The generation ship Adams sails through the endless ocean of space protected by a forcefield scoop that surrounds it in a white-blue halo. It glides serenely through the abyss, lonely but powerful. Inside it is a powder keg, ruled by a tyrannical Captain and a crew stirring like mad ants. With just that information, can you foresee divine intervention two galaxies away?
Let’s start at the end of the Great Mutiny. With the Last Mutineer and the Captain in a shootout on the hull, facing each other down at the climax of revolutionary hell. Each is stooped over because standing up means decapitation by forcefield scoop. Unless some infinitesimally unlikely fluctuation in the halo spares them, but that possibility is too small for them to consider. Not too small for our calculations though.
The Mutineer runs to the front of the ship and wields her crowbar to pry open the emergency hatch to the bridge. The Captain catches up and fires a warning shot. It zips past her helmet, making proximity alarms bloom in her HUD. She keeps prying, desperate to get inside. The Captain fires again, and blood shoots out from the Mutineer’s corpse like frozen bolts of lightning. She floats away and her body is destroyed by the scoop, all in complete silence.
The Captain never thinks about the warning shot again. Why would he? The halo would have destroyed it the same way it destroyed his enemy, and he had glorious victory to worry about. While he goes back inside to celebrate his pyrrhic victory, we must zoom out. This is when I remind you what I said about infinitesimally unlikely fluctuations. I’m talking about a 0.0000001% chance that the bullet could make it through the halo, and an even smaller chance it wouldn’t instantly collide with some scooped-up space dust and disintegrate. A possibility that sensible minds would never entertain, no matter how much we dress it up with reason.
We will think about it, though, because in an infinite universe, bullets are fired from ship hulls all the time. Literally every nanosecond. With every breath you take, millions of shots are fired through millions of unforgiving halos and their trailing clouds of matter. With the sheer number of times this scenario plays out, it is inevitable that eventually one bullet would find that nearly impossible road out into the emptiness beyond.
The warning shot made it through the forcefield scoop.
Our not-quite-impossible bullet travels at 4,390km/h as it leaves the gun. Add to that the momentum of the GS Adams, and our bullet becomes fast enough to achieve the improbable feat of catching up to something interesting in this ever-expanding universe. Yes, the universe is mostly empty, but you know what Isaac Newton said about bodies in motion. Once the gun fires, the bullet must end up somewhere eventually.
In our story, the somewhere we would expect our bullet to reach is a nebula 100 light-years ahead of the GS Adams. Through the ship’s telescopes it shines in a million different colors, which to the bullet means a million different forms of annihilation via space particle. Only a miracle can save it.
Yet, history is full of miracle stories. You probably know someone with a miracle story. Not a make-believe tall-tale type miracle, but some sort of twisting of probability that would destroy the suspension of disbelief if it happened in a story. Maybe your friend would have been run over if they had stood anywhere but that one patch of pavement they had happened upon, or if they had been two seconds late the elevator would have closed, and they would have missed either a fateful encounter with a stranger or a deadly fall down the shaft. Humans have always spoken about miracles, because we have always known deep down that improbable does not mean impossible.
Our bullet’s miracle comes in the form of a tiny rip in the fabric of space-time. A wormhole opens right in its path. You laugh? Why? Don’t you know that wormholes are all around us, just too small to be perceived? I called our wormhole a tiny rip, but by wormhole standards it is a monster. Now why shouldn’t wormholes have such extreme outliers? Everything else has exceptions. It isn’t impossible.
I know that the chances of our bullet finding its way through this wormhole, after already weaving an improbable path through the forcefield scoop, would be extremely unlikely. It would be like someone winning the lottery. Twice.
The thing is, though, people do win the lottery. Sometimes twice. Remember, in an infinite universe anything not actually impossible must happen. Infinity doesn’t just describe distance.
