A special event
Live from Plum Park, Plumpertino.
Good morning. Or whichever way the matter is moving where you are.
A "year" in this presentation isn't time. It's one trip of the Earth around the sun: a distance travelled, counted.
Radio is light. Say "hello" to Proxima Centauri by radio and you hear "hi" back after 8.4 years.
Light is the fastest thing we had.
A gas giant, ringed, parked out past the ice giants, where nothing was last year. Every instrument we point at it says Saturn. Every instrument we point at Saturn agrees. Saturn is where we left it. Saturn is also this.
Nobody in the solar system had ordered a new planet. It isn't clear that anybody got one.
The rings don't just sit there; they ripple. Saturn's do this: the planet quakes, and its rings write it down. We always filed that under weather. The quake is on purpose. It sets the tone — a carrier, in ring form.
Out in the rings, a few machines the size of small moons keep the ripple honest: ring-tenders, still running. We used to call them shepherds. We never asked what they were tending.
Far below the clouds, afloat in the sludge, something spins. Above it, up at the cloud tops, a storm gathers: a hexagon, six sides, because the builders like a firm edge on a signal.
The hexagon squeezes the whole planet in step with the message. Moving mass is the message.
It has been on top of Saturn for as long as we've looked. We never asked what it was for.
We listened with a Balance: a bar on a fiber that leans when mass moves. It leaned, in a pattern, and the pattern repeats every year.
Up from one. At ten it draws a shape we don't have a name for. There is no zero anywhere in it.
The Balance leans as the rings ripple, not after. No surprise. Light takes 8 minutes to cross from the sun, and in those 8 minutes the sun moves 110,000 km along its own orbit around the galaxy.
If gravity crossed at light speed, Earth would be pulled toward empty space, 110,000 km behind. Orbits would widen. They don't. Every orbit ever measured points at where the sun is.
How does the pull keep up? To answer that, we have to count the way it counts. Bear with us.
11=1111=11111111112=2
One place, ten numbers. Two places, a hundred. Base ten stays base ten; eleven is written 21.
There's no zero to put in front, so we put a 1. A leading 1 holds the place and adds nothing: starting with 11 is still 1, and 1111111112 is two.
1 = 111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Keep going. There's no end to the ones you can put in front, so one is an infinite string of ones. The smallest thing in this universe is already infinite.
An infinite thing doesn't need to travel to be somewhere. It's already there. So is its pull.
No time means no rate, no delay, no speed limit. Force isn't sent. It's where the matter is.
Gravity is a force.
It pulls; that's the whole job.
Force doesn't arrive. It's just there.
See: every orbit, ever.
So gravity is an instantaneous force.
Which, if you squint, is a telephone.
The builders squinted first.
F ∝ 1 / r2
Twice the distance, a quarter of the pull.
Nothing arrives late. It arrives quiet.
The small numbers: how hard one Core pulls from there, compared with the same Core sitting on the Moon. From Proxima, 10⁻¹⁶ as hard. Ripples drawn optimistically.
So we built a small one.
Theirs is the size of Saturn. Ours fits in a hand. Give it a wiggle.
Inside the Hula is a Core, a dense sphere, and around it a hoop. Wiggle the hoop and the Core sways. When the Core moves, its pull on every mass in the universe changes. Not soon. Not fast. At once.
Put the message in the wiggle. We call it Mass-Shift Keying.
The Core is in exactly one place at all times. No quantum physics here; we checked.
Inside, a Balance no bigger than a plum stone rests in aether, which turns out to be very good at holding still. When any Core, anywhere, sways, the Balance leans. Read the lean, read the message.
The aether isn't in the way. It's the wire.
So every Hula is already connected to every other Hula. And to every star. And to Saturn. And to Saturn. And to you. It has been since… well. There's no since. It's connected.
Missed calls: all of them.
We wiggled a Hula at the new planet. We asked how many of them there were.
Saturn picked up on the first ring.
It said: 11.
Which, counted its way, is one.
Reach out and pull someone.
Designed by Plum in Plumpertino.
A work of fiction, set in a universe with three dimensions, an aether, no quantum physics, no time, no black holes, and no single Big Bang — the one where Dayton Miller and Halton Arp were right. Any resemblance to actual fruit is intentional. Any resemblance to Saturn is unresolved.