Death's End

The research into lowering the speed of light through vacuum began at about the same time as the Bunker Project. As the Black Domain Plan was the second path for human survival, the international community devoted enormous resources to it, and the Bunker Project even built a large space city as a research center devoted to the subject—that would be Lightspeed I, located in the Saturn cluster. But sixty years of extensive research yielded no breakthroughs, and not even much advancement in theoretical foundation.

Lowering the speed of light through a medium wasn’t particularly difficult. As early as 2008 C.E., researchers had succeeded in lowering the speed of light through a medium to an incredible seventeen meters per second in a laboratory setting. But this was fundamentally different from lowering the speed of light through vacuum. The former only required causing the atoms in the medium to absorb and re-emit the photons—light continued to travel at its usual speed between atoms. This wasn’t useful for the Black Domain Plan.

The speed of light through vacuum was one of the fundamental constants of the universe. Altering it was equivalent to altering the laws of physics. Thus, lowering the speed of light required breakthroughs in fundamental physics—and considerable serendipity. After sixty years, the only substantive result of basic research was the creation of the circumsolar particle accelerator. This, in turn, led to the success of the largest project under the Black Domain Plan: the Black Hole Project.

Scientists had tried all kinds of extreme physical techniques in their efforts to alter the speed of light. Once, the strongest artificial magnetic field had been used. But the best way to influence light in vacuum was through a gravity field. Since it was extremely difficult to generate a local gravity field in a laboratory setting, the only path forward seemed to be a black hole. The circumsolar particle accelerator was capable of creating microscopic black holes.

The head of the Black Hole Project was 高 Way. Cao Bin had worked with him for a few years. He could not hide his complex feelings about the man as he described him to Cheng Xin.

“The man suffered from severe autism—no, I’m not talking about some kind of lonely genius choosing to isolate himself, but a real mental condition. He was extremely closed off and had trouble communicating with anyone, and he had never even touched a woman. His extraordinary professional success would only be possible in this age, but despite his accomplishments, most of his supervisors and colleagues thought of him as merely a high-powered intelligence battery. He was tortured by his illness and tried to change himself, and in this, he was different from other geniuses.

“Starting from, oh, I think the eighth year of the Broadcast Era, he dedicated himself to the theoretical study of lowering the speed of light. Over time, I think he began to develop a strange identification between the speed of light and his own personality—if he could change the speed of light, then it was the same as changing himself.

“But the speed of light through vacuum really was the most stable thing in the cosmos. Research into lowering the speed of light resembled torturing light without regard for consequences. People tried to do everything with light: strike it, twist it, break it, dissect it, stretch it, crush it, even destroy it—but the result was, at most, a change in its frequency in vacuum. But the speed of light remained unchanged, like an unscalable wall. After all these decades, theoreticians and experimenters alike were in despair. There was a saying: If there really were a Creator, the only thing He welded shut in all Creation was the speed of light.

“For 高 Way, the despair had yet another layer. By the time I went into hibernation, he was almost fifty. He had still never been with a woman, and he thought of his own fate as being as resistant as the speed of light; he became even more withdrawn and solitary.

“The Black Hole Project began in Year 1 of the Bunker Era and lasted eleven years. The planners did not invest much hope in it. Both theoretical calculations and astronomical observations had indicated that even black holes could not change the speed of light. These demons of the universe could only use their gravity fields to change the path of light and its frequency, not affecting the speed of light through vacuum one iota. However, to continue the research for the Black Domain Plan, it was necessary to create experimental conditions with superpowerful gravity fields, which depended on black holes. In addition, since a black domain is in essence a large-scale reduced-lightspeed black hole, perhaps close-range observation of a microscopic regular-lightspeed black hole would yield unexpected insights.