What waits for us in the Dark (Matter)?

It is well scientifically documented that the dark has always frightened mankind. From our earliest cave-dwelling ancestors huddling around fires through to our high-tech London2 (L2) megacity habitats of 2242 which are floodlit day and night – we are hard-wired to fear something in the gloom.

Once the lights go out, our primate minds begin to panic, subconsciously at first, our core human DNA warning triggers fire, possibly for fear of being attacked by predatory beings.

Fear of darkness itself, which in extreme forms is known as ‘nyctophobia’ is lurking somewhere inside us all to varying degrees. It’s not the darkness itself that’s frightening but, as stated, rather the fear of what the darkness masks. And the largest ‘mass’ of darkness in the universe is the unknown substance we term ‘Dark Matter’.

Another human element adopted by our scientific brethren is that anything unknown is seen as a challenge – something awaiting to be solved, illuminated, and discovered. The London2 (L2) Dark Matter Collaboration (L2DMC) were the group who were commissioned in 2055 to ‘find out once and for all’ what made up Dark Matter.

Young Siam M’diitch joined the L2DMC as a Junior Tech Assistant in 2235 – some 180 years into the project – seeing it as a huge career boost from the lowly L2 Dangerous Disease Testing Facility Lab Runner where his science education had deposited him. M’diitch threw himself into the work – this was his chance to make history and the fact that the Collaboration had been granted unlimited funding meant a huge leap in pay. He saw his mission to be the man who identified what Dark Matter was and hopefully even show how it linked to the rest of the Universe.

Dark Matter was given its name because it is 'matter' that does not give off any light, and it is only detectable by its gravitational pull on other matter. We knew it must exist though as far back as the 1970s when a study into spiral galaxies, pointed out that there were areas which rotated too fast only to be driven by the visible stars and gas in those regions.

Ancient astronomers, therefore, reasoned there must be more mass that is unseen. Now although the decades of galaxy observations have shown that almost all galaxies must contain huge quantities of Dark Matter, and that the quantities of it dwarf the detectable ‘visible matter’ in the universe. So with the component particles that make up some 95 percent of the universe being Dark Matter – mapping this and reconstructing historical maps of it going back roughly 13 billion years allowed the L2DMC to study changes in this Dark Matter’s movement and formation even if we couldn’t ascertain exactly what it was comprised of.

But when the breakthrough came, M’diitch was actually off duty – he was enjoying a Captain Addams SkyScreen presentation with his unfeasibly attractive wife Vermanda.

For those who aren’t familiar with Captain Addams, he’s the multi $Billion grossing fictional ‘star’ of a series of highly improbable adventures. Each tale is framed as him reminiscing in what some would say a delusional manner about his past daring-do. Quite how his appeal was so widespread was a constant mystery but when Addams’ cumulative box-office exceeded any of the tit-for-tat Avatar / Avengers ding-dong front runners from the 21st Century, no one could deny his impact.

Here is what M’diitch’s are witnessing: Captain Addams’ Lost Love

The ex-L2RAF pilot who was rumoured to once be ‘the best of the best’, sits in his luxury L2 retirement complex.

“I was once in love you know?” he proclaims to his personal nursedroid who was shaped in the popular ‘classic Marilyn M’ bodyshell.

“Oh sir, I’m not programmed to understand that human emotion, but please tell me about it.” She / It responds.

“I think it was the only time – you remember I’ve talked about how shy I was with girls? – I blame my oppressively religious parents of course… Well, I even had to create myself an internal persona in order to ‘play’ at being the confident and dashing devil I dreamt of being. It jolly well worked too – in fact, some people actually began to refer to me as DD (which was great and only a little to do with my geeky love of ‘the man without fear, Dare Devil comic books)”.

“One day I was trying out being DD with my wingman GooseK, we met this unconventional beauty. Blonde, petite, and packing the kind of smile that could stop hardened killers in their tracks. I pulled up her file on my IEI (Internal Eye Interface). It was a sad story – her life had been harder than it should have been. Abused in body and mind, both by others and then herself as a reaction to a broken childhood… but she seemed to be a dreamer like me – I immediately sensed a kindred-ship… I heard someone at the party we were both at calling ‘JJ’ and I knew I had to try and win her heart.”

“Nobody would have thought she would have fallen for me – this was before my L2RAF days and I was anything but cool. But fate is funny like that and as I’ve learned – rarely plays by the rules. Every bloke in the place was checking her out – GooseK included – even though she was wearing what I thought looked like a sack. Being a little drunk I plucked up the courage to approach her and asked if she was wearing the sack dress for a bet? She laughed and accepted my offer of a drink to apologise – later she kissed me, hard and passionately. I didn’t know what had hit me, it was like a chemical reaction – an endorphin overload – I knew I’d never be able to get enough of her.”

“What I didn’t know was that this girl who I only knew as ‘JJ’ was on the run from some very bad people. My offer to walk her home became far more eventful than I could possibly have expected.”

“We made our excuses and left, we stumbled along snogging vigorously in the warm evening rain. But just as we turned the corner of Gt Spence Street, a freakin military-grade, non-standard, seriously-armed combat shock assault droid and several heavy looking thugs sprung out on us and demanded that JJ hand over $5million nuDollars cred chip she had apparently stolen. Before I could even react JJ had drawn a dinky but deadly hand cannon from somewhere upon her person and fired a null-bomb round into the faceplate of the droid.”

