Chapter 2: Building a Bubbleverse.
To understand the science behind bubbleverses, we must travel back in time to the year 2178. I can think of no better introduction than Schmidt’s article. An excerpt from that paper appears below.
Frederick Smith, born Feb 28, 2117, died Sep 28, 2158.
Smith’s main theory asserted that blood sacrifices unleashed a spiritual force.
Fundies stopped reading at that point. They’d found all they needed and became even more insufferable.
You’re telling me a scientist has proven my faith?
No, that’s not what I’m…
But it says, ‘Spiritual,’ right there.
And round and round it went.
In his revised paper, Smith corrected his mistake. His error had been more a matter of being sloppy with his language. When he wrote the word spiritual in a scientific paper, people of both ends were excited, for very different reasons it turned out.
Until he disappeared from the public arena, Smith insisted that he wasn’t being literal with the word spiritual. His theory posited the existence of an immeasurable force in our traditional three dimensions. He thought it was cute, he would later say. The physical force didn’t exist in the x, y, or z axis, so he reached for and found the word spiritual to describe the phenomenon. He had meant it, he would go on to say, metaphorically.
It was a poor word choice that had reignited the centuries-long debate between the two camps: a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
What his model showed (theoretically) was that a blood sacrifice releases a physical force but one that is not measurable.
Good work if you can get it, right?
Wrong.
Smith’s genius went widely unrecognized until Steinheider at least.
To truly understand Smith’s genius, one needs to go back to his very first papers–the ones he authored while still in college. In truth, he had created an entire system, one that paralleled Newton’s work in its comprehensive breadth and depth.
His original hypothesis, out of which his entire scientific philosophy sat, was this: What if we relaxed the scientific method to include experimental data that was not repeatable?
The problem was in the two keywords not and repeatable. Between these, the “not” was vastly more problematic. All of this flew in the face of the scientific method. Without repeatability and, through extension, measurability, what good are such papers? It would be a great deal like a person claiming they could turn invisible at will as long as no one looked at them or recorded the feat.
He was a visionary; one who’d been born a century too soon (or eight too late). His work was destined to remain in the theoretical.
In a very short time, the hubbub his paper had created fizzled out and neither side spoke his name much after that. He faded into obscurity and died alone and tortured by all the truths he carried but was unable to share with the world.
Back to the spiritual force.
Scholars who understood all his preceding papers felt that Smith was on to something. But by then there were only a few Smith-ites left. The arguments he raised in his Luxembourg paper led a few of them to publicly declare the brilliance of Smith once again. A spiritual force would be unmeasurable. But reading any of his papers was always a rigorous exercise. This was especially true of the Luxembourg paper.
The story of Smith’s demise is a tragic tale. He would always be at odds with his colleagues. He insisted it was their insistence upon repeatability that limited them. This was a sacrilege to the community. The hallowed method had always rested on such principles, like a house resting on a concrete foundation. That foundation, Smith argued, was dated.
Smith was a smart man. It was a testament to his maturity that he recognized the fact that he was doomed to languish forever in the theoretical halls of academia. He had no love for that idea. He didn’t want to be precluded from doing practical application work of his theories. But the community had spoken. Smith was a heretic. And, sadly, he was expelled. Shortly after his third retraction paper was published, Smith accepted his fate and slipped quietly away, and the Earth was denied access to his brilliance.
History had repeated itself. Just as they had when he used the word ‘spiritual,’ people had misunderstood Smith. He slipped away into obscurity. And the Earth was denied access to his genius.
Per the McKay Act, pages 67-69 were redacted on November 15, 2190.
Thirteen years to the day after his death, Steinheider published her paper on Smith. It went a long way in saving his work from the pit of obscurity. No one who read the paper abandoned the scientific method, but it convinced many to temper their work with humility. The fascinating thing about her work was that she had written it around an experiment she’d conducted. Her experiment bridged the gap between Heisenberg and Smith. And she did it all with light.
Schmidt, Gerhardt, “A Brief History of the Bubbleverse”, The Word Today, vol 37, no 43, December 23, 2178, Pages 65–72.
Why did we do it? Why did we spend billions of dollars escaping the Earth?
Take your pick. Climate change, endless wars that made WW1 look like a happy-hour, fundamentalists killing each other in the name of a god they insisted was benevolent and loving.
COVID came back with a vengeance. Each new mutation was more impervious to vaccines than the last. Willful ignorance and greed wreaked havoc all around the globe. Being a billionaire was no longer that uncommon. The census of 2218 showed the earth had seventeen trillionaires. While most of the world fought over a few tenths of a percentage point of wealth, the ultra-wealthy were booking trips to Martian casinos and having weekly youth-regeneration procedures. But the worst part was the violence. It was awful.
