Fine Structure

by qntm

The Federated Shiftship Kardashev V passes the first advance warning beacon at a record-breaking velocity of almost one hundred and fifty thousand universes per second-- so fast that the second and third warning beacons are dopplering into its wake long before the ship's communications array has had time to decode, process and handle the first warning, let alone present it to the ship's captain for consideration and action. All three beacons explain, in more than three quarters of a million distinct languages and in the most urgent possible terms, that Space As You Know It is about to run out, and that all passing shiftships should immediately begin braking to avoid running headlong into the solid far wall of the multiverse. That's a problem, though, because a regular shiftship is to the Kardashev V as a Honda Civic is to Thrust SSC. The KV was brought all the way out to its home universe's Oort Cloud to make sure that it didn't collide with anything else during its mission to circumnavigate the multiverse, and it's spent the last two years and a measurable fraction of the multiversal curve doing nothing but accelerate kata, and it's not able to brake substantially faster than it's able to accelerate. You might as well put a sign saying "Bridge out 1/4 mile ahead" in front of a train moving at half the speed of light. Captain Xaeyo and his crew of 332 have a little over eight hundred and sixty millionths of a second to live. As luck would have it, Universe +1, representing...