“I could only watch in shock and awe as she grabbed me and pulled us into a diving roll away as the explosion tore the top of the droid’s ‘head module’ off. The combat robot was already returning fire, but the damage it sustained made it lose motor control – spinning around and mowing down the thugs around it.”

“I found myself looking on in shock and awe as the bad guys were torn apart by their expiring battle droid comrade, JJ was already stowing her gun and had pulled a neuro penaliser from her dress which she proceeded to zap me with.”

“We were coated in a bloody spray of body parts and shell casings – JJ was silhouetted like an angel in a maelstrom of gore – she looked me in the eye are said: ‘Sorry, don’t think it’s gonna work out, you’re much too nice a guy to be involved with me!’ She quipped with one of her killer sad-but-sexy smiles.”

“As I lost consciousness, the last thing I saw was her hitching up her surprisingly gadget-packed sack dress and running off into the night. I never saw her again. Of course, I searched for her – with no luck and I’d say part of me is still in love with that bad-ass chic to this day…”

“What do you think of that eh?”

The top-of-the-range nursedroid is looking as bored as it is possible for a machine with no emotional expressing facilities. It is however programmed to humour its patients so responds “Oh my, sir, unrequited love is the most poetic! I’m guessing this lost girl is the reason for your maverick lifestyle? Now bend over I need to administer your evening soul-boost enema…”

Before the happy denouement of the skyscreener M’diitch got an emergency alert from the L2DMC lab A.I. – without explaining to his Mrs, he leaped up, knocking his YUM-Gallon drink all over his wife and the others in their seating area. He sprinted for the exit and was back in the research facility within 20 mins.

His boss, Grand Information Controller Doyyle, had already messaged that he wanted an urgent update about the priority Dark Matter alert that had been awoken him from his evening snooze.

M’diitch stared in disbelief at the readouts on the screens. The breakthrough coding codenamed ‘MEJA37’ which he had taken the lead on working with since joining – had been initially configured in 2189 – now, for the first time, it had something that flagged as a ‘hit’. The data pouring in was modelling an extremely detailed record of the speed of a target galaxy’s rotation from its centre all the way out to its far reaches.

This macro ‘rotation curve’ measurement was ironically exactly what astronomers used to determine the amount of ‘unknown’ dark matter in any given galaxy. The curve data was fresh and far more detailed than anything the L2DMC had attained in their almost 200-year existence – this was unprecedented.

But it wasn’t the curve data that was troubling M’diitch – it was the single subscreen that he had programmed to run its findings through his Soul Upgrade module on an off-chance that it would add the even wider variable boost effect to the galaxy monitoring.

Soul Upgrade modules were the ‘in thing’ for the populace. They normally plugged into a person’s headchip and channeled their emotional response stimuli through a filter which allowed for a much greater sense of well-being to be maintained – and no guilt to be felt – whatever the individual happened to get up to.

There though, on the screen, the first concrete imaging of an area directly within a segment of Dark Matter glowed and he was transfixed.

The subscreen seemed impossibly to be showing a burning backdrop of infinite arches framing a monstrous scaly ‘face’!?

M’diitch almost peed himself as at that moment all the lights in the lab went out – along with all the other screens apart from the one showing this kind of demonic horned creature that seemed to be packing far too many teeth for its jaws to accommodate.

‘Nyctophobia’ produces symptoms beyond the normal instinctive parameters, such as breathlessness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly, or the sensation of detachment from reality, loss of bladder control and even in some cases death. M’diitch, bathed in the glow of the hell-fire flames was ticking off many of these symptoms as his mind recoiled from what it was seeing.

The lights came back on suddenly and the Lab A.I.s started running diagnostics to ensure a successful reboot of the various expensive kit. The NeoHarryKane3 telescope – named after the New Tottenham robostriker who helped them win the L2 Soccer Premiership for twenty years running was unique in that it had a built-in superfusion A.I. tasked with combining Einstein’s theory of relativity with every previous piece of Dark Matter research on the planet. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity actually warps space and time – and it transpired that it also might be the key that shows Dark Matter is responsible for more than just the formation of galaxies.

Mankind wasn’t ready, how could we be? What showed up in the ultimate darkness of Dark Matter turned out to be what many had termed over the centuries as ‘Hell’.

M’diitch found himself the first human to stare into the face of ‘Abaddon’ – which in Hebrew means ‘doom’. Described in history as an ‘Angel of the abyss – the king of an army of mutant locusts’ and ‘The Angel of Death’ – he / she sure looked incredible on the HD subscreen. Apparently not impressed at having his first-ever ‘selfie’ taken the demon appeared let out a furious howl of rage (there is no sound in the data stream – just images).

M’diitch was in an almost catatonic state but before losing control of his motor functions he at least managed to hit the ‘save to file’ command – in the process changing the history of humankind forever. Actually, if you want to be technical about it – his capturing of images from within ‘Hell’ shortened the future odds of humankind existing for much longer at all… But that is another story…

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If you liked this – you’ll love COMPLETE DARKNESS – a Darkmatters Novel, by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20) which tells of the events following our inadvertent mapping of ‘Hell’.

Find out more at www.completedarknessnovel.com