Vortex (Spin Saga, #3)

by Robert Charles Wilson

The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially. But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it. We emerged into a vast fractal space of many dimensions and discovered we were not alone there. Multidimensional structures hosted entities that had subsumed the four-dimensional space-time that once contained us. As old as we were, these entities were older. As large as we had become, they were larger. We passed among them unnoticed or ignored. From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.