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...

"What's wrong with the sky?" She replies, "The Sun is being consumed by a black hole." Mitch looks up out of the window behind him, and the swollen, unhealthy Sun stares back. The black hole, invisibly small from this distance, is obviously well inside Mercury's orbit, angrily raiding the solar corona for plasma and linear momentum. He digests this information rationally, and does not panic. It was going to be his first guess. "Is the Earth falling in as well?" "Yes. We have about six months before the planet becomes uninhabitable. "Our universe contains two stars. The Sun, you see right above us. The other is Noct, the Far Star, which rises when the Sun sets and sets when the Sun rises, which follows us around the Sun in a way which defies the laws of gravitation. Other than the Moon and the planets, Noct is the only thing in our night sky. The planets orbit the Sun and the Moon orbits the Earth but Noct is always opposite the Sun from us in space. Which is impossible. "It took us hundreds of years to realise what the Far Star actually is. It took us that long to build radio transmitters powerful enough to broadcast all the way around the universe and back and receive our own signals on a four-day echo. "Noct is also the Sun."

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...

But when the Jeep's head gasket gives up the ghost, and Mark has no choice but to declare their vehicle legally dead, they both get good and angry at one another. They were enjoying the experience of being further from civilisation than most people ever get to be, racing down the bumpy, barely-maintained "road" at sixty miles per hour with rocky sandy scrub surrounding them and the most glorious waltz of stars overhead (until a week ago neither of them had even seen the Milky Way, with naked eyes or otherwise), but that enjoyment was keyed to the fact that if everything went sideways they could, at any time, elect to leave the wilderness immediately and indefinitely. Sally, fiftyish, has been married to Mark, fiftyish, for long enough that she can recognise the pattern of their argument. She quietly short-circuits it by skipping to the end, the point at which everything that can be said has been said, she is no longer cross, and she is in a position to dispassionately address the problem. Without a resisting force to rail against, Mark soon calms down too, and they begin to discuss what they are going to say when they radio the emergency services for a pickup.

Mark gets back into the driver's seat and stares at the point in the sky where Arika and Sally were last visible. After a while he switches off the headlights so he can see better, but there is still nothing to see but the the Milky Way and crescent Moon. Mark Bryant is one of the few people in the world who are watching the sky live when the Milky Way begins to erode, blackened out star by star by the rapidly pooling and merging black network of event horizons, as they enclose and coddle the Solar System.

The red light flashes again. Arika realises that the real world is still moving at normal speed. She has spent the last twelve years automatically ducking into accelerated time whenever she needs a few extra moments to think about something. But that's another one of the million tricks that she'll never be able to use again. Minutes and seconds. Not hours and minutes.

Sally Bryant lives. She is the two hundred and twenty-third life that Arika McClure has saved.

It's 2111, the very start of the era that'll eventually come to be known as "post-environment". Anne Poole is fully clothed, but that's more of a concession to the legacy she represents than it is a concession to decency, or protection from the skin-searing, sand-blasting elements of the aftermath of the Hot War and the catastrophic Drop. When you are time's most remote outpost of humanity, everything you carry with you is significant. She wears clothes because humans wore clothes back when they existed. It's conceivable that a million years from now another intelligent species will arise on Earth and Anne will be responsible for communicating to them the fact that We Were Here. That's all a sentient species can really hope to achieve, after all: to make a mark on the universe big enough to prove that there was a moment in history when there was a sentient species, in this vicinity, with the power to make that big of a mark. All that's left of the human race right now is Anne Poole, a network of fried, shellshocked cities gradually eroding down to stubs in the unstoppable sun-driven sandstorms and nitric acid rain, and some footprints on the Moon. It'll take time to erase all of it, but geology is a patient entity and astronomy ten times more so. Anne Poole has a lot of time on her hands.

Talmansk Arcology was international news. If there was still a living human anywhere in the world, Anne Poole knew it was going to be here. They have the vat-cloning technology she needs - the knowledge, that is. Maybe not the machinery, but that can be built. And in her backpack is a hardened storage volume containing six distinct backups of Mitch Calrus' brain. And if they're corrupted she knows where to go to get more: namely, anywhere. It was the most widely-distributed, intensely mirrored file in the world.

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...

