Oink
exotic physics
Xylos rests his forelimbs on the obsidium railing, feeling the magnetic hum of the station vibrate through his chitin. Below, the God-Ring cuts a silver scar across the void, a perfect circle encompassing the dying twin stars of the Alpha-9 system. It is not merely a machine; it is a cage built of gravitationally bound neutrons, vast enough to encircle a solar system, hungry enough to swallow the energy output of two suns.
The air in the observation blister tastes of ozone and recycled nitrogen. Behind him, the ops-pit is a chaotic symphony of clicking mandibles and holographic chimes.
“Thermal gradients on the inner track are climbing,” Varel says. She does not look up from her interface. Her compound eyes twitch independently, tracking a thousand cascading data streams. “The photosphere of the primary star is thinning. We are drinking it dry, Xylos.”
“Maintain the siphon,” Xylos replies, his voice a low stridulation. “If the containment magnets starve for power, the antimatter stream will kiss the sidewalls. We will not just die; we will be erased.”
He looks back to the void. The binary stars are no longer blinding white; they are dimming to a sickly, bruise-colored violet. Streamers of plasma, thick as planets, are being ripped from the stellar surfaces and funneled into the ring’s capacitors. The structure groans, a sound that transmits through the station’s hull plating rather than the air.
“Injection cycle complete,” Varel clicks. “Proton streams are countering. Velocity is point-nine-nine repeating. We are barely sub-luminal.”
Xylos taps a claw against the glass. “Push it. Collapse the probability wave.”
The universe outside the window distorts. As the particle streams within the ring accelerate, they gain so much relativistic mass that they begin to drag the local spacetime frame with them. The stars in the background smear into streaks of light. The station’s artificial gravity lurches, heavy then light, as the God-Ring asserts its dominance over the fundamental forces.
“Collision in the focal chamber,” Varel announces.
There is no explosion. The event is too concentrated, too absolute for fire. In the center of the holographic projector, a sphere of absolute darkness forms. It is not a black hole; it is a knot in the fabric of the cosmos.
Data floods the screens. It scrolls faster than even Xylos’s species can process, a waterfall of numbers describing the breaking point of reality.
“Higgs Bosons are shedding like dead skin,” Varel whispers, her movements slowing. “I am reading quark-gluon plasma separation. And... wait.”
The darkness in the projection shivers. A single point of violet light ignites in the center of the void. It pulses, heavy and slow, like a heartbeat.
“Spin-2,” Varel says, the translator collar straining to convey the tremor in her voice. “Massless. Yet it curves the sensors. Xylos. Look at the geometry.”
Xylos leans in, his antennae trembling. The particle on the screen isn’t just sitting in space; it is pulling the grid of the monitor toward itself. “Isolate it. Harden the magnetic bottle.”
“We have it,” she says. “The first Graviton. The glue of the cosmos.”
The station shudders violently. This is not the mechanical vibration of the ring; this is a sickening lurch, as if the entire room has been dropped a meter and caught again.
“Field instability?” Xylos barks.
“No,” Varel’s hands fly across the haptic controls. “The bottle is green. This is external. Highly localized variance in... everything.”
A sound tears through the command deck. It is not a mechanical grind or an electronic shriek. It sounds like a piece of thick canvas being ripped by a giant.
In the center of the containment chamber, physically hovering above the captured Graviton, reality unzips.
It does not look like a wormhole. It lacks the swirling accretion disk or the event horizon shimmer. It looks flat. The tear reveals a swirling vortex of garish, impossible colors—polka-dots of neon pink and static-filled teal. It looks two-dimensional, a flat drawing imposed on a three-dimensional world.
“Intruder alert,” the station’s AI drones flatly. “Dimensional breach.”
A head pops through the tear.
Xylos freezes. The creature is biological, mammalian, and distinctly porcine. It wears a mask of red and blue fabric with white lenses that narrow expressively, defying the rigidity of the material. A snout protrudes from the center of the face. It looks soft. It looks ridiculous.
The creature pulls itself through the hole. It floats in the zero-gravity of the chamber, its movements jerky, lacking the fluidity of a living thing. It moves on a lower frame rate than the rest of the universe.
“What’s up, folks?” the creature asks.
The words don’t come through the translator. They appear in the air above the creature’s head in a white, jagged bubble of text.
Xylos stares, his mandibles slack. “What is that? A probability demon?”
The pig-thing reaches behind its back—where there is no pocket, no storage—and produces a wooden mallet the size of Xylos’s torso. It drifts toward the magnetic bottle, the most advanced containment field ever constructed by the intellect of a Type II civilization.
The creature winds up and swings.
THWACK.
The sound is wet and comical. The magnetic bottle, designed to withstand the pressure of a collapsing sun, shatters into sparkling pixels.
“No!” Varel shrieks. “The integrity!”
The Graviton, now free, begins to dissolve, but the pig is faster. It raises a gloved wrist. With a sound like thwip, a strand of white webbing shoots out, snagging the violet particle.
“Yoink,” the text bubble above the pig’s head reads.
The creature yanks the fundamental unit of gravity into its hand, stuffs it into a belt pouch, and turns back to the tear in reality. It looks directly at the sensor array, seemingly making eye contact with Xylos across the vacuum. It hops back into the swirling 2D vortex. The tear in the universe zips shut, leaving not a trace of radiation or residual energy.
From a multitudinous infinite beyond living comprehension, a message appears in the space left by the tear:
“That’s all, folks!”
