Singularity

By Vincent Berg

An experimental NASA flight goes horribly wrong, and the unlucky test pilot wakes up unhurt, back home. Struggling to discover what happened, Eric Morgan returns to NASA prepared to face a thousand questions as things continue to unravel around him. Is he still human or a new species and what does that mean for those around him?

Eric encountered something strange in the dead of space which left him forever changed. Testifying before a Congressional subcommittee, he inspires fear and hope. As the danger mounts, he tries to fall off the grid and begin a new life as he struggles with what happened, but the rest of the world won't allow him to walk away. Is he a threat or a blessing? Is he helping humanity or threatening them? Should he explain himself or hide? And what about those close to him? How will the changes to him impact them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Berg
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781941498750

Vincent Berg

Vincent Berg worked in both Chicago and Manhattan, working as a consultant designing computer systems for financial institutions, so this story was a return trip, allowing him to capitalize on his in-depth knowledge of the city and the complex financial issues involved in the story. More than this, the story allowed him to move away from his extensive science fiction background, and delve into some real-world relationship issues. He was familiar with many of the story’s locations, though he had no real connection with the city management, and no run-ins with the law to speak of. But often working on wall street, and walking back and forth between assignments and his apartment on 18th street, he spent a lot of time around City Hall, One Police Plaza and the other areas the story addresses.

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Singularity

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Author: Vincent BergCopyrightGraphic chapter header, featuring a silhouette sci-fi image of a alien mouth surrounded by broken wavy lines.

Singularity

Copyright © 2015 Vincent Berg, all rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

ISBN:  978-1-941498-75-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. All rights reserved by the author, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Product names, brands, and other trademarks referred to within this book are the property of their respective trademark holders. Unless otherwise specified, no association between the author and any trademark holders is expressed or implied. Nor does it express any endorsement by them, or of them. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, service mark, or registered trademark.

AcknowledgmentsGraphic chapter header, featuring a silhouette sci-fi image of a alien mouth surrounded by broken wavy lines.

As always, I’d like to thank all of those who’ve put up with me during the highs and lows of this story’s creation. It’s hard supporting temperamental authors, and the rewards aren’t always as clear cut as more time and attention.

I’ve got a long line of people who’ve helped with the story, but I’d like to thank:

•  My editors: Gary Bywater, Gordon Johnson, Michael Martin, Mike Omelanuk and Robert Grimmett.

•  The cover astronaut image is courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

•  Cover and chapter fonts are Colo Pro Black Regular by S. Simov of Fontfolio and Debock Regular by Tama Putra, both from fontsprings.com.

•  Internal graphics: "Set of text separator line by Narong Jongsirikui of comzeal and Decorative elements, border and page rules" by 100ker, both from AdobeStock.

•  I’d also like to thank Cindy Capatani for her personal guidance in energy medicine practices.

Other Books By the AuthorGraphic chapter header, featuring a silhouette sci-fi image of a alien mouth surrounded by broken wavy lines.

Not-Quite Human

A group of misfits discover they have more in common with otherworldly aliens than with their families and the rest of humanity. They set out to learn more about where they came from, and end up searching for their ancestral home, or at least somewhere they can call their own.

1) The Cuckoo’s Progeny

2) Lost with Nothing to Lose

3) Building a Nest of Our Own

A House in Disarray

Detective Em Rules investigates her boss, NYPD Police Commissioner Eddleson, even as her own life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of her sister-in-law and niece, Becky.

Demonic Issues

When Phil Walker starts seeing the demons within, the world of those afflicted with mental illnesses radically changes, dragging Phil, medical establishment, and everyone else along with it as he combats demons, dragons and fairies.

1) The Demons Within

2) Speaking With Your Demons

The Zombie Leza

A woman shows up, a decade after the zombie apocalypse began, who lives, communicates and controls thousands of the undead. Whether she’s mankind’s last, best hope or the source of their ultimate demise is anyone’s guess.

The Nature of the Game

The athletes at Windsor High are aiming for professional sports careers, and dislike making waves. But when Taylor meets the flamboyant Jacob, there’s a distinct clash of cultures. Casual meetings under the bleachers risk not only embarrassment, but millions in lost earnings.

Singularity

An experimental interstellar voyage goes horribly wrong and the unlucky test pilot, who died, ends up back home unhurt. Eric Morgan battles through internal, personal and Congressional investigations as he struggles to perceive exactly what he’s become.

Stranded in a Foreign Land

Josh discovers an injured, shipwrecked alien, and not only cares for and shelters it, but seeks to rescue its companions, despite being pursued by American military forces and other nations’ too.

Books can be found on my website at:

www.vincentbergauthor.com

Chapter one, on a worldly stageGraphic chapter header, featuring a silhouette sci-fi image of a alien mouth surrounded by broken wavy lines.

Eric Morgan clutched his harness, his breath falling silent as the final countdown began. The hair on his hands stood on end and the tension was a palpable essence. He was equally amazed at what was about to occur and terrified at what it entailed.

