The Fuller Crater

Mercury

Engineer and architect Richard "Bucky" Fuller published thirty-some books over his long life -- none were fiction. Experts agree, Bucky was no idiot. As the second president of Mensa, he'd helped propel a movement showcasing intelligence around the world at a time when national barriers were still strong. But with the passage of time, Bucky, like most of us, was mostly forgotten.

Decades after Bucky's passing, scientists looking under an electronic microscope observed the odd shape of new material: the carbon nanotube. The atoms aligned in neat strutted tubes made famous in Bucky’s buildings as if ordered by the deceased architect. These carbon ropes were baptized fullens in his honor. But few ever used the scientific names, preferring the slick new name, the nanotube. Once again, Bucky’s legacy failed to stick around.

Fuller's name surfaced several times, but each time, soon after, he was forgotten. In 2005 a technician charged with naming hundreds of new craters on Mercury came across Bucky's bio. As the Voyager probe mapped Mercury, hundreds of large craters required naming. Thus was baptized the Fuller Crater, one innocuous ring of dirt north of the new map.

But, in fact Bucky drew the lucky short straw. The crater was in fact in a unique magnetic location; it formed a prison for creatures allergic to waves.

Mercury, floats some sixty-five million miles away from earth. Posters on walls of astronomy classes show the planet as a small dark rock drowned over the bubbling plasma backdrop of our star. Once a year, images show a black dog moving diagonally across the ball of fire at the center of our system. Over the centuries, these clumsy images forced mankind develop yet another a false impression of a neighborhood planet in our system. To most, Mercury is a minuscule rock, too small and insignificant to be of any relevance.

In fact, Mercury is close to the size of earth's own gigantic moon, a darker cousin the size of mars. A visitor walking on the surface of mercury would feel about thirty percent of earth's gravity. Like all globes without an atmosphere, the grey rock is covered withscars and craters.

What cannot be ignored from the surface of the God of War's planet is the triple-sized white sun blazing in the sky. Unlike mars, an astronaut on Mercury, expending her hand to cast shade would be incapable of hiding the sun from her sight. A human's shadow here appears on the ground as a thin black line surrounded by several gray areas. Mercury orbits in eighty-eight earth days while it rotates upon itself just a bit longer than its year progression. A human born and living on Mercury would die at the ripe age of four hundred mercurial years, yet having seen three hundred sunrises.

As for the hot surface temperatures, on this alone the folklore is right. At this closer distance, both sides of Mercury (light and shadow) are twice as hot as earth's moon.

Near Mercury's North Pole, a crater 27 km in diameter was named after Bucky. The Fuller Crater is an invisible oddity at the intersection of two natural magnetic forces; the solar wind and the magnetic pole of the planet. Inside this crater, like the eye of a hurricane, both magnetic forces drop to zero as they cancel one another out in a strange invisible vortex. In this perfect nexus of conditions, creatures fragile to magnetic and electric forces roam free surrounded by deadly energy.

As seen by President Sanchez in his vision, about one hundred martians now hold a Mercurian passport stamped without a return ticket. When martians migrated to a body made of a small cloud of magnetized multi-facet balls, they never contemplated their great undertaking. When a Mercurian floats to the edge of the Fuller Crater, because of their fragile magnetic nature, they get lifted and crushed by the fields.

Mercury spins slowly upon itself and is tilted very slightly. Deadly invisible solar fluxes of charged radiation fly and kiss the planet at an angle of six degrees over the north-west rim of the Fuller Crater. In this invisible wind, which would produce heavy static on an old radio, is felt by the stranded Mercurians as a violent, painful upward push. The invisible waves of high energy solar plasma are relentless. They slide like dust over the edges of the Crater the same way snow covers the lip of a mountaintop in the Alpes.

The Crater wasn’t a home, it was a fortunate prison for martians stranded and unable to communicate out because of the energy.

In the natural oasis of shade which is the Fuller Crater, is also found the only substantial deposits of natural water and carbonic ice on the surface of the planet. The chunk of frozen water and carbon, about the size of twenty ice rinks, includes an underground network of caverns large enough to sustain a colony of very small Martians. Here, like an ant colony, the creatures survive.

The Messenger probe crashed on Mercury and in 2015, mankind first learned of the glaciers located here. But that year, mankind wasn't looking for life in the form of small puffs of magnetic martian sand, and no one gave a second thought of possible conditions hospitable for sand creatures. As a result, alien life here remained undiscovered until they were imagined by Ronaldo Corvas and seen by the President.

