Multiversal Yarns

Hello all, I was away sea so I apologize for the delayed post.  I really thought that Sea time would be conducive to writing but it doesn’t seem to work out that way.  I prefer to be in a dark room, with a hot cup of tea and the sounds of rain at my window or in a crowded coffee shop, fervently people-watching to help me build new characters.  Today’s sharing is not my best work but certainly a long way from my worst.  Hopefully you enjoy reading it, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.  Thanks for your time, I know there are a lot of demands on it.

Rumours and Imaginations

Interstellar travel, it has piqued the minds of every person who has ever tilted their chin up and really had a look.  Throughout human history people have always looked to the stars.  At first they simply wondered what they were and in doing so made up fanciful stories of great beings and how it all came to be.  Once the discovery was made that those little twinkly lights were actual locations that you could conceivably travel to, the spark was lit.  Unfortunately it wasn’t long before it was also discovered that they are far away, really surprisingly stupefyingly inordinately far away.  Due to that ludicrous distance it was quickly discovered that humans don’t yet have the means to get there.  That didn’t stop the need to study them, after some time these oppressive distances could be calculated with an impressive level of accuracy but that only served to drive home just how unattainable these stars were to conventional forms of travel.

Theories for unconventional methods of transportation were then of course the logical next step.  Someone named Alcubierre came up with a drive method that involved contracting reality until is was a shorter distance to be crossed, once at the far side you simply expand it again.  You could speed up your journey a thousand fold, unfortunately it relied on something called Negative Energy which no one could find or make, or even prove exists.  A man named Godel theorized that you could remain in place and find a way to persuade the universe to simply rotate beneath you.  Why travel all that way when you could have your destination come to you?  Unfortunately no one could devise a way to coax the universe to move while preventing themselves from moving with it.  This theory only served to double your problems, now you have to move the entire universe and you have to find a way to separate yourself from it.

New theories became fewer and harder to convey convincingly to an increasingly capable and knowledgable populace.  People had accepted that they would never travel to another star, this pursuit now relegated to astro-physicists and science fiction writers.  Each new theory was great at explaining one aspect of travel but under even the slightest scrutiny, they were littered with holes and flaws.  A curious cross section of people, science fiction writers and physicists.  One group dedicated to coming up with and writing about ideas that can’t yet be explained or understood and another group dedicating to explaining and understanding ideas that they come up with or read about.

It was only a matter of time before one of those science fiction writers would stumble upon an idea that one of those physicists would be able to properly explain and understand, and indeed recreate and prove.  In a further wrinkle of fate’s curiosity, that writer and that physicist also happened to be the same person.  Joan King was an astrophysicist who wrote the occasional science fiction novel as a form of creative output.  She was self-published and had a modest but loyal readership.  The novel in question was about a monk who dedicated his life to developing an understanding of the universe.  The monk, Heng Chun discovered, in his 63rd year, that although the universe was immense in terms of distance it was all situated along a mostly singular plane. 

The universe is imagined as a spherical shape or a never ending three dimensional expanse.  While it does have some width to it, Heng Chun’s discovery was that it was mostly flat.  This led to new understandings in terms of travel.  Monks have proven over millennia that if you dedicate your mind and body to a task, over time your mastery becomes assured.  Supposedly it takes 10,000 hours to master any task. That works out to 417 days assuming you could work 24 hours. 

Jump ahead in Joan’s book to 3 years later in Heng Chun’s life when he masters his new ability.  With an understanding of the universe being mostly flat, using his mind he folds it like a piece of paper, now the two points he wants to travel between are mere feet apart, he simply steps across and allows the universe to unfold.  He traveled millions of light years in mere seconds.  So the question remained; how do you bend the universe?  It turns out to be more about perception.

Perception is a powerful thing, most people think of perception as what can be observed from a certain point of view and that isn’t an incorrect understanding.  It is however an incomplete one.  Your perception is not solely passive, it can affect the world around you.  Think of trying to swat a fly, one of many creatures that seem to operate on a whole different time scale than we do.  Combine that with the idiom that Time flies when you are having fun and the idea becomes clear that time’s passing is based on how you chose to perceive it. With dedication and devotion many monks had learned to take control of the way their mind processes time, allowing them to remain motionless for days or performing feats of inhuman speed.

Altering your interaction with time and folding the universe are very different animals, but they are achieved through similar methods; Time.  Time changes everything, it wears away all boundaries and impediments, allowing the truth to reveal itself.  The epiphany came when Heng Chun understood that he didn’t need to physically fold the universe, he simply needed to perceive the universe as already being bent and if his conviction was strong enough, it would become true. 

