Fine Structure

by qntm

And what forces would those be? In the time he has at his disposal, John Zhang knows that there is no way that he can save the world. Not alone. But the greatest discovery that anybody ever made was that even the Imprisoning God obeys laws. So he manipulates God into doing it for him; he performs an act so abhorrent and dangerous to the underlying structure of nature that the universe itself has no choice but to step in, like a terrified parent removing a loaded firearm from the hands of a toddler. He plugs the entire infinite Structure into his brain, and as punishment, and precisely as planned, planet Earth and everything else within a 48 light-hour radius of Sol are placed into solitary confinement; dropped into a pocket universe of such infinitesimal relative size that there is no SI prefix to describe it. Alef is physically divided in two, with Umbra as the junction point where the two parts meet, a bottleneck in spacetime. The sudden disconnection from earth stings Oul to the quick, and the wavefront of an outbound gravitational wave alarms him, in as much as he is capable of any emotion other than raw hunger for destruction. When he arrives, just seconds behind the sterilising light of several dozen dangerously local gravitationally-induced supernovae, all there is left of his adversary's home system is a three-mile-wide event horizon. And after the brief delay while the Imprisoner rearranges the Solar System just the way humanity likes it, the Earth continues its p...