Into The Void (27 page)

Chapter 20

Dimensional Rift

              “John? Can you hear me?”

              Captain Steele started to come to on the floor of the engine room.

              “What happened?”

              “You threw the scale into the engine John.”

              “Last thing I remember is my arm starting to vaporize.”

              “John come to the bridge.”

              Captain Steele looked at his left hand. All his fingers were there. There was just a small bit that was missing on the very tips of his fingers.

              “Am I dead?” he asked.

              “John come the the bridge.”

              Captain Steele got up and walked to the bridge. The ship looked like it was frozen in time. Objects were floating in the air slowly rotating but not moving in any direction. All the spots in this ship that had hull breaches had gravity and life support. Everything looked normal and okay. He even walked by one of the hull breaches he made when he flew through the ship and there were no sparks coming from any of the wires that had broken open. He walked all the way to the bridge to see Jamie's holographic form floating above the floor.

              “John...” She said.

              “What's going on? Nothing is making any sense. Gravity is normal, there's life support where their shouldn't be, and broken electrical cables that don't seem to have any sparks emitting from them. It's like everything just stopped.”

              “We are frozen in time John.”

              Captain Steele paused for a minute.

              “How? Did the black hole eat us?”

              “No. The point of no return was incredibly deep. It wasn't a single point, but was really several hundred feet deep. It was more of a band than a single small line. We had entered it and part of the ship was just further into it then the rest.”

              “How can that be?” Captain Steele asked.

              “I am still analyzing the data on the black hole, but it looks like the center of a black hole has gravity so strong that causes all matter to be packed into an incredibly tight spot and the schwarzchild radius, also known as the point of no return, increases as the matter inside the black hole increases. At the center of a black hole the gravity is the strongest and because of that, all matter gets packed in so tight that time itself freezes because at that point because gravity is so strong. This causes all the material to take only one form of matter, most likely a solid, or a state of matter similar to the black dwarf. Apparently there is a point somewhere on the black hole that is always growing when it is consuming matter, but the point of no return also has to overcome the pull of the black hole's gravity causing time to tear and stretch at that point. This makes the point of no return not a narrow line but an extended point where the black hole slowly changes into normal space.

              “At the point of no return many things change. All matter is changed into highly compressed matter as it passed through the point of no return into the core of the black hole, temperature drops rapidly to absolute zero as it passes through the point of no return and then into the core of the black hole, and that all matter freezes in both temperature and time. However, because the mass of the black hole is so great it still has gravity and gravity is still pulling in things that have yet to reach the point of no return, even though at the core of the black hole everything has stopped. This causes the mass of the black hole to increase creating more gravity,” Jamie said.

              “Can I get it in plain English please?” Captain Steel asked.

              “Certainly,” Jamie said.

              “Imagine dropping a pebble into the middle of large perfectly still lake. The pebble that was dropped will create a single ripple, which we will call ripple 1, and that will create more and more ripples that get bigger and bigger and move outward equally in all directions. After a while there will be more and more ripples. Let's say there is a ripple number 50 way, way, way, out there from ripple number 1.

              “Now imagine that those ripples are gravity and the pebble is a black hole. Now imagine that pebble becoming bigger and bigger and bigger until it consumes the entire size of ripple number 1. All the ripples further away are still moving further and further away, but the pebble is growing bigger and bigger and over taking some of those smaller ripples. Now imagine that somewhere just beyond the pebble is the point of no return. Everything that falls in and passes through the point of no return falls into the pebble making the pebble larger but everything that touches the pebble stops, including time, energy, and temperature but the pebble keeps getting bigger and bigger because more things touch it causing more to be added into it.

              “Ripple 1, which is originally gravity reaching out away from the black hole, was created and then consumed as the black hole grew, but ripple 50 hasn't been consumed yet, but eventually it will be. When the pebble gets big enough it will consume ripple number 25 but ripple number 50 is still moving further away from the pebble but eventually the pebble with will catch up to it and consume it. Gravity is still moving away from the black hole, but gravity is also pulling anything it touches towards the black hole.

              “In summery, the point of no return is really a length just outside the core of the black hole. It is also the growth of the black hole that distorts space and time. As the black hole grows, it grows faster than the ripples and the ripples get pulled into the point of no return, which in turn, causes the ripple to become part of the black hole. The point of no return, which is really called the schwarzchild radius, is really just the part of the black hole that is growing and changing objects to become part of the black hole. You could say that it's what turns objects into what becomes the core of the black hole.

              “All the processes of how a black hole works is really going on in the point of no return,” Jamie said.

              “Okay, I think I got it. Basically there are three parts of a black hole, the core, the point of no return, and the space outside the black hole. The core, is the black hole itself, the point of no return is what is becoming the core of the black hole and that is where the change to become the core of the black hole happens, and then the space outside the point of no return which is where objects that interact with the black hole's gravity is. If that's the case then where are we now?”

              “That scale you threw into the engine did something. Do you remember exactly what our analysis said about it?” Jamie asked.

