15 January

Predictably, the feds got involved. Experimental work halted for several weeks as a variety of unmarked black vehicles delivered suits into the prefab offices surrounding the site. Blake had to remove most of the team, but managed to keep me around as the one most familiar with the void. Construction began anew. This time a sturdy silo was erected over the kaaba. I furnished my measurements of the void’s position and dimensions and was shooed out of the way.

A belt conveyor was installed, feeding into the top of the silo from an adjacent receiving building, and by year’s end trucks began arriving on a road built to the site. The void was now a trash can.

I arranged monitoring for the first test dumps. The chute was a steel pipe, just over a meter in diameter, positioned directly over the void with a gap of about 20 cm. Some kind of internal trap door held air pressure and the waste material while the loading door was open. They told me the first dump was depleted uranium. Background radiation measured slightly lower close to the void, so I positioned detectors in the corners of the room. Radiation increased during the drop, then tapered back down to normal as the material vanished.

Trucks continued to deliver loads through the winter. From my vantage point among the outbuildings, I couldn’t see what they carried, but judging by the HAZMAT gear it was the sort of stuff Yucca Mountain wouldn’t take.

Word must have leaked to the EPA, because disposal work halted and I was called in again to check on the void, see if it had indigestion. Holding a stethoscope up to a black hole was unnerving enough, so I tried not to think about what had been dumped in there and kept rad monitors in my socks, pockets, and under my hat.

During my time off I had time to plan some more exacting measurements than can be done with broomsticks. Connected to the tether I couldn’t get near enough to the sphere to hurt myself, but I had some leeway with equipment. The bismuth stack had been removed. I brought a rolling equipment table and a modified jack-in-the box toy through the airlock. Using a stack of books, I positioned the spring-loaded launcher under the lowest point of the sphere. I pulled the table back and loaded the launcher with the biggest ball of fused quartz I had been able to lay hands on, calling in a favor from a school pal at NASA. I wound up the jack-in-the-box and could feel the vibration of the mechanism turning inside, though the cheerful music did not carry through the vacuum. I had about eight seconds to position the table back under the center of the sphere, then stop breathing and wait for it to pop. Without a hitch, the quartz ball popped up and intersected with the void, dropping back down as a hemisphere.

Analysis showed a radius of 104.243 cm. The earlier paper measurement was not perfectly precise, but it was clear that the baby was growing on its diet of atom bomb cores and spent fuel rods.

Radiation was still absent, slightly lower than background. There was nothing I could throw from one side that could be detected at the other (they wouldn’t allow me to test with firearms, perhaps fearing that I would damage their plutonium sink).

Testing for refraction of radio and light near the sphere’s edge gave me the idea to test for gravitational aberrations. I imagined recreating the Cavendish experiment but couldn’t work out a design that wasn’t too finicky for the airlock and close quarters of the containment chamber. Instead, I used a lab scale to weigh a block of titanium at the side of the kaaba, and again directly under the void. The block lost 1.5% of its weight under the void, and other materials gave similar results.

All this went into a 50-page report, which would have done as much good if I fed it to the void. Dumping resumed at an accelerated pace, with two to five trucks arriving daily with their loads of nuclear waste and enemies of the state. I resumed playing with a Newton’s cradle in my windowless container office a kilometer away from the secured site, on call as the world’s foremost expert in the world’s least understood singularity. Now and then someone wearing a decorated uniform would demand a report on the feasibility of transporting the void to another “theater of operations,” presumably one with more sand and bad guys than New Jersey. I imagined it would make for an impressive demonstration of destructive capability, if you could only load it on a battleship without sinking it.

7 May

There’s been an accident. They wouldn’t tell me what they were dropping, but it somehow missed the target. Must not have been a smart bomb. A lot of it got swallowed, but enough high explosive fell past the void to set off an impressive dirty bomb. The recording showed a bunch of junk crashing to the floor, then a bright flash that wrecked the kaaba, then no more video. The sarcophagus was also depressurized, so after the blast weakened its walls, it imploded into the center and disappeared. Outside, we heard a bang, then the fantastic roar began again.

From a distance, the void was visible as a perfect black sphere hovering over a crater twenty or so meters across. The explosion must have smashed the foundation and caused all the nearby concrete and soil to get sucked in. Trees had been removed from the area, so there wasn’t much visible movement, just a steady wind that flattened grass in a radial pattern toward the crater.

Without the building’s floor to judge by, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to me that the sphere was a good bit lower than where it started. It was also larger. That night we projected a diffused laser from a safe distance toward the sphere and measured its shadow on the side of a truck. It was approaching three meters in diameter.

By morning the sphere was not visible over the edge of the crater when viewing from a safe distance. The airspace was closed, but satellites and drones showed the sphere was still in the center of the crater, which was also getting larger by the hour. I decided to clear out.

21 May, USS Arlington

Those grad school connections come in handy. I packed a rucksack while making calls, and talked my way onto the biggest ship with good satcom I could manage. It was docked in Norfolk, and I drove through the night to get there by dawn. Word was not yet out, but I didn’t think it would be long before things would be conspicuously out of whack.

New York City went dark sooner than I expected. Someone at the Pentagon must have noticed a giant hole in New England, assumed the worst, and we got our sailing orders. We went north, for lack of a better idea. I didn’t say anything, figuring it was only a matter of time one way or another.

We were never close enough to land to see anything, but TV news was covering the story of a lifetime. There was seismic activity all over the northeast, and Yellowstone National Park was closed without explanation. Before New England fell apart, we saw helicopter footage of what looked like a sinkhole a mile across, a big brown hole in the Earth. I couldn’t see any sign of the void. Later helicopters must have become unusable, or maybe fuel ran out, and we saw satellite images of a vast and growing dark circle.

29 May

We turned east, whether under orders or not I have no idea. Communication has been spotty, but I get occasional messages from West Coast colleagues who are anxious to move somewhere stable. For once, being an astronaut seems like a good career choice.

We end up in the Mediterranean, probably because the captain is Greek. GPS is acting funny, or else the maps no longer resemble the territory. When we picked up fuel in the Canaries the water was several meters low at what should have been high tide.

Captain Noeides searched for a place to dock but the ports are now a kilometer inland. We sailed back toward the Atlantic on dead reckoning, keeping the Rock to starboard, and ran aground in the strait and got stuck. There have been some scenes on board, but we have a year’s supply of food and unlimited water and nothing to do but wait. We drop supplies overboard to the occasional small craft that does not appear piratical.

One day we hear rumbling in the distance, then an hour later a large swell carries us out to sea. We drift. There are no signals on the air and no reason to go anywhere. We stargaze by night and read to pass the days. The atmosphere is perversely festive, on this warship cruise ship at the end of the world. People tell stories and perform comedies, recitals, and concerts. Liquor and tobacco are scarce, and the gym is a diversion, so many on board are taking care of their long-term health, and making merry. I am inclined to join them.

[Here the record ends.]