Chapter four

Catherine did not know what to think about the NASA facility. Outside in the field, before she and Weir had entered the bunker- what was out there? From the looks of it, it seemed to resemble an underground launch facility, designed to fire various rockets and projectiles into outer space. As a result of the war, most of NASA's government funding had reached a taper; not only because of the war, mind you, but also because of the public's opinion about space exploration. Why should you devote money to exploring space when all that matters is the Earth upon which you stand? Earth was humanity- life's only home, for that matter. One, of course, could not forget the many sentient beings that humans had created and augmented throughout the twenty first and twenty second centuries; so many people often did, however.

When Elizabeth Lareau told her that her bold supposition was correct- that the gravitational waves she had discovered were, in fact, generated by a black hole- she nearly found her heart skipping a beat.

“Pardon me?" Catherine asked her incredulously, while all others in the NASA conference room looked on.

“You are correct," the human responded. “The waves were generated by a supermassive black hole, but not in our solar system."

“How? It had to be in our solar system; I tested the attenuation myself." She quickly found that she was the only one asking questions, the only one not in the know.

“Phillip, bring up a scan of Neptune. Keep the entrance to Asgard centred in the frame."

“Roger," the electronic voice in the ceiling responded. “Do you have a preference for a specific optical display mode?"

“Full spectrum, but omit neutrino and fermionic contributions from stellar radiation."

“That's a go on full-spectrum footage; coming up now, doctor."

A vaguely purple-lilac sphere appeared above the middle of the table again, tinted with blotches of increased and decreased hue, representing regions of higher and lower temperature, respectively. Neptune and its moons were visible, hanging lazily around the slow, corpulent planet. As the camera slowly moved from left to right on the hologram, she could see the slight outline of Neptune's faint ring system, slightly warmer than the chilliness of the near absolute-zero vacuum. But she could also see something else, something in front of the planet, some sort of camera distortion, bending the image of Neptune ever so slightly…

It resembled an orb of glass, transparent on its own right but pulling in the image of the planet and stars behind it. As the distant starlight in the background entered the frame of the distortion, it was bent off course, suddenly warping around in a sphere and then emerging on the other side. It was like a bubble in a tub of water, how it distorted and bent the light behind it like an hourglass. But it could not have been a black hole, for that simply would have appeared like a black dot on the full-spectrum image. It was something more subtle than that.

“What is that?" the dog asked uncertainly. “Is that…?"

“A wormhole," Elizabeth responded, answering her question. “It orbits Neptune like a satellite, bounded into a stable orbit by gravity."

“That wormhole," Rodney spoke, “Connects our solar system to another. It is fully traversable in both directions by both matter and energy."

Catherine's mind went blank. A wormhole. An actual, physically real wormhole, acting as a connection across the universe to another remote point in spacetime. Countless theorems had been published over the centuries supposedly 'outlawing' wormholes and other exotic distortions of spacetime; now, it would seem, they had all, or at least in part, been invalidated by the soap bubble orbiting Neptune.

“Did it generate the gravitational waves?" she asked.

“No," Weir said. “That alien solar system contains a black hole. Based on the radiological emissions and the size of the black hole, we believe it to be the core of a dead quasar, which presumably ran out of fuel millions of years ago. The data is rough, but there seem to be multiple smaller black holes which orbit the central one. One of them probably merged with the core, which generated the disturbance you detected."

How long has he known? she wanted to know. She ultimately decided to hold that question back for a later time, in a more private place.

“How is the wormhole stabilised?" she asked, again with her Russian voice replete with incredulity. “Wormholes require negative mass to remain stable, but the quantum inequality hypothesis demands that negative mass can't exist in significant quantities."

“You're cleverer than even Weir suggested, Ms. Alexeyevna," Lareau said, smiling at the professor. “But negative mass isn't the only support that wormholes can take. Are you familiar with M-theory?" Catherine nodded, yes, which persuaded Elizabeth to continue. “Well, as it would happen, energetic fields in the bulk, in M-theory, can interact with our brane. They can thread through our spacetime and cause it to expand or contract. Here, let me show you."

Elizabeth rose out of her seat and walked over to the other end of the room, snapping her fingers and pulling up a holographic rectangle before her. With a finger, she began drawing an hourglass shape, tilted on its side, with several lines threading through it along the vertical axis. “This," she said, highlighting the hourglass figure, “Is the wormhole. These lines are lines of force in the dilaton field, in the bulk, likely extending from another brane alongside ours. Now, since the dilaton field action is directly proportional to the scale of compactification of the bulk, when its action increases, so does the bulk's curvature; the same happens with string coupling constants, including Newton's constant and the cosmological constant.

“What we believe to be occurring is that the dilaton field has been amplified in energy density across the bulk to here," where she highlighted the wormhole's throat. “This, we believe, increases the bulk's curvature enough to cause an outward pressure on the wormhole's throat, preventing it from collapsing from its own gravity."

“Hmm," Catherine groaned, unsure of what to believe. “I see. That would eliminate the requirement of repulsive gravity from negative mass."

“Indeed it would, and it would do so quite elegantly. It is magnifique, non?"

“But what caused the dilaton field to become denser only within the wormhole's throat? That couldn't have been a quantum fluctuation, could it? There's no way- well, it would be very unlikely for it to be such a large-scale distortion with such stability."

“Exactly," Miles Lee, the Chinese man, said. “We don't actually know what caused the wormhole to appear. We don't even know if there is a dilaton field, if there is a higher-dimensional bulk space in the first place. It's all just supposition- I suppose the same thing which brought you here, supposition, that is."

It was true, when you really thought about it. Catherine could have easily decided that the gravitational signal was simply a mechanical failure and written it off as such, but she did not do that. She held on to that blind hope, that little component of her mind which said: Hey, maybe something interesting is out there. You won't know until you find out.

“Why don't you know those for certain?" the dog asked.

