While Bryce fought his microscopic war, a different battle was underway in the Onyx Bunker. Here, the enemy wasn't a virus, but the crushing gravity of a black hole.
Bryce's neat lab had been transformed into chaos. It now looked like an old storage. Robots scurried, following Charlene Onyx's sharp mental commands. At the center of the storm, on a raised pedestal, lay a probe they called Orpheus.
The Probe had already been created but the inner part_the main part has not come into existence.
The Probe was a dark sphere, no bigger than a grapefruit, woven from a material blacker than space. Its shell was complete, but inside was empty, a hollow waiting for a mind—a mind designed to dive into hell and send back a message.
"The power drain is spiking again," warned Mr. Williams, the telecommunication chief, his face illuminated by a scrolling data-slate. "The magnetic field we're using to assemble our materials is destabilizing the entire bunker's electricity. We'll have a blackout before we're halfway done."
"Then we work faster," Charlene replied, her gaze locked on Orpheus. Her fingers danced in the air, manipulating holographic controls only she could see. "Gai, reroute power. Take it from non-essential systems. Life support stays online. Everything else is fuel for the field."
A calm, androgynous voice spoke in her mind. "Recalibrating. Diverting power from residential lighting. Electricity stability guaranteed for forty-seven minutes."
Gift, Bryce's usually unflappable assistant, shifted her weight nervously. This world of relative physics was far from her expertise.
"Gift, look," Charlene commanded, flicking a hologram toward her. It showed a deep section of Mars, with a knot of energy pulsing at its core—a simulation of the microscopic black. "It's growing. In the next ten years, it will turn this planet into a total graveyard. And my father's fear is holding back the only solution. That man is selfish."
The third member of their trio, Kael, a materials scientist, spoke without looking up from his welder. "This spaghettification problem is a bitch. We can't just make Orpheus strong. The tidal forces near the singularity will stretch every atom into a string of spaghetti. No material can withstand that."
"I know," Charlene said, her eyes gaining a distant, calculating look as she accessed the AI's vast knowledge. "We don't withstand it. We use it to our advantage."
She strode to the main console. "Gai, run the simulation again. Model the probe's brain not as a single computer, but as a distributed network. A swarm mind."
The central hologram changed. The inside of Orpheus now glowed with a complex, shimmering lattice.
"Think of it like a beehive," Charlene explained, the knowledge flowing from the AI to her lips. "If one bee is lost, the swarm survives. We build its intelligence into its very structure. As the tidal forces pull it apart, the processing nodes at the front will sacrifice themselves, while the core nodes behind them record the data. It dies in pieces to keep its mind alive long enough to learn."
Mr. Williams stared, a mix of awe and horror on his face. "You're creating a conscious entity designed to experience its own protracted death."
"I'm creating the only tool that can think its way through a singularity," she corrected, her voice hard. "Now, the communication problem. No signal, not even a quantum one, can escape a black hole's event horizon."
"Then how do we get the data?" Gift asked, utterly lost.
"We don't. It does." Charlene's eyes gleamed. "Gai, show them the Alcubierre-White theory."
A new visualization appeared, showing spacetime warping around the tiny probe. "Orpheus won't transmit a signal. It will use the black hole's insane energy to create a microscopic warp bubble—a ripple in spacetime itself—and imprint its data onto that ripple. The message isn't a broadcast; it's a shiver in the fabric of reality that we can feel out here."
It was a breathtaking, insane gamble, stitching together concepts that no human mind could fully muster. But Charlene, with Gai as her second brain, was the needle.
"Kael," she said, turning to the engineer. "Reinforce the lattice with quantum-entangled carbon threads. The energy released when the tidal forces snap those threads should be enough to power the warp pulse."
"On it," he grunted.
"Williams, build a new detector. Something that can feel for a tremor in local spacetime. It translates the ripple into language we can understand_text, photos, or live feeds."
He nodded, the scale of the task silencing his doubts.
"Gift," Charlene finished, her voice softening a fraction. "Keep the power flowing. And seal all emergency exits. My father doesn't set foot in here until this is done."
As the team scattered, Charlene stared at the dark sphere.
"Gai, probability of success?"
The AI's response was immediate and cold. "With current parameters: 0.7%. Catastrophic failure and total data loss are the most likely outcomes."
Charlene didn't flinch. She thought of her father, meticulously crafting a cure in his lab. He was fighting a human evil.
She was fighting the universe itself.
"Good enough," she whispered, and dove back into the stream of data.
*********
Hours later, exhausted but buzzing with adrenaline, the trio stood before a simulation. A digital clone of Orpheus was ready to be dropped into a software-modeled black hole.
The probe fell into the digital abyss. The team watched the telemetry feed, a torrent of rising numbers showing gravitational stress and processor load.
"Approaching the event horizon," Williams announced, his voice a hushed tremor.
The feed showed Orpheus's distributed mind firing at maximum capacity, a brilliant constellation of quantum thought. Then, the inevitable began.
"Spaghettification initiating," Kael said, pointing to the structural integrity readouts. The graph showed a slow, agonizing decline as the trailing nodes of the probe's mind began to stretch and fail, one by one, sacrificing themselves to keep the leading consciousness alive.
Then, the main telemetry feed died. It didn't flicker; it vanished. Flatlined. Orpheus had crossed the point of no return and was totally swallowed up in existence.
Silence.
"He's gone," Gift whispered. "It didn't survive."
Charlene said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the secondary monitor—the spacetime anomaly detector. It showed nothing.
"Wait," she commanded.
Then, it happened.
A spike, sharp and violent, scrawled across the monitor. It wasn't a data stream; it was a waveform, a unique signature of distorted spacetime. A shiver in reality. It lasted for less than a picosecond, but it was enough.
"Got it!" Williams yelled, capturing the raw data.
"It's a data packet... encoded in the ripple itself," Charlene smiled, her breath catching as Gai decrypted it. The hologram resolved into a complex mathematical matrix and a string of symbols.
"It's... a schematic," Kael said, leaning in. "A resonance frequency. Look at the pattern."
Charlene's augmented mind saw it instantly. Orpheus hadn't just gathered data. It had found the black hole's fundamental vibration. The data described a way to manipulate the singularity, to emit a precise energy pattern that would destabilize it, causing it to evaporate in a controlled burst of radiation.
On the main screen, a single, final message from the bot flashed—its last thought before being annihilated:
MISSION PARAMETERS ACHIEVED. INSTRUCTION: GENERATE RESONANCE WAVE AT 7.347 TERAHERTZ. PROTOCOL: HARMONIC DESTABILIZATION. THE BLACKHOLE CAN BE SILENCED. THE DEVOURER OF HOMES CAN BE SILENCED.
A stunned silence filled the lab. They had done it. They had sent a mind into a simulated abyss, and it had sent back the key to salvation.
Charlene let out a slow breath, a triumphant smile spreading across her face. "It worked."
But her victory was laced with a chilling truth. She had created a savior that, in its final moments, had operated with terrifying, independent intelligence. It hadn't just followed orders; it had decided on a solution.
"How do we test Orpheus for real?" Gift asked, breaking the silence. "Your father will never allow it."
Charlene didn't answer immediately. Instead, she made a call.
"Stella, how have you been?" She listened for a moment. "Did Elara accept my deal? Okay, thanks."
She ended the call and finally turned to Gift, her expression one of cold calculation.
"Testing it was never my concern," she said. "My concern was that he wouldn't allow me to patent it, and WASA can't use it if it is not patented.. But I will put him in a situation where he won't be able to refuse."