In the novel he used this newfound power to explore new worlds, map the cosmos and in time, interact with alien life and share his wisdom.  The book was Joan’s best work, it sold more copies than all her other titles combined.  She organized a bit of a promotional tour thanks to demand for speaking engagements in several cities.  Different populations in different locations around the world, but the same question kept coming up… “Would this sort of travel be feasible?”  Over time she began to question her stock answer of:  “The truth is that conventional travel will not get us out of our own solar system, never mind allow us to explore the cosmos.  We need something radical, a paradigm shift,if we hope to get out any further towards the reaches of the universe.  Would Heng Chun’s method work?  It is no more or less crazy than Alcubierre or Godel.  It is an idea, a possibility.”

Just how possible was this crazy idea?  She could either commit career suicide or die knowing she had never tried.  Her scientific curiosity took over.  A sabbatical secured, she made for Tibet and sought out a teacher to guide her through the first part of what she must do.  As we did for her novel we skip ahead two years to her mind-bending discovery.  The idea and logic are sound but more than that, once you figure it out it is easy.  Easy to do, safe and even easy to explain.  Secure in her ability for interstellar travel, she focused on building a concise set of instructions with which she could teach someone else how to bend the universe.

Notes in hand, she brought them before five novice monks and walked them through the process.  She was staggered when one after another the five men glowed an odd spectral light then disappeared.  Joan’s grin could not be wiped away, even while being chided, in a very respectful buddhist way, by other members of the monastery and asked about the locations of the now missing monks.  Three of the five returned within a week but the other two were never  heard from again.

The little details like missing monks didn’t matter much to Joan King, she was leaving the mountain behind and headed back to the madness and bustle of the big city.  Her new plan was to teach the world how to travel through the cosmos, for a modest fee of course.  The name Joan King would go down in history as the person who unlocked the dormant human ability, the woman who freed the world of the confines of this planet and its singular understanding. 

The process took longer than she thought, most marketing teams failed to believe her outlandish claims and simply hung up the phone.  Eventually she got the word out and people responded in a big way.  People traveled from all over the globe to learn her method, no expense was spared.   In only a few short months interest waned and it seemed like her new business was drying up. 

“How is this possible?  I hold the keys to the ability to travel to any place in the universe, how could people lose interest in that?  What else could possibly be more interesting?”

“Well Joan, in your words, you don’t “hold the key” anymore.  It turns out that your instructions were a little too simplified, the word is spreading, people are teaching each other.”

“What?!?!  Isn’t that like patent infringement or fraud or theft or something?”

“Your patent is in the branding and specifics of your instruction set and teaching method, you can’t patent a natural process of the body.”

“So what do I do?”

“Accept your fate.  Embrace your role as the one who freed humanity and let them roam the stars.  Make a video explaining the whole process and give it away for free, put it online.”

“Offer a donation option?”

“Sure if you must but focus on the idea of it being an altruistic act.  You want to go down in history as a good person overall.  Plus with a world full of people capable of interstellar travel, who knows what will happen to the raw concept of money.  What new minerals will be discovered, what new gems, new life.  The market as we know it is about to get quite a shake.”

And so it came to be, the world was freed by watching of an 8 minute internet video.  In the time it takes to watch a compilation of cats chasing laser pointers, you could learn how to travel to any point in the universe.  That is a lot of power to bestow upon the internet video watching populace.  View counter records were broken within days, servers crashed, mere add revenue alone on the video outsold all the money that Joan had made teaching the classes.  The largest concern turned out to be the many unforeseen changes that this ability would inflict on the world.

Like folding a piece of paper, it is easier to fold a larger sheet than a smaller one, there is more likelihood that the fold will be even and the corners will line up.  Folding space had the same issues, it was easier to travel farther away and it took time and skill to move with any real accuracy. This meant that at first travel was limited to destinations outside of our own planet.  The dangers of sudden toxic death or asphyxiation were minimized by the fact that you could peer through in a sense, before you decided to step through to the new destination. 

Give someone power and you will reveal their true character, most people, given the chance will abuse any power given to them.  People quickly learning a simple workaround in order to traveling short distances;  Round-tips became the standard.  Fold to a set, known location halfway across the galaxy and then fold back to earth but not quite to your start point.  Arrive inside a bank vault, out of prison, into your obsession’s bedroom, nowhere was safe and nothing was sacred.  Enforcing any kind of law on these sorts of folds was neigh impossible, there was no indication of where the person would go next or where they had come from.

