Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  With an effort, Sasha refocused on the denial of service attack, trying to contemplate it as an exercise in abstract design. Though Yuri had managed to intrude even on this, Sasha’s own domain, hustling him off before the arrangements could be completed.

  It shouldn’t really matter; Irina Konstantinovna had seemed perfectly competent once she understood what was needed. He pulled out his handheld. It never hurt to check.

  It took him three tries before he got a ring and an answer.

  “Telecommunications, Kuznetsova.”

  “Irina Konstantinovna? Bondarenko. How are things progressing?”

  “Ah, Aleksandr Andreyevich. Things go well. Five minutes ago we set the demon-dialers to begin building traffic on the wireline and wireless switches. Gradually, of course, in order not to arouse suspicion. Even so, you may already have noticed an effect.”

  “Yes, I had to redial several times. I kept getting fast-busy.”

  “Ten minutes more and the trunks will be so overloaded you will not be able to get through at all.”

  By Russian standards, the American telephone system was a miracle of reliability. That did not make it invulnerable. Cost-effectiveness dictated that the networks be engineered to deal with ordinary peak loads, not extraordinary ones. A presidential assassination or a local team’s upset victory or a snowstorm in the Sun Belt—any freak occurrence that prompted everyone to pick up the phone and try calling everyone else—could so swamp the switches that no one could place an outbound call.

  As could enough automatic dialers deliberately tying up all the lines in a given area.

  “And what of the target’s DSL service?” This was to be the piece de resistance’, leeching away the bandwidth from Weathertop’s digital subscriber line.

  “I have hacked into the DSL Access Multiplexer colocated in the Boone Central Office. I have granted myself supervisor status; their DSLAM now belongs to us.”

  “Excellent, excellent.”

  DSL was an access technology that transformed the twisted-pair copper wire of an ordinary analog telephone line into a high-speed multi-megabyte digital conduit, turning a soda straw into a fire hose, so to speak. All that extra bandwidth made possible real-time Internet access, two-way videoconferencing, low-cost virtual private networks, a host of other marvels.

  All that extra bandwidth was the challenge. To seal Weathertop off from the rest of the world, they’d had to find a way to shut down its DSL line.

  The access multiplexer was the key. With DSLAM supervisor privileges, Irina Konstantinovna could run resource-consuming line tests against all subscribers to the service. The more capacity devoted to the spurious tests, the less left over for Weathertop. Yet there would be nothing overt to give the game away at the target site itself, just a gradual attenuating of bandwidth.

  With any luck, it would have the appearance of normal service degradation, ending in total outage.

  “Is there anything else, Aleksandr Andreyevich?”

  “No, Irina. You have authorization to go for totality. Prepare to initiate full Denial of Service in twelve minutes.”

  Sasha smiled as he hung up. Such an elegant plan. Its elegance totally lost on that thug, Yuri. Ironically, the one best able to understand Sasha’s accomplishment here today was the one who would shortly fall victim to it. Dzhon, with all his years of consulting to the telecommunications industry, would surely appreciate how cunningly he had been trapped.

  Sasha made a mental note to tell his friend all about it once this was all over.

  Provided Dzhon survived.

  34 | Spin Doctor

  JACK ADLER LEANED back in his chair and studied the image filling his computer screen. “Well, that puts a different spin on things,” he said, then chuckled at his own small joke.

  When no one joined him, he explained, “They’re rotating it, see?” He moved the cursor to the readout showing Vurdalak’s rate of spin. Its ever-increasing rate of spin.

  It had taken Mycroft another quarter hour to reverse-engineer the telemetry signals coming in from Antipode Station by way of the bugged LAN in Rusalka’s secret lab, but it was well worth the wait. Somewhere in the images now flowing in lay the answer to their mystery.

  They had already downloaded a time-compressed recording of the capture and watched as Armageddon Phases One, Two, and Three played out in edge-of-the-seat half-second increments. The last vestiges of doubt were gone now: Grishin had Vurdalak. And the containment configuration looked stable, thank God! More than stable; its simple, elegant metastability was a work of art. Jack would have liked to shake the designer by his hand.

