“From inside the Hole”

And they didn’t exist. At least, not functionally, stars.

Burning celestial objects, immense gravitational pressures sustaining the transformation of hydrogen into all the rest of the elements in the universe? Sure, conceptually, they existed. But they were now, humanity, beyond the plane of concept. Beyond the plane of threat.

“Odo, I really don’t see the point of keeping yourself up at night about this.”

“And why would you?” Odo replied. “You have no imagination, none of you do.”

My little brother, a curious sort, by models of old Earth time he would have been about in his thirties. But time worked differently in the black-box. Everything worked differently when the constants of the universe were modified. And for what? I didn’t like it much myself, but safety above all. The survival of humanity above all.

Or so the ancients said.

“So that’s it. I’m supposed to believe you saw a star up there, in the eternal darkness, where light on a physics level can absolutely never reach us — I’m supposed to believe all this happened and I can’t because I can’t imagine.”

Odo shrugged. “Yep.”

“But I just did imagine it!” I shouted. “Its dumb.”

“Be that as it may, brother, my grants have been awarded and I intend on conducting my experiments,” he said, tapping the odd looking telescope. Not cylindrical by any means, but more a series of disks and interlocking, shifting struts and gears the length of a person with not even a view port but rather a screen he interfaced with on the biocomputer.

“This is a science fair project,” I said, running a hand through my hair as I paced through his room. An odd thing, three walls, convex in nature as was the style of the times, with the fourth open right out into the planes. Grasses eating up right up to beneath my feet. The dew was wet between my toes and the shifting from the carpet to the turf was pleasant in it s contrast.

“There’s no need to be sour,” Odo replied, inputting a series of numbers into the console of the biocomputer.

“We could go out and drink, read poems, or meet women for God’s sake.”

“Since when did you convert?”

“A figure of speech, Jesus!” I said, unable to help myself. There were still Christians, of course, and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Sheiks and just about all the rest. But religion looked… odd, after light years of distance and however much time did its due. Or maybe it was Old Earth that was the weird ones about it. He wasn’t able to put much of a finger on exactly what it was, but there was some vague notion of the ‘stakes’ having changed, after first contact so many millennia ago.

“I can do all of that later. Or not. It doesn’t matter,” Odo insisted, as he pressed a button and the telescope whirred to life. “This does.”

“We live in what is effectively a blackhole. We are out of the equation. All equations. There’s nothing to come out of this and all I’ve been suggesting is just one step short of — ”

“Therapy.” Odo cut me off. “Intervention. I know.”

“Do you?”

My little brother paused in his work, which was rare, and stared at the floor, his eyes following a centipede as it marched through the forest of blades.

“I do,” he said. “I’m not going to do that again.”

“I know.” I gave back. It had been years, but no one was quite at ease when it came to Odo. Everyone except me treating him with a coldness that even thousands years of mental health studies had not much of an answer for. My brother, he was a gazer. The formal name for the condition being ‘Cosmic Isolation Induced Depressive Disorder,”. It was a rare diagnosis, as it happened. The studies reported that those likely to have been astronauts or spacers or planet hoppers in the Era of Good Times. But now, they had nothing but an ever solid black sky or the simulacra of the envirodomes.

Seventy-eight percent.

“So,” I said, wanting to push the conversation anywhere else. “What happens if you see a star. Throw a party? Feel all validated and what not? Finally have a lay?”

“I would be extremely worried.”

I wasn’t expecting that response. “Sorry, what?”

“This isn’t a light spectrum telescope. Those aren’t even effective in the pocket. This is a… its complex, a cutting edge low powered version of a device scientists made in 1822 AB.”

“This thing is thousands of years old?” I said. “How’s it even working?”

“It’s a replica produced by the replicators, brother. It measures gravitational waves, radiation, dark matter net emulsions, local quarkfield manifold fluctuations — ”

“A bunch of sci-fi shit.”

“Yes, a bunch of sci-fi shit that is measured and run into a model compatible with our low powered biocomputers.”

“And then you’ll be able to see the ghost star.”

“I’ll be able to determine the rate of temporal decay and other anomalies from a limited region of pocket space.”

“Jeez…” I said. “And those scientists from way back when, they couldn’t figure it out themselves?”

“They were looking for other things,” was all he said.

“You didn’t answer the question.” I said. “Why would you be worried?”

Odo paused as the lights on the biocomputer interface sparkled in various lights. There as a shadow beneath his eyes, a haggardness in that boyish, thirty year old youth. “Before I get to all the concerns of the unobserved phenomenon of a temporal collapse or the sublimation of one region’s local rate of space-time and lightspeed into another’s, there’s the aspect of not every light in the sky being a star, planet, or galaxy.”

“Aliens,” I said, my jaw hitting my chest. “You’re kidding.”

“We know they exist. They’re the reason we’re here.”

“Yes, dark forest theory and all the rest but why would they bother with us? We have the resource of one rogue planet floating God knows.”

“I don’t know,” Odo said, typing away into another console on a large spreadsheet. “I just take the measurements