Fine Structure

by qntm

It is known that matter and energy warp the shape of spacetime. This is why, for example, objects in space fall into curved orbits rather than straight lines. The Alcubierre metric is a highly unconventional shape into which spacetime could, hypothetically, be warped. All it would take is a suitable arrangement of matter and energy, but there are two obstacles. For one, the matter must be exotic "un-matter", a substance which, while perfectly consistent with the laws of physics, only even exists hypothetically-- except, of course, for within the fertile and dangerous imagination of Eka Script savant John Zhang. The other is that the amount of energy must be enough to literally bring the farthest stars closer together; more energy than the entire observable universe has output in its lifetime; more energy than the Big Bang itself brought into existence. This second obstacle has been the more difficult to overcome. But not substantially. Zhang's information-energy exchanger is the third-simplest of the four dozen or so virtual components in his brain; a simple pipe with some control structures attached to it. He hooks one end up to the processor which will weave the exotic matter into the geodesic bubble he needs. And into the other end he simply feeds the tail end of the Script itself, a maximally dense information resource which in its full, incomprehensible length describes the entire Structure and everything in it. And before the universe can pull Zhang back from the edg...