  Her hand, rather—a Dr. Galina Postrel’nikova.

  But that was old news. What they were watching now was the late-breaking story: a real-time schematic showing Vurdalak being spun ever faster, as part of something called Phase Four.

  “What’s speeding it up, Jack?” Jon asked.

  “Good question.” Jack peered again at the cutaway diagram of Antipode’s containment chamber being transshipped to him from Weathertop.

  “There,” he said, “see the particle beams? With room-temperature superconductivity, you could build a linear accelerator to put Brookhaven’s Heavy Ion Collider to shame. Not just protons, but whole atomic nuclei, boosted close as you like to lightspeed. And the closer you get to c, the more the mass increases. Think of a continuous beam of particles, each with an energy hundreds or thousands of times its rest mass. Individually, their momentum is tiny compared to Vurdalak’s inertia, but collectively they pack one hell of a punch.”

  “But why? Why run the risk of destabilizing it like that?”

  Why indeed? Jack leaned back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head, and gazed off into the middle distance. He passed perhaps thirty seconds that way, sifting through the possibilities. Then he sat bolt upright. “Oh, now, wait a minute.”

  “What is it, Jack?” Marianna said. “What’ve you got?”

  “The difference in scales had me going there for a minute, but this is one of those times size doesn’t matter. The spin’s the giveaway: they’re trying to turn your Vurdalak into a SEKO.”

  “Lot of trouble to go to for a Japanese watch,” Jon said.

  “Huh? Oh, no, not a Seiko—an S-E-K-O: a Super-Extreme Kerr Object. Kerr-Newman Object, to be precise.”

  “You’ve lost me.” It was Jon doing the talking, but he wasn’t alone; all their faces wore some variant of that puzzled look. Well, maybe not Mycroft’s.

  Jack thought a moment, then said “Okay, let’s step back and start over. Do any of you know what a singularity is?”

  “It comes in sight now, Dr. Postrel’nikova,” the pilot said as Navtilus began to level off.

  Galina walked to the bathyscaphe’s forward viewport. Strange, she had anticipated this descent into the abyss with utmost trepidation, yet now there was only room in her for awe.

  At first she could make out nothing but darkness through the centimeters-thick Plexiglas. Then Navtilus’s floods were playing over the upper slopes of Mount Nadyezhda. Ellipses of wan light illuminated acres of surrealism: a ring of colossal trapezoids jutted upright out of the flattened summit like bony plates on the back of a stegosaurus designed by Salvador Dali—Antipode’s radiator fins.

  The pilot swung the bathyscaphe hard a-port, steering clear of the turbulent updrafts spawned by the release of so much waste heat into the near-freezing water. Steering clear, too, of the shoals of bathypelagic monstrosities attracted by the warmth of the convection currents. Galina craned for a glimpse of the weird sealife, caught only dimly limned amorphousness.

  She refocused her attention on the radiator array as the ’scaphe skirted its base. Now she could see where the great fins tapered into the heat pipes that formed the heart of Antipode Station’s cooling system.

  Those heat pipes . . . a stroke of genius, really: maintenance-free, quadruply redundant, no moving parts to break or wear. All that from a simple double tube filled with a liquid-metal e
utectic. The refrigeration cycle started hundreds of meters below in Antipode’s containment chamber, where liquid metal circulated between the inner and outer walls of the spherical heat shield surrounding Vurdalak. The PBH’s radiation heated the coolant to its high-temperature boiling point, and the resulting pressure gradient forced the vapor all the way up the heat pipes to the fins, where it cooled and condensed back into liquid form for the return trip to the evaporator. Not only did the eutectic fluid dump Vurdalak’s excess thermal output into the enormous heat sink of the North Atlantic, it was an efficient absorber of gamma rays, too, lessening the need for radiation shielding in the human-occupied areas of Antipode Station.

  A real Russian solution, Galina thought with quiet pride. Simple, robust, one more example of her countrymen’s unparalleled talent for making do. The old adage said it all: “if you’ve no plow, you’d best furrow with a stick.”