It's Sol Earth Gregorian Common Era Five Four Three Five. (It's probably a million other years, too, depending on where you're from and how you count them. Here at the edge of the multiverse, where all humanity eventually arrives, the popular epoch of late is the Yuur Unambiguous Era, in which the current year number is The Smallest Year Number Not Currently In Use Anywhere Else. It's currently YUE 189, but sooner or later a traveller is going to arrive whose own epoch was 189 years ago, causing YUE to conscientiously jump forward to 190 to avoid the clash.) Universe +1 is the first of approximately 1.84E13 parallel universes arranged in a closed circle in hyperspace. Because most Earths are still, to within acceptable tolerances, firmly rooted to their original orbital track, stepping between parallel Earths is substantially simpler than stepping from planet to planet within a solar system, let alone crossing a universe to reach other stars. So even though many parts of the multiverse have FTL travel, the Earth-shaped core of the multiverse is where almost everything happens. Almost every conceivable eventuality is happening out there on the strand somewhere, on some Earth. Every historical path has been taken, for better or worse. There is cross-universe communication, trade, cultural exchange, technological exchange, colonisation, invasion, conflict and war. There are perfect shining lights and completely extinguished graveyard universes which neighbouring Earths use fo...

"Please can you tell me how far from home you are?" he concludes. The man doesn't need to be asking this, because the information was pulled out of the ship with time to spare, but Xaeyo needs orienting. "Almost four point seven trillion universes," he replies. "We were trying to map the whole multiverse." The man nods. "That's correct. Well, you've succeeded as far as you were ever likely to. This is Universe +1. Unfortunately, it is impossible to travel beyond this point along the multiversal curve. There is a discontinuity in the multiverse. We believe that if you turned around and headed in the opposite direction, you would eventually encounter the same problem from the far side - there is almost certainly another universe, -1, there, confronted with the same conundrum as us. Captain Xaeyo, are you aware that there are walls?" Xaeyo expresses polite incomprehension. "There are walls surrounding and containing us. They prevent certain things from being possible. They block out certain features that the multiverse should have, but does not."

"I agree. They nest, you see, and all of them contain this entire multiverse, as far as anybody knows. Except this one. It nests inside the others but it contains just one universe. Zero." "And what's special about that universe?" "We can't travel to it or communicate with it. Other than that, we don't know. Because we can't travel to it or communicate with it. "There's supposed to be teleportation. Not the way we hack it, with deconstruction and reconstruction by nanobots; I mean true teleportation. And FTL communications. But they're walled off from us. Why? Well, this is why. Behind this wall is the reason. "There's supposed to be an afterlife."

It was going to take twenty thousand years, using "brute force" (a subtle form of brute force, admittedly: an incredibly complex and unearthly powerful and mind-bogglingly resilient self-programming supercomputer), to unravel enough of the Script to successfully "earth" all of Mitch "Xio" Calrus' remaining power. Thanks to Zhang's sacrifice, humanity had now bought that time, and Anne Poole, for one, was almost certain to live long enough see the calculation through to the end. Mitch Calrus, though, was not. And Xio's mind had to be there, alive and operational in a capable shell, to receive the power at the end of the calculation. At that moment, the New Cosmology could be undone, Oul would attack, Xio would defeat Oul, and the story would be over. So, conscious of his present shell's mortality, Mitch Calrus had himself backed up. Those backups were distributed as far across the world as he could finance. When Calrus inevitably died, which would happen hundreds of times before the calculation was complete, Anne Poole would arrange for him to be resurrected. In turn, whenever Anne Poole was abducted, buried, lost, stranded or marooned - and this, too happened dozens of times over the next twenty-odd millennia - Mitch Calrus sought her out, pulled her out of her prison using his four-dimensional powers and restored her mind to normal as well. And so they found one another, over and again. They kept one another sane, and together on their shared path. In the mid-21st century...

In the early 21st century, very shortly after memory surgery first became practical but before it became cheap, two hundred and fifty people paid to have their mind-states stored alongside the battery of conventional scientific instruments on the TRIDENT space probe. TRIDENT was sent to observe Neptune and ultimately land on its moon Nereid. It would continue transmitting data until its radiothermal generator ran out, half a century later, and then lie dormant until it was destroyed by an asteroid, most likely billions of years later still. Mitchell Calrus was one of those people. And so, thousands of years later, Anne Poole went to Science City, set herself up as a God and created Empyreanism, the Religion Of Space, in which the sky and planets were Heaven, which humanity had to reach and visit in person in order to obtain salvation. At the expense of all other scientific and social progress, aerospace engineering and astronomy and their related disciplines became the only important undert...

