Thursday, September 20, 2018

Still No Laudanum

No Laudanum
Only cats
And purrs, a furry toy chase
And breath, a bare bodkin
Whose wand a silver wocket
and stride a steel stratagem

now

The parameters must be adjusted
to accommodate the inevitability of puppies
and chewing, crocodile-mouthed
foraging for fallen Doritos

When a kind heart 
encompasses so many volumes
it never fills to capacity
its zoo a forever monument
its mineral gods grounded
only augment
improve its multitudes
its glory unfaded by tears and lightning

Thirty turns
It isn't much
I've known screws more stubborn
Barely enough time to move a sun in space



Wednesday, February 14, 2018

To Urania

When you walk through the door, the world rights itself on its axis.  It is irrevocable.  Things make more sense when you are around.  Something about the way your smile sits over your chin; hips support shoulders and shoulders support a sort of gravitational lens that brings everything into focus.  Like Animaxander’s cylindrical world, wobbling without a point of reference, you right it like some cosmic hand.  Nothing makes sense except in light of you.   Like one of Harlow’s monkeys that never truly got the point, I can see myself wasting a lifetime at some lactating stone colossus.

Maybe things aren’t as bad as all that.  Back during the Jurassic, our distant ancestors made a good living for themselves climbing trees and laying eggs.  Morganocodon didn’t care that an asteroid was coming 70 million years in the future.  Our progenitors just wanted to be happy.  It’s a different kind of happy though, accepting the universe as incomprehensible and life as ultimately pointless.  You are a roadmap, of sorts. I take off your shirt and trace you to your logical conclusions, your pleasant mammal-ness.


In some fantasy world of my mind, there are twin statues of us, embracing in a marble temple.  This is the love we have built between our two souls; the storms weathered, promises kept, rants carefully listened to, ledges stepped back from.  Finally, after centuries in the dark, starlight, clean and bright, shines through the glass of the observatory dome above.  Its spring and from a dozen different archways, a flower-scented breeze brings the pneuma from a thousand verdant worlds.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

A Brief Treatise on the Cosmology of Hyperspace, for Space Adventurers
by Indigal Black Spiral, Senior Cosmologist. 
Published in Big Truths, New Galactic Year 4,000,908,786.414

Every intelligent species evolved in a state of nature for untold millions of years before it found the slightest interest in building starships and conquering the cosmos.  Evolution shaped our brains in such a way as to enable our ancient predecessors to find energy, produce offspring, and escape death.  We all began this way- wormlike or medusoid, catlike or avian, blob or walking tree, net or monkey.  We were in the business of catching prey, seducing mates, hiding eggs, capturing sunlight, feeding on electrons, reducing sulphur, and escaping the things that wanted to use it as food.  Dealing with other intelligent beings, friend and foe, conspecific and otherwise, honed our minds as well, and gave us the ability to think about the abstract intentions of others.   We overcome incredible obstacles to go on interstellar voyages, and each sapient species follows its own path.

The sense organs of this hypothetical ancestor are attuned to its immediate needs.  Anything extra is an expensive or dangerous distraction.  Heightened cosmological awareness, or even an inappropriate fascination with shiny things, could get it killed, or at the very least, cost it energy it needed to grow.   It is for this reason that most sapient beings sense the world in three dimensions.  This is no great cosmic mystery.  Prey swim around in three dimensions.  Rain, clouds, mountains, and burrows are three dimensional constructs.   Because time has the asymmetric arrow of causality, guiding our present continuously along a maze of possible futures, this other dimension seems a thing into itself.   Seasons come and go and come again, things die and do not come back, and this other thing, time, is a spiral that keeps going and going.  Our creature sees space, and senses time, but to it, there is no spacetime.

Sapient beings are almost inevitably social in one respect or another.  The demands of group living induce the evolution of more complex minds.  It is impossible for a single sapient being to develop science alone.  Group life affirms our sense that the world we perceive is, in fact, real, and that it is the same world perceived by others.

If you are familiar enough with cosmology to take an interest in this treatise, you are aware that nothing can be farther from the truth.  We see what we think we see based upon sense organs evolved for very practical purposes, and the information is cobbled together into a coherent narrative of the world that we come to believe, even though it is a fiction.  The universe our senses present to us is a fiction, written by evolution, for a species that no longer exists, on a world likely demolished by the sapient beings that arose from it.