***

"Toro, Toro, something in the seventh quantum bend appears to be changing," said a frantic voice deep below the ice of Mercury. The cavern was the size of a human basketball. Here, sunshine never shone. On the wall, dirty crystals resonated from a deep red color. The sand creature was excited, the grains forming the hand-sized cloud were shaking lightly. It floated next to a darker portion of the room on which multiple dots of color bounced.

"Nothing short of the seventh, really?" came the sarcastic reply from his friend floating in.

"Yes, yes, yes!" confirmed the first creature.

"You said the same thing thirty-eight days ago," joked Toro. It moved slowly, and it’s grains merged at the same location as his friend increasing the density of the cloud. Both creatures for the moment existed in the same area, their grains interlocked. In this formation, they were capable of using each other's energy to warm themselves. On mars, the merger of two creatures into the same location, much like public sex on earth, was filled with taboo. But here on mercury, the necessity of subsistence in this cold hostile place had long forced the creatures to abandon this stigma. Like Everest climbers, life here was in close quarters and they merged as often as possible to save a joule of energy.

From a distance, the colony looked like a giant ant farm made of a maze of irregular tubes like veins in the ice. Each stranded creature owned a physical part of the colony. The pair was floating alone in the scientific gallery, at the heart of the structure. To a human, this place looked like a dirty tube carved in ice. Next to the pair, a small white speck large enough to hold a subatomic machine was carved in the ice. Here, technology was only available on an atomic scale.

The excited creature continued, "Look at the higher properties of this photon, at the seventh bend in the machine. It points to the right; that's not possible. It points at space in a direction the outside the magnetic shield in a vector that points between Jupiter and earth. That can't be a coincidence. Earth!" The creature's excitement was infectious. This notion that Martians were stoic creatures, entities free of emotions and only made of reason was pure falsehood. The optimist merged with Toro was named Grix, but most on Mercury deformed his name and called him Grox. The friendly taunt annoyed him, but here anything designed to pass the time was welcomed.

"Do you realize how crazy you sound? Are you sure? That's a very bold statement. How about the fourth bend instead of the seventh?"

"Look for yourself," replied Grix vibrating over part of the cold wall.

Before it could look at the machine, Toro needed to sever himself from Grix. In the small crack, deep inside a rock were floating about two thousand grains of sand inches above the ground. A thousand grains formed each creature. One by one, the two creatures began to slide away from each other leaving a gold streak of energy in the faint atmosphere. As they untangled, there was pleasure. The merger and the severing felt good to them.

To the untrained eye, there was nothing on the machine here to see. The surface of the ice was dirty and irregular, and the machine was too small for the naked human eye. But using a very fine microscope, one could see the surface of the ice carved precisely to allow millions of small platelets to form a network of angles. On each tip of the machine was an angled mirror. The same way satellites are built to house titanium waveguides, carved labyrinth corridors in metal blocks to hold waves, this machine was designed to guide a single photon, like a Plinko ball, through this network of mirrors. With each bounce, the photon lost energy and slowed, flipping from its particulate form back and to wave form.

Grix squeezed himself very hard; the cloud became almost half its size until a single photon shot out in the direction of the wall like a lama spits at a tourist. The yellow ball of light hit the machine, bent sideways and began a long bouncing trajectory. As it moved within the labyrinth, it slowed from the speed of light to a virtual standstill. During the short process, the yellow photon changed color to a deep shade of gold and finally into a red dot.

"There!" confirmed Grix. "Look at its shape, the edge; it seems to twist."

"It did not."

"Did so."

"It did not."

"Did so." His enthusiasm was audible. Like a candle running out of wax, the red photon wicked and extinguished as the two creatures argued like children. "Let me show you again," offered Grix. The creature compressed itself once again and launched a second photon in the crystal labyrinth. It followed the same trajectory and slowed. "See it," he finally said, "Right there!" he offered as it finally turned red. An instant before it blinked out of existence, the same thing happened. The photon's rounded shape became oblong, it then twisted upon itself, flipped like a fish running out of air just before it blinked out of existence.

"I guess," had to admit the skeptic, "but that is a long way from being a shift in the seventh bend of space. It could be an extension of the second or a split of the fourth. I don't know. You're reaching the conclusion you want to believe. Stop giving yourself this false hope, no one has ever come here or will ever come to this place. We've been disappointed so many times by false messages and predictions. If anyone comes, it will be from mars, not from earth. The vector of escape from this miserable photon points to the water rock. Mars is on the left, if this was Jupiter," he concluded.

