The Hole

by Brandon Q Morris

  “He hit me! Shit, shit!” came through the radio in Russian, a male voice. That had to be one of the guards. How had they noticed him?

  “Your own bloody fault, idiot, I told you not to approach from that side,” said a second voice. Was that the other guard? Wouldn’t he run to help his colleague? The first man would die otherwise, no doubt, Artem thought.

  But the second guard wasn’t so stupid. He probably figured out he would be shot then, too. Or not? Indeed, there was a second person showing up next to the shot guard. Artem was lifting his arm to take aim when he got a hard kick against his elbow. He managed not to drop the weapon. At the same time somebody grabbed him around the neck. Couldn’t be the kicker, so I must be up against four. Has RB been ramping up security? And I haven’t noticed anything?

  “My partner is aiming at your head,” said a new voice. It didn’t sound like a bluff, but he wasn’t intimidated and kept aiming at the second man. His suit ramped up the ventilation as he was sweating profusely now. His mind raced. What are my options? Should I give up? I don’t think they’ll let me live. Shouldn’t I at least take one of them along with me?

  “Don’t you dare,” said the last voice, “or we’ll take the helmet off your little pet here.”

  A man in a brand-new RB spacesuit stepped into his view and brushed Artem’s weapon hand aside in a careless move. He had Sobachka stuck under his arm.

  “Should I? She would probably look real sweet yapping for air.”

  Artem released the weapon. It sailed away in slow motion.

  “I give up!” he yelled.

  “That’s very wise. Maybe we let your dog live that way. However,” the guard said in an ominous tone, “the Chinese cook on board has asked us for fresh meat so many times now…”

  “You son of a bitch! You thug!” burst out of Artem.

  “Hey, take it easy, Artjom. The villain here is you.”

  “Artem, you Russian asshole, it’s Artem. I am Ukrainian.”

  “Isn’t that the same, Artjom? I’ll call you what I choose. Be glad I don’t call you a piece of shit—I am well educated after all.”

  Artem tried to twist out of the grip of the man who was holding him from behind, but with no luck. The other guy, who still was holding Sobachka and seemed to be the boss here, kept coming closer and closer until their helmets met. He had blue eyes, a receding forehead, and the oft-broken nose of a boxer.

  “Nobody steals from RB. That should be clear to you!” he hissed over the radio.

  Suddenly an incredible pain seared through him. Sobachka was his last thought as he lost consciousness.

  October 16, 2071, SS Lenin

  “For the last time, who have you been working with?” The blue-eyed guy waved pliers in front of Artem’s face without getting any reaction.

  “I asked you something!” The man opened the pliers and adjusted them to Artem’s little finger. Then he started to squeeze. Artem tried to pull his hand away, his muscles twitching, but he was strapped down.

  “Alone. I am alone,” burst out of him. He tried not to show it, but the pain was so excruciating tears were running down his face.

  “Indeed you are, Artjom, but that doesn’t answer my question.” The pliers moved to his ring finger. He saw in slow motion how its jaws closed. Then, after a brief delay, pain flashed. The room on board the Russian ship with the outdated name began to waver. Maybe he’d be lucky and lose consciousness. Then somebody poured cold water over him from behind, and that hope vanished. The torture was set to continue.

  “You know, Artjom,” the boxer-guy said in a pretentiously jovial manner, “you must think I am a sadist. But torture is as strenuous for me as it is for you. Really. Can’t we meet halfway? You tell me who buys your wares and I… I let your dog live.”

  Sobachka—they haven’t killed her. The first good news since waking up only to be tortured by this sadist. Warm feelings welled up as he thought about Sobachka. Suddenly the deal didn’t sound bad. He’d give the name of the Chinese trader to whom he sold the rare earths, and Sobachka could join him. The trader wouldn’t be in immediate danger since Russia couldn’t afford trouble with China.

  Artem gave the name.

  “That’s the way!” said the man who was torturing him. He came closer and stroked Artem’s forehead. “You are a good boy, after all, Artjom.”

  “I want a real trial.”

  The man stepped back and looked at him with genuine surprise. “You want to be shot? After all, you killed an innocent man.”

  “I want a fair trial,” said Artem.

  “But we have a far better offer for you. You really impressed the big boss, Artjom. He digs creative work. We need people like you. You work for us in the future. We pay quite well, right guys?”

