Holding the Bag

This is a bit of a change from my usual content, but I’ve been sitting on this idea for a short SF story for a long time and I had to try to actually writing it. I’m mostly a technical writer not a creative one so hopefully this turned out decently :)

Arrival

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

It took Dr. Lynn Clarke a minute to wake up enough to register that the noise was her alarm clock. She was not a morning person, preferring late nights in the lab to coffee-fueled 8AM PHYS 1100 lectures.

“This is the new normal, better get used to it,” she thought as she ate breakfast. Her dreams of spending her career publishing IEEE papers on improving fabrication yields of THz photonic crystals were over, as with untold thousands of her peers. The collapse of government funding in the mid 2020s had been catastrophic for pure physics researchers, and really anyone working on science that wasn’t something an oil company thought looked profitable.

As if that wasn’t enough, the history of Y2K had been forgotten or ignored by Wall Street management and when 2038 came (who would have thought banks and stock exchanges would still be running their databases on 32-bit operating systems for that long?) the resulting financial apocalypse devastated what little budget had been coming from industry. The database recovery folks were raking in cash from companies desperate to salvage their records, of course, but physics faculty? Good luck.

MIT had been hit harder than some other institutions, with the endowment losing half its value in a week and most of the department being laid off at the end of the fiscal year as corporate research sponsors went bankrupt, stopped funding non-essential work, or automatic payments simply ended because the accounts payable system thought it was 1901 and nobody could be reached to fix the problem because the email server was just as corrupted.

The job at Rensselaer Polytechnic was a pay cut and meant starting over as an associate professor teaching freshmen about Newton’s laws rather than working in the cleanroom on cutting-edge research, but it would put food on the table and a roof over her head. And it beat stocking shelves overnight at the Cambridge Wal-Mart like her former department head.

After breakfast she grabbed her helmet and tire pump and went down to the garage to get her bike ready for the morning commute, checking the map for what felt like the 20th time to make sure she had the route memorized. Being delayed by a flat tire or making a wrong turn on the way to the first day of classes would be an embarrassing start to the new job. And she wanted to allow plenty of time for the trip until she got back in shape. Years of desk work and car commuting had let her once-athletic legs weaken, but she had sold the car over the summer to pay for groceries and there was no bus service to her new neighborhood (a good thing - apartments with transit access were more expensive) so it was the only option left.

As she rode down the hill towards campus, she tried to enjoy the view of the distant Hudson river as cars zipped past her every few seconds. Biking to work was going to take some getting used to.

Lost in thought, she didn’t even notice her view of the river vanish in a wall of blackness until the squealing of brakes and crunching of metal in front of her shattered her daydream. A fraction of a second later, the cacophony was drowned out by pain and confusion as she flew over the handlebars into something hard.

The Cube

“Dr. Clarke?”

Lynn woke up in a daze and looked around the room. Her left leg was in a cast and every breath hurt her chest despite the IV delivering what she assumed was some sort of pain medication. “W… What happened? I feel like I got hit by a bus!”

“Close!” the nurse responded, “You hit the bus. The Cube popped up right in front of the school bus in the next lane and you smashed into the back door. You’ve got a hairline fracture of your left fibula, three broken ribs, and some road rash but the doctor says you should make a full recovery in a few months.”

“Months? I have a class to teach… and wait a minute, what cube?” she asked.

“Oh, you must not remember what happened. That’s a normal mental reaction to traumatic events. Don’t worry, it’s not brain damage or anything - your MRI came back fine and there’s no sign of a concussion.”

The nurse reached over for the bedside TV remote and turned it on. A local news anchor stood in front of a video wall showing a helicopter view of Hoosick Street. But where there should have been a traffic light and four-way intersection a few blocks from the school, there was nothing but blackness. It appeared perfectly square and featureless, not even reflecting the lights of the tow trucks and police cars blocking the road as they removed the debris of what was clearly a massive multi-car pileup.

“Thankfully there were no fatalities, but over a dozen drivers and a cyclist were hospitalized after the Cube appeared in the middle of the road during the morning rush hour. The area has been blocked off by the FBI who refused to comment when our reporter asked them if they had any idea what the object was or where it had come from.”

The helicopter camera panned over to the Price Chopper parking lot across the street, which was lined with people pressing up against hastily erected barriers trying to get a glimpse of the object, then cut to a reporter on the ground in the parking lot.