"There is life now on earth, you know this. They have space travel capacity. They crashed a probe here a while back. Maybe the jailers on mars asked for their help. Or maybe the help comes from Jupiter, it also orbits on the right, behind earth."

"Jupiter? My god, you are finally going mad. A very short time ago, the earthians sent a probe; it was so primitive, it appeared not even to possess a visual camera. They are sending waves -- waves, you get that?! We are invisible to them. They simply cannot know we exist and even those on mars think we are dead." Much like apples on a tree, all photons appeared identical from a distance, but to any advanced civilization, when examined carefully, photons, they differed widely and demonstrated change over time.

"I will not and cannot give up on being rescued."

"This is our home."

"This is a prison, not a home."

"I know," conceded the second, "I cannot give up on hope. I would have let myself drift to the sun a long time ago if I did." The martians ended their lives by rising in the sky and entering the flux barrier, a deadly sea of electromagnetic energy. "I apologize Grox; your optimism must be encouraged, not dashed. I hope you're right. Let's watch it again."

They did, again and again, the way only a prisoner could.

***

Unlike what Grox may have suggested to Toro, there was no real bridge between the present and the future. The information collected from the seventh bend was in many ways more subtle. Communication between semi-immoral beings rarely slow to explain subtle physics. The seventh bend was a name given to one crucial property of the Multiverse by many experts.

To these advanced scientists, the ways of the seventh bend remained one of the most complex to comprehend. Unlike what most lower life forms (like humans) loved to imagine, true void does not exist and the Multiverse. Space between everything physical is formed of a highly unique and sophisticated fabric. The Ancient Greek once used a finer notion of Ether to define the area between physical objects and they were much closer to reality than modern scientists.

The notion of void is often used in advanced places to teach children the primitive notions of space. Fish in water at first cannot understand they move in an invisible liquid. Humans took centuries to discover air. The same way, creatures take time to understand space is also a fluid - but a much different type of fluid. As it turns out, the fabric of space, when analogized with human skin, has pores, cells, nerves, hair, and the list goes on. Ether is defined by multiple physical ‘bends’ of space, dimensions or even properties. Space is made of much more than width, length, and depth. On earth, some misbelieve time is a fourth dimension. But that is a gross notion needed to make sense of void and three dimensional space. The fabric of pace has for example diagonal properties, scaling properties, and even tunnel properties to name a few of the nearly one hundred effects or catalogued bends in mercurial books.

Humans don't understand radioactive decay because they have yet to understand tunneling, one of the bends. Once a race understands that natural senses only allow the perception of a couple of bends, finding the others is simple observation. One thing was certain: if mankind survived the Sixth Attraction, it would no longer take these higher things for granted. The time of complacency and false superiority would be over.

The fourth bend is not time, but a strange ortho-diagonal property of space. Space between two things will "diagonalize" and make the first three bends shorter. This is the fundamental explanation how, between two things, a natural path, like a line drawn in the sand is created by our Multiverse. Humans often call this gravity but more than physical objects attract under the fourth bend. The fourth bend teaches that traveling along this direct line is easier, downhill, shorter, because space itself is different there. To visualize the fourth bend, imagine a map folded in the shape of a V to form the shortest road between two points. The crease created in the map, even once flattened back illustrates the fourth bend. A ball-point pen, also will create a crease if a line is drawn in the map.

The fourth bend helps objects move in the universe toward each other as space is slightly ‘downhill’ between things. But the fourth bend goes much deeper in its significance. Imagine a golfer, putting to finish a hole feet from a cup. In his mind, he sees a curved path between the hole and the ball in the grass. Traveling this line results in a desirable outcome, as a result, space bends and with a very minimal quantity, traveling the line is actually easier. Space does not favor mankind. It is built with purpose if given a chance. The God Bias, which man believes favors itself is mankind’s first feeble attempt to understand this bend.

Before we can try to understand Grix’s seventh bend, we must talk about the fifth bend. It somewhat constructs on the first four. The fifth bend provides that on top of the first four, space will change locally in pockets or areas. To visualize this bend, image the different pockets of resources and mining goods on earth. Locally, certain areas differ. The same way, the Multiverse has areas (small and big) which change space. The fourth bend regulates force fields and helps understand why galaxies form where they do.

The fifth bend is a property of space which provides that warps the reach of effects. For example, the fifth bend explains that distances are not considered equal for everything. In space, some things, like Rho waves and other mental waves benefit from entirely different properties. Certain things are giving highways to travel while some must move down dirt roads. Your body grows hair at different speeds. Mankind has yet to understand that what scientists think is dark matter is in fact the notion some light is able to travel faster. Rho waves populate the fifth bend.