Then the bees went extinct, literally overnight. April 4, 2234, they were there. Then on the morning of April 5, 2234, farmers noticed the bees weren’t leaving their hives. Hundreds of thousands of hives, all dead. Food production was no longer a given. Things we’d taken for granted for too long. The climate change rift was a bloody battlefield.
We decided to do what we could to escape it. In short, we saw only one of accomplishing that goal. We had to escape the planet; there was no other way to be sure we’d be safe.
We looked at rogue, commercial avenues through which we could terraform and colonize Mars, but, ironically, that was a much more expensive and riskier project than creating our universe from scratch. Calling it a universe was rather grandiose. It was more like a bubbleverse; one that would be the size of our reinforced ballroom.
The engineer was the one who worked out how to construct a bubbleverse. To create an STC and shift into it (otherwise all you’re doing is littering the multiverse with empty bubbles of space-time, and why would you do that?). If you wish to construct a bubbleverse, you will need the following items:
- Eighteen EMPs pulse generators.
- Sixty-four blood sacrifices (with SPI > 7.78).
- A dozen military-grade ion cannons.
- Four high-power impulse generators.
- Thirteen atomic clocks (with quantum entanglement locking).
- A supercomputer workstation to control everything.
If you have to ask how much any of these things cost, you might want to opt for a more modest project. We spent the equivalent of the 2243 annual operating budget of New Bel-Germany building ours.
EMP Generators (Qty: 18)
The first thing you do is fire the EMP generators that have been arranged in a modified Helsinki configuration. The electromagnetic pulses create a protective sphere that encloses a void. This is the womb of creation from which you will birth your miniverse.
Yeah, I didn’t understand this the first time either.
Nature abhors a vacuum. (Or, in this case, a void.) The spherical void is stable for only a few microseconds. That’s why things must happen fast and in order.
Sacrifices (Qty: 64)
Next, come the sacrifices. These must occur simultaneously. Hence the need for something as surefire as the necksplosive collars. Also, and this is, like everything else in this project, crucial to get right, each lamb must possess an SPI index equal to or greater than 7.78. (See Cooper’s work on this.)
I won’t try to explain what exactly the sacrifices do; that’s something I will leave for a Smith-Scholar.
Ion Cannons (Qty: 12)
Then the ion cannons (ICs) are fired in sequence. The cannons were the only equipment that had to be installed away from the ballroom. Each cannon required a remote location that sat 400 meters from the ballroom’s center of gravity and was separated by thirty degrees. We bought the properties to install these things. They were the only equipment that would be left after the ballroom had shifted. They fired once and that was it. Don’t ask me to explain what it was they did; the engineer tried explaining it to me. I thought my eyes would bleed and we abandoned the project of helping Scott understand ICs.
High Impulse Generators (HIGs) (Qty: 4)
We embedded these in the ballroom’s foundation. They would be traveling with us to our new home, but they would only ever be fired once. (Of all our equipment, these are the things that I trusted the least.) Their sole job was to create a huge impulse spike in four different directions to the plane of the floor. Each contained explosive charges that would move one-ton weights one sixty-fourth of an inch linearly within 3.7 milliseconds. (As big as these were, its ancillary noise cancellation system was even bigger.)
Physically, these were the most daunting-looking things in the project. Each one was fashioned from a 100-meter length of reinforced steel tubing, two meters in diameter. They looked like giant sticks of dynamite to me. We were reassured that if everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t move and would be quite safe.
That was always a hard thing to hear with a straight face.
If this and if that! Indeed.
Atomic Clocks (Qty: 13)
You need one cesium clock for the workstation in the ballroom control center, and one clock for each of the remote IC sites. It was probably overkill, but we opted for the quantum entanglement locks on these; they weren’t cheap.
Workstation (Qty: 1)
You need to control everything with the fastest, superconducting, organic processor. There is very little room for errors. We knew that. The engineer told us all of this in his for-dummies version of what all the expensive equipment did. He emphasized it was all theoretical. The good news, he said, was that if it didn’t work, we would never know as we’d be instantly incinerated by the explosion. You don’t become a billionaire or a trillionaire without taking some risks, so we signed up and committed to seeing the project through to its conclusions, regardless of what that might be.
There was more equipment than that, a lot more. We had backups for almost everything except the atomic clocks. By the time we’d sprung for the quantum entanglement options on those, most of us were tired and ready to be done.
Let’s do it. I have faith in the engineer!
Oh, the irony.
Before you rush out and begin assembling the equipment needed to assemble a bubbleverse, let me just offer one word of advice. Don’t.
Stories by Shawn 