My own sensory experience seems relevant here.  As a Uruquar, my ancestors lived, by the thousands, in mud tunnels by the sea.  We sensed electrical currents in the muddy salt waters of our home, we smelled the rush of seasonal floods coming through our burrows, we sensed vibrations in the land above us and below.  To raise the top of one’s head to the surface and gaze out at the heavens with our pineal eye was to see the stars and cosmos, but what did we really see?  There is a pattern of lights in the sky that mark the seasons of our world, and the tides that come and go with the wanderings of its two moons, but for untold eons, we saw magical eggs in an endless sea.

Our pineal eye did not evolve to recognize our red suns for what they are, enormous balls of plasma, or our moons for what they are, frozen rocky orbs nearly the size of worlds in their own right, or the stars for what they are, enormous balls of plasma strewn by the trillions in a spiral mist that is a great galaxy among many other great galaxies, in a universe, that lies parallel to so many others along the axes of invisible dimensions that are present everywhere but impossible to senses.  As we grew to understand the universe through science, our senses maintained this fiction even as the facts contradicted it.  Our minds struggled to understand the difference between what we see and what is actually going on.  We built burrows on land to master fire and discovered the means to channel electricity through wires, but the stars looked the same.   We discovered a theory of gravitation and a theory of electromagnetism, but the stars looked the same.  Since we are electrical creatures in our mind eye, it was through electricity that we discovered the cosmos.  Sathran kind never reached for the stars the way humanity did.  We reached into the microcosmos with our wires.

I hear from a human friend that, to a man, the Uruquari homeworld presents a lovely night sky.  Our world sits above the plane of a giant spiral galaxy.  There are stars bright enough to cast shadows.  With his mind, a human can form a mental picture of a forest with tree trunks and leaves and things living in those trees.  Some part of him looks for places to climb, like his ancestors, and his mind is well suited for the task.  He uses his eyes.   I struggle with pronouns here because Uruquari do not come in male and female and I truly cannot understand why this hypothetical human must have a sex.  Sexual creatures see dichotomies easily, and imagine false ones just as easily.  Humans see.  Uruquqri sense.  To a human, dipping a toe into the pond is a symbolic act. Perhaps the human’s toe feels cold.  It feels something very bland and uninformative called “wet”.  A Uruquar dips a nose into the water and forms a picture of every reed, all the mud and the creatures burrowing in it, every tunnel running to and fro, the way the water drains.  To early human scientists, electrons were negatively charged particles orbiting atomic nuclei.  To early Uruquari scientists, electrons were a very small class of tunnels.  It was the nature of the electron that led Uruquari to a scientific understanding of cosmology.  For humanity, it was observation of galaxies.

Neither a human nor a Uruquar can see, or even imagine a complete picture of the universe, and yet we use science to build models of it.  We test those models even thought they drive us to illogical conclusions, and a picture emerges.  Here is a model of the universe, built by the science of many species.  This model is of tremendous practical significance, because we can use it to find potential ways to move from one part of the cosmos to another without actually crossing the space between.  We have a word for the matrix of connections between worlds this cosmos enables. We call it the Void Matrix.

The particular universe you inhabit has three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension.  It is finite, in three dimensions, but inconceivably large.  If you were to travel for long enough in any given direction, thousands of trillions of light years, you would come back to the same place.  It has gotten considerably larger in the time it took you to read this sentence, but it remains finite.  With respect to the one time like dimension, it is bounded on one end, the past, but not on the other, the future.  This is rather unusual.  Most universes have closed time loops as well, some of rather short duration.  Your universe also has seven small-scale dimensions compressed within it, each one finite, and closed on a very small scale.  These dimensions are invisible to you, but they are responsible for the behavior of subatomic particles.  Universes without compressed small dimensions do not have particles, like electrons or protons  There are also dimensions that transcend universes.  We call them Z dimensions, because, according to mathematical convention, a Z axis is orthogonal to the x and y axes.

Universes typically have eight to fifteen dimensions, of which one to five are expanded to very large scales, or are infinite.  Of these, from zero to two are time-like, and expanded.  Most universes are finite in all dimensions, but some are not.  Many are small, but just as many are inconceivably vast.  There are universes that repeat time every few moments.  There are universes without time.  There are many one-dimensional universes, all of which are finite strings.  There are a great many known universes.  The vast majority of these are uninhabitable by any known for of life.  Some universes host forms of life very different from our own.  Some are filled with black holes.  Others are full of exotic matter, with negative light and antigravity.  In some, time flows backward relative to others.  As different as they are, these universes all share relationships with each other due to their relative positions in the hyperspace manifold.

