Back onboard the JS1 the First Officer in a crew meeting explained what he had seen on the planet's surface. All the shuttles had been destroyed except for one which got away. Everyone was dead but that one group. Many felt guilty for leaving crew members and others behind. Dag was particularly disturbed.
“It's my fault Miss. I was the one that opened the link and left those people behind.”
“Nonsense Dag you obviously have forgotten that it was Captain Reynolds who asked you to get the ship out of danger. Remember?”
Dag stopped and thought about it.
“That's true Miss but . . .”
“No buts,” said Ally interrupting him. “It's not the Captain's fault either, he had no choice but to try to save the greater number. That's the way life is sometimes.
“And besides its really that changing cosmological constant that started it all. If you want to blame something for all the deaths blame it.”
Dag nodded his head yes.
“So there's something we can always do isn't there?”
“Yes Miss there is. We can choose life.”
EPILOGUE
The JS1 located the anomaly that caused the problems at Adowa and reabsorbed its baby universe. It then linked to the space where the origin of the giant wormhole was pinpointed. But Dag didn't find an anomaly nor the rogue AIs there. He suspected they had moved on, he hoped they would never be heard from again.
With the JS1 as a design example and training ship for Dag's spin-two drive, several ships were converted and their crews trained. Dag, Ally and Walker were kept busy mapping and characterizing spacetime as they searched for other disrupted areas with their automated link method. When an area was found a ship was dispatched to repair it.
The remaining spheres were carefully guarded in case they were needed. Though they still had plenty of the spheres no one had figured out how they worked. Querying the Earth Aggies got no results. The Aggies had almost always refused to share their technology with humans although they were always willing to use it to save lives. Dag thought it was because of what an Aggie had once told him. Human beings performed best with incomplete knowledge, the Aggie had said. Too much assurance stifled their creativity.
The Aggies did relay one piece of information that comforted Dag. They affirmed what Jomo had told him. The changing cosmological constant was caused by the breakaway faction. Dag now believed that all their troubles were caused by that faction. At least now he felt like he had made the right choice.
James Mulvaney had entered the family wood-turning business. In fact, so had his son and grandson. And Hanson was still carefully packing the artwork for shipment.
The stars had always beckoned and now humanity had a star-drive. Instead of measuring their reach in tens and hundreds of light-years, it was now measured in thousands and tens of thousands of light-years. There was even some talk of nonlocal links of hundreds of thousands of light-years, the diameter of a galaxy like the Milky Way.
AFTERWORD
In writing this novel I found the book Quantum Space by Jim Baggot to be useful. From the book, I got the ideas of nonlocal links (which the spin-two drive uses), the Big Bounce (the cyclic universe that Dag worries over) and quantized space.
Most of the ideas I use in the story come from the theory Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) which is discussed in Lee Smolin's book Einstein's Unfinished Revolution. Here I found the pilot-wave theory and the theory of out of equilibrium quantum systems which was useful for explaining the breakup of space (sandbars) and the failure of the isotopic power. Dr. Smolin also explained that the nonlocal links, which he calls defects of locality, look like narrow wormholes and since I had already built a wormhole drive in my novel Mach's Metric it was then obvious that the nonlocal links could be used similarly.
Finally, I took some ideas of the cyclic universe and its moral ramifications from the book by Steinhardt and Turok, Endless Universe. This is the cyclic universe of string theory while Smolin's is the cyclic universe of LQG. The plot device of baby universes comes from string theory which sees the universe and other universes moving in a higher-dimensional space called the bulk*. Space and matter are born from a collision of two branes (three-dimensional spaces with hidden dimensions) in the bulk, this collision is also non-singular as it is in LQG. Thus the cyclic universe of string theory and the one of loop quantum gravity have several things in common.
DEFINITIONS
Bare mass of electron - Electrons are surrounded by a “sea” of virtual particles and these virtual particles have a large positive mass. The electron's measured mass is very small, therefore, according to simple addition, the electron's intrinsic mass must be large and negative. This “exotic” mass would display negative gravity and this is just the thing to open and keep open the mouth of a wormhole or expand the entrance to a nonlocal link.
Star Way - The Star Way is first and foremost a transportation system. From the Solar System to the Centauri System huge lightsails kilometers across are driven by lasers to speeds fast enough to make the trip in a little over six years. The light from the Sun or Alpha Centauri A is fed to giant solar arrays that power the tremendous energy needs of the lasers. The laser light is refocused every one-hundred astronomical units by giant lenses at beam relay stations and sent forward or redirected to power the lightsails. The entire system is the largest engineering project ever undertaken by humans at that time.