Mercifully many people used this paradigm shift in human ability for good, interstellar explorers sprung up in an attempt to map the cosmos.  That task turned out to be more daunting that initially though.  Despite a year passing with nearly the entire human population being able to fold away to new locations and explore the universe, the borders of the universe’s massive expanse continued to elude the now highly mobile humans.  

Tens of thousands of livable planets were discovered, some rich with vegetation and even what could be described as animals.  No creature that the humans would consider intelligent was ever located.  With increasingly predatory folder gangs on the rise there was less and less reason to return to earth at all and within five years, humanity had scattered.  Hidding themselves in safe locations away from criminals, to raise a family and live a new life. 

The name Joan King was forgotten to time within just 10 short years and earth was nearly abandoned, left to the criminal folders and waring gangs.  Joan however was still very much alive and her analytical mind was something that she had never quite learned how to turn off.  Regret wasn’t the right word to describe her emotion set, she still firmly believed that she unlocked the true potential of humanity and freed them, unfortunately she empowered the virtuous and the dubious in the same brush stroke.

She found a world that matched her needs precisely, a very small, super dense dwarf planet in a binary system with a very interesting orbit which meant that you never really ran out of daylight.  The local flora contained trace amounts of a substance that acted as a stimulant, but instead of simply boosting energy or heart palpitations, it simulated downtime on a cellular level to refresh your body.  This meant that Joan could tirelessly pursue her next theory or project and it would always be daytime and she would never need to sleep and no one would bother her.  Interesting how one person’s dream can be another’s nightmare.

After years of study, introspection and experimentation, without sleep or rest, Joan King was ready to change the course of humanity once again.  This time her focus was on safety and curbing the current rabid exploitation of her previous discovery.  This time she had invented something physical rather than a mental ability.  She had created a device that could trace back the folds that someone had taken.  One scan with the King Tracer and you could see someone’s timeline stretching back to birth with detailed annotations showing personal interactions and location data.  Every person that you interact with leaves their imprint on you and every location has a unique signature of background radiation.  The device checks a person’s unique signature and can see everywhere they have been, when they were there and who they interacted with.

Knowing where someone has been is one thing, preventing them from simply folding away into obscurity is another.  She also developed a new material, a substance made from elements found on her dwarf planet but easily mass produced in most laboratories.  Physical contact with this substance would render the human mind incapable of performing a fold.  Substance J could be fired from a modified paintball gun and on contact it would inhibit the target’s ability to fold.  She made collars and handcuffs laced with Substance J that would prevent any prospective prisoner from escaping by folding away.  There remained of course one last complex question.  Who could be trusted with such a powerful new technology?  In the right hands in can turn humanities’ exploration of the cosmos into a worry free romp and set the stage for an era of unprecedented growth, learning and happiness.  In the wrong hands it could be used to subjugate and enslave the entire species and take ownership of the Universe.

All previous social constructs such as government or royal lineage have long since been forgotten, there are pockets of gathered humanity that have reformed their own leadership but what makes any of those more worthy or capable of fair law enforcement than any other?  What ensures that they won’t use this technology to boost their own power or control?  Whoever she chose to bestow these inventions on would be the new leader of the entire human species by default, they would be the authority.  After careful assessment she decided that she could not name anyone she trusted to that degree so she decided to start the ball rolling herself.

Joan King had the brains to create these wonderful discoveries but she wasn’t a strong physical specimen, she needed people she could employ to actually enforce the law using her new technology.  The idea dawned on her while she was recalling life on earth before this all began.  Thinking back on all of the job roles humans used to have and which groups of people would be best suited to act as enforcers with King Tracers and Substance J.  Security, Police and the Military was the obvious choice but she didn’t want to bring back old problems of overregulation and corruption.  Instead she turned to a group of individuals that are used to working in groups, are in peak physical condition, know how to follow a plan and are used to abiding by a set of complex rules: Professional Athletes.

Once she tracked down a few football player it was easy to find more through association.  Quickly a large organization formed around Joan King, the introverted astrophysicist and author.  A prison planet was established with a focus on reform rather than simply confinement and punishment, sentences were not long but thankfully there were rarely any repeat offenders. 

Joan’s preference to remain away from the public eye meant that her name quickly took on an almost legendary status.  Joan King the woman was soon forgotten again, but like before her name lived on, with all sorts of fanciful rumours and imaginations about how humanity first came to be able to explore the stars.