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 death, 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 unique 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: nanotube. Once again, Bucky’s legacy and name failed to stick around.

To his credit, Fuller's name surfaced several times, but each time, 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 had to be baptized. Thus the Fuller Crater was born. But it was one innocuous ring of dirt north of the map. But Bucky finally had drawn the lucky straw. The crater was in a unique magnetic location; right where the planet’s magnetic pole surfaced and solar electric wind bent over the horizon. The energy mix formed a prison and an island of protection for creatures allergic to electromagnetic waves or solar energy.

***

Mercury floats some sixty-five million miles 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 while, images illustrate the rock as a black dot moving diagonally across the ball of fire. These clumsy views forced mankind to develop 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. Untrue.

Mercury is the size of Earth’s own gigantic moon and 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 with scars and craters, a testament to the asteroids polluting our system for quite some time.

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 on Mars, an astronaut walking 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 yearly progression. A human born and living on Mercury would die at the ripe age of four hundred mercurial years, yet having seen only three hundred sunrises.

As for the hot surface temperatures, on this alone the folklore is right. At this 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 of energy. In this perfect nexus of conditions, immortal creatures vulnerable to magnetic and electric forces are offered an island of protection.

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 lift and crushed by 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 Alps.

The Crater wasn’t a home, it was a fortunate prison for martians stranded and unable to communicate. 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, include an underground network of caverns large enough to sustain the colony. Here the creatures survive.

The Messenger probe crashed on Mercury and in 2015, mankind first learned of the glaciers located here. But that year, man 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 seen by the President.

***

"Toro, Toro, something in the seventh quantum bend is 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 in 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 five storms 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 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 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 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 did 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. I apologize; 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.

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. The other was laughing hysterically. Behind him were a hundred fragile figurines of Marilyn Monroe stored in protective boxes. The clouds of sand inside of each were fighting the deadly lift forces.

The acceleration was brutal.

The new destination was the Fuller Crater. Soon.

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.