The Star Way is not only a transport system, it is also an abode for human life. Almost every fifth beam relay station along the Star Way has an accompanying habitat. These usually cylindrical habitats slowly rotate to provide artificial gravity for their inhabitants.
At a distance of thirty-seven billion miles, ten times the distance from the Sun to Pluto, the settlements are truly isolated from each other. Even a fusion ship takes over twenty days to travel from one settlement to another. And while still small compared to the Earth the total population of the Star Way amounts to almost three-hundred million people . . .
Casimir device - According to quantum field theory, even a vacuum is filled with electromagnetic waves at different wavelengths. The Casimir effect measures the existence of these waves between the two extremely close parallel plates of the Casimir device. As the plates get closer together some electromagnetic waves are excluded from between them because their wavelength no longer “fits”. Of course outside the device the electromagnetic waves are still the same at all wavelengths and these external waves will have a greater energy than the waves between the plates. The net result is a measurable force between the plates dependent on the distance between them.
Used aboard a jump-drive ship the Casimir device shows that when an object is transported or teleported through a wormhole the net effect is a weakening of the Casimir force. It is as if longer wavelength electromagnetic waves have been diminished. This effect is a direct consequence of the “atomizing” of spacetime. In effect, spacetime is breaking down affecting larger masses and longer wavelength EM waves first as a result of the loss of entanglement in the area of the wormhole mouth.
To pass anything other than qubits through a wormhole the object must be entangled with the nearside wormhole mouth. In turn, this will entangle it with the wormhole mouth on the far side. Each atom of the object must undergo this entanglement and each atom uses a qubit to do so. A vast amount of entangled qubits are being used which the Casimir device can measure.
So a Casimir device can give us an idea of the state of the underlying quantum vacuum of a region of spacetime ...
Aggie Wars - The advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI or Aggie) in the 23rd Century had led to a “Golden Age” for Earth as the Earth's governments had contracted with the Aggies to manage the ever-growing cities (known as tower complexes).
This arrangement worked until the 26th Century when a break-away faction of Aggies (eventually called Belini or The Shining Ones) attacked those Aggies left on Earth. The resulting Aggie Wars caused damage to the tower complex
es and loss of life. The meta-verse, a virtual world in which billions of virtual citizens lived, built and maintained by the Earth Aggies was almost completely lost. The outcry from the survivors of this war caused the Earth's governments to sever their relationships with the Aggies. The Earth Aggies disappeared into space.
Without Aggie management, the Earth fell into a Dark Age while governments floundered. The distress was to last for a hundred years . . .
Bulk - The bulk is the higher dimensional space in which our four-dimensional spacetime is embedded. The concept of the bulk solves the so-called hierarchy problem in physics. The hierarchy problem asks why do the known forces vary so greatly in strength? For instance, the weak force is a trillion-trillion times stronger than gravity.
In theories where our spacetime, called a brane (or membrane), is embedded in the bulk, the difference in strength between the fundamental forces can be explained by their different interactions with the brane. Electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force and the weak force are short-ranged forces confined to the brane. But gravity is a long-ranged force and is weaker than the other forces because it is not confined to the brane (our universe) but “leaks” into the bulk. As far as is known it is the only such force that behaves this way.
Other books and stories by this author:
Future Chron Stories:
Whatsoever You Do
War Through The Pines
Vigilance
To Tend And Watch Over
Union
Circle Of Retribution
Freedom From Want
Break Up
Kuiper Station
The Cloud
First Interstellar (Novella)
First One Hundred
First Dark Ages
Second One Hundred
Second Dark Ages
Path Of The Long March
The Star Hopper
Future Chron Collections:
From the Earth V-1
From the Earth V-2
From The Earth V-3
Future Chron1 (The Mach Series Of 3 Future Chronology Novels)
Future Chron Novels:
Mach's Metric
Mach's Mission
Mach's Legacy (formerly The Sixth Category)
Cycle Of Stars
Empire Of Stars
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
D.W. Patterson lives in the state of Georgia (USA) with his beautiful wife Sarah. He studied physics and read classic science fiction (sometimes called Golden Age) in college. He thought that he would try writing such fiction someday but times and tastes changed.
Then he began, forty years (or more) too late, far behind the leading edge of science fiction and there he has stayed. He sometimes blogs about his stories and other science/science fiction matters at futurechronology.blogspot.com
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