Let’s consider a single universe for a moment, ours.  Using whatever organ serves as your mind, compress its dimensions into a two dimensional sheet.  If he universe is finite in both of these two dimensions, that universe now takes the form of a spheroid in hyperspace, because the curvature in two Z dimensions is responsible for the sheet bending back on itself.  The larger cosmos beyond our universe extends in at least nine dimensions that transcend universes.  We call them Z dimensions.  Our universe is like a bubble in a pond full of bubbles.  There are bubbles within bubbles. The bubbles are universes.  The ponds are hyperspace. Hyperspace is any space considered when a Z dimension enters the picture.  These bubbles are all separated from each other along Z dimensions, and float in hyperspace.  This curving sheet of spacetime that makes up the surface of our bubble is made up not just of every object in the universe, it is made up of every object that has ever existed, or could have ever existed in this universe.  These quantum possibilities, different timelines, are layered together in a structure, such that every state in it is a universe exists because of the states surrounding make it possible.  These quantum aspects of the two-dimensional sheet that makes up our bubble can be thought of as arranged on an axis of rotation.  This axis of rotation is actually a specific Z dimension-the z dimension orthogonal to the universe’s time like dimension.  Universes with no time like dimension lack such an axis, and are naturally frozen in a single state-at a fixed angle.  Universes with more than one time like dimension are chaotic, and no object can be properly said to exist.  Rotate an object in your universe a small amount, and it enters a state very close to the original.  If a point in reality is rotated in these quantum dimensions, it alternates among the different universes that were possible for it.  Rotate yourself a millionth of an arc second.  Perhaps you didn’t swallow that sea worm earlier, put off the process of setting seed, or had tea rather than coffee when you woke up this morning.  Rotate yourself another millionth of a degree, and perhaps you have a deep scar, are very wealthy, or are dead.  Few objects in any universe survive the rotation of a full degree. 

This aspect of spacetime is essential to interstellar voyages.  Meaningful travel in hyperspace implies that the object, perhaps a starship and its crew, retain its integrity.  Thus, its angle of rotation must be preserved as it traverses the wormhole and establishes itself at its destination.  Special devices are required for this.  The Aker Ming autotorque, is such a device.  In essence, this device records the essential connection of the transported objects to their past and possible futures.  During hyperspace travel, many sapient beings experience déjà vu, or even mental hallucinations of other realities.  This is because the rotation of the object experiences a “wobble” during passage through a wormhole.  Particularly sensitive sapients sense enough information to construct mental pictures of the alternate timelines that are close to their angle of rotation   Malfunctioning Z drive augmentors produce a common and often tragic misjump phenomenon, where the ship reaches a destination in alternate reality.  There are several famous cases of starships emerging from jump space and crashing into alternate versions of themselves.  Impressive, Thune stargates were constructed to use this phenomenon intentionally, to connect to alternate realities within the same universe.  The Thune homeworld, Reptilicus, is said to have been connected to sixteen alternate realities of itself, all in communication, and connected by the constant travel of Thunes and their artifacts.  

Once again, consider our bubble.  Universes of any scale or magnitude have many convolutions, involutions, folds, ripples, and yes, wormholes.  In addition, other universes are layered above and below it like the mud strata of a pond.  A given point in any universe is likely to convoluted in such a way that very distant places are close in hyperspace.  Humans have thermoregulatory artifacts called blankets.  Any given universe is like an erratically folded blanket, and the layer above or below in z space is likely very far away in spacetime.  This is an essential aspect of the void matrix that makes astrogation both interesting and challenging.   In any given planetary system, the hyperspace manifold is such that traversable wormholes can be created to a limited set of destinations.  Some places are highly folded, with many possible connections, other places are flat, with few or none.  There is little correspondence between distance in spacetime and hyperspace connectivity.  Two planetary systems just a few light years away may be on opposite ends of the void matrix, or permanently isolated from each other, because of the curvature of spacetime.  Neighbors in the void matrix are therefore likely to be in distant galaxies, or neighboring universes.

