotten wind of it earlier, and that was why he’d procured the flowers. They could all kiss ass. Brandon had signed up for a comfortable circumnavigation, not an adventure. He’d even preferred to explore the Grand Canyon from a helicopter rather than a donkey.

  “No one has to fly with me to the surface, of course,” said KK. “If necessary, I can perform the descent on my own. Like the spaceship, the lander is fully automated. But I’d also be pleased to make use of the three spaces available to us.”

  “I’d like to go,” cried Sophie.

  Brandon looked at her. She was serious.

  “You can count me in,” said Yunus.

  “Please add my name to the lottery, too,” said Emily.

  Did they really think KK hadn’t already decided?

  “Then you have enough candidates,” said Vyacheslav.

  Oh, that sounded like a refusal.

  “What’s wrong?” asked KK.

  “I’m concerned about my fingers. You’ll probably want to disembark. That’s too much of a risk for me.”

  “I understand,” said Kenichi. “And you, Brandon?”

  “I’d rather stay on board the ship.”

  “But don’t you want to experience just once what it’s like walking around in the moon’s low gravity? You described it so vividly in your novel.”

  “And I don’t need to land on the moon to do that. It’s enough to know the physical characteristics of the environment and the protagonists. The rest develops from there.”

  “What about imagination?” asked Sophie. “Where does that come into it?”

  “I don’t have any imagination. Imagination is damaging, because it leads to illogical treatment.”

  “Supposing you wanted to write about a painter on board a spaceship.”

  “Then my protagonist would behave according to the psychological and physical attributes I assigned her.”

  “And that makes for an exciting novel?”

  That was the question he always asked himself. Maybe it had to do with the satisfaction that people felt when all the cogs in a complex machine meshed. Wasn’t a frictionless process also exciting, even if you could predict the end?

  “Brandon?” said Sophie.

  “Sorry. The answer is yes.”

  August 21, 2026 – TU Darmstadt

  “This looks good,” said Sylvia.

  She ran her finger down the list Karl had put in front of her. She stopped around the middle.

  “The Θ+ looks good with its 1540 MeV per c2,” she said.

  “It’s not confirmed yet, though,” said Karl.

  “Which ones a
re confirmed?”

  Karl pushed her finger further down the list. “These two, for example.”

  “P+c (4380) and P+c (4450)—those are much too heavy,” said Sylvia.

  The mass of a multi-quark expressed in mega-electron volts per square of the speed of light was listed in brackets after the name.

  “Then maybe we need to look at the hexaquarks,” said Karl.

  “Or the heavy tetraquarks.”

  “Then the only confirmed variants I can offer you are the Zc(3900) and the Z(4430), both definitely too heavy.”

  “Why didn’t you just say straight off that you have a favorite?” asked Sylvia.

  Because then you would have tried to find an argument against it, thought Karl, but said nothing.

  “Oh, I see,” said Sylvia. “You were afraid I’d try to talk you out of it. I admit it, I would. But only in order to strengthen your argumentation with counter questions, which someone else would pose if I didn’t.”

  At least she admitted it. Still, it would be nice not to have every new idea contradicted immediately. It was a challenging field. It was best not to work with someone you were in a relationship with, or used to be. It made it difficult to separate the personal from the professional.

  “Am I right?” asked Sylvia. “Come on... Say it.”

  “My favorite, as you call it, is the hexaquark d*(2380). You can find all its properties in these lines down here.”

  Sylvia scanned the text. “But d*(2380) is supposed to consist of three up and three down quarks. That results in an electrical charge of one. And it’s a little too heavy. Do you think there are errors in Philae’s measurements?”

  “In principle, that’s possible. But I think it’s more likely that the electrical charge rules it out. The alpha particle has two positive charges, the hexaquark, only one. In the case of an elastic collision, which the Coulomb repulsive force would also contribute to, of course, the alpha appears relatively heavier and the hexaquark lighter. So what we’ve derived from the spectrum of the reflected alphas is an insufficient mass for our unknown substance.”

  “Very interesting, Karl. Although I still see entries here that fit better with the data we have.”

  “They’re all as yet unconfirmed multi-quarks.”

  “I know. But couldn’t it just be that they haven’t been discovered before because no one’s ever looked for them?”

  “Hmm. There was a real boom in the search for exotic hadrons in the early 2000s. At the time, they used the big accelerators to scan for everything that was within their energetic range—with no results. But they could have overlooked something.”

  “But?” asked Sylvia.

  “But they could have overlooked something.”

  “No. I mean, what’s the catch? Your last sentence made me think I’d missed something important.”

  “You haven’t. We simply haven’t looked at all the data yet.”

  “Yes, I think we have.”

  Sylvia went through the entire table one more time and read out the column names. “Mass, spin, charge, isospin, strangeness, hypercharge—”

  “The property I’m talking about,” he interrupted, “isn’t a quantum number, it’s a statistical size.”

  She slapped her hand to her forehead. “Of course! The CIVA photos! I’d completely forgotten about them. The substance must be quite cold.”

  “Quite cold sums it up,” said Karl. “That’s why I’m so interested in d*(2380). It has a whole number spin, so it’s a boson. As such, it can form a Bose-Einstein condensate with many of its siblings, and that would energetically default to its absolute base state. So, the temperature is zero. That also makes it a candidate for dark matter. If lots of those kinds of hexaquarks existed soon after the Big Bang, they could have formed giant oceans, seas, and rivers in the universe, which only interact with normal matter through mass attraction.”

