“You won’t be surprised that the Silver Ghosts once dabbled with this kind of technology,” Nilis said ruefully. “They created microscopic black holes, with information and processing instructions encoded in the formative collapse. Small enough holes evaporate very quickly—they explode, in fact. The computation’s output is encoded in the radiation they emit in the process. You can solve some spectacularly hard problems that way.” He sniffed. “The Ghosts did get it to work. But each micro-hole computer was a one-off; you could only run one program, because it blew itself up in the process! Even the Ghosts couldn’t find a way to make the technology practical.”
“And,” Torec prompted, “this is what the Xeelee are doing?”
“Yes. But they don’t restrict themselves to mere microscopic holes.”
He showed them data extracted from Pirius Blue’s jaunt into the Cavity. They still had no good close-up images of Chandra, but somehow the Xeelee were controlling the inflow of matter to the event horizon. And through that control, they were “programming” the monstrous black hole. They allowed the Planck scale dynamics of the event horizon to process the input information, and were “reading” the results by analyzing the Hawking radiation the black hole gave off.
“At least that’s what I think they are doing,” Nilis said. “There is still a great deal we don’t know about black holes. For instance, there must be structure in the deep interior, close to the singularity. There the strings and membranes that underlie subatomic particles must be torn and stretched, perhaps reaching dimensions comparable to the black hole itself. Can this ‘fuzzball’ be used for computing purposes? I don’t know—I can’t rule it out. Or perhaps the Xeelee work on some other principle entirely . . .
“It’s remarkable,” he breathed. “A black hole is a convergence of information and physics, a junction in the structure of our universe. And the Xeelee are using this miracle as a tactical computer!” He grinned. “No wonder they were able to fend us off so easily. But now, thanks to your CTC computer, we’ve changed the rules—eh, Ensigns? Even a black hole computer can’t beat that.
“But I don’t think I’ve got to the bottom of it yet.”
“Of what, sir?”
“Of Chandra.”
His proximity to the Galaxy’s center had inspired him to start a whole new line of research, he said. He would go to the Navy’s archives for tactical material from three thousand years’ worth of scouting missions, and perhaps even hunt out scientific data from more innocent times, when Chandra had been thought to be a mere astrophysical marvel, not a military target. “In the quagmites and the Xeelee we have already found two layers of life, from quite different cosmic epochs—and a third, if you include us! I’m beginning to wonder what else is there in Chandra’s nested layers, waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps there is more life to be found in there, still more ancient and strange, perhaps permeating the singularity itself.