Two universes can exist very close to each other along a Z axis. That is to say, two universes can be very close together in hyperspace.  The only physical force that acts in Z dimensions is gravity.  This aspect of the cosmos produces the so-called “dark matter” phenomenon.  Universes close to our own possess matter densities that exert gravitational attraction in their own spacetime and also in hyperspace.  Galaxies in nearby parallel universes exert mutual gravitation such that they tend to overlap each other.  In many cases, a series of parallel galaxies may sit on top of each other in hyperspace, bound by their own gravity and by the gravity that bleeds through from parallel dimensions.  Thus, the so called “dark matter” of a galaxy-the matter present in parallel universes but still gravitationally significant, can exceed the matter in a galaxy by an order of magnitude or more.  Fortunately, gravitation attenuates through hyperspace, and universes crushed into a series of black holes by dark matter are rare. 

The universe bubble we have created, in our hyperspace pond, is highly convoluted and involuted.  In addition, it is filled with many bubbles, and surrounded by many as well.  A typical involution of our bubble might have entirely different universe curled up within it.  Thus, there are regions of spacetime where Z drive travel to other universes is possible.  In fact, there are many places in space where arrays of parallel universes are very proximate to our own, and navigable by spacecraft with fairly standard designs.  The so called “Trade Corridors” of the Void Matrix are such areas.  Deep involutions of our universe produce concentrations of dark matter.  Dark matter is simply the gravitational influence of matter in universes close to our own in z space.  Attracted to common centers of gravity, because their involutions are parallel, galaxies in several parallel universes fall into these regions and concentrate there.  Theses strands of galactic clusters are the largest structures in the each of these universes.  Major hubs of communication in the Void Matrix are almost inevitably strung along these hyperspace folds.  Their strategic importance in economic, cultural, and military conflict cannot be underestimated.

As cultures accumulate the scientific knowledge necessary to engage in interstellar travel, they inevitably formulate a theory to explain the relationship between gravity, spacetime, and the speed of light.  One manifestation of a successful theory is the existence of gravity wells.  Human and K’tarra scientists call this relationship “relativity”.  Gravity distorts spacetime, and this distortion can be imagined as a divot in a two dimensional sheet.  Large concentrations of mass produce deep divots.  Deep divots produce strong distortions of spacetime.  Very deep divots effectively create tunnels to other universes, or regions of the universe that have folded over it in hyperspace.  We call these tunnels wormholes.  In the vicinity of a gravity well, spacetime is curved in a Z dimension, either positively, or negatively.   In these places, time runs slower than outside.  Objects are distorted, relative to those outside the well.  These effects are precisely the same as the “time dialation” effects observed when two objects move with respect to each other at speeds approaching the speed of light.  This is because the spacetime distortions produce analogous displacements in z space.  Distortions in spacetime produce predictable, reproducible effects that can be emulated by the right devices.  For a nascent technological civilization, this insight is a first step to the void matrix.

Gravity wells have profound effects on hyperspace travel.  When plotting a jump through hyperspace, most astrogators prefer to place their spacecraft outside the vicinity of deep gravity wells.  It is not that gravity wells keep Z drives from functioning (a common misconception among humans especially).  It is that gravity wells profoundly augment the direction and amplitude of Z jumps.

Black holes are a class of physical phenomenon common to many universes.  As naturally occurring wormholes, they have profound implications to the ultramacroscopic cosmos.  A black hole is, by definition, a concentration of matter such that spacetime is distorted deep enough in the Z dimension such that a wormhole opens up and inflates a bubble in hyperspace.  The singularity manifests itself as a point or disk singularity bounded by a three-dimensional structure (actually a two dimensional sheet warped into an oblate sphere) called an event horizon.  Some basic geometry is called for here.  Two lines meet at a point.  Two planes meet at a line.  Two three dimensional areas meet in a plane.  When higher dimensional objects meet, the intersection is a solid in a universe reduced by one dimension, called a brane.  An event horizon is a brane-the boundary between a three dimensional universe and a one dimensional universe.  Any object that enters an event horizon leaves its original universe and enters a wormhole bounded on one side by the event horizon and on the other end by the singularity.  By definition, any matter entering a singularity degenerates and looses it rotation in the space-time continuum, effectively being annihilated.  Black holes are of tremendous importance the overall cosmology of the multiverse, however.  It is well established that the flow of degenerate matter into singularities effectively transfers it into hyperspace, establishing and inflating other universes as a result.