A senior NASA pilot, Eric was aboard a much-heralded test of a new technology which promised to revolutionize space flight. It could also change human destiny forever. He stood to travel farther in a few seconds than every other earthling combined since they climbed from the primordial ooze. Instead of traveling miles above the Earth to the now defunct Space Station, hundreds of thousands to the Moon, or millions to the nearby planets, this would throw him light years into the unknown, without any forward momentum. Best of all, without tons of fuel, there was no chance of his ship blowing up under him.

The technology to accomplish this, the Interstellar Spatial Displacement Device (ISSDD), is a fancy term for teleportation. It’s not as sexy as it appears in the movies, requiring a huge infrastructure. Yet it would transport him from a stationary position inside an enclosed NASA laboratory to a point ten light-years away.

While the researchers felt confident that it worked, they encountered problems during testing. They could send things from one end of a lab to another, but faced complications they hadn’t anticipated. There was the obvious problem with moving two things into the same space, but there were ‘displacement’ issues too. In short, transmitting something to a stationary target caused it to fall into the object as gravity affected it before it completely materialized. This also determined how air molecules shifted on both ends of the teleportation. For the return trip, the capsule was programmed with a complex algorithm, accounting for the Earth’s rotation, elevated twelve feet in the air. That allowed it to materialize completely before falling to the landing pads beneath. The only solution to the displacement factor on the outward journey was to utilize areas with few stray elements.

Open space was the simple fix, but there were tremendous amounts of random junk within Earth’s solar system. The gravity of the sun attracted passing comets, and interspace collisions multiplied the debris filling the cosmos. That meant there were numerous miniscule objects traveling through the otherwise empty vacuum of space. Transporting into another object would have unpleasant effects.

That’s why they chose an area clear of potential obstructions; a particularly dark region where they’d never detected any celestial bodies. The hope was, while only there for a few minutes, they could determine where the universe’s missing mass was hidden. Since the estimated mass of visible objects didn’t account for the acceleration of the universe, scientists realized there were huge amounts of unobserved matter. There were several theories concerning ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, but being unable to detect, it has always been difficult to observe.

They speculated that the gravity which attracts objects to large bodies—such as stars—also disrupts dark matter. Seeking an area with no such dynamic, they were sending Eric’s ship to a region with no detectable physical objects. He stood to witness entities never before observed, from whether dark matter existed in such regions, to making entirely new astronomical observations. What he learned would influence future research into the nature of both time and space.

However, the biggest issue wasn’t technical or theoretical, it was practical. Without any earth-breaking projects in decades, NASA had steadily lost the interest and enthusiasm of the public, and more precisely, the legislators they relied on for funding. With the Space Station abandoned and Congress questioning the negligible benefits of manned missions to the other planets, NASA depended on this solitary initial flight to reinvigorate the public’s interest.

The idea was intriguing. They could transport a fully staffed crew near a foreign solar system and set up facilities for the future. They’d record all the details not otherwise possible, and return to plan the next stage of the endeavor. There were still numerous issues with reaching a habitable planet. Yet the concept of jumping from one observatory position to another whet the most hardened skeptic’s enthusiasm.

The problem with space travel is that our fastest rockets can only travel a fraction of the speed of light. With any meaningful destination hundreds of light years distant, it would take hundreds to thousands of years to travel there. What’s more, the resources required to maintain a sustainable crew were unrealistic. They’d have to recycle everything they consumed. They’d need to create a complete viable ecosystem which could survive for at least a hundred years with no room to expand. The idea you could do so without complications, when putting a few people in orbit in a closed container and not compromise their physical and mental health, was preposterous.

Making space travel into a series of jumps, from one safe location to another where we could build facilities to allow us to undertake the next stage, was encouraging. Especially if we can do so for a fraction of the cost of flying a manned voyage to Mars.

To generate the enthusiasm needed to get the necessary funding, this solitary trip had become a media circus. Live video cameras were mounted around the ISSDD capsule. They’d record his disappearing and reappearance. To commemorate the event, part of the mission was to flash a light bright enough to reach the Earth in another ten years. That would prove, in a visceral way, the massive distances they’d crossed in the blink of an eye.

Essentially, the entire future of space travel rested on Eric’s narrow shoulders. Seeing there was little he could do to affect the journey, it left him feeling frustrated, anxious and uneasy. He’d return in several minutes an international hero of unimagined significance. This initial test was being watched by millions, with schools across the globe halting their daily lessons to witness the unfolding events.

Final countdown initiating, a faceless voice announced over his earphones. He let out a long, calming breath. While nervous, it wasn’t as if this process hadn’t been tested. They sent robots on short excursions, revealing the technique worked by photographing the surrounding stars and correlating them to existing star charts. They transferred small animals—mostly mice, since PETA raised a stink about resuming testing on primates—but this was their first time sending a human. As a result, he already had a whirlwind schedule of speaking engagements once this enterprise was completed. In fact, it would take longer to release him from his tiny capsule than for the entire ninety-seven trillion kilometer journey! That’s one-hundred and ninety-thousand trillion kilometers round trip! No matter how many times he heard the figure, it still boggled Eric’s mind.