The journey takes weeks, during which the Earth falls millions of kilometres closer to the Sol/Umbra binary system. Earth is not spiralling inevitably into Umbra, because spiral orbits don't exist. A black hole is not a magical cosmic magnet; it can be modelled as a point mass like any other and the laws of orbital mechanics apply to it as much as any other object (outside of its event horizon). Earth is merely adjusting to a new, elliptical orbit with an intolerably hot perihelion. There is no singular point at which a planet becomes uninhabitable to human life, but an absence of drinkable water suffices, and the average surface temperature at the Equator is going to pass boiling point before this is over.

When they reach the coordinates where the enormous granite geodesic dome is supposed to be located, it isn't there. The landscape has changed too much. The building has been carried away by moving ice. But it was always a complete sphere, not a dome, and it floated on the ice, rather than being built on top of it, allowing it to roll and drift with the flow - up to a point, anyway. It has left a trail wide enough to follow from the air. A horizon north they catch up with it. It has fallen into an enormous rocky crevasse, where sharp outcroppings have dented and punctured its roof and destroyed its structural integrity. There's just enough of the granite shell left for Mitch Calrus to be able to see what the machine inside it was supposed to look like - all intricate golden and steel and silicon gears and cylinders, now bent and broken by the drop and impact. There are hexagonal granite pieces weighing tens of tonnes littering the floor of the icy canyon. There are plates of metal punched with holes. There are crushed supercomputers. The half-shell that's left is slowly filling with ice and icy water flowing into the crevasse from the south. It's a trainwreck. It's a broken, drooling egg.

Anne Poole, after a month of travel, has reached Umbra. Thanks to the enormous gravitational gradient, she cannot move. Her arms are clamped to her sides and her toes are pointed straight down into the black hole. Her capsule and restraints have long since been torn away from her and crushed into atoms by the same tidal forces. She would see momentary flashes of distorted light from the Sun and other captured photons above her, if her eyelids weren't held closed under tonnes of their own weight. Anne Poole has no way of knowing what is happening on Earth, if the word "is" even has the usual meaning in a region of such intense spacetime distortion. She finishes up her magic spell. Still intact, immovable, she hits the event horizon at a respectable fraction of the speed of light, with her protected synapses still able to fire information at one other, even while semi-infinite gravitational forces try to prise her apart at the quark level. And nothing gives. Spacetime screams contradiction and paradox, and there is an instant during which the laws of physics and even the Imprisoning God itself all drop into failure mode-- an instant during which an intelligent mind, suitably positioned, is able to make a decision about what happens next. At the expense of her own life and a technology which, if allowed to grow to fruition, would have come to be known as Secondary Functional Singularity Modulation, Anne Poole chooses to dissolve Umbra. She disintegrates in an instant. The kin...

"There goes the Sun." The swollen solar disc begins to dim, areas of its surface switching off in ugly black blotches as wide as worlds. Out of the sabotaged star shoots an actinic blue pinprick, arcing around to bear down on Earth, currently host to some one point zero five billion souls. Moving at a respectable and increasing fraction of the speed of light, he'll arrive in just minutes, hitting the Antarctic first, hard enough to punch a hole right from one side of the planet to the other. The shockwave from the supernova will follow a few minutes later. There'll be nothing left but ionised plasma. Anne Poole is dead. There is no Calculation, no Script Solution, no Power. A war which spanned twenty millennia, and inexpressibly gigantic tracts of hyperspacetime besides, is accelerating to its conclusion. Humanity-Zero is over. Mitch hits the catwalks feet-first, but it's icy and on an angle and he slides uncontrollably. Shards of exploded helicopter rain down around him. If it was ever time, it's time--

"I study the Script. It's all anybody studies these days. But the amount of stuff locked out to us is becoming unpleasant. Everybody knows that trying to implement these designs always ends in death for anybody involved, but they keep trying it on, with compartmentalisation and remotely-controlled automated fabrication. Did you hear about this exec in Spain who's on trial? It turned out that he had about two hundred and fifty people working on parts of a single supertechnology and none of them had any idea what the full picture was. They were having fatal accidents. More than a dozen of them. And they were just working on the smallest, most innocuous pieces of the puzzle. You get nowhere, now. "Science is over, do you see? Roadblocked. Until we can send you home. Teleportation, replication, antimemetics. There will never be FTL. Even if it works once, it'll break right after."

