Many Matters

[MC_Escher 0]

Many Matters

A Log by Lieutenant MC Escher

 

Escher stared gloomily at the official Star Fleet orders readout. He didn’t know if he was angry, shocked or just plain sad. He also almost regretted ever bringing the Cremorian barking spiders on board…almost.

 

Dark matter…dark matter…Starfleet Academy Science hadn’t spent much time on it, simply because it wasn’t particularly useful or interesting. Oh, it served its purpose in the universe, but it couldn’t be used for anything. In the mid twentieth century, scientists discovered a colossal error in the universal arithmetic. When they measured a galaxy cluster by looking at it, based on its brightness and size, they got a mass 400 times less than the mass derived from the affect of the galaxy cluster on objects around it. This “missing mass problem” was solved with the concept of dark matter. It is an unseen, universal type of matter. While only a few hydrogen atoms worth of it exist in a cubic meter, every cubic meter in the universe has those atoms (unlike observable matter, which is concentrated clumps with massive empty voids in between), so it adds up to a lot. That was pretty much its purpose: maintain the gravitational pull in the universe so the things don’t come crashing back together again. It didn’t do much.

 

Until now.

 

Escher’s main sore spot with this whole affair was that Starfleet hadn’t told him the special properties of the spiders. They had duped him into getting them for the ship by planting shiny facts in front of him that no good scientist could turn down. They had made some vague (and completely false) reference to magic sweat, and left it at that. Nothing about possible uses in dark matter, nothing about possible endangerment of life and limb brought about by these unique traits. Apparently, they had planned for the spiders to hitch a ride on the Manticore all along. It was a black ops ship; it was under the radar; it wouldn’t be missed if it suddenly disappeared. Escher really, really hoped it wouldn’t do that.

 

He tabbed to the next page on the PADD. It had the complicated schematics for the inner workings of the containment device and dark matter scoop. Manticore would head to the quasar cluster, around which was a concentrated ring of dark matter. The ship would fly along this ring so that the scoop could collect the dark matter and send it along channels into the containment box in Science. (That was another problem. It would have to be assembled in four different parts in the Cargo Bay, then physically walked to Science for installation because the massive magnetic coils in the containment device rendered the structure un-beamable.) There, the magnetic fields would concentrate the dark matter, at which point the spiders would be let into the chamber. They would encounter the collected dark matter and concentrate it or focus it in a way that nobody who has observed the spiders before could say anything about, other than “something happens.” If the spiders actually make a product from the dark matter, it will get sucked into a separate chamber and stored for later use.

 

Escher sighed and pushed back from his desk. He went over to the replicator and replicated himself a drink. It worried him that he could only see dark and dangerous times on the horizon. Mark my words, he said to himself, this is only going to end in trouble….