The Anomaly

Xeno Studies

The Xeno Studies faculty had been designed to be venerable and made no secret of the fact. The entrance hall – it had an entrance hall! – felt more like a museum than anything else. A long high-ceilinged corridor that stretched off into the shadows, with the aquarium airiness that comes from all that empty overhead space. It was illuminated by diffuse sunbeams filtered in through a series of skylights that served to emphasize the shadows in between. To complete the impression, the walls were lined with exhibits in glass cases, real or reconstructed artefacts of long-dead alien races, objects extracted from archeological digs or extrapolated from the ruins of abandoned cities, what little was left of them after such a passage of time. A teasing set of clues to the pervading questions: Who were they? How had they lived? Where did they go?

David Sonet's office was more conventionally proportioned.

"Mr. Morrison, it's such an honor to meet you." He had stood up from behind his desk and come around to greet his visitor. A young man, slim with a soft chubby face framed by short curly hair. "Whatever your reasons for this visit, I hope I can be of some help." The tone of his speech was affable, accompaniment to an effusive shaking of hands. "But first you must indulge me. There are some things here you really must see." He bustled Ernest back out into the broad corridor.

"You had a chance to view some of our treasures on your way in?" Again the words were used to rhetorical effect, spoken in a way that did not suggest any expectation of an answer. Ernest took advantage of this, did no more than smile politely and nod his head. His host meanwhile looked about, chose an exhibit as if by random and guided Ernest to it.

"What do you think?"

What Ernest saw was a tangle of fibers resembling a fishing net tossed on the ground, or perhaps something sicked up by a rather large cat. "Um?" He racked his mind for an appropriate reaction. A small plaque next to the exhibit identified the planet where this particular relic had been found. Just a serial number. It meant nothing to Ernest; he wasn't that sort of navigator.

"What is it? We don't know. What is its purpose? We have no idea. In some ways it resembles a tangle of chromosomes. Each thread, when you examine it at a microscopic level, encodes a string of data. Which we can read easily enough, but sadly not decode. No context, you see? Is it functional? Is it informational? Decorational? Symbolic? Can't tell you. We do know it is more than a twenty thousand years old. And that it is a product of intelligent design."

"Really?" The slowness of Ernest's reply contrasted with a tendency to rapid speech in his host.

"Xenology is a frustrating field, to be sure. But over here is what I really wanted to show you." He took Ernest by the elbow, guided him across to the opposite side of the corridor. The new exhibit was a cube of a lace-like metallic substance with a large hole in each face surrounded in turn by further holes of progressively smaller size.

"It's a Menger sponge. Imagine a cube as being composed of smaller cubes, three high and three wide. You remove the central cube from each face of the large cube. That is the simplest a Menger sponge can be. But then you repeat the process for each of the smaller cubes – split those into three-by-three yet smaller cubes and remove the center ones – and so on and so on until you get down to atomic scale and can go no further. If you could continue indefinitely, your idealized sponge would have infinite surface area and zero volume. This particular example is a level ten, which is about as far as matter will allow you to go, maximum ratio of surface area to volume achievable in practice. It represents an astonishing level of control over fabrication, but what is truly remarkable is that this too has survived intact through those thousands of years. We suspect some form of stasis technology, but if so, where is it?"