There was no mistaking it. Yun wasn't an astrophysicist, she wasn't even a physicist at all, but this was something she knew from all her prior conversations with them. It had been theorized that a spinning blackhole could maybe do the very thing in this simulation. That it might have or create the right kind of mass needed to exsert expansionary pressures, conceptually it was like a negative mass. The theory hadn't paned out yet, but what they were seeing in this simulation was, very convincing. Enough so that Yun had no hesitation in proclaiming,

“It’s wormhole.” She whispered in awe, just loud enough for the other participants to hear.

"No, it's not possible." The professor on call from Zurich almost shouted quite impassionedly. No doubt, this was something he had a vested interest in. "We've explored this idea with our high energy arrays. We have millions of spinning singularities on record, none of which show this… 'echo'. It's got to be an error in the simulation. You said it yourself the data you have is only 90, 94% complete?"

Another professor spoke up, the woman was from Kyoto University, and from the dark circles was asleep before this call, but still from her voice she seemed energized. "But what you're ignoring here is the size. The singularities we make on earth are small, below the plank mass. Technically they shouldn’t even exist to begin with. That’s still an open problem in our field.”

“What’s your point?” Zurich's voice held more disdain.

“Well, the singularity at Lerna is massive by our standards. Remember, that was one of the goals of the station, to create and test gravitational drives-”

“I thought the purpose was to make fusion rockets?” Someone else interrupted.

“They also wanted to do research into this, eh, I’m still bitter my experiments couldn’t be run before being sold off…" Kyoto was still carrying water for her ideas, given the venom in her voice that was a sore subject for her. But she waved it away, "Anyway, details. The point is, our blackholes are all fundamentally unstable. They will dissolve in around a plank second, a short time period and there’s no way to keep them stable. Perhaps, this phenomenon only appears after a certain point of time?”

Dr. Shroder interrupted his two colleagues, “The fact is, all the evidence Yun has shows this singularity exceeds the Bekenstein bound, something has to be going on there. Maybe it's not a worm hole, but none of our research on earth shows the same. Even our theoretical models don't show this.”

"That… may not be true." Another professor she didn't recognize spoke up. "There are a few data points in our experiments we excluded from publication. The entropy was far higher than we expected, but it wasn't like this, and there were other anomalies. We assumed they were bad runs, but looking at this, maybe not?"

Sammy from Caltech was the last to speak, further lending credence to the idea. "We've noticed some irregularities in our singularity processors too, most do. On very rare occasions, if a beam is slightly misaligned, the singularity produced gets a significant spin. Like everywhere else, it fizzles out quickly, and the data is considered corrupted and ignored. But, on deeper examinations, we've noticed similar entropy instabilities at least on rare occasions. Most chalked it up to just bad data, but we have reason to suspect that's not the case. I probably shouldn't be mentioning it, the US DOD has us doing research work into it. To see if it's reproducible..."

"And what did you discover or I guess what can you tell us?"

"It's complicated, but maybe. We never considered it could be a wormhole. Most of us were assuming compacted dimensions."

Yun was growing tired of this conversation. Normally she would be more invested and curious, but the deeper this went the more it bothered her. Something else was wrong here and it went deeper than the blackhole. "So let's say we all agree, the extra information is coming from whatever is beyond that wormhole? But then, what's actually creating the extra information? Something has to be there to do the calculations on the other end and it can't just be random matter. The wormhole would just be a bridge to, somewhere."

There was silence. None of them seemed to have a good answer, or any answer. Merely having a connection to somewhere else shouldn't just increase the computational power. There had to be something there. Something that was able to act like a computer.

That worry turned into a chill that suddenly ran down Yun's spine. Random points of data, bits of information she had acquired over the years began to sit unsteadily at the surface of her thoughts.

"You ok, Yun." Dr. Shroder tapped her shoulder. The smile on his face was undeniable. Like a proud father of a child that won the science fair.

"I don't know. Something about this really bothers me."

"Bothers you?" He practically laughed, "If this pans out, you'll be a shoe in for a Nobel! It's your discovery Yun."

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"Now wait a minute…" Suddenly the silence exploded in a cacophony of arguing. Aggressive academics via and fighting over an award that doesn't exist yet, and very well may not. Again, any other day and it would have been almost fun to have this argument, but for now she needed to break away to think.

Pulling back from the video conference, Yun wandered out of the office, lost in thought. A wormhole made some sense. The Bekenstein bound was the maximum information you could contain in a point of space time. Anything more, and it would collapse into, well, a blackhole. Arguments about extra dimensions of spacetime had been put to rest after the initial research done on singularities. Her own thesis was more evidence of the fact that it didn't seem to exist.

It's why she was so excited to hear and see that there was unaccounted for data from the central core. Small amounts could have been explained by variances in the singularity's size, or just compression artifacts. But what was discussed in those meetings with her boss and a few engineers was hundreds of times that, and then, when she had the actual data in front of her. Well, it was so much more than even that.