The sixth bend provides that some areas of space, the fabric itself expands and contracts the same way a lung does when filled with air. Because it does, matter caught in these minuscule changes also expands. This effect is very small in the Cold and only influence the microscopic world. Once scientists on mars began to discover these higher dimensions of space, they understood there was no reason for the list to be limited. In what was called the sixth bend, the roads and lines from the fourth bend were twisted, creating tunnels which illustrated these expansions. This property resembles hair which appears straight when short but as it grows bends into wavy locks.

Grossly speaking, these were the fourth to sixth bends. The seventh bend or dimension is by far the strangest. The great Stephen Hawking was the first to suggest local compression of time, created by a mind, could dilate nothing short of time itself. The suggestion was wrong in its execution but truthful in how the Multiverse functions. To a human, Stephen was right, the seventh bend creates a space which differs for each individual.

The seventh dimension provides that space today depends on how it was yesterday and how it will be tomorrow. That time, is not linear and that things are defined by more that current conditions. Imagine a long road with multiple traffic lights. The capacity of a car to reach the end of the road quickly influences when the traffic lights change which in turn influence when the car arrives. This strange effect provides that time, the future influences the present.

Another way to understand this causal link is to imagine a car painted today in yellow. If in two years, the owner (unknown to him) will repaint the vehicle in blue, the Multiverse which controls these changes over time will lightly alter today’s tint of yellow to be a bit closer to the blue. The owner does not know but today’s color is changed based on the future. But the same way, if two years ago the same car was red, the tint was already changed.

As the seventh bend is understood, a time paradox may be said to arise. Few scientists, even in evolved worlds, ever mastered these rules. Lifting the paradox actually explains quantum indeterminism. In sum, the Multiverse uses chaos to offset any effort to manipulate the seventh bend. If the Multiverse catches you looking to closely at the current color of your car, trying to determine what shade will be, and with a desire to change the future, the color becomes impossible to measure with enough certainty. Humans were not ready for this knowledge.

But Grix was right. He had lifted part of the paradox in that he deeply wanted to leave his prison. Irrespective of the future, irrespective of the measure, his acts would not change. He planned to leave his planet. For that reason, he was able to read photon’s seventh bend values without the determinism mask. He saw the future, and he was right.

Help was coming.

Grox and Toro continued their experimentation. "Look, the blur begins here, past this date. Time is very short. Less than half one of our years. Our future here is now undetermined, how exciting! We must warn the others."

"Calm yourself. Yes, but this can mean many things. Not sure why you jump to the conclusion of a rescue." Toro hated to challenge once again the optimism of Grox.

"What else could it mean?"

"Hundreds of things. I don't know. For example, the Multiverse is changing. It is bending, and past a point, it may want to destroy this world, this entire dimension."

"Then that outcome would be determined, certain and visible."

"Not really. I know of a rare phenomenon, an occurrence when the variables begin to change and align. In theory, it is as if all these values are "attracted" to each other. I call it the Attraction or the Great Curvature."

"What the hell are you talking about? You must stop taking in those high energy plasma photons. They're damaging you; you're half crazy already. You discard a rescue mission and favor a much less probable outcome."

"That would be fun. I will run tests to confirm this theory. Maybe there is an Attraction coming."

"I have had enough of you."

"Nothing is coming here; I apologize if my words seem harsh."

The voices in the Crater went silent.

***

In the silence of night, a large rocket launched from its pad in Florida. It was a capsule designed to perforate the ice of a moon of Jupiter. It rose silently, appear to twist in the sky as the pad on earth rotated away. Instead of initiating the complex orbit and ricochet the craft around the moon, the craft ignited thrusters and plunged the black tube instead toward the sun. In it were two men, one was a prisoner of the other. The prisoner slept under the action of a powerful sedative designed for the META. The other was laughing hysterically. Behind him were secured tightly were a hundred fragile figurines of Marilyn Monroe stored in protective boxes. The clouds of sand were fighting the deadly lift forces. Martians hated the fourth bend. Next to them were crates of equipment including a rocket launcher dismantled in pieces. The Jester had requested a strange list of equipment which made sense only to him.

The acceleration was brutal.

His new destination was the Fuller Crater. Soon, he would be famous.

It was a rescue mission, and Grox was partly right.

The Sixth Attraction was coming, and Toro was also partly right.

Grox released another photon. Looked at it. It bounced, slowed and then twisted. Help was coming... it was coming from Earth.