As the disembodied announcer counted down the seconds before launch, Eric tried to prepare for the unknowable. To distract himself, he thought about the processes instead.

NASA achieved the teleportation process by capitalizing on advances in string theory research. Since these ‘strings’ connected multiple places huge distances apart, they’d found a way of forcing the strings open. That provided a way to access any of the way points touched by any one string. It was a controversial premise when first proposed. Many detractors warned it might cause the annihilation of the Earth. Those warnings proved baseless, as various experiments revealed no such danger.

Since you could only visit locations devoid of matter, they traced these strings, settling on a number of destinations. The final selections were based on isolation, a lack of nearby objects, but near enough to Earth to correlate where the end result was. Once they’d done the initial research, and found many of these waypoints, they learned how to calculate where each point resided in physical space.

3 … the voice called out, bringing Eric’s attention back to the present. With his launch only seconds away, it didn’t make sense concentrating on other topics. He checked the vast array of sensors, ensuring each operated properly.

2 …

He glanced around the small cabin, looking for anything out of place. Since he’d only be gone for five minutes total, there wasn’t a need for much inside the tiny metallic capsule. Besides, if something did go wrong, and he was stranded trillions of kilometers from Earth, an extra few hours of oxygen or a spare suit wouldn’t buy him much. Either the machinery to make the return jump worked or it didn’t.

1 …

This time Eric did hold his breath. He realized it was silly and wouldn’t affect anything, but he was used to planning where he jumped. Having flown test aircraft and shuttle missions for years, he was experienced with facing the unknown, but he’d always watched what was coming. This time, he was going in with no idea where he was diving, relying on emotionless machines to decide which spot in the pool was safest.

LAUNCHING!

The various readings on his display jumped and a hum enveloped the entire craft as it created the linkage to the imaginary strings linking worlds together. It took a few moments to generate the energy to create the opening for the ship to slip into. Eric once again grasped his safety harness as he waited for it to launch. There was a building whine, increasing and growing more blaring, and then he was gone. Simply no longer there, screens across the world revealed an empty platform where his tiny craft once stood.

Chapter two, otherworldly catastrophesGraphic chapter header, featuring a silhouette sci-fi image of a alien mouth surrounded by broken wavy lines.

The transition, while transparent to Eric Morgan, left him dazed. Before he was even aware he’d successfully jumped trillions of kilometers, the ship’s alarms blared, alerting him that something was wrong.

Scrambling, he checked the various displays. Despite being largely automated, the capsule was arrayed with a variety of sensors to record this region to correlate where he’d ended up with their observations of the nearby galaxies. He scanned down a list of problems with the craft: Structural Integrity Compromised, Unexpected Forces Affecting Craft Performance, Unable to Stabilize. As he wrestled with what was happening, he was blinded as the interior was bathed in brilliant lights from outside.

If he wasn’t distracted by the alarms—necessitating immediate action—he’d have remembered to close his eyes to avoid this problem. As he groped for the display he couldn’t see, squeezing his eyes closed too late to do any good, he recalled what happened. In order to record the success of the trip, the ship was equipped with a massive array of lights to shine in a direct beam for home. The idea was, after he returned, the Earth would receive visual confirmation in another ten years when the signal reached Earth. It was designed to reinforce for everyone how phenomenal the distances were.

The majority of his ship was dedicated to the massive beacon and the power cells to operate it. There wasn’t much need for life support since he was only expected to be gone a matter of minutes. Generating enough illumination to be visible ten light years out required a tremendous power outlay. Most of his remaining time was waiting for the systems to regenerate the energy needed to return.

The lights clicked off, though his vision was slow to recover. Meanwhile, the clarion calls of multiple alarms continued. Eric was desperate to discover what was wrong. From what he’d read, there was a systematic failure and he was understandably anxious about taking corrective action. However, the ship wasn’t constructed to facilitate repairs, only with getting him there and back. Glancing at his oversized gloves, there wasn’t much he could do even if he had tools.

They’d assured him it would be a safe journey. While teleportation was a risky venture, since two physical objects can’t occupy the same space, NASA patiently informed him about the multiple test drones they’d sent. Each separated by millions of miles and taking images of the region, so they felt secure the area was free of obstructions. Clearly they were wrong about the risks. Deadly wrong!

Cursing, he opened his eyes to almost complete darkness, his pupils still constricted. The dimly lit interior was obscured by floating dots obscuring his limited vision. Like most electronic devices, there was a switch to make the display read its output audibly, designed so he could get updates while doing other things. However, he couldn’t see enough to find the damn thing.

The ship lurched, jarring him. He squinted, trying to force his eyes to adjust—which they did—just not fast enough to do much good.

Another terrible groan echoed as the entire craft shuddered, and he felt himself stretched backwards. Not yanked or pulled, but elongated, as if space itself was stretching in some weird relativity demonstration. He remained firmly strapped into his seat, but the monitor was now farther away than it had been. When he reached out for it, his limbs seemed more distant than they were moments before.

Eric had no idea what was occurring. No one ever warned him of this, since it had never