Chapter 1
Na-Yeli Maya approaches the alien object with a mix of pride, trepidation, and curiosity. Unsure of her exact role—champion? explorer? scientist?—she’s well aware that she may be the next in a long line of adventurers that went in, but never came out.
An impenetrable, perfectly black sphere—only blocked-out starlight, a fast-rotating magnetic field, and a massively complex gravitational footprint betray its presence—with two opposite holes, dubbed the Enigmatic Object. Its radius is approximately 86 kilometers, or exactly 2 to the power of 132 Planck Lengths, as one brilliant mind deduced. One hole is blocked with—what seems to be—a spherically shaped, highly charged piece of strange matter. For reference’s sake, it’s called the South Pole. The other one—the North Pole—is not covered, and nicknamed ‘the shutter’. The rest of the sphere—the outer shell—is an invisible, impenetrable barrier that reduces any normal matter touching it to its atomic constituents—a process named ‘spaghettification’ as the molecules are strung out until they break—and has proven impervious to exotic matter like neutronium, quark matter and strangelet, as well.
Most of the time, through a cycle so complex it verges on the chaotic, the North Pole is closed. At unpredictable times, it will open in a truly minuscule manner—micrometers, possibly even nanometers—and then be fully opaque, again. Only once every two-hundred-and-thirty-three human days—or exactly 2 to the power of 168 Planck Times, as calculated by the same brilliant mind—it opens, bang on schedule, wide enough to let an object with a diameter of one meter through.
Its widest opening remains for just over two seconds. Barely enough to let one vessel out, and another vessel in. Through carefully negotiated treaties—after a number of intense interstellar wars over access to the Enigmatic Object decimated several galactic civilizations—each alien species gets a turn and is only allowed to go in during the second second, in order to let someone—whoever it is—out first. Timing is everything. Timing is sacrosanct. Timing is make or break.
Not only is the window of entry short, but the tidal forces surrounding it formidable. Anything with more than one hundred kilograms of mass, or bigger than one meter across will be irresistibly drawn towards the ominous outer shell and ‘spaghettified’ into its atomic constituents.
Na-Yeli is dropped from her mothership and the spherical pod (with an exoskin of metamaterials that can both transform and shape-shift) in which she will explore the unknown object—while its one hundred-and-seventy-two kilometer diameter makes it cosmically small, inside it is said to contain whole worlds in miniature—is weighed and manufactured to the picogram and picometer. Her aim must be true and her timing must be right: one nanometer off, or one millisecond late, and she’s toast. Or more accurately, spaghetti on toast.
Using the lasers of the mothership for course corrections—so she can enter the black enigma with the maximum possible amount of life support and equipment—she aims at the opening, dead center, in a perfectly perpendicular approach. Maximum acceleration at full laser power, so her passage time is as short as possible. Her pod heating up just short of cooking her—this has been rehearsed to exhaustion, and dog knows she might need the extra energy—she races to the forbidding gate, wondering if other explorers were cutting it as fine as she is. A mental brace, a sharp gravitational tug from all directions at once, and … she’s in.