“Because we haven't solved quantum gravity," Lareau provided. “M-theory is simply a theory, after all. Gravitational waves and quantum fluctuations observed from the Big Bang seem to coincide almost exactly with M-theory's predictions, down to a five-sigma level, but that doesn't quite equal a total validation."

It was true. M-theory had resisted the test of time for well over a century, and when it was shown that loop quantum gravity could be combined with the theory via AdS/CFT correspondence in twistor spacetime, it had earned yet another victory. But, until one could observe all of its predictions, it could not be conclusively known that it was the theory which described nature; the fabled 'theory of everything,' as physicists liked to call it. And so many had forgotten that.

“I noticed you said to the computer that the wormhole is called 'Asgard.' Why?"

She heard Weir sigh and turned to face him. “Well," he began, “We have no idea what could have caused that dilaton field fluctuation. It's given us a distortion of spacetime which we can use to access an entirely new star system. If that system has even one habitable world, we can, perhaps, escape the clutches of the war that's been holding back the collective breath of the entire planet. Perhaps there are resources on those worlds; maybe those worlds can provide us with agricultural space.

“Simply put, the wormhole came along almost as soon as the human race needed it. It's stable, long lasting, and fully traversable in both directions. What are the chances of that happening naturally? And at this specific point in human history, when we barely have enough resources to even put food on the table and craft basic machinery? This simply cannot be a natural phenomenon; the chances are simply far, far too low for it to be natural."

What were those chances, really? One could argue something similar on grounds of Earth's formation. Hell, one could even argue the same contention on the basis of the entire universe. All of the physical constants- the string coupling constants, Newton's gravitational constant, the cosmological constant, the electromagnetic fine structure constant, the gluon nuclear coupling constant- seemed to be balanced perfectly for life. If the gluon coupling constant was increased by even one percent, for example, then the Sun would burn far too quickly and hotly for Earth to support life. If the fine structure constant was increased by even five percent, then the electromagnetic interaction would be too strong for the electron transport chain to be completed, since the probabilistic radii of atoms' electron clouds would decrease accordingly, again making life on Earth impossible.

It would almost seem, from a distance- hell, perhaps a sizeable one, at that- that the universe was designed to have life; that life's existence would automatically prove the existence of a higher intelligence, since the probability is simply too low for the physical constants to be so 'fine-tuned' to allow it in the first place. But was it really proof? Perhaps it was comparable to the billions of people on Earth who simply could not see probabilistic events on Earth as being of natural origin. If someone was 'miraculously' saved from a car accident, then they dictated that a higher power enabled their survival. If someone was struck by lightning and suffered from consequent heart failure, then it was all part of some vague 'plan' of a higher deity; you could, in fact, invent seemingly anything and excuse it via religion, because no one could ever prove you wrong.

Convenient.

“So," Catherine said, “You're saying that someone placed it there?"

“So it would seem," the professor responded.

“I didn't take you as a religious man."

“I'm not. But, whoever placed it there- they have control over the fields in the bulk. They've solved the problem of quantum gravity. They can manipulate higher dimensions and realms of existence that we can't even imagine. For all intents and purposes, they are gods. Whoever they are."

“Thus," Miles's happy-sounding voice concluded, “We arrive at 'Asgard'; the realm of the gods, so to speak."

The collie sighed slightly. Was NASA really reducing themselves to petty superstition? Even the anthropic principle seemed preferable to the supposition that 'gods' living in hyperspace could have created the wormhole. Certainly, the chance of the dilaton field increasing in energy density at that specific region of spacetime, so tantalisingly close to the ventures of human space travel, seemed exceedingly unlikely, but was it really as impossible as Weir and Lee had suggested? Earth's formation could have been, and very often was, regarded with such superstition. The chances of a planet possessing one g of gravitational acceleration, with a favourable atmosphere, with the right proportions of carbon and hydrogen to nonorganic elements to allow nucleotide formation, lying exactly in the Goldilocks Zone, orbiting a main-sequence yellow dwarf star, with the outer gas giants' gravity fields protecting against most hazardous meteorite impacts, with a very large moon to encourage the rise and fall of mineral-scattering tides, and so on, were nigh excruciatingly unlikely, but perhaps Earth simply just happened in a purely probabilistic sense, without the need for any supposed divine intervention. When one resorted to miracle-working to explain reality, then they were not really talking about reality, were they?

Further evidence supporting this contention could easily be found out in the stars. The vast majority of alien star systems contained not a shred of evidence for life- all of the planets, if any were present, were almost always bathed in radiation, lacking an atmosphere, lacking a stable balance of hot and cold weather, or were simply lacking in key minerals to sustain life. If any were appearing as even remotely habitable, then humankind had only remote access to them via telescope; even with fusion power, the nearest stars were still centuries away. Nature, as Bernie liked to call it, was a, “Cruel, uncaring bitch," which only very rarely gave the chances for anything to be of interest to sentient life, be it the formation of a habitable world or the formation of a traversable wormhole; or, in Bernie's case, a cure for his incurable cancer.

Nature did not hand out miracles, and nature did not care. With that in mind, Catherine found herself curious as to what exactly the supposed 'gods' had lying in wait on the other side of the portal.

“What's on the other side?" she asked. “What do we know about the foreign solar system?"

Rodney and Lareau glanced at each other. Rodney soon nodded towards the door on the other end of the room and rose from his seat, with Lareau following. Facing away from the rest of the group, they spoke quietly, almost imperceptibly, though Catherine's sensitive ears could occasionally pick up subtle notes of their conversation. She sat there, as did all of the remaining members of the NASA group, for well over a minute whilst they clearly tried to maintain their secrecy. After an annoyingly long juncture the two scientists nodded towards each other. Lareau flicked her head at Lee and he left, along with her, through the door, while Rodney returned to the table and grinned slightly at Weir.

“We'll resume this meeting in an hour," he said. “Professor Weir, why don't you show her around the place?" Catherine began to object but was stopped soon enough by the pneumatic hiss of a door behind her. As it would happen, the wall behind her slid up, revealing a previously hidden component of the facility, and she cautiously rose out of her seat to investigate.