“Hi there it’s Bob from Channel 10 News. We’re here with some of the spectators looking at the Cube.”

Bob shoved the microphone in the face of a bearded man in his 60s.

“What do you think about the Cube?”

“The army should have already blown it up. The eggs will be hatching any minute and then it’s game over!”

Bob turned to a pair of college girls behind him. “What about you?”

“This is the most exciting moment in our history. We’ve finally made contact with another species! We need to put aside our differences and show them our best side.”

Bob continued interviewing the locals. Theories ranged from a secret government project gone wrong to an unexploded alien antimatter bomb to a real-life version of the Monolith from “2001”. Member of a local religious cult had already erected a cross at one side of the parking lot and were singing and praying in hopes of being spared by whatever deity had delivered it.

As the TV droned on and on, failing to reveal any useful information other than “it’s a big black box”, she fell back asleep.

Going Home

Lynn rolled down the hallway of the hospital with her broken leg on a scooter. It had been a difficult couple of days, but she had been cleared for discharge.

“Professor?”

She looked up and saw a skinny man wearing a T-shirt featuring an anthropomorphic fox, holding a set of car keys.

“Abe Jackson. I’m one of Dr. Chan’s Ph.D students. He said you called asking for a ride? I live a few blocks from you so he asked me to help you out. I can give you a lift to campus whenever you need.”

“That would be great! I was planning on biking to school but that’s not going to be happening for a while,” she responded with a small laugh.

Abe walked her to an old blue Toyota Tercel that looked like it would fall apart if it made a sudden stop. The foam in the seats had disintegrated decades ago and had been replaced by cloth seat covers over some kind of improvised padding. The hatchback brake light dangled precariously from two strips of duct tape, and several spots on the fenders were rusted through. “Meet Old Betsy. She doesn’t look like much, but she runs. With the stipends they pay us these days…”

He started the car and threw it into gear. There was a disconcerting rattling noise from the brake light bouncing against the rear window but it otherwise didn’t sound like too much of a death trap.

“So how much have you been following the Cube situation?” he asked.

“Not much. I was too loopy from the meds to be paying much attention. What do we know about it?”

“You mean them?”

“Wait, there’s more than one now???” she asked.

“Yeah, another one popped up a day later right in the middle of a house in Costa Rica. Looked like it got hit by a tornado. Luckily nobody was home. And some guy on the internet browsing aerial photos found another in the Mojave. Who knows how long it’s been there. So that’s three that we know about so far. There might well be more in uninhabited areas that nobody’s found yet.”

“Wow. OK, what do we know about them?”

“Not a whole lot. They’re very heavy, nobody’s managed to move one of them yet. They completely absorb every wavelength of light or RF we’ve thrown at them so far and radiate weakly around 30ish GHz. The spectrum looks just like you’d expect from an ideal black-body… with a temperature of around 2.7K rather than ambient. No idea if they’re solid or hollow or what they’re made of. The governor set up a task force to focus on this one and several of us have been asked to participate. They want you involved too, once you’re feeling up to it.”

“Wait, 2.7K? 30 GHz? That sounds like the cosmic microwave background.”

“Definitely similar,” Abe replied. “We have no idea if that’s a coincidence or if there’s some kind of connection somehow.”

He pulled Betsy to the side of the road. “This is your place, right?”

“Yep, that’s it. Thanks a lot!”

“Any time. Dr. Chan said you had an 8AM lecture tomorrow so I’ll see you 7:30ish?”

“Sounds good. See you tomorrow.”

The Lab

HONK HONK

Lynn opened her front door and saw Abe waving at her from Old Betsy.

“Morning! Need a hand?”

“No, I gotta get used to moving on my own if I want to be getting anything done for the… what’s it called again?”

“Well, it was the NY Cube Task Force. But overnight one of them dropped in a village in Siberia, another in some Greek farm, and then one flattened a factory in Shenzhen squishing a bunch of workers. Now it’s the UN Cube Task Force. No changes to field operations, just means we’re sharing data more widely. Class is canceled, we’re going straight to the lab. You’re taking over as Director of THz Studies, leading all of the characterization work between 100 GHz and 20 micron far infrared.”

“That’s quite the promotion from associate professor,” she replied. “How did I get picked and not somebody else?”

“You’re new here, but you’ve done more work with high-sensitivity THz imaging sensors than anybody else. This thing is such a good absorber that we might have to fabricate custom detectors to see anything.”