The bullet zips through the wormhole and comes out into a strange new galaxy. It doesn’t feel too different, at least not in any way that a metal bullet would notice. Maybe the galaxy not being crushed by its central supermassive black hole’s gravity or something more unimaginable isn’t too improbable, but the fact that our bullet arrives in a perfectly manicured single star solar system is. Yes, our stray bullet, after being alone and unbothered in the abyss for thousands of years, finds an island in the void. I’m sure someone out there has won the lottery three times.
This solar system is highly unlikely, but not impossible, so yes, it must exist. It has a gas giant in the habitable zone, surrounded by moons inhabited by thinking creatures who all built telescopes at the same time. Again, highly unlikely, but not impossible, and you know what that means by now.
These aliens hate each other and have been waging war throughout their shared skies. Your cynicism will determine how improbable that seems to you. A military outpost picks up our little bullet as it zips around, but they don’t report it. Too small to be of any interest and all that. In a small, logical universe, they would have been right to ignore it. There are billions of tiny specs floating around in space. What are the chances of any one of those specs – even one of unusual speed – causing any mischief?
Well, one such small spec ended up hitting the James Webb Space Telescope and causing such mischief. Yes, the chances of any one bit of debris that has been singled out hitting something is negligible, but that doesn’t change the fact that bits of debris do hit stuff on a regular basis.
As for the possibility that our tiny spec is the one that hits something? Now what have I been saying about anything not impossible?
In the dozens of years that our bullet zips through this solar system, looping around planets and miraculously avoiding collisions, a peace movement starts forming amongst the peoples of the moons. A timespan measured in only dozens of years is nothing. Such a tiny, tiny thimble of sand in a desert that stretches beyond the horizon. So, take the arrival of a bullet from a long-ago mutiny lost in space and an unprecedented peace conference held at a symbolic Lagrange point, and I know you must think it unreasonable that they would happen close enough to influence each other. But is it really such a stretch?
Every single moment is an event, and we never know until we reach the comfort of hindsight which events even impact each other, let alone which ones seem odd together.
You know about the bullet. You know why and how it got here, and why it isn’t as impossible as it appears. You do not need the same level of backstory for the alien peace talks, even though I admit that may be more interesting. All you need to know is that the space station constructed to hold the talks is certainly a somewhere.
Once the talks are underway, it becomes apparent that there is one Evil Emperor who does not want peace. He’s fine with killing other moon peoples to expand his wealth and influence, and why should he ever worry about defeat? He has the Great and Terrifying Storm God of the Gas Giant on his side. He sits at a table surrounded by other aliens, with the violent clash of the god filling the glass window-wall in front of him. He knows that he is too powerful for these silly mutterings of peace.
He lasts two weeks our time, then declares the talks a heresy and swears to gather his forces to enact the Great and Terrifying Storm God of the Gas Giant’s will. The other delegates watch in horror as his shuttle returns to his mothership. All they can do is pray to their own gods – gods also of the gas giant but focused more on the rings or the clouds – for deliverance from this endless war.
Then the bullet hits the shuttle.
A single bullet, fired without a second thought by a tyrannical Captain as a warning in an ancient past an unfathomable distance away. It slams through a fault along the windows of the heavily armored shuttle, zips through the interior, damaged but still deadly enough to pierce the Evil Emperor’s heart-equivalent, then come to its final, improbably rest in a crucial pipe deep in the shuttle’s innards.
The shuttle explodes.
The moon peoples watching rejoice, their prayers answered. The Evil Emperor’s followers consider that maybe the Great and Terrifying Storm God of the Gas Giant is disappointed in them and sign the peace treaty.
And yes, the peoples of the moons all lived happily ever after for a while. And yes, I know how unsatisfying this story would be if told from their perspective. Unfortunately for your reasonable little sensibilities, wonderous not-quite-impossible stuff like this happens all the time.
If you don’t believe me, then take a long hard look in the mirror, consider the winding tapestry threaded with coincidence and improbability needed to create the unique being you see, and run your own calculations.
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Jayde Holmes is an Australian writer, artist, and gamer living in Newcastle with her husband and cat. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dirty Magick Magazine, and on her website at https://jaydeholmes.com. | |