              “Sort of. Something about it putting out massive amounts of energy. Composed of dark matter and dark energy and some weird type of plasma. The level of power that we can't really understand and a type of weird combination energy,” Captain Steele said.

              “Correct,” Jamie replied, “It uses gravity, magnetic, elastic, radiant energy, and intrinsic rest energy. This means that it has energy that works with gravity, is some how magnetic, is the energy that light uses, and basically has the characteristic of total energy and momentum of an object in all frames of reference. It also probably acts on its own plane of time. It also had some super heated condensed form of unknown plasma. When you threw that scale in the engines it did something I'm not sure can even be explained.”

              “Try it,” Captain Steele said.

              “I'm not sure I can.”

              “Alright. So then give me the basics,” Captain Steele said.

              “I'm not really sure I can.”

              “Try anyway.”

              “Alright,” Jamie said taking a deep breath, “The engines over clocked to a level of energy unknown to any race including those on the derelict ship, we violated every law known to science, we 'warped', and are now we are stuck in a dimensional rift.”

              “Huh,” Captain Steele said.

              “Huh?” Jamie asked.

              “Huh.”

              “Huh? Is that a good thing or bad thing?” Jamie asked.

              “Dimensional rift...?” Captain Steele asked.

              “Yes. Dimensional rift,” Jamie replied.

              “Dimensional rift?”

              “Dimensional rift.”

              “Hmm...” Captain Steele said, “Let me get this straight. We were traveling at speeds faster than light trying to fly out of the deep gravity well of a black hole that was pulling us in at speeds faster than light when we over clocked the engines with some kind of super heated dark energy induced super plasma, that just so happened to some how and in some way, have the power to effect time and gravity in ways so completely contradictory to what we know that we could seriously question the laws of science while also possibly coming to a complete stand still in everything which caused us to 'teleport' from the pebble you call a black hole?”

              “Yes. You also forgot the dimensional rift,” Jamie replied.

              “Right, because that's the most important part of this whole thing. It's an incredibly absurd theory but, if its what we got to go off of then let's roll with it. So, what's the plan?”

              “Well, the engines need to be fixed. You destroyed them. That would be the first step. I'm not sure what the second would be. Quite frankly, I'm not even sure where or even when we are. Time seems to be frozen which makes it rather tricky because there really is no way to say where or what we are in and how to get out.”

              “Well, for us to go faster than light our engines use Tachyon particles, which then propel the rest of the ship forward. So is it possible that we just activate the engines and we go right out this rift?” Captain Steele asked.

              “Highly unlikely. There are so many theorized types of dimensional rifts and we don't know which one we are in or the precise way we even got here. If we knew which theorized type of rift we were in or how we got here it would be much easier to figure that out. The types of rifts are far too numerous and are all theoretical and have never been proven to even exist. We could be caught up in some part of the string theory or we could be caught up in something completely else. Without any basis for knowing anything about where we are or how we got here, or what kind of rift, or anything else about what this is, we can only guess,” Jamie said.

              “Well, we are out of parts for the engine.”

              “Look out the bridge windows John,” Jamie said as she opened the bulkhead doors so he could.

              “What the...”

              As Captain Steele looked out the windows he saw debris everywhere. It was of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Many of them he didn't recognize but looked beyond age.

              “What
exactly
is this place Jamie?”

              “It is unknown. What ever it is it's a rift of some sort. Some how these things ended up here. The vast majority of these don't even match any known ships. What ever it is, there seem to be ships from species else where in the universe. How they got here could be in a similar manner or they could have been brought here by some unknown entity. It is unknown but it is a treasure trove of unfathomable knowledge. We could spend a billion years in here and probably only learn a minuscule bit of what there is to learn.”

              “We don't have that time unfortunately. I'll head out there to see what I can find. I don't really know what to look for or even where to begin looking,” Captain Steele said as he looked at the atomic clock and saw it wasn't ticking.

              “It's possible time is frozen here but is moving normally out in the universe and when we emerge we could have aged as much as the universe has or we could have not aged a second while the universe aged normally. What ever the case may be, we need to hurry. Also, please make sure to take your suit with you. While this rift doesn't seem to have an environment or even be without one, you don't know what environments those ships have. You might be perfectly fine outside the ships without your DSSM until you step into one of those ships. Who knows whats out there,” Jamie said.

              “Can you put out a scan for something?”

              “I've already tried. Nothing seems to be working when scanning for comparable parts.”

              “I need to fix some of these DSSMs first. This one I'm wearing has taken a lot of damage. I'll have to try and salvage it. It could take hours to properly salvage all of them to fix the damages to this one.”

              Captain Steele worked for what he though would have been several hours until he had properly restored one of his DSSM suits. It didn't really feel like hours though. He wasn't sure what it felt like but he knew it just didn't feel like hours.

              “Alright, I'm off,” Captain Steele said as he suited up and left the portside airlock.

              As Captain Steele stepped out the port side air lock he noticed there was no gravity in the dimensional rift but he did feel as if he was flying through space.

              “I feel as if I'm flying through space at incredible speeds but it certainly doesn't look like it. It might be nice to make a note of it Jamie.”