Her sensitive nose detected the faint remnants of burnt zinc and copper oxide. As she neared the now opened section of the wall, she could see a massive hollowed out space of metal frames and cavernous walkways arranged in a stacked pattern, extending in great circular patterns hundreds of metres wide and tall. “Follow me," Weir said, and they both walked through the open doorway.

To her right, she could see a massive white cylinder poking out from far beneath her, the NASA emblem painted on its side. As she walked on the curved walkway, she looked over the edge and saw a tremendous tunnel extending farther than her vision could extend. Workers in harnesses were affixed to the sides of the tunnel, welding and bolting what looked to be gyroscopic support struts to the walls. Curiosity and intrigue taking her over, she looked back up at the tremendous white cylinder and saw what looked to be a spacecraft mounted at the tip. It was sleek and angular with a sweptback wing design. Just metres beyond that, built into the impossibly high ceiling, she saw a circular cut with rotational pivots mounted equidistantly along its circumference, as though it were made to come open much like the retractable wall she had just stepped through. It was then when she realised what the circle outside in the field was, the nature of the cylinder and the rather alien-looking vehicle mounted upon it.

It's a spaceplane. She had a flash of remembrance of her history lessons. Back in the 2060s, NASA and the European Space Agency had jointly designed a new species of spacecraft known as the Aurora spaceplane. While it hardly resembled a typical airplane on Earth, its surface was covered with tiny, movable angular protrusions which, combined with the sweptback wings which extended only just slightly beyond the width of its body, allowed it to displace enough air to keep in afloat in Earth's atmosphere without relying on a great amount of fuel. The angular protrusions acted as a sort of advanced aileron system, and were each controllable to maximise efficiency and manoeuvrability. The result was a spacecraft longer than it was wider, with a geometric, angular, slightly flattened appearance and flight performance far exceeding most air-based vehicles on Earth. To aid in flight, it possessed two high-yield fusion reactors for propulsion and an array of powerful reaction-control-system thrusters mounted all over its body. The Aurora was well capable of both long term spaceflight and blindingly fast atmospheric flight, and was far superior to the Space Shuttle it had replaced, though its only problem was its relative lack of cargo capacity. On top of that, being much more angular than the Space Shuttle, it almost resembled a fighter plane, albeit a slightly larger yet sleeker one.

“An Aurora spaceplane," she said to Weir, nodding towards the rocket upon which it was mounted. “I thought the Aurora programme was cancelled after the ESA went bankrupt back in the sixties."

“And you think NASA didn't revive it?" Weir chuckled lightly. “We may be criminally short on government funding, but that doesn't mean we have just ceased all developments. After we found that wormhole, well, suddenly the private funding began to skyrocket. The Auroras are the most advanced vehicles on the planet."

She growled slightly, mostly in her throat, fighting back the instincts to suppress her anger like a 'good little doggy' the corporation had branded her as. “Speaking of the wormhole," she said slowly, angrily, “When were you planning on informing me of its existence, professor?"

The professor sighed and placed both hands on the railing, leaning over slightly and looking down the massive launch chamber, ruffling through his thinning silver hair.

“You were never supposed to discover it, Catherine. We had no way of knowing that the system contained multiple black holes, so I didn't expect there to be a significant source of gravitational waves. I thought you would've just added it to the list of bizarre spatial anomalies we know virtually nothing about, like the Great Attractor or something like that. The probes simply didn't reveal enough data. I'm sorry."

She growled angrily again, claws fully extended from her fingers, her ears pointed down in anger, a tiny part of her desiring to push him over that bottomless ledge. Supress your instincts. “Do you think I wouldn't investigate that? It's in our solar system, for Christ's sakes! Why the hell would you hire me if you didn't intend on informing me? I'm not just some stupid mutt, professor! You said you didn't think of me that way."

He sighed again and looked through the massive cavern. The solid rocket booster was having some panelling welded to it on the ventral stabiliser and sparks were constantly being kicked around the worker, but it was at least a hundred metres below Weir. Still, the electric blue of the welding torch, the ultraviolet singe of the high-energy plasma on his retina, was still enough to cause his eyes some discomfort after staring at it for more than a few seconds. Blinking a few times to get the spots out of his eyes, he turned his head slightly away from her, not ready to look her in the eyes.

“Do you know why I hired you, Catherine?"

She shook her head, blinking repeatedly so as to not shed tears. Neither of them had the nerve to look at one another. “No."

“You aren't even anywhere near the top of the qualification list. You were only sixteen, for Christ's sakes; you don't even have your PhD yet, and there were so many other people I could have chosen over you. You're an Augment; hell, I didn't want you anywhere near my office. Civil rights activists applauded me for it, and every other racist motherfucker despised me for it. Like I said, I knew your presence would rock the socio-political boat far more than it should have, and it did. And you know what? I hired you anyway."

“Why?" she asked, her Russian-accented voice failing her. A tear found its way down the fur in her cheek.

“Because I knew that no one else was going to offer you a job, Catherine. I knew that hiring you was inevitably going to bite me in the ass, but I said 'fuck it' and did it anyway. Because I didn't want to see another poor soul underestimated from day one, treated like a dreg from the get-go and tossed out on their ass, like I was when I was your age. Because I knew that you could do it, that you wanted to prove that you could do it, to yourself and to everybody." He finally looked at her. “Because I believed in you."

She stood there, with her head slightly over the railing, tears dropping down into the seemingly bottomless abyss. Her breathing was erratic and her claws extended rhythmically, something she had developed early in her childhood as a way to comfort herself, though it scarcely worked here. She had to face it: She was a dog. No matter how hard she tried, how hard she wanted, she would never be human, and she had to deal with the consequences of that.

“I don't think of you like that," Weir said consolingly. “I never have. I'm sorry I didn't disclose the wormhole to you. I screwed up, and I'm sorry." He, too, found that his voice was failing him.

