The Winnowing Metric

This week, Ian Tregillis spins up a complex and lyrical possibility, and takes us along for the amazing ride. ~ Julian and Fran, October 13, 2024

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The Winnowing Metric

by Ian Tregillis

Ring, Space-time! Etch in my tensors the tale of those beings exceptional: / Hexadimensional wanderers, sculptors of Planckian quantum foam, / Conquerors prideful (and foolish, yes), lost after claiming the engine galactical, / Drifting for aeons uncountable, victims of hubris and entropy . . .

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Nobody said it would be easy, hunting a cantaloupe-sized what-if in the Stygian boondocks of the solar system. But flinging your discarnate consciousness beyond the Kuiper Belt isn’t so different from having the wisdom teeth chiseled from your jaw long, long ago, and that wasn’t so bad. Do us a favor and count back from a hundred, they said, and you did, or you tried, but you lost the plot around ninety-five, which also happens to be where there’s a splice in your subjective experience like the smash cuts in an artless student film. And suddenly you’re awake again, a little bit lighter and a little worse for wear. If anything, it’s better this time. Your mouth isn’t full of gauze and there’s no pain. Of course not. You have no mouth to fill, no body to ache. You’re just a sludge of algae—eye-wateringly expensive algae genetically sculpted to mimic your original brain’s neural architecture—sloshing in a chrome-plated nutrient tank.

That first time, at age nineteen, anesthetic noetectomy took but one afternoon from your life. This time, the fruit of the lotus lulled you into a forty-year torpor. Long enough.

So you reach out with a newly enhanced mind, engaging the executive control systems for your optical telescopes. Once you’ve oriented on the guide stars (Celestial navigation, marvels the part of you that once taught Classics, like Odysseus departing Ogygia) and confirmed the transmitter alignment, you ping Earth: You up?

Earth is up, and down to clown, but a week passes before you get the nod. A week you spend extending sensor booms, calibrating the laser interferometers hovering ten million miles away, and testing the cryogenics on your particle calorimeters. If your quarry calls to you with the siren song of space-time ripples, or winks at you with a cyclopean picolensing event, or tickles you with the gentle aeolian breath of Hawking radiation, you’ll sense it.

Assuming mission control sent you to the correct swath of nothingness. Assuming the math is right and that somewhere out here lurks an invisible cannonball packing nine times the mass of Earth. Assuming Planet IX is no planet, but an honest-to-gods primordial black hole within humanity’s grasp, if barely.

The odds are against you. Like a wrathful god, they’re against you. But you don’t mind.