  “That’s a great idea,” said Sylvia. “If we can show evidence of the structure of dark matter, the Nobel Prize is ours.”

  “Slow down. We were just trying to find a plausible candidate for our paper.”

  “I think you’ve succeeded in doing that, Karl. Philae appears to be a real lucky charm. Our lander is sending us messages directly from a dark spring!”

  “Am I interrupting?” asked Karl.

  He stood in the doorway to Sylvia’s office. She was talking to Piras, who was standing in front of her desk.

  The professor turned around. “We were finished, anyway,” he said. “You’ll deliver the text to me this evening, and I’ll submit it to Science. One of the editors there owes me a favor.”

  “So you think they’ll be able to publish it online?” asked Sylvia.

  “Give them three days.”

  That was almost unheard of for such a renowned journal. It usually took months for external scientists to evaluate a contribution. But there were exceptions.

  “Thanks, Bernhardt,” said Sylvia.

  Oh, so she was on a first-name basis with her boss, but presumably never in public. That meant Karl was part of the family again, if only for work.

  “Come in, Karl,” she said.

  Piras left the room. They nodded at each other as they passed. At that moment, Karl recognized the look in the other man’s eyes. Piras had the hots for Sylvia. Who didn’t?

  “So, what is it?” asked Sylvia.

  “You said something important earlier.”

  “I only say important things.”

  “Ha, ha, that’s my line.”

  “Well, I suppose I learned something from you. Anyway, what did I say? I don’t remember every word.”

  “You mentioned a dark spring.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Something always comes out of a spring. Something that wasn’t there before, or at least something that wasn’t visible.”

  “Correct.”

  “So if there are hexaquarks escaping from it, which weren’t there before, then that should have an impact on the mass of the comet.”

  “Hmm. Under certain circumstances, sure.”

  “The orbit of Churyumov-Gerasimenko would change if its mass changed.”

  “That’s true, Karl. But only if the substance wasn’t already there.”

  “So why didn’t we find it in 2014 and ’15?”

  “Because Philae landed on a spot where it simply wasn’t present?”

  “You mean it could have changed its position on the comet?”

  “In the low gravity there, it would only need a small nudge.”

  “True.”

  “You’re right,” said Sylvia. “We should at least consider it as a possibility.”

  “I could go back through the calculations from back in the day. Maybe we overlooked something in the signals, and we’ll find this isn’t new at all.”

  “Maybe. Wait a minute, please.” She picked up the phone. “Bernd?”

  That must be Professor Piras’s assistant, Bernd Arians. Karl had seen the name on the door to the faculty wing.

  “I need to speak to your boss again briefly.”

  Karl couldn’t hear what the assistant was saying.

  “He must have just come through the door,” said Sylvia.

  Brief pause.

  “Bernhardt, thanks. Just a quick question. Do you know anyone who could check the path of 67P’s orbit for us? Preferably keeping it in-house?”

  Pause.

  “Pity. Thanks, anyway.”

  Sylvia hung up.

  “You heard,” she said.

  “Hmm. We don’t need anything big. It doesn’t have to be the James Webb.”

  “I could ask around the Physics faculty. They have a small, automatic observatory in the clock tower.”

  “It probably wouldn’t give us much, what with the light pollution here.”

  “Then the official channels are our only option,” said Sylvia.

  “Wait.”

  He’d had an intern working with him until a month ago. Dieter, last name beginn
ing with Z. Zitschelwitz? Something like that. He could search through his emails. Dieter had meanwhile taken another internship at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, “I know who I can ask.”

  “I’ll go, then.”

  “Yes. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “Do you know what, Karl?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t even want to think about what could happen if we’re successful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It would mean dark matter is emerging from a comet in the solar system, a process that we can’t even understand, let alone control. Imagine if it continues or even intensifies. Maybe it’s a small tear in the dam of a giant reservoir? If the dam broke, it would throw the gravitational relationships in the solar system into chaos. The planets would leave their orbits. There’d be collisions—”

  “It’s no use worrying about things like that, Sylvia. It’s much more likely we’ve just made a measurement error.”

  Karl had always tried to allay his ex-wife’s fears. But the fact that Sylvia was expressing them at all worried him. And the fact that he didn’t believe his own reassurances frightened him.

  August 21, 2026 – Lunar Gateway

  “Slowly, Daniel.”

  He turned around. Dave was standing in the airlock, waving at him with one hand and holding the safety line in the other. Daniel waved back. He’d trained for this, and it wasn’t his first EVA. Still, everything looked different here. Earth was missing. The moon rotated below them, but it looked dry, cold, and dead. Just like space. Would a human ever feel at home on the moon?

  The HLS—the Human Landing System—loomed in front of him. From his perspective, it looked like the kind of dark tower in which a sorcerer might live. Daniel illuminated the module with his helmet lamp. Higher up, it gleamed gold. That was where the tanks were located for the thruster that would take them to the surface and back to the Gateway. Unlike the Apollo missions, theirs would leave almost no trash behind on the moon.

  Daniel felt for a metal handhold at head height. His fingers closed around it easily, as the new Artemis suits were at least twice as good as the EVA suits on the ISS. You noticed it, especially in such details. He clambered up the tower. Without gravity, he felt like an insect.