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Some technology is simply too powerful.
This short story was written in early 2025 simply for the love of writing science fiction. Enjoy!
Lanye notice a drip of sweat snaking its way down Fallow's forehead, and she wondered if he was even aware of it. His attention was purely focused on aligning the experiment rods just right... and there was a lot at stake if he failed. Their last experiment ended with half the base complex vaporized—no casualties, thankfully, since they were guiding the base's robots remotely. Still. It was harrowing work.
"...aaaaaand that should... do it." Fallow gingerly extended his fingers outward, and pulled away from the handles. Everything was assisted by the bots, but human input was always the default method to get results. As it should be. If there was ever failure, it had to be by humans. Fallow finally let his hands drop to his sides, and sat back in his chair. After a nervous laugh, he turned to Lanye and reflexively wiped away the sweat.
Lanye glanced at her monitor as more metrics popped up in her optical feed. "Everything looks nominal over here."
Fallow stood, peering over her shoulder. "Watch the—"
"—I see it, yeah." She flexed her hands a little, typing feedback with her implants. The screen's bars quietly slipped from red into green. "Stable. Probably."
"I think we're there." Fallow stretched, cracking his neck with a double-handed twist. "Jesus, I thought we'd never finish this."
The screen looked normal. Everything was within limits. Lanye allowed herself to smirk a little. "Congratulations, Doctor. You just made a stable black hole in a lab. Feel like a god yet?"
"Only if we can undo it, too."
"One step at a time, Doc. Shall I start building out the next phase?"
"Yeah, submit our next budget request and auto-build after that." Fallow looked around. "Where'd our servo go?"
"Told him to wait in the landing bay."
"What for?"
Layne stopped looking at the screen and gave Fallow a steady look. "We've just successfully re-created the most powerful force in the universe in a controlled environment, a technology the military would surely kill to get its hands on... and you want a servo bot in the room?"
Fallow's head swayed from side to side. "Point taken." He headed for the door. "Coffee?"
"Always."
The door hissed shut. Layne waited until sensors told her Fallow was in the galley. Then she moved her right pinky at a quick, weird angle.
By outward appearances, nothing had happened. Layne just seemed to have had an odd twitch. But her pinky was wired to trigger a sequence of lightning fast events: first, the security systems would experience an unexpected overload to weakened their detection system. Then, at a planned moment, security system would dropped completely... after that, a nano-blip signal, a micro-burst transmission would be sent from a communications array she'd planted over a year ago, and travel through that security hole like rabbit escaping under a fence. She waited quietly and when no alerts showed up on her screen, she knew the transmission had gone undetected.
She sat back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. Her work was finally done. In 12 hours, her handlers would come to rescue her, kill Fallow, surgically wipe all servo bots, massage all the data to make it unusable, and stage a Stage Five black hole collapse so horrible that half of the base's moon would be vaporized.
If all went according to plan, nobody would ever consider researching black holes ever again. Some tech was simply too dangerous to develop.
Metal Mosaic is a collection of standalone short stories I started in 2025 to get back into writing science fiction again. They are the first inklings of my science fiction novels.