The Story Line:

There is a small group of scientists performing an experiment with gravity and an accident happens. They create a form of matter with high gravity and their lab ends up collapsing into the ground.

Approach:

The story is currently posed as a report to a U.N. investigator. Opposed to the tension of the gravitational accident and the excitement of learning some physics, is the blandness of investigative reports.

Features:

Small amounts of tense moments, foul language and nudity.

The Characters:

GEG: gravity experiment group, a mix of scientists, researchers, technicians, and supporting staff.

TEx:    technicians

            TE2: petite, blonde, somewhat exhibitionistic

CCx:    construction crew (maintenance crew)

LPM:  lead project manager, worrier

LSO:   lead security officer, Authoritative, slightly paranoid, older

LP: Lead Physicist: Arrogant, self assured and confident. 25 years old.

UNI: Investigator from the U.N. 53 years old: relaxed, somewhat distant

SCP: space-craft pilot

The Places:

GEL:   gravity experiment lab, a colossal lab that is almost entirely empty.

Hotel:  place where GEG members are interviewed.

U.N. safety committee room

Brown Ball One

LP trying to seem calm and composed as possible so as not to alarm the U.N. investigator. 50 years had passed between the time GEG had an “accident” and the time there were problems again. New developments at the GEG site had brought a U.N. investigator to the site. GEG staff members are sequestered and interviewed at a nearby hotel.

1. LP: “I’m sure it wasn’t our screw-up and I’d classify the situation as safe.” That’s was the best response he could give the investigator. It had been one of the most dangerous physics experiments ever to take place. The experiment had taken place when he was a young man of age 25. It was a leading edge experiment in physics having to do with the nature of matter and gravity. It was rated potentially so dangerous an experiment that it had to be sanctioned by the U.N. It was rated a “do-once-ever” experiment. The danger of the experiment was that if something went wrong, it had the potential to generate a black-hole. One of the problems with the experiment was the time-frame over which it had to occur.

The U.N. investigator returns to the U.N. after interviewing GEG staff members. He reports his findings to a U.N. global safety committee.

2. UNI to superiors: “GEG had estimated that we, we meaning everybody on the planet, would be history in a minimum of 10 years, and a maximum of forty to fifty years, if something went wrong with this experiment. If a black hole were to form, the Earth would have collapse into it within forty years, was the GEG estimate. LP himself came up with an estimate of about a decade, which was verified by several other members of GEG. However, not everybody agreed, and what was considered a conservative range of estimates was arrived at.”

3. UNI to superiors: “There were indications of a problem right at the extreme edge of the GE “safe” time. The “safe” time was the time at which we could all be guaranteed that the experiment had been a complete success and there were no issues with safety. Although the experiment itself took less than a year, there was a requirement for site monitoring for over fifty years. Data recorded during the experiment would be enough to keep people busy for decades. Careers worth of work for a number of people.”

4. LPM to UNI describing the situation just prior to the incident that brought the UNI: “GEG members were sitting playing cards in a portable room just outside the lab at the 50 years mark. There was no indication at all of a problem of any sort. Since 50 years was moving into the “green” alert area of our experiment, GEG members started talking about holding a “we’re safe” a party for the 60 year mark. GEG was planning a party at the next decade mark.

5. Then during the 50th year GEG received a may-day from a space-craft. Someone had a space-craft that was in duress. Their vehicle was “toast” and they wanted to teleport to the surface. And the one thing they could locate and get a fix on, on the surface was the GEL, GEG’s huge lab. It looked like an immense cube. They were able to pick the GEL up on radar, etc. So they asked permission to teleport in, nearby. GEL was intentionally huge, and also almost empty. The idea behind the immense lab was one of restricting the amount of matter near the experiment. If something went wrong, the size of the lab and lack of matter nearby should render the experiment safe. At least that was the idea.

6. GEG calculated an immense square footage on the surface, so that the lab could act like snow-shoes for any strange heavy matter that might arise. The lab itself was constructed out of a super-strong metallic alloy. “ “ What was the name of that alloy again ? Adamantium ?”

7. LSO to UNI: “After talking about it, GEG said “okay” to the space-craft pilot.”

8. So SCP teleported in, then GEG members exclaimed: “Shit!” and swore. Because when SCP arrived, they arrived as a “cartoon pancake” on the surface, nearby the lab. What was left of the pilot looked like a neatly laid out portrait on the surface of the ground. It was a horrible sight to see. Obviously the teleporter had failed, but why.”