A block later they pulled into the Price Chopper parking lot. Traffic had been rerouted around the back of the store to bypass the Cube, which was now hidden from view under a large tent.

Approaching the tent, they were greeted by an elderly Asian man. “Paul Chan. I’m Abe’s advisor. You must be Lynn.”

“Nice to meet you. You’ve got quite the setup here, mind giving us the overview?”

“The Cube is such a good absorber that we’re doing everything we can to improve SNR,” he replied. “There’s a full Faraday cage around it with >100 dB of attenuation from a few hundred kHz to ultraviolet - building that in 48 hours wasn’t cheap but we pulled it off. We have cryo-cooled panels we can move around it to reduce black-body radiation from the cage itself, although they do reflect in other frequency bands so we only use them when necessary. The foam is pretty decent at acoustic shielding too but we have sound absorbing panels we can use to supplement. All of the analysis and data processing is done from outside the cage so we don’t disturb the measurements.”

“So what do we know so far? Anything on surface characterization yet?”

“The surface is perfectly flat, within the limits of our measurement capability. There’s no tunneling current whatsoever in a STM, and the AFM showed no deviation at all, not even on the atomic scale. HOPG looks like sandpaper compared to this. We’re not even sure it’s a physical surface, it might just be some kind of energy field. Somebody volunteered to touch it with a bare hand and they said it felt like nothing, their hand just stopped but it didn’t feel hot or cold or rough or… like anything besides just sitting there in open air.”

“Ultrasound?”

“Zilch. No reflection or transmission at all, it’s as if we’re broadcasting into a vacuum.”

“Gravitation?”

“Hard to measure on earth, obviously. But between the fact that we haven’t been able to move it, and it’s not sucking things up like a black hole or sinking into the ground, we’re guesstimating a mass of somewhere in the 20K to 500K ton range. Our geologists say that the bedrock is pretty deep under this intersection and none of the buried sewer lines seem to have been crushed, so probably towards the lower end of that.”

“Particle radiation?”

“Nothing. Alpha, beta, and neutron detectors show nothing but noise, not even normal Earth-surface background levels. We’ve tried irradiating it in a few spots and got nothing detectable transmitted or reflected.”

“And what about the EM side?”

“So far, not a whole lot but we’ve got further there than anywhere else. It emits what appears to be uniform black-body radiation, so that’s something. We’re trying to get the most sensitive detectors we can across the entire EM band in hopes of getting some level of modulation back that we can detect. Some of them have long lead times that are hard to accelerate, so we’re trying to use cooled detectors and strong transmitters to improve SNR as much as practical in the meantime. We were hoping you might be able to continue the THz focal plane array work from your IEEE paper last year, it looks like it will outperform anything we’ve got north of 100 GHz and CNSE thinks they’ll be able to fab prototypes pretty easily… And this is your new desk. Have at it, let me know if you need anything equipment or staff wise and we’ll make it happen.”

Lynn sat down with her laptop and pulled up her notes from the nearly-forgotten project to refresh her memory.

Progress

“We got something on the last sweep!”

Lynn looked up as Abe ran excitedly up to her desk. It had been four weeks and two rushed wafer lots, but the new THz detector prototypes were in operation, part of an ongoing global campaign to try and see inside the Cube or determine what it was made of and where it came from by any means possible.

“What?”

“Yeah. Extremely narrow transmission peak right around 120 micron wavelength - 2.5 THz. They’re setting the detector to do a 360 degree scan and see if there’s any spatial pattern but I thought you’d want to know.”

She got up and walked into the RF chamber surrounding the Cube. Between the featureless black surface and the thousands of sharp pyramidal RF absorber cones lay a narrow circular track with two wheeled carts, 180 degrees apart. One held a high-power transmitter with heavy power cables dangling from the back. The other held her experimental detector, wired to a complicated ensemble of electronics. The entire setup was clearly thrown together in a hurry - boards screwed to frames made from 2x4 lumber, hand soldered jumper wires to fix missing connections, and cables secured to the frame with duct tape.

“Lynn! You’re just in time!” exclaimed Dr. Chan. “We’re all set up, let’s clear the chamber and see what we get.”

Everyone walked out of the chamber and over to the control desk on the far side of the wall. Abe closed the door and sat down at the bench as the rest of the team crowded around.