  Of course, the Americans, in their high-tech arrogance, would have derided such an approach as “brute force and awkwardness.” Worse, a roobgoldberg. So little they understood the satisfaction that came from solving a problem, not by simply throwing microchips at it, but by creatively exploiting circumstance, scarce resources, and available technology.

  Navtilus continued her slow descent down the rugged north face of the seamount. The ovoids of light from her spots were now rippling across a myriad of bulbous lava pillows marring Nadyezhda’s complexion and betraying its ancient origins. Born on the active volcanic axis of the North Atlantic Ridge, the mountain had crept many kilometers to the west over the course of millennia, as tectonics gradually ratcheted the seabed apart. And that was a good thing; engineering Antipode Station had been challenge enough as it was without the additional complication of having to buttress the facility against the eruptions that periodically shook the rift proper.

  But even if Nadyezhda had been closer to the midocean rift valley, its unique topography would have made it hard to pass up. The sheer drop-off on its southeastern side in particular had afforded an ideal site for the braking train: it had been possible to install the last kilometer and a half of the train’s superconductor deceleration rings with no excavation whatsoever.

  Navtilus s spotlights were already picking up all that remained of the last few links in that chain: a wrack of shattered, contorted toroids littering the cliffside below. Rest in peace, Galina bade these warped and silent sentinels. You have done your work. Now I go to do mine.

  Yet the nature of that work was shifting under her. She had seen the Antipode Project as her gift to the world, harnessing a dread threat in the service of all humankind. It was only in the early morning hours following Vurdalak’s capture that Arkady Grigoriyevich had explained—had argued, had cajoled, in their marathon tete-a-tete—that Russia’s own needs must come first.

  For, known only to Grishin’s inner circle until a scant forty hours ago, there was a secret within the secret: Vurdalak could alter Russia’s destiny! Its spin-up to relativistic speeds would open a doorway to some as-yet undisclosed turning point from which their suffering motherland might take a new and different path into the future.

  Well, and what of it? Why should Russia not reassume her former greatness, reclaim her rightful place in the council of nations? It was high time she ceased being the lapdog of the Americans, as Arkady Grigoriyevich had said.—As Arkasha had said, Galina corrected herself, reliving that surge of pride she had felt when he’d first asked her, in view of their new and closer working relationship, to address him with the familiarity, the collegiality connoted by the diminutive.

  And hadn’t the main thing already been accomplished, after all? Vurdalak’s fangs had been drawn. It hung caged and confined within her electromagnetic web, never again to break free. The world would go on, the planet would continue to bear its precious freight of humanity through the starry night, forward into the far future.

  She, Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova, had saved it for—had bequeathed it to—the children.

  The silence of the deep was broken by the variable rumble and whine of Navtilus‘s engines and the metronomic pinging of sonar sweeps as the pilot maneuvered in toward the main airlock. A few more minute adjustments, then he cut power and let the bathyscaphe drift the final few centimeters into its socketed berth. A muted clunk resounded throughout the cabin. They had arrived at Antipode Station. Galina was home!

  “A singularity?” Though the quasi-mysticism of quantum mechanics had always held first claim on Knox’s imagination, the pseudo-paradoxes of relativistic physics ran a close second.

  And he was pretty sure “singularity” rang a bell. “It’s this thing at the center of a black hole, isn’t it? The rabbit hole all the mass disappears down. A point of infinite density and infinite gravity, a place where the laws of physics break down.”

  “Close enough for government work,” Jack said. “And, yeah, those infinities are a bitch. All kinds of strange things happen in an infinite gravity field, things us physicists would as soon not deal with.

  Fortunately, we don’t have to; black holes just naturally wall themselves off from the rest of the universe. It’s called an event horizon.”

  “That’s like the cosmic point of no return, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Once you’re in past the horizon, the hole’s pull gets so strong not even light can escape. That means nothing can—no material body and no coherent information, either. And that’s a good thing. It means no matter how weird things get down at the singularity, none of that weirdness can ever reach out and pollute the universe at large.” Another time, Knox could’ve talked about this stuff all day. But the clock was ticking on Operation Tsunami. “Uh, Jack? We’re still waiting to hear how all this ties in with what Grishin’s up to.”