9.  LP to UNI: “The two dimensional nature of the cartoon pancake was an indication of a black-hole or extreme gravity; two-dimensionality a theoretical effect of a black-hole.

10. CC1 to UNI: “A short time later, there was a thunderclap, and the lab wall cracked again. That had been GEG’s problem 50 years before; a crack in the lab wall.”

11. LSO continued on talking to the investigator. “My thinking is, someone teleported their own “black-hole/high gravity problem” to our location; using our lab site as a cover-up. They did a setup, and teleported their problem to GEL, under the guise of a fake space-craft problem. This is what I and several other people think happened.”

12. LPM: “If it was a GEL problem we should all have been history all ready. We should have been history decades before.  Some of the staff were throwing parties already, because we were that certain we didn’t have a problem. We had reached the fifty year mark.”

13. GEG opened the lab door the one day (just before the person tried to teleport in), the technician looking couldn’t see anything. There didn’t seem to be a problem at all. Opening the lab door after 50 years had been a big event; the lab had been sealed all that time. The lab door was also immense and quite foreboding. The door itself almost seeming to deserve some fanfare at it’s use.

14. UNI to superiors: “GEG felt so safe after 50 years, that it decided to open the door to do a safety check, before the pilot teleported down. The pilot was trying to do an emergency landing, and they picked that spot to land in.”

15. If there had been a black-hole there, after 50 years, when GEG opened the door, it should have pulled everybody into the GEL. It should’ve sucked everything right in, mass-wise.

16. LPM: After 50 years, the hole would be that large. There wasn’t anything there, is what several people concluded. Many in GEG were thinking after only six months, that we were probably okay. But it was GEG’s “really, really optimistic” estimate. Not GEG’s ridiculously pessimistic one.

17. Being really, really pessimistic about things, GEG estimated it would collapse within 50 years. So GEG was going to check after 60 years, and declare a “non accident” after 60 years. The odds of there being a problem there were really, really, really, low.  Because GEG “caught it in time”

18. UNI to superiors: “. GEG was sure they had caught it in time. An about six weeks of inactivity would get rid of the thing. GEG allowed 60 years to be really, really safe. In case someone had a decimal point wrong, etc.”

19. LP: What happened was, an atomic particle at the core of a lab started attracting things gravitationally. The gravitational force was powerful enough to start dragging chairs across the lab. But; someone shut it down immediately. AS soon as they started seeing things move, it was shut down. Someone saw a lab chair moving by itself, and exclaimed: “Whoa!” Someone else turned around and saw the chair, and flipped the off switch on the experiment, and sounded an alarm immediately.

20. TE2 to UNI: “Stuff was sliding towards the experiment site, and the force behind it was determined to be gravitational. Sunken into the floor after the table collapsed was a small round brown ball. This little brown ball left a grove in the lab floor where it rolled across the floor to the corner of the lab.”

21. UNI: “After the alarm sounded, GEG went in with specialized equipment to look at the lab.”

22. The lab was destroyed, and all kinds of things including valuable equipment were “missing”, but, in the middle of the lab, was something resembling a small brown ball. It was incredibly dense; and it was just sitting there, and nothing in the lab was actually moving anymore. It was about like a piece of star. It looked to us like the action in the lab had stopped. Like it didn’t acquire enough mass to convert into a black hole. GEG had been careful with the lab setup that way. So they sealed the lab, and left it there. GEG didn’t allow anybody or anything near it.”

23. Several weeks later, the lab was checked again, it hadn’t changed at all. But, the person checking –TE2 - dropped her necklace just inside the lab, and it slid about an inch on the sloped floor. Then stopped, so GEG weren’t sure. The initial incident had given the lab a sloped floor. There was a lot of screaming and yelling that day when that necklace dropped. A short while later, we noticed a crack in the lab wall; but our problem was, nobody had noticed whether or not there was one there before. It may have been a crack present when the lab was constructed.

24. TE3 to UNI: “We were yelling at the woman, you better not fucking even breathe, as you back away slowly. We shut the door, and locked it good.” We thought maybe a magnetic field flux was present. The mag field grabbed the technician’s necklace. She was supposed to be completely naked in order to minimize the amount of matter falling towards the ball; but she decided to leave her necklace (cross) on.