The dog sniffled and wiped her eyes, finally coming to her senses. With a brief shake of her head, she finally turned back to him. “Thank you, professor."

He nodded cordially to her and looked back at the rocket booster suspended before them, feeling like a weight had been brought from his chest. They stood like that for several minutes, watching the workers driving bolts and welding panelling into the impressive rocket booster.

To think of the power that monster could unleash, what with its fusion-powered engines and massive fuel container. The interesting niche of fusion power, of course, was its cleanliness and surprising ease. Only a source of deuterium and tritium were required to sustain most commonplace fusion reactors; experimental ones relied on helium-3, though that isotope was far too rare on Earth to warrant its usage as fuel. Most contemporary reactors could even accept bare protium as their sole reactant, though the energy density of each reaction and fusion yield would be smaller, of course. Modern gas-based reactors, however, were all very clean and produced minimal radioactive contamination, meaning that their exhaust of hydrogen-helium plasma, though very hot, had a minimal impact on Earth's delicate global environment once it cooled and reached thermodynamic equilibrium.

“You said there were probes launched into the alien galaxy?" Catherine finally asked, her eyes fairly dry. “Through the wormhole?"

“Yes," Weir responded. “We've sent multiple probes through the wormhole into Asgard, though only a few have managed to relay back any transmissions."

“Why? The wormhole is traversable, right?"

“So far as we know. Some of the probes survived, we know that, but some of them have been lost in transit. It is possible that the wormhole isn't entirely stable; if the dilaton field is subject to quantum fluctuations, it's possible that the gravity inside the throat may become too strong for some to survive. Perhaps the bulk beings destroyed them; we have no real way of knowing without being out there ourselves."

The dog scoffed slightly. “Do you really believe in the bulk beings, 'gods' living in hyperspace? Doesn't that remind you too much of Flatland?"

“I don't know what to believe anymore. Maybe they're out there, maybe they're not; until we see them, I can't say for sure."

“Is that what this is for?" she asked, pointing to the Aurora atop the rocket booster. “Seeing them?"

“Yes, I suppose you could say that. We have an expedition planned."

The dog's ears perked up at the sound of that. “What sort of expedition?"

“Exploring the final frontier. We've constructed a ship in orbit, the Tour de Force, and that Aurora is the last component of it. That, and a crew, that is." He looked at her, seriousness and gravity etched on his face. “We need to know what's out there. Before it's too late."

“Too late?" she asked in an understandably grave tone.

“Walk with me, Catherine. We have a lot to discuss."

***

Elizabeth, Miles and Dr. Rodney arrived in the corridor outside of the biological lab. The walls around them were still made of grey concrete, as was to be expected from a rebuilt nuclear fallout shelter, but the hallway was quite spacious and provided ample room to move. To their right was the biology lab, with sealed doors and an optical scanner preventing access to those without clearance, with the blue and red NASA emblem painted on the doors. A few scientists scuttled by every now and again, opening the doors and traversing the chemical shower before the airlock opened and they were able to enter the laboratory free of potential contamination.

That, however, was not the trio's intended destination.

“How soon can we be ready to launch?" Miles asked.

“Six months," Lareau responded. “Our schedule remains unchanged."

“What are we going to do about her?" Rodney asked with a vague sense of urgency. “Only the President and the Senior Cabinet members know anything about this facility! By even letting her in here, we completed violated established protocol. We can't risk our security because of some inquisitive dog."

“We offer her double what she makes at LIGO," Lareau offered. “Easy. She is an Augment, non? She'll take the offer because she'll have nowhere else to go. Hundreds know about this facility, Rodney; one more wouldn't hurt, so long as we ensure she keeps her mouth shut. Besides, with the loyalty of her species, she won't bite."

“But the fact of the matter," Rodney said matter-of-factly, “Is that she is a security risk. How many Augments are employed in the government, hmm? None, because they're not citizens. What if she is a Chinese sleeper spy? She has no record of citizenship because of her species, making it easy for her to slip into the country with virtually no suspicion. If we let her leave, she might tell everything she knows to the Reds. Why did Weir lie about her credentials?"

“Because he knew we would never accept her if we knew her species from the beginning. Maybe he was just trying to give her a chance; perhaps we should do the same."

“I have another idea," Miles said with a hint of nervousness. “We still have two open spots on the expedition's crew, correct?"

“True," said Rodney. “What are you implying, Lee?"

***

They walked down the concrete hallway, passing various observation rooms. Catherine noticed that she was somewhat out of dress code, wearing her typical monochromatic trench coat and 'busijamas'; not exactly the office clothing that all of the other professionals in the building wore, but it was not quite out of style. More than a few people had given her confused glances, very likely wondering what the hell an Augment was doing inside the Hanford Site facility, but no one said anything to her.

“People," the professor said, “Are very often illogical. They don't like to dig deep into the details of something because they're afraid of what they might see, because they're afraid of having their little bubble of safety popped with a needle. In doing so, they believe things wholeheartedly without really checking the facts, because the facts frighten them and make them face the reality that their agendas and world views are false. I can point out hundreds of examples: Vaccines yielding autism; the wage gap; the immorality of homosexuality- most people only hear what they want to hear, to suit their own agendas, to make themselves feel happy and tell them that every little thing in the world works the exact way it's supposed to in a way that makes everyone happy."

“I understand, professor," Catherine said. “The corporation made me believe many things before I finally opened my eyes, before I finally saw how the world really worked."

“Exactly. People are so afraid of damaging their delicate world view that they'll believe almost anything without even attempting to challenge it. Governments around the world have been exploiting that little facet of human psychology for millennia, including ours, even today."

She marked her approval with an hmm. “How so?"

“The Resource War is the only thing anyone talks about nowadays, have you noticed? People all around the world are terrified that a nuclear exchange will occur and wipe out all life on Earth. But they have a right to believe that."

“I'm assuming that's untrue?"

He looked at her with a stern, unchanging expression. There was a mark of sadness and empathy on his face, like a doctor explaining to a family member that the patient did not survive the operation.

