Disembodied, the Sink Ambassador and I floated over Virtual images of the collapsing core. I said, "I wish Eve could see this."

"Yes."

By now, of course, the Ghosts had figured it out for themselves; but I couldn't resist rubbing it in. "It was your chance comment about electron degeneracy pressure that gave me the key. Suppose Planck were reduced to zero in the star core. The higher quantum states would collapse -- spin values, for instance, would fall from Planck multiples to zero."

The Pauli Exclusion Principle could not work, and electron degeneracy pressure would fail. The star core must implode... all the way, past the neutron star compaction limit, on to become a black hole.

"Actually," the Ambassador said smoothly, "there are technicalities you didn't consider. For example, no electron can have zero spin value. Nor can any fermion. Presumably the core fermions are collapsing to bosons, like photons... The physics must be interesting in there."

"Whatever. It worked, didn't it?"

"Yes. We have contained the Planck Zero sac expansion. Within an event horizon, for all time."

"And we've locked away your Planck Zero AI."

The Ghost thought that over. "That is important to you?"

"What did you sense, inside the sac?"

"Infinite power... and anger."

"There was more, Ambassador. In discontinuous space, without the anchorage of quantum wave functions, it was utterly alone. And lonely. And it was furious. Do you see?"

Quantum loneliness.

I had recognized a fellow sufferer. In my loneliness I can only hurt myself, but the mind-device had an infinite capacity for destruction. Still, it was trapped now...

Then I began to wonder, and I haven't been able to stop. Is there any way out of a black hole?

The images conjured up by Eve had been like reflections in the glimmering walls of the Planck sac.

I brooded, for a while unable to speak.

Eve asked, "Are you all right?"

"I don't know."

I'd relived it all again. The rebuilding. The horror of that quantum loneliness.

"Nobody should have to go through that twice," I said angrily.

"I know, Jack. And I'm sorry. But it's important that--"

" -- I understand. I know. What next, Eve?"

"Next," she said, "we'll look ahead..."

"Ahead? Into the future? How is that possible?"

"Watch," she said. "Just watch."

...Five thousand years in the future, and ten thousand years after its first eruption from Earth, humanity's colonization wavefront spread at lightspeed through the Galaxy.

Its experiences, at the hands of the Qax and others, had changed humanity.

Never again would humanity be made to serve at the behest of some alien power.

As humans grew in power, the conquest of other species became an industry. A new era began.

PART 4 ERA: Assimilation

PART 4
ERA: Assimilation

The Godel Sunflowers

The Godel Sunflowers

A.D. 10515