Piece by Piece | Ultimate SciFi Smack Down [✓]

[R3] The Fracture That Contained Infinity

The fracture was incomprehensibly massive. The gash was V-shaped, as if a giant had taken a razor blade to reality and torn a laceration through space. And it glowed, gently, with the colors of a sunset, orange-red spilling over purple.

Our mission aboard Atropos: map the anomaly.

It had taken us five years to reach it while we did other science stuff en route, but it was worth it. For five years, we'd watched the fracture grow in the distance from a faint point into a glowing behemoth.

Now we were three light-minutes from the anomaly. My cat and I admired the monolith from our starboard quarters, which took up the entire view. It reminded me of an acrylic pour painting.

My Siamese cat, Mitzi, who usually loved space, hissed out the window. She poofed up and zipped around my quarters, as if to find an escape.

"Whatcha doin', ya silly goose?" I said.

Three seconds later, the ship shuddered under my feet. It groaned with a horrible, deep metallic sound so loud that I could feel the vibration in my chest. I covered my ears. My poor cat. I'd never heard something so loud in space before.

I ran to the main area of our ship, where everyone was scrambling around, trying to keep the ship in one piece. The entire ship vibrated so hard I could see it. Emergency sirens blared, which was unnecessary.

Technicians yelled information at the captain as it came in. "The anomaly bombarded us with high-energy radiation!"

"Why?" Captain Menseh said.

"Unknown!"

Radiation came in increasing bursts, like something was escalating an attack. The first had been two bursts. Now it was three, then five, then seven.

Bharadwaj leapt with excitement when it sent eleven our way. She exclaimed, "Primes! It's telling us prime numbers!"

"Maybe it's sentient," said Fedorov, our xenobiologist.

Another bombardment. Our ship began an uncontrolled yaw. The metallic grinding sound keened at a higher pitch.

"Then can it please tell us the prime numbers without destroying our ship!" I hollered from the back, as fire exploded from Engine 3. There were other problems too-the chaos on the ship could attest to that-but the fire had given me tunnel vision.

"Chronions!" Chen yelled. "The radiation is chronionic!"

Well, that was bad. Chronions were stable in intraspace, but when they interacted with matter in normal space, they caused all kinds of problems. So many problems, in fact, that chronionic weapons had been outlawed for 181 years.

After a lot of yelling and putting out fires (both literal and metaphorical), the ship was back in a minimum working order. The ship stopped making weird sounds. Someone figured out how to turn the sirens off.

The anomaly had stopped firing chronions beams at us, but I knew that wouldn't be the end of our woes.

After we reported to the medical bay for examination, we gathered in the conference room for a debrief.

"The anomaly could be a peaceful, living creature," insisted Fedorov as wiring from the ship's busted systems sparked. "We've never witnessed a species like this."

"We don't know for sure if it's alive," I argued. "And if it is, what good does that do us? It's hurting us. Can't we tell it to stop?"

Captain Menseh turned to Bharadwaj, the resident xenolinguistics expert. "What do you think?"

"The primes make me think it's peaceful. Because of its composition, it may not have realized that chronions are harmful to us. Asking it to stop would require theory of mind, a common language, an understanding of physics..." Bharadwaj frowned. "In short, it would require communication. And if its communication is hurting us, then maybe we shouldn't communicate."