“Is it, professor?" she asked more urgently, her ears splaying back. “Is it at least exaggerated?"

“To a degree," he sighed. “Come with me through here, I've already given you clearance. It's just past this corner."

They neared the entrance to the biological laboratory, the words BIO-LAB written in big black letters on top of the sealed glass doors. Weir placed his ID card into the optical scanner's beam on the right of the doors and, when the laser chirped in a positive electronic tone, he stepped in to the airlock. There was another glass door sealing him in; until he initiated the decon procedure, it would remain locked.

“Wait a sec," he said, “I need to be decontaminated. You, too, after I'm done." He depressed the red button on the wall and the glass door sealed shut. She could hear a faint hissing sound coming from inside the airlock, and Weir's clothing was rippling and his thin silver hair was vibrating rapidly, his eyes closed. Pressure nozzles surrounding him were blasted concentrated streams of pressurised air at him, with puffs of antibiotic and antiviral compounds injected at regular intervals to remove any trace of biological compounds from his body. Soon enough his clothes and hair stopped rippling and the faint hiss of the electrically driven fans dissipated. The ceiling above him, inside the airlock, flashed a pleasant green briefly before the glass door to the laboratory parted, and he stepped through.

Catherine brought the ID card from her coat pocket and showed it to the optical scanner, stepping into the airlock once it returned a positive electronic chirp. She depressed the button and instantly felt a rush of wind blow into her. The pressurised air ruffled across her fur and she felt the slick coldness of the antibiotic and antiviral gels soak into her skin, drying with an impressive, nigh-instantaneous speed. Despite that, it still irritated her sensitive nose, causing her sinuses to burn and twinge slightly. Finally the ceiling above flashed green briefly and the whine of the electric turbines died down, and the glass door into the laboratory parted. Instantly she could detect a rush of overtly clean, cold air hit her nostrils.

The room was bare white, with virtually nothing adorning the tiled walls. Throughout the open room, built into the walls, were glass doors separating the main laboratory from individual experimentation centres. On her left was one such habitat, with a man inside dressed in a hazmat suit grasping a smooth, metallic crystal in his hands, which looked as though it were made of rock but had the appearance of a pyramid. He placed it on the lab table along with several petri dishes and samples of various grasses and herbs. She noticed that the flesh of a pumpkin lay in one of the dishes, which she found curious.

“What is this?" she asked Weir. “What is he doing?"

“This is the biological lab, Catherine," the professor replied. “This is where we run various biological experiments, such as the effects of severe radiation on crop growth. You see that stone he has there? It's an ingot of uranium-235, being tested against an artificial species of pumpkin."

It was true. The scientist reached for a scalpel and scraped an almost imperceptible cut of pumpkin flesh across the blade, smearing it against a petri dish. He then applied a drop of dye to a swab and smeared it into the petri dish, which he subsequently placed under a microscope. He grasped the uranium ingot with his thick radiation-insulated gloves and inserted it into a small tray underneath the petri dish, whereupon he looked through the microscope and recorded the findings on a holographic notepad projected from the wall.

“Assuming conservative projections of China's arsenal," the professor began, “Most species of crop will not survive the ordeal."

Catherine looked back at him slowly, a look of deep concern boiling in her eyes. “What you said earlier… about people only accepting what they want to hear, about not looking into the facts because they scare you…"

He nodded silently. “There's a strong possibility, Catherine. You and I both know that."

“But- genetic engineering can save us, can't it? I mean…" She looked at her hands, the blue merle fur that sat on her skin like the dead weight that it was. “If science can create me, then… can't we just make radiation resistant crops?"

He shook his head. “Don't you think they know that? We've been doing that for fifty years now. But you know what comes for every action?"

“An equal and opposite reaction?" Her eyes became watery.

“Exactly; for every new species we create, China'll just make a new fungus that we can't kill. For every cure we create, China will create a new strain of virus that our artificially-implanted antibodies can't eliminate."

Her voice was failing her again and she felt as though she wanted to punch something. “Nanotechnology?"

“Now that is a possibility, but a very difficult one. Nanite drones are designed to respond solely to one user's genome and either attack or mitigate all others, depending on its characteristics. That means everyone would have to get their own genome scanned and their own nanites created specifically for them- and you expect everyone to just pay for that, all willy-nilly? That would be a multi-trillion dollar expenditure. And even then, what about the irradiated, dead, decaying crops? If people have no fuel, then it doesn't matter if they carry around a portable cure for every disease known to man in their to-go bag. Hell, even if they can somehow survive the radiation poisoning, that won't matter. No food equals no life."

She thought of her caretakers whose faces but not names she could remember, teaching her calculus and philosophy and history, even though anything beyond the company-approved educational material was prohibited. She thought of Bernie, his pudgy face and happy smile ever present despite the nigh-unbearable, overextending bloating and pain his cancer had had him wrought in. She even thought of professor Weir, who, despite being somewhat of a hard-ass at times, was more personable than just about everyone. And, for some ineffable reason, she could not seem to get Miles out of her head; he, too, was very personable, and she found herself inexplicably drawn to him more strongly than the others.

And she thought of them all standing before a titanic nuclear detonation, coughing and vomiting phlegm and blood from their virus-infected lungs while the explosion grew closer in the background. And then the shockwave would overtake them, bathing them in egregious heat and incinerating them in one fell swoop. It reminded her of the her previous thoughts about the gravitational signal, how it was like a bomb's shockwave rapidly catching up to her, blinding her, moving at incredible speed. And then it, too, would overtake her and bathe her in incinerating heat.

What was that heat? Knowledge? Hope? Fear? After escaping the hypothetical bomb and being exposed to the terrifying reality that was the gravitational signal, where did it all lead? The NASA facility, of course, and the sudden realisation that a wormhole was responsible for relaying that transmission of waves from its other mouth in the foreign galaxy; the sudden realisation that reality was so much greater, so much grander, so much wider in scope than anything she had previously imagined, and that the solution was right there in front of her the whole time, she was just too frightened to see it.