  “Getting there. See, the thing about event horizons is, they’re not some sort of physical barrier. All they really are is a fancy piece of spacetime geometry. That suggest anything to you?”

  Mycroft jumped in before Knox could open his mouth to say no. “You imply there might be other geometries where an event horizon never forms. Or forms, but does not persist.”

  “Uh-huh. Resulting in what we call a naked singularity—a singularity without an event horizon to hide behind, accessible from anywhere in the universe.”

  Jack frowned. “Now, a lot of physicists don’t believe that could ever happen. Steve Hawking has declared naked singularities to be anathema. Roger Penrose goes one him better with his “Cosmic Censorship Conjecture”—claims nature herself forbids a singularity from exposing itself in public.”

  “Why worry about it, if it’s impossible?” Knox asked.

  “Who says it’s impossible? Conjecture’s just a fancy word for guess. And Roger’s guess hasn’t been doing too well lately. Matt Choptuik found the first stellar-collapse configuration leading to full-frontal singularity way back in ’96. Since then seems like somebody comes up with a new one every year or so. It’s looking like the cosmic censors are whistling in the dark.”

  Jack made a sound somewhere between a snort and a sigh. “Still, I know where they’re coming from. As a group, us physicists’ve got a lot riding on the proposition that the cosmos is mostly a nice, dull, predictable place. So this is pretty scary stuff. Because if naked singularities are possible, there’s no way to quarantine the madness.”

  “And yet you think Grishin is trying to create one of these . . . things?” Marianna asked.

  “Sure looks it. Leastways it’s the only reason I can figure to boost the hole’s spin.”

  Knox was almost afraid to ask. “How’s that, Jack?”

  “Here, let me show you. Mycroft, could you load my SEKO-1 simulation? Thanks.”

  The window that had held Jack’s lecture animations blanked briefly, then filled with an image of a matte-black spheroid. Longitudinal reference lines superimposed on its surface showed it was spinning at a furious pace.

  “A Kerr Object is just a rotating black hole, like you see here. Spin her up to the speed of l
ight and you get an Extreme Kerr Object.”

  As Jack spoke, the spin increased to where the white reference lines and the black of the simulated hole itself merged into a uniform gray.

  “Now, if we could give her one more nudge, so she’s rotating faster than the speed of light, we’d get a Super Extreme Kerr Object—a SEKO. At that point, the event horizon just plain evaporates and leaves the singularity behind.” Jack flashed a quick grin. “That’s a big if though. In the real world nothing beats lightspeed. 299,792 kilometers per second—it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”

  “Sounds like this is a dead end too, then.” Marianna put in.

  “Hold your horses; we’re not done yet. Not if we can magically reduce the mass just a tad.”

  A small twinkling object spiraled into the wildly gyrating hole. As it hit, the horizon shimmered and froze. Then it was gone. Knox strained to see what was left behind, but a blinking question mark interposed itself, blocking off whatever the horizon’s annihilation had revealed.

  Jack grinned. “Naked singularity city! And we didn’t have to break the lightspeed barrier to do it.”

  The question mark was still blinking.

  “That pretty much concludes the science portion of our program,” Jack said. “You’re all probably wondering what’s behind the question mark. Me, too. Unfortunately, the simulator halts as soon as the infinities start cropping up. Anything beyond this point would be wild-eyed speculation. I’ve got a canned lecture on that, too, if you’re interested.”

  “What was that thing at the end there?” Knox asked. “The magic part, I mean.”

  “Exotic matter, maybe. Something with an average negative energy density, anyway.”

  “Exotic? And you think Grishin’s got hold of some?”

  “Okay, okay, you got me—I don’t really know how they plan to do it. But the thing you’ve got to understand about black holes is, they’re really simple objects: there just isn’t that much you can do with them. And given what Grishin is doing, a naked singularity’s just about the only thing he could be shooting for.”