The beginning of the event

Adabeie and Manahem watched the horizon while Jonathan scanned the bandwidth for news.

A slow rumble filled the room, loose papers and glasses slowly skittering across table tops.

Adabeie looked at Manahem, a look of disbelief breaking through his skeptical blankness. The sound grew, like an industrial scratching, whining, a static thunderclap stretched to infinity, but as the pitch rose the room ceased to tremble.

Jonathan scrambled to to window, the holoscreen distorted completely behind them, broadcasting only static.

There seemed to be a blink on the horizon from the city's epicenter. For a moment, an expanding circumference of dust seemed to race towards them, stirring an approaching globe of haze which seemed to magnify itself with each passing breath.

An enormous clap reverberated through the room, and the wide bay windows of the lounge which faced the city blew out, an enormous rise in pressure throwing everything and everyone to the ground in a sea of shattered glass.

The roar of unequal pressures reestablishing equilibrium filled their deafened ears, and Manahem was the first to arise. At once he surveyed the distant city, and his empty expression drew the others' notice. Adabeie and Jonathan rose to stand beside Manahem, though none said anything.

A point like a globe, perhaps a mile across, seemed to hover like a shadow amid the city, peeking out between the buildings, which were still intact.

"What is it?" Jonathan murmured.

Adabeie said softly, "It is the dreaded possibility, come to be."

Jonathan asked, "You mean to say.."

Manahem nodded. "A singularity."

Jonathan said, "But it's not drawing in anything, so.."

"No," Adabeie said, "Not a material singularity. It's a gravity hole. It's like a black hole but for all applicable consideration, it doesn't actually exist. A black hole is there, dense, vast, perpetually collapsing.. a gravity hole is.. well, until a second ago, it was purely hypothetical. It seems the gravity well has given way."

The gravity well was an experimental project designed to produce unlimited energy, cleanly, steadily, with no byproduct whatsoever. Its concept relied on an artificial black hole, magnetically contained, as a seed force to be placed beneath a balanced grid which in turn would support a city's superstructure. The black hole would equalize the downward force of the city and generate power by maintaining the downward force and evenly distributing that force in a way that would be unmanageable by mechanical means.

"But the gravity well has conflicted with the black hole... the reverberations have reversed, and the hole will expand now unless it is contained.. it's as though the force of the black hole has been inverted, yet it remains constrained by the remnants of the gravity well, with which it is now mixed inextricably," said Adabeie.

Manahem leapt up and cried, "The vault! We could contain the singularity in the vault!"

Adabeie nodded. "That's an idea," he said. "What better to contain an infinitely expanding explosion than a nullspace which by its very definition has no bounds?"

Jonathan stared at the two quizzically. "Is that even possible?" he asked.

"There's no point in not trying to find out... even at a slowed rate of expansion we'd feel the force of it all sooner or later... I'd be surprised if anyone survived the influence of the blast within the city," Manahem said flatly. "I'll flush the lines and prep the dish."

Manahem left, and Jonathan's face fell. "My family was in the city.. they hadn't moved to the Outer Township yet."

Adabeie put his hand on Jonathan's shoulder. "There's no reason they wouldn't have made it, you know. The explosion isn't exactly conventional, and if we can attract the singularity to the vault there's no reason we can't suspend thigns for a few days to head on in to the city and see what's left."

Jonathan nodded, and they waited in the falling light of the evening for Manahem.