"An antimeme is the opposite of a meme. A meme is any idea with a self-replicating property, a hook which causes people to disperse the idea to other people. Any world religion is a meme. Memes can be attached together, they mutate, and they reproduce, like genes do. An antimeme is the opposite. It's an idea with self-censoring properties. An idea which is repulsive. People who have the idea discard it. They don't share it. They try to prevent it from spreading. Secrets. Scandals. 'The public must never know about this.' 'We don't talk about X.'"

"And another. We saw impossible things. We shared a vision of the Structure and your war. And we all believed you when you told us your story. That's wrong. We had what amounts to a religious experience, but we didn't test it. We just fell into line and started working for you, trying to send you home. Why didn't we challenge you? We're supposed to be scientists. "Mikhail Zykov was smart, manipulative and powerful. He surrounded himself with scientists who knew more than he did and politicians with more power than he had and he brainwashed them into helping him achieve his goals. He created false ideas and put them into other people's minds. He was a telepath. Does this sound familiar, Xio? "What did Muoka see which we didn't?"

The prison in which Alef is suspended is impregnable and inescapable in all known conventional and unconventional spatial directions and, any time another path is discovered and tested, another, narrower set of walls is erected to block those off. There was a time before the walls existed, but the prison is now capped at that end, too - no time travel, no closed timelike curves, no possibility of escape via the singularity at the origin of the universe. There will also be a time after which the walls cease to exist. Eventually, there will be an instant of total entropy, the Omega Point which no finite energy resource can stave off eternally and beyond which nothing coherent will ever exist. A point when all Alef's intelligent life - cosmic or otherwise - will have passed; when the walls are no longer necessary and the Imprisoning God, task completed, will have expired too.

"You saved yourself! I don't think you understand the scale of what we've been denied! We could have taken every star. We could have circumnavigated this universe. And this is just the lowest rung on the Structure. But all possibility of salvation was taken from us as soon as we knew it existed, before we could comprehend the magnitude of its implications, before we even had a chance to process the colossal theft which was happening in front of us. We should have lived forever, but the door to an uncountable infinity of possible afterlives was closed to us because of a single, petty, stupid creature which decided we were acceptable collateral."

Oul is humanoid, and this is the only thought that Ching has time to process before absorbing the entirety of Oul's opening seven attacks, all of them energy-based and equivalent to titanic, tightly focused nuclear weapons. In an instant Ching is improvising and constructing force-field shields to protect himself-- force fields being an entire technology which he had no idea even existed before he ramped up his intellect. He retaliates with a half-formed attempt at a force-field punch, flanked by multidimensional energy attacks of his own and a steel-sharp mental directive which, all things being equal, should eviscerate Oul's brain of all intelligent thought, leaving him docile. This does not work. Oul not only shrugs off the blow, but starts breeding secondary offensive units. Ching instinctively does the same and rapidly loses track of the war. With further attacks converging on him and absolutely no idea what he is doing, Ching grants some autonomy, a lot of intelligence and a monumental injection of firepower to his external pawns and the fight instantly blossoms to a hundred times its original diameter. Then Oul finally physically collides with him, so hard that Ching's physical manifestation momentarily disconnects from his perceptual centre - he is borne back down to Earth so fast that he can barely keep up with his own body. Ching senses that he is losing the initiative. There are people on the rapidly rising continent down there - he clenches one fist and moves t...

Ching manages to gain the upper hand in the tussle, turns, uses Oul as a live shield and switches every particle of Antarctica from "mass" over to "energy". ("No," warns the Imprisoning God, in stern, blunt Eka: "In this universe, you do not pull stunts like that. There is a limit. You are racing towards it.") The sparkle, flash and catastrophic outrushing shockwave from the detonating continent will easily be enough to wipe out all life on Earth. But there'll be a critical delay before the shockwave starts hitting inhabited countries, and now that Ching has used this trick, Oul can't use the same on the planet itself or the people on it. Ching locates the null spot in Oul's energy wake-- the point directly behind him where all his shields neatly intersect with one another-- curls into a ball and rides out the shock. Oul, caught off-guard, bears the brunt of the entire explosion. Easily. Then turns, and resumes the fight, with negligible damage, yet greater aggression and the same furious purpose: EVERYBODY DIES NOW. It has no mind - that's how it withstood the first kill-command. All it has is firepower. Even within punishing and rapidly contracting constraints, Oul is unimaginably stronger. The thought occurs to Ching that the two of them could battle until they were invisible points fighting for control of a zero-dimensional universe, and he would still be hopelessly outclassed. Xio and Oul were both of effectively infinite capability. But there are levels of infinity. ...