Somewhat boring possibly.
Giving us an idea.
And, as usual, short :)
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What was this space? We know it has a distance at least, at least they thought they did. The diameter of the planet defines the distance inside it. They knew that it was big, but, just how big? The probe they had sent to circumnavigate it hadn’t reported back, not since it passed into the planet’s radio shadow.
They all tacitly assumed that the probe had malfunctioned, when it didn’t came back to report. But old suit wasn’t as sure anymore. He had an extensive library downloaded, a memorial to his first owner, one of the first miners of Jupiter’s moons. Yes, suit was that old, several hundred years, at least parts of it. And that library was definitely one of those parts. And as it also had those writings constantly, instantly, accessible? In it there were mentions of thing unseen by any explorers suit had heard off. Planets, even galaxies with a mind of their own, animals that revolted against humans, all sorts of unthinkable things for a loyal suit to consider.
But those same stories also, in a way, invited to think the unthinkable. Maybe the planet was just that big? Maybe the probe would have to wander a hundred years more before it came back? Still, those questions could as easily be seen as a result of those glitches suit had started to develop. When they first arrived they had seen the planet silhouette though, and it had been in the shape of a curve. That should mean that it was wrong, shouldn't it? So maybe Royal was right after all? And it was just as possible that this 'thing' negotiating with them had destroyed it, who could say what strange technologies such a being might have.
The suit started to prepare for the tunneling, enclosing himself in wrap he started to loosen the molecular bindings he found in the soil, changing its properties. Part chemistry, part quantum technology it was not unlike an art. You had to guess, or if you like assess, the probabilities of their bonding with each other. When it came to those parts suit recognized it was no problem but as he came further down it became harder. Those last hundred meters didn’t work at all.
“I can’t dissolve it.”
The Royal who continuously had overseen suit’s progress was now busily searching for a solution. Much of the technology the suit used was unknown to him, specialized for working in space, but the theory behind it wasn’t.
“The last layer is like nothing I’ve ever meet, it’s not rock and it’s not metal. I don’t know what it is?”
It was perfectly transparent to electromagnetic radiation but refused to let itself be manipulated, and suit did not have the up to date equipment for analyzing its bonding. When he tried to ‘see’ it using as short waves as he could create, trusting in its refraction to tell him, he found no interference coming from the material. And that meant that using 'half-waves', made by clever manipulations of the waves interfering with each other, also became impossible.
“You’re right Royal, we should have brought an Emperor with us, instead of me.”
“Don’t you say that suit.” Jeff spoke up. “Without you we would never had thought to look inside.”
Royal had to give Jeff right there. They probably wouldn’t, and to be entirely truthful, a emperor would probably had brought the negotiations to a fruitful solution, instead of bungling it refusing to talk, as he had done. But now it seemed as their last window of opportunity was closing on them. Without being able to crack those last hundred meters they didn’t really stand a chance.
For Jeff, who had been keeping himself awake for the longest time, the world was becoming increasingly strange. He kept moving and and out of swift microsleep, short intervals of being away. He at one second saw suit as he normally appeared, the other as some sort of shining globe using tendrils of light. And the colors he saw when in that other state was weird, he couldn’t really describe them.
He turned his attention to that last layer of the crust,. finding himself descending, or maybe floating, down to take a close look. Suit was right he heard himself thinking, almost as if dreaming it. This wasn’t atoms interacting, it was something entirely different. More like one single atom, a Bose—Einstein condensate maybe, chilled to a near ‘absolute zero’. But it wasn’t at any temperature like that? How could it be? Yet it still felt as if he recognized it, even though he never had seen anything like it before in his life?
“It’s a Bose—Einstein condensate.” He explained, or at least thought he explained. “Let me see what I can do.” A Bose—Einstein condensate was a description of a state where all atoms are at their lowest state of ‘energy’. There are two ways to look at reality, one in which you have a state of absolute rest, where all atoms disappear, as they then will ‘dissolve’ into nothingness, alternatively for the first time ever be ‘still’ allowing you to measure all their properties simultaneously. That is what is called the classical view, the one we had before quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics also speaks of states of ‘rest’, but this ‘rest’ will always have to obey HUP, which was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. And according to that one it’s impossible to judge all parameters of a ‘system’ simultaneously, meaning that there can’t exist any classical definition of absolute zero, or ‘no-motion’. Instead you always will have something undefined, possible of motion, no matter how much you chill it down. And the only ‘rest’ there can be will be some lowest state of ‘energy’ from where we can’t bring it down further.
And that was what Jeff was looking at now.
