Dead End of a Circle

by David Myhro

  Every living thing, except for me, has some form of a metabolism, every living thing has the ability—at least on the cellular level—to reproduce, and every living thing will eventually die. I could not even have been described as alive on the most basic level—as an open thermal system—because, as my stay in the vault suggested, I could live indefinitely in a closed system as entropy becomes arbitrarily dominant (entropy would not degrade me because I was only one thing and thus not a nontrivial system).

  My natural bodily functions—the few that I had—were fraudulent imitations of genuine human functions. My tears, so I've been told, were made of moisture from the air, although, of course, the reason that my deep emotional anguish could coerce water droplets to coalesce remained a mystery. Why I felt the need to breathe, to take in oxygen and give it right back, to produce the frivolous chemical reaction O2 → O2, was something that I'd been asking myself my whole life.

  My bloodlust was merely a purposeless addiction—unlike my minions of old, I'd never drawn any sustenance from blood; I probably just associated blood with the life force in humanity, and I therefore craved its essence to sustain my own life force because I did not understand that I could have been so different from humanity so as to not have any need for sustenance at all. My ability to turn a human was an art that I had long forgotten due to the madness that I endured in the vault… and to be honest, I found myself wondering more and more if I had really done anything more than just garner loyalty from ordinary, unaltered humans.

  Whatever I was, and whatever unknown processes were at work in ensuring that I was alive, it was certain that I was the absolutely ideal observer. Many millennia-old inventions that were useless without an indestructible operator were now being pushed past the theoretical stage. There were so many things that the humans wanted to see and so many things that they wanted to show me. Among these many things was the time machine, and all parties involved agreed that we would use that one last. The current level of technology wasn't sufficient to create it, but the theoretics of how it would work were sound. It didn't matter, though, because no one was in a hurry to cease my existence. We would examine everything that the universe had to offer, and at the end I would be put forth to solve the last mystery…

  Chapter 35

  It did not occur to them that my first experience of leaving this planet was special to me. Probably every human of this time had been to outer space at least several times, and so they were culturally blinded. Even still, strangely, I think that their casual disposition made my experience all the more thrilling—since there were no others to share in my childlike anticipation of going into outer space, I was left to feel all of it like an overflowing cup.

  Our destination was Jupiter, and we got there in less time than it would take a twenty-first-century international flight to bring you from Los Angeles to London. We were constantly accelerating toward Jupiter until the halfway point, and then we began the constant reverse acceleration; I never got to experience the famous weightlessness of space until we began orbit of the boisterous beast. They allowed me to play around in the zero gravity for a while, and then they had me suited up in my drop gear.

  I was still not perfectly fluent in their language—I suppose that I was lacking in some technical terms—and so it came as somewhat of a surprise when they put me into the airlock and then ejected me into outer space. I wasn't ready for it… I thought that there was going to be more prepping.

  The darkness of space was something that I was unable to appreciate until there was no longer a pane of glass between it and my eyes. And then the darkness got into my lungs. I couldn't breathe, and the suffocating feeling was an extremely terrible one. I had to come to realize in my mind that I didn't actually need to breathe at all.

  And the pressure difference was just as much of a shock on the rest of my body as it was on my lungs—I thought I felt my eyes bulging out of my head, but I knew that such a thing was impossible due to the structure of my body. Despite all of this there wasn't a whole lot going through my mind while I was falling into Jupiter, other than maybe the occasional fear that my drop cable would snap and I'd be lost forever in a sea of metallic hydrogen.

  When I broke through the clouds I was surprised at how cold, dark, and wet it was. I really didn't even expect there to be clouds—I don't know why, but I just assumed that the atmosphere would be ubiquitous and uniform, like an all-encompassing fog. But the clouds were present and they were blanketing the whole sky, which was probably why it was a bit colder and darker underneath them.

  In my mouth were strange new tastes. And the sound was quite loud, louder than anything I'd ever heard, like a million ghosts all whispering at once.

  I was in free fall, and I didn't know how far down the humans planned to drop me. But just as I felt myself starting to panic, they contacted me. That's right—despite the thick clouds and the heavy noise and the ever-increasing pressure, the working parts of my one-way earpiece radio triumphed in delivering me a message from the humans:

  "I want you to touch your fingertip to your nose and see how long you can hold it there."

  And that was all the voice said. I would have asked if they wanted me to recite the alphabet in reverse order as well, but it was a one-way radio and I wouldn't have been able to formulate the question in their language anyway. So I touched my fingertip to the tip of my nose and started counting to infinity.

  Perhaps I shouldn't have been able to do this for very long, considering the ferocious winds that were at play, but the fact is that I was just able to do it. After some time they reeled me back into the ship and asked me specific questions about what I'd experienced. They then gave me some oblong object that I needed to keep hold of while once again falling through the Jovian atmosphere.

