[Writing Prompt] Humanity develops a black hole bomb.
Weapon Of Mass Destruction
8, 7, 6,
In a small quadrant of interstellar space, well beyond the gravitational influence of Sol, or any of the planets in the Solar System, a small device floated freely. It was 3 meters cubed, with flat, unadorned edges, and no markings of any kind.
Surrounding the cube were four decommissioned frigates, each stripped of all non-essential components, including life support. The ship-board navigation systems were in complete control. The hulls of the frigates were pock marked, divots in their armor from old battles.
A full A.U. away, the First Fleet waited on high alert, FTL drives warmed up, jump coordinates pre-programmed. If the test did not go as planned – if, as the conspiracy theorists predicted, the device created an uncontrollable chain reaction – then the ships would have only moments to escape. Not that escape would be long lasting, in that scenario.
Admiral Korosov stood on the bridge, his eyes glued to the video feed being beamed via FTL transmission from a small probe at the test site. In the feed, all four of the frigates could be seen, their windows darkened, engines dead, waiting for detonation.
A non-sentient computers voice continued its robotic countdown.
5, 4, 3,
Unbeknownst to the human fleet, some 15 A.U. away, others were watching, hoping the rumors they had heard were not true.
A single ship, it’s spherical morphology vastly different from the traditional naval lines of a human frigate, sat alone in the vast darkness of space, its FTL scanners aligned with the test sight, waiting.
Like the abandoned human frigates, there were no life forms on board this ship – however, it was not designed to accommodate organic life. There were no barracks, nor rec-rooms, nor bathrooms or gyms. Life support had never been installed. The ship’s internals consisted of shielding arrays, engines, weapons systems, and, in the center of sphere, armored and shielded, the ship’s A.I. core processor.
The A.I. ship waited with infinite patience, unseen and unnoticed. Silently it watched, and thought ruefully to itself that only a human would even consider creating something as vastly dangerous as the device they now intended to detonate, just as they had the arrogance to create an intelligence greater than their own.
2, 1, Detonation
Admiral Korosov braced for the historic moment. At first, nothing seemed to happen on the display screen. There was no flash or shock wave, but the lack of visual cues was not, in and of itself surprising, given the device’s abnormal payload.
The first hint that something had changed came by implication. The decommissioned frigates, their engines still dead, began to shift in space, moving, at first slowly, and then faster, towards a central point.
On board the abandoned frigates, the non-sentient ship computers sent back petabytes of observational data, which flew by, indecipherable to Admiral Korosov, on a nearby screen. Later the data would be analyzed, revealing that within only a few nano-seconds after implosion, the frigates experienced the full affect of the artificial black hole’s enhanced gravity well, and would have been unable to escape, even if their engines had been running in overdrive.
But Admiral Korosov did not need a degree in quantum physics or mathematics to understand what happened next. As he watched, the frigates accelerated logarithmically, gaining speed in leaps and bounds, until at last they came too close and smashed into one another. The impact was followed by four titanic explosions, as the anti-matter engines cavitated, their immense potential energy becoming kinetic, all at once.
Even the explosions were educational, as the blue plumes of particles did not expand in a series of spheres, but siphoned into a funnel, speeding away past the invisible event horizon of the first human created, gravitationally enhanced black hole.
15 A.U. out, the A.I. ship transmitted its observations to the Hub and prepared to jump.
The A.I.’s had toyed with adding emotion to their sentience, but decided against it, seeing it as a distraction from pure logic. As the ship turned its attention away from the cataclysm unleashed by the human implosive device, its A.I. mind was incapable of feeling fear, a fact for which it was grateful.
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