25. CC1 to UNI: “Then we fixed the crack in the lab wall, from the outside.”

26. CC1 to UNI: “The strange thing is, if there was a black hole there, we should not have been able to fix the lab wall. According to what we were told, under the conditions of a black hole, once the lab wall cracks, that’s it, you’re probably history. That’s usually the signal to evacuate off the planet.”

27. CC2 to UNI: “But we managed to repair the wall. It should not have been possible with a black-hole.”

28. TEn: “If there was a black-hole strong enough to cause a crack in the wall, when you go to fix the wall, the materials would go flying into the hole. There should’ve have been a howling wind of air entering the lab from the outside, because of the black hole, and there wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be any effects, so we rated it, not likely a hole, and we set down to wait the 50 years to prove it. If a black-hole cracked the wall, there was no way at all, we should’ve lasted 50 years.”

29. There was however, a thing in the middle of the lab, looked a bit like a small wrecking ball.
30. We think it was a material perhaps something like neutronium. A very, very dense piece of material, but not a black-hole. It was like something one might find from a star. Or a planetary core. All the lab stuff, all rolled up into a ball about the size of large baseball.

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31. 80 years after the original accident, the entire lab “disappeared”. The ground caved in, and the whole site disappeared; sank into the ground. It disappeared all of the sudden, in a matter of minutes. It was as if it was disintegrated or something. It was really, really strange to see a vacant lot where once there had been a huge lab.

32. LP: “According to what we knew, a small black-hole needs a continuous input of matter. Usually they form in dense hydrogen clouds, collapsing stars. Once all the matter in the lab was gone, it was like a vacuum. The experimental setup was calculated to be not able to form a black-hole.”
    
     

33. UNI: “We think the lab is slowly sinking to the centre of the Earth, simply because it’s that massive. Fortunately, there is no evidence of a black-hole.”

Experimental Apparatus:

Year One: Expanding on the First Event

LPM worried: “I think we need to risk checking the lab again. We need to know if everything has remained the same, or if things are changing dynamically in the lab. If nothing in the lab’s changed, we may have a non-event; if things are still moving in the lab, we could be in trouble. There is some risk of being turned into a pancake, so who goes ?”

LP:      “Whoever checks should be the smallest – mass wise, qualified person in GEG, and they’ll have to check naked. We can’t risk anymore than the minimum amount of mass.”

LPM: “I think that means it has to be TE2 who does the check. But I’ll go through the roster to try and find other candidates. There’s no drawing straws here, it has to be who weighs the least.”

The first thing they noticed was that the white-hot little sphere was of a yellow color today. TE3: “Somehow or other the sphere seems to be able to absorb laser energy without heating up as much.”

When LP heard, he phoned and ordered the experiment shutdown immediately.

Gravity within the sphere itself was beginning to absorb some frequencies of light, causing the apparent color of the sphere to be yellow, rather than it’s normal white.

TE3 decided to take a step or two closer to the experimental apparatus in order to find out if the temperature level was different that it usually was.

Todo (lots):

-          describe GEG team member selection / recruitment

-          fill out some of the focal characters

-          describe the GEL better

GEG team recruitment was not the usual. Some of the issues that fell into the team selection were: a) the length of the experiment, b) potential issues with the physics c) safety, d) security.

The gravity experiment had a potential requirement for long-time site monitoring. In order to accommodate this requirement some team members had to be young. To ensure that there were people at the end of the monitoring stage, that were involved at the beginning of the experiment. The potential length of the experiment also meant that some significant staff turn-over could anticipated. That meant there needed to be some redundancy in the staffing.

Potential issues with the physics meant that the staff had to a varied physical makeup. In the event of high-gravity or low-gravity environments, selected team members may be required to carry out tasks not possible by other team members. Potential environmental issues with the gravity experiment meant that personalities needed to vary as well.

Because the gravity experiment was long term in nature, there was a concern about the security surrounding the experiment. The length of time involved (perhaps decades) meant that there was an increased likelihood of persons not involved with the experiment to be encountered. The gravity experiment had to be secure in order to ensure valid results that didn’t include outside tampering.

At the same time that staffing requirements varied fairly widely, the number of people included in the staff also had to be minimized for safety and security reasons.

TE2:

She didn’t know why she did it; the police had warned her before. Walking around nude on the beach. It wasn’t a nude beach. This time they decided to charge her with indecent exposure.

TEx:

They called him the ‘big man of physics’.