The transaction records the station gave her were old. Very old, the dates on the records suggested sometime in 2089. Why they didn't give her more recent records was anyone's guess. As much as she grumbled, even that data showed tell tail signs of excess processing capacity. Record sizes that were just too big for what the system should have been able to put out. Well, the output of that data was now obvious. What would more recent data show?

Again, that creeping thought in the back of her mind, why didn't she have more recent data. It felt like someone… or something, was trying to hide it from her.

The sounds of hurried footsteps came up from behind her and brought Yun out of her daze. For such an old man, Dr. Shroder was surprisingly quick. A fact he was no doubt proud of as he'd still go on about his half-marathon time if you let him.

"Yun, wait up!" The old fool was still smiling. "You left the meeting so quickly. I didn't take you for the sore winner type."

Her mind was a drift with the many different thoughts, it was hard to find something to say or counter with. Instead, she just smiled at her old mentor and gazed forward, attempting to break the conversation.

"Now I know something's wrong. You aren't one to keep silent. You seem really uncertain about something."

"The data you all saw was old. About 4 years old to be exact. I'm just, why am I just now finding about this now?"

Dr. Shroder opened his mouth as if to speak before closing it and rocking his head back and forth looking for the right statement or question to answer with. "Well, why did they give you 4 year old data in the first place?"

"That's just it, I don't know." A long-protracted sigh and she continued. "Originally, I was asked to look into this by my boss. She's good at what she does, but honestly a bit of a moron otherwise. She had no data to give me, and no way to get the data. I had to bargain for an uplink key over the secure line to the station. There was a tech I had worked with a few other times up there, he's the one that sent me the canned data… You know, that's another strange thing."

"What is?"

"'I've sent about 3 dozen messages to that station over the past 5 years. Aside from the first two, he's the only person that ever answered. Him, or that one AI up there. It's just weird. There's 20 people up there, why just him?"

"This doesn't seem like it's about the wormhole, is it?"

"I don't… know. It's just the whole situation is weird. There's an AI that runs the station, it lives on that event horizon. It should have been the first time to see these records don't make sense. Why didn't it say anything? Why don't I have more recent records? Why did they make me take a vacation after I started looking into this data. It's Just… a lot of questions. This wormhole, adds more and it doesn't really answer anything."

Dr. Shroder put his hand on Yun's shoulder. "You were always a brilliant student, and you couldn't just leave problems to the side. You had to answer them."

There was a bit of silence between the two. Dr. Shroder could tell, Yun was done with the conversation, and her visit. "Maybe I'll stop up and visit you this weekend. I need to talk to my old friends in NYU anyway. Alvin doesn't like technology and refuses to talk via holo or even a phone call."

That elicited a smile from her, "I remember Dr. Folger, he was, a character."

"Right? What kind of computer scientist doesn't have a computer at home in the 22nd century?"

"Pretty sure it's still the 21st."

"Minor details, a few seven more and… Never thought I'd see the turn of two centuries."

A short hug, and Yun left the building. Her mind still turning over all the possibilities. On the Train ride back, she began to jot down notes on her tablet. The whole trip back to her apartment was spent lost in thought.

That same tablet continued to buzz, more messages and calls from the various professors and doctorates that she had talked to earlier, and a few others. But she had no interest in those conversations right now. So many of the notes she made seemed to have the same root actor attached to them. It may not have been the root cause, but it always seemed to be involved. It all kept pointing back to that one AI, Asher. It just had to know something. What's more, someone intercepted her communications to the station and told Jordin. Maybe even Theo directly.

Could it have been the AI?

Entering her apartment, Yun's feet were attacked by the furry monster who was getting spoiled by being uncaged every day. Of course, she had to bend down to pick up her fluffy terror.

"Yun! You're back late." Arial was right, it was almost 8PM, originally Yun had told her sister it was just going to be a couple hours. She wasn't even planning to head down to Jersey it was, just something she did on a whim.

"Yeah. I decided to visit my old professor, Dr. Shroder."

"Dr. Shroder? Isn't he like a 100 now?"

"110! Looks great for his age too. Wouldn't expect a year over 60."

"Talk about anything interesting?"

"You could say that… Might be looking at a noble prize in the future."

"Ha! Well, at least you're finding things to do." Arial didn't believe her sister. Not that it really mattered. "Oh, by the way. Bob tried to eat the lamp cord. You're going to have to replace it."

Yun sighed. Her sister was supposed to have watched him better than that. Though, it did bring up thoughts of other rodents. Squirls in particular.

Theo… That squirl was still scratching up her world. It was past time she had a talk with him about this. After all, this was her 'vacation.' Maybe it was time to speak to another old… friend.