And all she had to do was look.

A flash in the middle of a long night.

“What can I do?" the dog asked feebly, her instinct to help overtaking her emotions of crushing despair. “There's got to be something I can do."

“Get out there," he replied, “And save us."

***

The lights in the conference room dimmed once more, draping the room in darkness. Near the far end of the room, where the wall had previously retracted and exposed the Aurora's rocket booster, a full spectrum hologram was projected from the ceiling, showing the known telemetry of the alien system.

“We don't know much about Asgard," Miles began, standing near the wall and highlighting a circle around four particularly bright points of red in the hologram. “But, as we see from some of the collected images of the relay probes we sent, we have detected a few unusual hotspots of thermal energy in the system."

In the centre of the hologram was a very fuzzy picture of a massive sphere of pure blackness, surrounded by a faint ring of deep red. Orbiting the red ring, from quite a sizable distance, were three pinpricks of red standing out amongst the purple haze of empty space, glowing purple in the full spectrum image. “This is Asgard," Miles said, pointing to the tremendous black sphere in the image. “The black hole you detected, Ms. Alexeyevna, with a mass of about one hundred and ten million solar masses. Your prediction was right on the mark." Catherine found herself blushing slightly. Why was he making her feel this way?

“We have detected three planets orbiting the black hole," he continued. “Virtually nothing is known about them, nor about the system itself. The only things we know, for certain, are that there are a few potential worlds within our reach, and that they all orbit the supermassive black hole."

“Why don't you have anything more concrete?" Catherine asked. “Didn't the probes relay the data back through the wormhole?"

Rodney spoke up. “We built them to do that very thing, so that we could minimise the risk of exploration by knowing which worlds are safe. But, for an unknown reason, we have been unable to receive most transmissions once the probes pass a significant distance from the wormhole."

“We believe," Elizabeth spoke, “That the system exhibits an unusually dense solar wind being emitted from Asgard's accretion disk. The plasma distribution throughout the interplanetary medium in that system is very dense, causing any radio transmissions to attenuate much too fast to make it through the wormhole."

“So," Catherine said, “If the expedition were to enter the system, they'd be radio-blind?"

“To a degree," Miles said. “Which is where you come in."

“Me?"

“You have an unparalleled ability to differentiate and decompose signals into their constituent components; we could do the same with a computer, of course, but we would lose the ingenuity of a living being."

Catherine found her temperature skyrocketing. “You want me to go on the expedition?"

“Yes," Rodney said, somewhat regrettably; he still had comparatively little trust for the dog. “As spurious as that sounds, you would be an invaluable asset as an astrophysicist and signal analyser."

She looked back at the professor, who had a sagely look and very slight smile on his face. He nodded once.

“Plus," Lareau added in her French voice, “The professor recommended you."

“And that's got to count for something, coming from him," Miles said sarcastically. Weir simply huffed out a tiny laugh.

***

Miles accompanied her to the biology lab once the meeting was concluded. They stepped through the airlock and were doused with pressurised air and germ-killing compounds once more. As they walked deeper into the facility, past the scientists working in their hermetically-sealed habitats, they came to another sealed glass door. Depressing the red button on the right of the door, it retracted into the walls and revealed a massive, low-lit cavern, concrete making up the ceiling and floors and very distant walls.

On either side of the door lay massive glass chambers with fields of crops in them. Scientists walked through them donning hazmat suits, presumably preventing any sort of biological contamination. “What is this?" Catherine asked like a kid in a candy store.

“This?" he said. “Well, we call it the 'Bestiary'; it's a repository of almost all agricultural species on Earth. We have corn, sorghum, beats, oranges, rice, cotton, lettuce, tomato- you name it, and we probably have it."

“Is this a seed bank?"

“That, too, in addition to a food bank. This facility is actually the remnants of an old bunker built over one hundred and fifty years ago, during the rush to develop the first atomic weapon- the Manhattan Project, I believe it was called."

“Is this able to survive a nuclear strike?" she asked, marvelling at how thick and tall the stocks of corn to her right were.

“Absolutely," he replied. “That's what it was designed for. If the country was ever placed in danger, this is one of the bunkers President Rosen and the Senior Cabinet members could escape to in the event of war."

Eventually they neared a door built into the wall. Lee flashed his ID card into the scanner and it opened, and they both stepped through into a room looking very much like the biology lab. As they passed through the lab tables, they passed a few scientists donned in lab coats examining unknown subjects under their microscopes. Catherine was curious of their doings before she caught the distinctive cold chill of liquid nitrogen in her nostrils.

The corner of the laboratory Miles had led her to resembled an oversized phone booth, to a degree, consisting of a roughly square box of thick glass with a hermetically-sealed exit. On the interior lay what looked to be a computer bank, but the distinctive white mist of liquid nitrogen slowly emanated from it.

“What is that?" she asked.

He punched in a code at the security door and it slid open, sending egregiously cold air into the lab, as well as a puff of cold steam. They walked inside and Miles strapped on a pair of insulated gloves, disconnecting some latches from the computer bank. Upon doing so, the outer edge of the bank lifted open like a refrigerator door, revealing a black and white honeycomb of machined metal.

“This is a repository of human embryos," he said, “Designed to prevent our extinction. The system is called Aphrodite- for the goddess of fertility. Ten thousand human embryos, one male for every female, collected from all over Earth, fortified with personalised nanites to fend off any known diseases, connected to a fusion reactor and cryogenic system to preserve them. Assuming we can't make it back to Earth, we can start a colony on one of the planets and begin growing the population there. All in all, a four billion dollar investment, but a very worthwhile one nonetheless."

Humans, she thought somewhat sadly, of course. “What about other species? Dogs, cats, cows, camels?"