  The two men left and right of him nodded in unison.

  “And Sobachka?”

  “You can keep the bitch. Where else do you have that option, pets on spacecraft? Only with us.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then you get the trial that you wish for so much. I can assure you that you will end up with a bullet in the head. Our unbribable courts show no mercy for villains of your kind.”

  The man with the blue eyes laughed out loud and the other two chimed in obediently.

  March 24, 2074, Paris

  “Damn doorstep!” Alain Petit held on to the doorframe and complained loudly. Not in spite of being alone in his apartment, but because of it. If his wife were here—instead of resting at the Passy Cemetery—she’d reprimand him. She would tell him to lower his voice because of the neighbors, and because loud rants are improper in the first place. Alain smiled. It had been hard losing her a year and a half ago, but by now he was starting to appreciate his new-found freedom.

  That included fried noodles from the Asian fast-food place, which he had just eaten with a healthy appetite. And it included his hobby, astronomy, for which he no longer had to endure cold nights. He owned a good telescope that had been on the expensive side, and he had even gotten the permission of the landlord to position it under a skylight, but the nights in Paris had become too bright to see any useful details.

  Last year his son had shown him how to move his hobby to the computer. Professional astronomers worldwide had too much on their plates with millions of high-res pictures streaming in from probes all across the solar system. Astronomers were often still busy with a given set of pictures years after the particular probe had already shut down. They had tried to train AIs but the results were far from perfect, especially when it was not clear what one was looking for in the first place. So, astronomers were glad to have the help of hobbyist-researchers.

  Alain dedicated every afternoon to this task, starting after lunch and continuing until it got dark. He would only interrupt his routine for visitors, and grudgingly at that. The software he was using had awarded him with a virtual prize—apparently he was the participant who had analyzed the most images to date.

  His computer greeted him with the familiar startup chime while he settled down. He launched the app developed by an American university and followed the instructions. Some scientists were trying to learn how small sunspots moved across the surface of the sun. To that end, the app kept showing him time-lapsed photography of a particular location.

  His task was to track a specific spot with the mouse. The spot was defined in a first shot of the series at hand. The same set was also shown to other users since the spot was not always clearly defined. Although Alain knew that others were repeating his work, and that he worked on photos others had already processed, his work felt rewarding. In a few months, once the voluntary scientific aides finished their processing, the professional astronomers would use their results in a research report and his work would be part of that. Humanity would have learned something new about the sun.

  Alain leaned back after 30 minutes. It was time to close the curtains a bit to avoid glare on his screen from the afternoon sun. This particular spring was unusually warm, ne
cessitating extra trips to the cemetery to water the flowers he had planted on his wife’s grave. But today he had a day off. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling the pain of rusty joints. Fortunately his eyes were still good except that he needed reading glasses.

  Then he pressed ‘Start.’ Some youngster’s stats had been catching up on him over the past weeks so he couldn’t afford long breaks. His daughter had given him an odd look when he had explained why he could not take his bothersome grandchildren over the weekend. His competitor had to be young judging by the smiley and newfangled codes in his alias. Alain wondered where he might be from. Was it a man, or a woman? A Frenchman like himself? Or maybe an Australian, or even from China or India? Since India had overtaken China in population, that was the most likely answer, he mused.

  Wait. Where did the spot go? Alain squinted. A moment ago it was all clear. To keep conditions constant it was not permitted to zoom into the picture. But his son had installed a software loupe. “So you can read the fine print!” he had said. Alain had laughed at that. He didn’t think he needed a loupe. Now he was glad it was there since he could zoom even although the software lacked the function. He was cheating, that was clear enough, but he felt comfortable because his competitor certainly was at least 30 years younger and so much more efficient.

  The spot remained lost. Alain checked the picture line-by-line and sector-by-sector. He tried to picture how the spot would look under the loupe, but there wasn’t anything even remotely like it. What he did notice was a fine line. He moved the entire window with the picture just to make sure it wasn’t something on his monitor—the line moved along just fine. Was there a scale somewhere? He didn’t find anything on the solar image itself. He rummaged around for the instructions that he had printed out for moments like this. It was in the drawer of his desk. And the number was right there: Every pixel of the image corresponded to ten kilometers in reality. Alain stared at the screen again. Then he used the loupe one more time. It was crystal clear—the line was exactly one pixel thick and if he zoomed in it grew into little blocks.