  In this manner they kept reeling me back in, collecting testimonial data from me, and giving me objects to hold onto or telling me to do jumping jacks while free falling through Jupiter's clouds. It went on for hours, and I certainly had no complaints because I was the first living creature to perpetually survive unassisted on Jupiter.

  Chapter 36

  Something personal. I needed to see Padempire again because I kept wondering if this was all a dream and if I would wake up. But when I got to the vault, nothing happened. I just felt nothing. That's how I knew it was real. But I already knew it was real—by now I'd been out for centuries, and I had more information in my head than the entire sum of humanity's knowledge in your day.

  Padempire's broken body rested on the floor where they'd left him after disemboweling him with the white fire. The side facing me now was the side I hadn't seen since the days when people were still dying of cancer and heart disease. I just sat down on the filthy floor and stared down at him, unable to think of anything else worthwhile.

  I slipped into a trance; after some time had passed I discovered that I had been, without realizing it, staring into my light source. It was like a solitary star in this palace of darkness.

  Perhaps the reason I came here to visit Padempire was because tomorrow I would be traveling to the stars for the harvest. This moment was possibly among the very last that I'd ever be spending on this planet. Something could go wrong out in deep space, or we could find some other planet of permanent inhabitance. Perhaps we will encounter some abundant source of energy, or we might find a remarkable civilization with wonders yet unseen. There were just so many stars…

  Chapter 37

  After observing and measuring many white dwarf stars with no success, we had finally located one that was just right. It was a solitary star on the fringes of the Orion Arm. We'd found many other white dwarf stars that were more suitable for our aspirations, but the bulk of them were in the galactic halo; we were not sufficiently sophisticated at this point in time to voyage that far.

  Interstellar travel was fairly tedious for us, as the advances of technology over the years first exhausted the limitless wonders of extremely small,
extremely fast computers, and so at this point in time we were not capable of exploring much farther than the reaches of our deepest exoplanet outposts (the limiting factor here was not thrust but rather a finitely renewable environment to harbor human life).

  We calculated that the dwarf star was in the perfect temperature range for the tools that I would be bringing to its surface (taking into account, of course, the immense pressure differences above and below the well-defined surface of the shining dead star). The temperature of a white dwarf is typically a function of its age since these dead stars deplete their heat supply with no way of renewing it, and so we had to find a star that was of the perfect age—it needed to be hot enough to create a desired effect in our tools, but not so hot that the tools would helplessly melt. The star's rotational speed—the single most important factor—was ideal: the more compact dead stars, such as black holes and neutron stars, have extremely fast rotational speeds on account of the fact that angular momentum is conserved during their explosive stellar deaths, but white dwarf stars typically spin very slowly; we needed a white dwarf star with a curiously high rotational speed. This was because the strength of a star's magnetic field is related to its rotational speed, and we had necessary applications that could not be possible without a strong enough magnetic field. At the same time, the rotational speed could not be too high: if I was going to be submerged in the solid substance of the star, then the ship (to which I would be tethered, just like in the practice runs on Jupiter) will need to be traveling fast enough to keep up with the star's rotation while simultaneously thrusting upward to prevent the escape of orbit. The window of acceptable rotational speed was thus quite small.

  Upon discovery of our perfect white dwarf star we left the blue planet. After a bit of interstellar travel we had to dock our deep-space vessel at the station closest to the star and there make modifications to create a new degenerate-matter extraction vessel.

  The extraction vessel was brutal to human life. Since it was completely impossible to protect the humans from the intense radiation that will engulf the ship at such close proximity to the shining dead star, it was decided that no resources whatsoever would be devoted to such an endeavor. Thus, aside from having no radiation protection while traveling even through the docile parts of space, the crew would be cooked from the inside while in close orbit of the white dwarf; the solution, as I'm sure you'd surmise, was simply to have machines constantly healing every member of the crew.

  With all of this punishment being inflicted upon the humans, you might anticipate that the payoff would be vast. But that is not the way humanity was in these days. Remember that there was no longer such a thing as money. There was no longer the need to benefit in some kind of material way from doing something. We were going to this star for the purpose of collecting a sample, but there was really nothing to analyze or experiment on because we already knew everything there was to know about the substance. This was just some kind of scientific conquest for the sake of doing it.

  It was necessary to collect and trap the electron-degenerate matter in a strong container because otherwise the degenerate matter would explode, becoming corrupt and worthless (not to mention the fact that it would destroy the ship). The abnormally high pressure that only a retired star can provide is what's necessary to generate and maintain the matter's strange state of energy, and this pressure will be so immense that even our most advanced artificial crystal, reinforced with efficient shaping, could only withstand the external pressure for a few seconds. That is, the container—I'll describe this shortly—was designed to hold pressure internally, but not externally, and so the extraction could be successful as long as the container wouldn't be exposed to the vast ocean of degenerate matter for more than a few seconds.