Miles blushed slightly and looked away from her bashfully. “I persuaded NASA to keep a hundred Augment embryos alongside the human ones. That alone cost eighty million dollars, but at least the species could survive. For almost every known species on Earth, we have a record of their genome on Aphrodite's computer banks. Assuming the colony ever develops the technology, perhaps we'll be able to recreate them and terraform the world."

She felt her heartbeat rise and a smile creep up her muzzle, her tail wagging slightly. “Thank you. I appreciate that."

Miles let out a smile as well. “I'd figured you guys deserved a chance. This mission is about preserving life; it wouldn't be fair to leave your species behind."

Her tail continued to wag. “Will we be able to come home after we find a habitable world?"

“Yeah," he replied. “If everything works out, we'll be back on Earth in only a few years." He resealed the latches on the Aphrodite system and stowed his insulated gloves.

“If everything works out," he repeated, more to himself than anyone else.

***

Quantum gravity was a fabled, almost mythical thing. Just when you thought you had it, it ran away; just when you thought you had it in your hands, it swelled under the heat of renormalisation and inflated to infinite size, crushing you under its weight of infinite terms and Feynman diagrams. Such was the situation with M-theory, which was, nowadays, quite different from the comparatively meagre string theory that it had evolved from.

Modern M-theory- no one really remembered what the M stood for, but most believed it to mean either 'membrane' or 'magic'- relied on replacing the concept of point particles with one dimensional 'branes' as fundamental physical objects. In essence, all particles were really just manifestations of branes, each one characterised by a different quantum state and consequently a different particle identity. Furthermore, for reasons of internal consistency, the theory only operated successfully in a spacetime of eleven dimensions- the four familiar to human experience, plus a hypothetical hyperspace of seven extra dimensions known collectively as 'the bulk.'

And that, of course, was the tricky part. The bulk consisted, hypothetically, of an eleven dimensional hyperspace in which the entire multiverse existed- every other brane (equivalent, every other universe) and every point in time in all of those branes. Though relativists would point out that this is a classic block world scenario, M-theory accepted the uncertainty principle as a necessary component, thereby making reality indeterministic, exactly as professor Weir had told Catherine two years earlier. Thus, though all time may have been simultaneous, it was all subject to change. Though Catherine had been indoctrinated to believe in her existence as a purely biochemical entity, physics had not, and very likely could not, seem to abolish the concept of free will. She held on close to that little light of hope.

Of course, that was not really the problem with trying to quantise gravity. General relativity described the universe on the large scale, representing gravity as a symmetric distortion of spacetime, and represented acceleration as a distortion to a geodesic's originally linear trajectory through a path in spacetime. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, relied on the assumption that spacetime was flat- if one tried to introduce curved spacetime into the mix, the equations usually exploded with infinites and nonsensical answers. One could rectify this via perturbation theory, but the real prize was a way to describe curved spacetime in terms of quantum mechanics, and that meant describing the smooth, curvaceous manifolds of general relativity in terms of the chunky, quantised world of quantum mechanics. There were also further problems with rephrasing relativity with the experimentally-confirmed reality of quantum nonlocality, and the strong theoretical evidence that unitarity was not a requirement of quantum field theory, both of which posed serious problems for reconciling relativity and quantum theory. A solution, in 2104, had yet to be found, and at present there weren't any in obvious sight.

That is the reason, she supposed, that Weir was so eager to solve the problem of quantum gravity- because he believed that he could.

A few hours after the initial meeting at the Hanford Site NASA facility, Weir had driven her back to LIGO; based on the position of the Sun and the relative darkness they had found themselves in, she guessed it was around five o'clock or so when they'd arrived. He led her to his office and offered her a drink, which she begrudgingly accepted: A glass of chilled amber rum, which she found to be relatively agreeable in taste save for its extreme sweetness and nose-tingling array of herbaceous, spiced aromas. Such was the sensitivity of her nose and tongue; what a normal human would consider tasteful and herbaceous, she would consider it as overpowered and overtly stimulating. She winced when she first tasted it, but settled into a lap at the liquid with her long, flat tongue every few minutes during their conversation. Her liver was so terribly ineffective at filtering alcohol that even so much as a few millilitres would render her virtually incapable of very much higher-level thinking.

“Bullshit," the professor said, taking a sip of rum from his own chilled glass, “As I've explained previously, is everywhere. There are various kinds of bullshit, of course, and most of it is healthy and good and clean. If there wasn't any bullshit in this world, people wouldn't tell you that they think your kids are cute; no, they'd say, 'Oh, god, that is an ugly baby!'"

Catherine could not help but laugh a little, considering her traditionally hard-ass boss was being so free and friendly. “True, true."

“M-theory, as we now know it, is a special kind of bullshit. It allows for good, clean fun, and it's made a lot of powerful predictions over the years; its inflationary approach and its prediction of quantum fluctuations from primordial gravitational waves match to observation almost exactly, for example. But for all it can tell us, you know what it can't?"

She shrugged her shoulders and took another lap at the rum, enjoying the spices exploding across her tongue. “What?"

“It still can't describe a singularity!" he said, taking another sip of his drink. “We have no damn clue what happens in a black hole after you cross the event horizon. Is there a singularity at the centre? Is there no singularity? Is what we think of a black hole actually just an extremely distorted wormhole? We don't know, and it doesn't look like we really can know."

“Why not?" She already knew the answer, but it seemed meaningful to engage in conversation with him.

“Well, the equations of M-theory in eleven dimensional twistor space- the bulk, as we call it- say that, as you near the Planck length, the dilaton field becomes divergent and blows up to infinity."

“Meaning that, at the singularity, there'll be infinite bulk curvature?"

“Bingo. And that, Ms. Alexeyevna, is why they pay us the big bucks."

“Why can't we just reformulate the formulae?"

The professor scoffed, but he intended no offence. “Because, somewhere along the way, we fucked up. We know Einstein fucked up because he modelled relativity with locality and smooth manifolds; we know Planck fucked up because he modelled quantum theory with unitarity; we know Feynman fucked up because he modelled the vacuum as having an infinite number of virtual particle pairs. The question is: Who screwed the pooch the worst? To understand and truly find the answer, we'd have to unravel the past two centuries of progress in theoretical physics. We've done the best we can with M-theory. Suffice it to say, we screwed up somewhere, and where, exactly, to find that screw-up point is something we don't know."

