[Archive] Apollonian Sphere

I'm not sure where I was going with this one, honestly. Another from 2015.

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...
Is this thing on? Hm, yup, allright, I see the tape goin'. Can't tell these damn little buttons from each other anymore.

Guess I'll just start in on it then.

Thinking back, I find it hard to believe that it was a coincidence. We only went to the moon once, just once, and they found the sphere then- what if they had landed beside a different crater? What then? Maybe, I think there are others. Maybe there was one in every crater. Maybe. But Apollo brought back just the one. That said, it isn't as though we needed more. But lord-in-heaven, what else could be up there waiting?

Any larger and it wouldn't have fit. Also fortunate was the object's weight. A large sphere, bigger than ah... a beach ball, I suppose. Its an odd size, and there isn't a good frame of reference, but it was a bit more than a meter in diameter. Brass, at first glace. That was how Armstrong described it. A giant brass ball, featureless, but for a dusting of regolith, with a fine patina, and glossy enough to reflect the astronaut in fine, if distorted detail as he brushed the dust off it's glassy surface with his glove. That day was filled with new experiences for humanity, but somehow... seeing that thing on the video footage, hearing Armstrong's voice describing it... It hit us all in central command so much harder than even those first iconic words of his. "One small step" indeed. Something else had been there before us, and that was both awe inspiring and terrifying.

As I said, the sphere was light. Strangely light, even for being on the moon. As though it were a hollow shell of aluminum, but tapping it, he said it did not feel hollow. Sonar tests back here on earth confirmed it was... whatever it was, through and through. I remember Aldrin called it the Moon Ball, but some how, giving it a whimsical name never seemed to do it justice. Most of us just referred to it as the Sphere, if that wasn't ominous enough.

The Sphere's peculiar, astonishing properties did not end with it's composition. We ran several careful tests on it, but it was when we hooked up two leads to its surface and applied a current that we began getting the strange results. It was a complex process of discovery, though a mostly tedious one, and I won't get into it, but the end result was that we began to discover that this Sphere was some manner of computing device.

Understand, back then, 'computer' was not yet the household term it is today. But even in the contemporary sense, this thing was not like any computer in the traditional sense. First of all, supplied with a problem, the processing time was instantaneous. It seemed to have infinite internal memory, though there was no real interface, so accessing any of this memory directly eluded us. Rather, once we uncovered the language on which it operated, we could posit to the Sphere basic questions and it would present an output. This language was, on the surface, a sort of binary. But it was more complex than this. The Sphere seemed to be capable of subdividing problems infinitely, creating sub-binary languages for each sub-process, if that makes any sense. I recall McConnell calling it a fractal-binary, whatever that means.

I am not doing this justice, but the main point is that we were able to deduce that it was accomplishing its computing power through instantaneous, infinitely complex subdivision of any basic quandary worded to it. And then it broke.

Now, understand, I mean 'broke' as in, it literally cracked. Its functionality was not harmed at all. But breaking, in this case, is a very peculiar thing. We on the research team had had us a long debate about whether or not it would be wise to attempt to open the Sphere up. After all, we had only vague guesses as to what its insides looked like. It was clearly a powerful tool, but could more be learned from an autopsy than through non-invasive testing? I imagine any team unlucky enough to examine a captured extraterrestrial would have to make the same decision. But we couldn't decide. Coincidence again worked in our favor. Though I suppose it would be less pretentious to simply call it an accident. We'd been very dainty in our handling of the thing- and rightly so, I suppose, seeing as all it took was a radio bumped from its shelf by a careless shoulder to crack the thing open.

Again, I use a euphemism for precisely the manner in which the Sphere 'broke.' As I said, it was not hollow, and so it did not split like an egg. Rather it was as though the outer surface was a delicate membrane, like a soap bubble, and when the radio struck its surface, this bubble burst. Visually, for a few moments, its appearance remained unchanged. And then it was like it was crumbling, but in a way I can give no context to describe. The sphere quickly fell into a pile. The pile consisted of four large spheres, roughly somewhat larger than a basket ball each of them. And then many smaller spheres of varying sizes, the largest of these about baseball sized. The smaller the spheres were, the more of them were present in the pile, down to hundreds of marble sized orbs, and millions perhaps like grains of sand, and an uncountable number presumably making up dust that comprised the finest substrata produced from the Sphere's 'breaking'. I have no reason to doubt that there was no end, either, to how small the spheres were, grains finer than the finest dust. Perhaps even atom sized, and smaller. I'd bet you that all of us that were in the lab that day still today have little bitty dust-spheres stuck in our lungs. Whatever the sphere was made of, it was not traditional matter, and had no atomic structure to speak of.

Following that even, we broke other of the lesser spheres as well, and the result was identical to the first breaking, only scaled down. You see, we found that each of the spheres operated identically to the first, initial Mother sphere. Even the grain sized specks showed no discernible difference. And why should they? If each was composed of an infinite number of smaller layers... well, infinity divided by two is still infinity.

But breaking the sphere was important you see. One sphere alone could solve only basic problems, because only one simple thing could be asked of it at a time- even if it was processed instantaneously, it provided little use for more complex questions. This is why we constructed the network. Keeping the spheres separate, yet linked electrically to one another, we were able to create simple circuits based around the phenomenal properties of each Sphere sub-unit. This allowed for complex problem solving, logic gates, loops, everything. All of it instantaneous.

The perplexing properties of the Sphere... we formed a sort of explanation for how it functioned. A working model anyway. It was paradoxical, you see. The properties of a Sphere on the whole could be explained if you assumed that each of the smaller spheres making it up were a network of resistors or capacitors. Going down a layer further, we could imagine that the network of spheres inside each of those resistor or capacitor spheres could result in that sphere's properties as a resistor or capacitor. And you can keep on going down the rabbit hole this way, infinitely.