  And so I was going to be placed upon the surface of a white dwarf star, and I can already hear your objections. We can civilly agree, I'm sure, that the active and hot stars could not be approached and that complex technology could not be brought beyond the corona. And just as the heat is the problem in approaching an active star, a reasonable objection is that gravity is the problem in approaching a dead star—the gravity at the surface will be so strong that atoms will be shattered, and an object falling to the surface would be super-accelerated so fast that you'd have to use Einstein's physics, rather than Newton's, to track it.

  Suppose, however, that we could soften the impact. Would you then find it reasonable to believe that an object—a very special object—could survive for a few seconds on or beneath the surface? Would you believe that this could be done if the object was a cylinder, simple and strong in structure, made from a new kind of artificial crystal—something similar to diamond, except that it could, with respect to the alignment of the molecules, withstand trillions of times more pressure—along with a cork of similar, but weaker, material that would, after slight melting from the surface temperatures of the star, fit into the mouth of the container and then solidify into a perfect seal?

  I have seen the tech and I know it can be done. The humans saw to it with tireless engineering. As for me, I had very little to worry about because the humans had taken care of the trivialities of drop depth, drag speed, charge of my drop cable, and evasion of irregular temperature spots on the stellar surface. I literally had to do nothing but be the bolt holding everything together—there was no responsibility given to me because I would be completely powerless to move on my own accord, unable to resist the gravity even one bit.

  Perhaps worthy of note is that, due to relativity, a few seconds on my clock or a few inches on my ruler would not correlate to the same amount of seconds or inches for the humans in the extraction vessel, and so it was a bit complicated to compute the tensions that would be applied to the drop cable; in fact, due to this and several other factors, the drop cable that we were using was so difficult to design that it was probably far more an advanced piece of technology than anything your grandchildren could ever hope to see.

  Equally impressive were the aforementioned cork and container that would be provided for me. The crystalline objects will be formed around my hands, since I'll, of course, have no hope of manually holding onto them, and they will be appropriately oriented considering all of the different forces that will be acting upon my arms. Among these forces will be the effects of the super magnets embedded in each of the objects, super magnets that were going to be activated by a charge sent to my person via the drop cable (being of one particle I, like distilled water, cannot conduct electricity, but the impurities all over my body will suffice for this). This would hopefully create the attraction necessary to power through the material of the star, plugging the container with the cork and allowing the slight melting of the cork to create the desired seal.

  With regards to the impact event, I will land toes first. Of course, as I slit through the surface there will be a rush of degenerate matter attempting to obliterate the precious crystalline tools in my hands; this, not being unanticipated, was accounted for in the design of the two simple tools, and there was a level of tolerance to instantaneous, extreme external pressure. The main places that made the tools vulnerable to fracture were the handhold regions where my hands would be encased in them; however, there would not be any shockwave traveling through me to shatter my crystalline tools on account of the fortunate fact that I was made of only one particle.

  I had to be submerged because I would have absolutely no control over my extremities in the star's environment, as I mentioned already, and bending over to scoop up some degenerate matter was absolutely out of the question. But how were they going to get me back out after dunking me in? It seems like I will be a bit like the sword in the stone. But by countering the gravity with a charged drop cable I will ride the magnetic field of the compact star, essentially turning the star sideways so that the net forces are pushing me orthogonally to a ray coming out from the star's core; the extraction will be much easier if gravity is partially negated in this fashion. After I'
m free from the material of the white dwarf, we will simply use the cable's tension to finish reeling me back up.

  There were, of course, many other variables to keep track of as well, and we had to keep the margin of error on each one smaller than how small we were in relation to the star; despite all of these things, I had tremendous faith in the humans because of all the wonders that I'd seen on Earth.

  Chapter 38

  I was tethered to the ship via my drop cable. It was knotted around my neck in a simple noose—perhaps not very elegant but nevertheless quite effective, seeing as how there is no other chokepoint on an indestructible human body that can more readily guarantee a perfect grasp. Then they gave me my final bits of instruction, and out I went.

  I had been offered, out of courtesy, a visor device that would shield my eyes to the point that I could clearly see the surface structures of the star during my descent. The visor would, of course, be destroyed upon impact.

  While in free fall I gazed upon the photosphere of the star, and the device worked perfectly. Directly below me it was a blinding blur, but off into the distance I could see a vast, well-defined ocean of something like liquid marble. And that ocean… it moved like a pit of serpents… it was like it was a solid, but yet it moved like a liquid.

  As I got much closer the intensity of the star became all the more apparent, and after my shielded eyes adjusted to the brightness I was able to distinguish more surface features of the star. There were networks of slim rivers of bright light all over the erratic surface, as if they were tiny cracks with hope-white light coming out to the heavens like a prayer.

  I was soon encompassed by one of those rivers, and it spanned farther than my eyes could see. It was at this point that the gravity became extremely dominant upon my center of mass, and I felt all crushed-like in the intuition area of my gut. Then the horizon swallowed the sky, and then it swallowed me.