  Alain had been an engineer all his life. Sometimes, he knew, there were faults in pictures, so-called artefacts, especially if computers had processed the image. Was this an artefact? He flipped forward a few times and stopped at a different picture of the series. He zoomed in again. Any thin lines? He concentrated, squinting again. Nothing. He was disappointed.

  But he wouldn’t give up so quickly. He randomly selected yet another image from the series, enlarged it as far as possible, and then scrutinized it for lines. Nothing. Alain straightened his back, which was letting him know his age once again. One more photo, quick! If he didn’t find anything now he would return to his actual task, the solar spots. No lines in that photo either. It was time to give up. On the other hand… he thought. No. He… had been reasonable all his life. Today he’d give in to folly and look at one more picture. Just one!

  And, there it was—a line, one pixel strong, parallel to the sun’s equator! He had two hits now. That might not be enough to bother a scientist, but it was enough to nudge him to keep looking for more evidence. The sunspots would have to wait, even if his smiley-faced competitor would be overtaking his spot in the rankings.

  Three hours later Alain noticed that he was cold. Small surprise with the window open all that time. He got up and closed it. Night was falling outside so he closed the curtain, too. Then he turned around and looked at his desk, dimly lit by the pale screen light. His wife would have called him to dinner around this time. They would sit opposite each other, facing each other and exchanging thoughts in silence. Alain missed her.

  He shook his head to drive out the memories and returned to his desk. Twelve pictures with lines—a dozen out of maybe 300 pictures he had assessed. That should be enough to get a scientist interested. He opened his email account and dropped a note to the lead scientist of the sunspot project. Before shutting down he quickly checked the leaderboard. His competitor now led him by one point. Alain smiled in recognition of good work. Someday he wanted to meet that man—or was it a woman?

  He powered down his computer. It was time for his evening walk around the block.

  Little could he imagine how that one-pixel-wide line would change his life.

  You can preorder my next novel, Silent Sun, under this link:

  hard-sf.com/links/522762

  Glossary of Acronyms

  AI – Artificial Intelligence

  CERN – Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research)

  CLST – Chile Summer Time

  CTO – Chief Technical Officer

  DLR – Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center)

  ESA – European Space Agency

  ESO – European Southern Observatory

  EU – European Union

  EVA – ExtraVehicular Activity

  FAST – (Chinese) Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope

  HUT – Hard Upper Torso

  IAC – Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands)

  ISC – Intermittent Self-Catheterization

  ΛCDM – Lambda-Cold Dark Matter

  LCVG – Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment

  LHC – Large Hedron Collider

  LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory

  NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  LED – Light Emiting Diode

  MCT – Mars Colonial Transporter

  OGS2 – Optical Ground Station 2 (telescope)

  OWL – OverWhelmingly Large Telescope

  TCS – Telescopio Carlos Sánchez

  UPA – Urine Processor Assembly

  VR – Virtual Reality

  WHC – Waste Hygiene Compartment

  Metric to English Conversions

  It is assumed that by the time the events of this novel take place, the United States will have joined the rest of the world and will be using the International System of Units, the modern form of the metric system.

  Length:

  centimeter = 0.39 inches

  meter = 1.09 yards, or 3.28 feet

  kilometer = 1093.61 yards, or 0.62 miles

  Area:

  square centimeter = 0.16 square inches

  square meter = 1.20 square yards

  square kilometer = 0.39 square miles

  Weight:

  gram = 0.04 ounces

  kilogram = 35.27 ounces, or 2.20 pounds

  Volume:

  liter = 1.06 quarts, or 0.26 gallons

  cubic meter = 35.31 cubic feet, or 1.31 cubic yards

  Temperature:

  To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, multiply by 1.8 and then add 32

  Copyright

  Brandon Q. Morris

  --

  www.hard-sf.com

  brandon@hardsf.com

  Translator: Frank Dietz, Ph.D. Editor: Pamela Bruce, B.S.

  Final editing: Marcia Kwiecinski, A.A.S., and Stephen Kwiecinski, B.S.

  Technical Advisors: Dr. Lutz Hillmann, Hauke Sattler

  Cover design: Haresh R. Makwana