Asgard came to her mind. The nearest black hole known to mankind before that was located more 2,800 light years away- far, far outside the realm of near-future human exploration. Now, however, that was no longer the case: Although it technically laid billions of light years away in a dead quasar, the wormhole acted as, essentially, a portal across spacetime, giving explorers a chance at traversing the distance and exploring the Asgard system. Black holes, due to their immense mass, required both general relativity and quantum mechanics to describe their internality, since the interior centre of a black hole- whatever it was, singularity or otherwise- was so compacted by the gravitational force. Observing the singularity would reveal all the answers.

But that was the problem.

“What about the black hole?" she asked him.

He took another drink of his rum and placed the glass on the desk next to the computer monitor. “What about it?"

“We could get the answers from observing it, maybe."

“Nothing can escape the horizon, Catherine, you know that."

“The Hawking radiation; perhaps it could describe the interior, what the singularity looks like?"

He chuckled. “Yeah, I'll go ahead and bet my paycheck on that one. Besides, after making some observations on the wormhole, I've made some improvements."

“Improvements? To M-theory?"

He smiled and opened up his holographic keyboard, typing in some commands. “You see those pictures on the wall behind me?" he said, nudging towards the grey wall behind him. There were two framed images: One, of some children and, presumably, a wife; the other, an image of the Milky Way taken by the eLISA trinary satellite system. “Take 'em down, I want to show you something."

At one point five metres she was a tad too short to reach the photographs, so she grabbed an office chair and put it under her. She stood upon it like it was her own personal throne, and she enjoyed the feeling of being so tall, before the remembrance of her boss's request entered her mind, and she promptly took the photographs off of their plastic placeholders and gently laid them on the floor. She hopped down from the chair and wheeled it into place, looking back at Weir.

“What is it?" the dog asked.

He hit the Enter key and projected a blue hologram onto the now-bare wall, showing a long, clumsy-looking equation. She quickly recognised the integral and higher-order action terms coupled with the lambda symbol, as well as a myriad of other multiplicative terms, along with the characteristic dx.

“Is this the bulk Lagrangian?"

“Clever, Ms. Alexeyevna, as always. This is actually an incomplete bulk Lagrangian formulated in twistor spacetime; as of now, it can't seem to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. I need more."

“The black hol-"

“We aren't going to get shit from the black hole," he said in a slightly defeated tone. “I can't use any fine tuning from experiment. I'm going to have to determine this from theory, and theory alone. I can sense it, though- I'm damn close. I just need this damn compactification scale factor-" he pointed to the italicised lambda symbol- “to stop blowing up when x approaches zero. I'm close."

But how close? the collie wondered. Einstein nearly lost his mind searching for that answer.

“How close, professor?"

“Close. I'm almost there."

“And you convinced the government to fund the most expensive expedition in Earth history with an almost. Brilliant."

He chuckled in a fatherly tone. “No. I convinced the government to fund the most expensive expedition in Earth history with a, 'I'm going to save the world against self-induced mass extinction, and damn soon.' I promise."

“You promise? What kind of a person makes a promise he doesn't even know he can keep?"

“The kind who cares about you enough to see it through to the end," he said. “I promise. I promise that, when you return, I will have quantised gravity and solved the theory of everything."

Her ears splayed back and she felt a slight twinge of sadness in her chest. Is that what that was? Sadness?

“What good will it do, you solving the theory of everything? Other than satisfying your insatiable curiosity, of course."

“Think about it, Catherine. Maxwell mathematically unified electricity and magnetism in 1856, and look what came of it! When Faraday was experimenting, he didn't have concrete equations to guide him along, which limited both his technology and his ways of thinking. Before Maxwell, we were using our best guesses to try and get a spark with rotating magnets; after Maxwell, we had electrical generators and power grids and radio transmission. Of course, it wasn't solely Maxwell, but his formulation of a theory was brilliant and allowed us to do things we could only dream of beforehand."

Catherine placed the rum down on the desk, starting to feel slightly out of place with the millilitres of alcohol in her bloodstream. “So what? Now we can build flying cars or something?" She quickly blushed and groaned, looking away from him; it was uncharacteristic of her to be so callous and, well, angry.

“Perhaps," he replied. “Once we know how electromagnetism and gravity unite, who knows what we'll know how to do?"

“How will that allow you to save the world?"

“If I'm right, the gravitational constant can be controlled by the dilaton field's energy density. If so, when I finish this, and we know how all the fundamental forces interact and convert, we should be able to construct and propel objects of unparalleled mass- filled with people, even."

“That's quite a dream you have, professor."

 Hypothetically, his idea, on paper, may have been plausible. With rapid advances in nanotechnology, nanite factories had already been built, allowing the rapid construction of tough, sturdy materials at fast rates of production. Space stations, though prohibitively expensive, were even possible to build this way. Was it a pipe dream to assume that massive space stations could be built, filled to the brim with people, with propulsion coming from the gravitational force instead of the Newtonian reaction force? With the theory of everything in hand, infinitely more powerful than Maxwell's equations… maybe.

No one would ever know until it would happen.

Weir sighed and sat back down in his office chair, thinking of everything humanity had accomplished during its relatively short history. First came survival through continuous improvement and adaptation to the external environment, a process later termed by Darwin as evolution. Next came the gradual departure from the superstitious beliefs of reality to legitimacy, a process and way of thinking later known as science. Next came the sociological singularity- the turning point of human history, the ultimate deciding moment for the future of the species- that was the Resource War. Another mass extinction event lay skulking around the corner, just waiting for someone to make a mistake, for someone to get too jumpy and press the big red button, to launch the first of what would be an uncountable number of irradiated missiles of death and misery.

“Every dream has humble beginnings, Catherine."