“I’ve been playing around with some open source CT scanning software and I think I’ve got a 2D slice processing flow working. Let’s see if we have enough power to see anything…”

He clicked the “start” button. A slight humming noise came from the power transformer outside and the lights dimmed briefly, then a graph began to slowly trace along the screen. As the scan finished, there was a short pause, then a grainy black and white image appeared below the graph.

“Well, it’s not solid,” Lynn said. “Definitely looks artificially constructed, too.”

A regular grid pattern of small squares was visible in the image. In between the grid points, smaller rectangular and circular objects, as well as some more irregular blobs, could be seen.

“But what’s special about this frequency? And what is this structure?” Abe wondered out loud.

“Abe, work with the lab techs to get us an elevation axis so we can do full 3D reconstructions. That will tell us a lot. Dr. Chan, take the S21 sweep over to the theory folks and let them stew on it for a while. This is the only spot we’ve seen any transmission at all, even if it’s attenuated by 90 dB. I want to know what’s special about it.”

Lynn sat down at her desk and stared at the grid image. It reminded her of something familiar but she couldn’t place it.

Answers

“We think we know what the walls are!”

Dr. Chan and several other grad students approached Lynn’s desk with a whiteboard in tow.

“So, the blackbody spectrum was the big clue. It is cosmic microwave background radiation.”

“But how could that be?” she asked. “It’s sitting right here, not in deep space.”

“Our side of the discontinuity is, yes. But after that…”

“Discontinuity? What are you talking about?”

“Our working theory is that the ‘wall’ isn’t a wall at all. It’s a jump discontinuity in space-time. Matter can’t pass through it because there’s an undefined slope rather than a smooth curve like you get around a normal point mass. You’d need an infinite force to push over the edge. EM fields get diffracted out into deep space, so anything you send in vanishes and all you see coming out is the CMB.”

“But then why are we seeing transmitted signal?”

“There’s a second discontinuity about 60 microns away from the first one, acting like a liner. The Cube is hollow. If your incident signal has a wavelength exactly matching the spacing of the discontinuities, it acts like a very high Q cavity resonator, almost like a laser. When you’ve pumped the cavity hard enough, the field strength gets to the point some of the energy can jump the discontinuity and enter the interior of the Cube. Presumably something similar happens on the exit side but we’re still working on how that bit works.”

“So if it’s hollow, what’s inside?”

“You’re… not going to believe this,” said Abe, walking in with a laptop. “The 3D reconstruction is done.”

Everyone stared in amazement as Abe tilted the point cloud slightly and the structure became clear: open aisles, separated by rows of rectangular shelving with fuzzy objects of various sizes resting on them.

“The grid of squares we saw on the 2D slice were the support pillars of these shelves. And it’s not static, either. I went back to the 1-meter elevation slice we did last week and several new objects are here that weren’t there before.”

“But… That would mean someone or something is going in and out of the Cube! We’ve had it completely surrounded the whole time,” Dr. Chan replied.

“Yes, on our side of the discontinuity, “ Abe said. “We don’t know how static it is. It’s very possible that it can slide around somehow, maybe opening up some kind of portal if you’re in the right spot.”

Lynn’s face turned pale as the implications sunk in. “Get me the President.”

The Bag

“White House switchboard”

“Lynn Clarke, NY Cube Task Force division. We have a problem.”

A few minutes of holding later, the phone clicked.

“Situation Room duty officer here. I’m with the President, VP, and Secretary of Defense.”

“Mr. President, have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?” she asked.

After a second of incredulous laughter, he replied. “This better not get out before Election Day. But yes, I was a bit of a nerd in my Harvard days. What does this have to do with the Cube, though?”

The Secretary of Defense chimed in “Never been into that stuff. What are you getting at?”

“What about Dr. Who? The TARDIS? Just like the Bag of Holding from D&D, it’s bigger on the inside than the outside.”

“So? This is a national emergency, not an RPG convention,” the President responded angrily.

“Did you ever stop and think about where all that stuff goes? The bag is bigger inside than outside, but that means there’s a big storage room somewhere.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Yes, precisely. We checked historical satellite photos, the one in the Mojave has been there for years and nobody ever got close enough to know it was there. It must have been the prototype, and now they’ve started mass production. It’s not going to stop until we find a way to get a message across to whatever parallel universe is building these things and hope they’re willing to shut down their Bag of Holding factory.”

The President sighed. “And we’re the ones left holding the bag.”

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