Artificial distortions of the space-time continuum are at the heart of every method of faster than light travel.  Nearly every Z drive works on the following principle; gravity produces distortions in spacetime along a Z axis orthogonal to spacetime.  Advanced technological cultures sometimes discover techniques to convert radiant, or electromagnetic energy to gravitational energy.  The most common technique is to create reinforcing gravity waves.  Another technique uses exotic photons.  Sufficient gravitational disturbance can be shaped to distort spacetime sufficiently to create a topological tunnel.  This tunnel can connect to another place in the same universe, or to a parallel universe.  It is no coincidence that the first spaceships with faster than light technology often have early versions of artificial gravity aboard.  Transforming energy to gravitation is an essential to both technologies.  Z drives, specifically function by creating a distortion of the space-time continuum by surrounding the spacecraft in a (usually spherical) brane and mutually transposing the contents with those of another place in the universe or in a parallel universe.  Only the most advanced Z drives attempt the latter.  A Z drive has a jump core, which, when powered by sufficient energy, distorts spacetime in a spherical area surrounding the starship.  The surface of this sphere is a brane.  The tunnel is not a three dimensional structure.  It exists in higher dimensions.  The spherical brane surrounding the ship is simultaneously both ends of the hyperspace tunnel, separated along a Z axis determined by the energy density of the bubble. 

Accelerating the Z drive generator or exposing it to a gravity well affects the orientation of this wormhole in hyperspace.  Controlling the exact properties of this wormhole is the means by which it is shaped to connect two precise locations that can be millions of light years away, or billions.  Depending upon the nature of the tunnel, time may pass inside the bubble during the passage through the wormhole, and not pass outside.  Any combination of relative rates of time passage is possible, though typical wormholes used for interstellar travel exist for a few seconds, and no more, inside the wormhole and perhaps a few standard weeks or months outside.  The reverse may be true as well.  Wormholes that connect alternate universes may experience no time while time passes, either in the same direction or in opposite directions, on opposite ends of the wormhole.  Thus, when travelling to certain alternate universes, the ship experiences the perception of travel backwards through time.

Wormholes are energetically expensive to create, and require highly advanced technology to manipulate.  Even in sophisticated starships, the Z drive typically occupies a great deal of mass and consumes a high proportion of that vessel’s energy budget.  As Z drives increase in sophistication, they confer more possibilities to travel between destinations.  Primitive Z drives function only in rare, difficult to reach locations of spacetime, such as the immediate vicinity of supermassive black holes.  More sophisticated Z drives may confer three of four different options for travel from a typical G1 solar mass sun near the center of an elliptical galaxy.  More advanced drives can reach nearly every region of most galaxy types.  The most advanced known drives can seamlessly create passages to the surface of other planets, sometimes in alternate realities.  There no obvious linear relationship between the energy density, and the duration of the wormhole, and the distance it travels in spacetime. 

Remember that a so called “jump bubble” is a closed universe in its own right.  It is bounded in three dimensions.  There have been cases of combat, where a pursuing starship entered the jump bubble created by its adversary.  Both ships emerged destroyed-the energy of their weapon salvos did not dissipate as they would in a normal universe, and annihilated both primitive combatants.

Hyperwave communication utilizes particle-wave packets that can be induced to travel in Z dimensions, through hyperspace.  Some of these so-called “tachyons” will reflect against a neighboring universe and bounce back in Z space to the sender.  Thus, jump routes can be predicted on the basis of hyperwave probes.

Let us take a look at the controls of your starship for a moment.  You may notice that much of the fuel reserves are dedicated to the Z drive.  They are either hydrogen and helium of certain isotopic compositions, for the purpose of thermonuclear fusion, or antimatter.  Antimatter, naturally, demands a containment vessel.  If your ship is truly sophisticated, it draws energy directly from universes with higher free energy.  Jump cores are usually iridium or lanthanum coils configured to create opposing electronic and positronic currents.  This is the operating principle of all antigravity.  Pulsed correctly, a “shell” of currents can create reinforcing gravitational distortions that create a wormhole.  Thus, even for the most sophisticated starship, a wormhole cannot be opened instantaneously,  It takes time to “power up”.  You have some version of an autotorque-a wormhole would destroy a starship otherwise, reducing it to entropy as its contents were transposed.  You probably use hyperwave telemetry to bounce tachyons off of masses of dark matter, exploring potential jump routes.  If not, you follow preprogrammed jump coordinates in Z space, knowing that as galaxies drift, these are bound to change.   Your Z drive is probably configured to jump in from one to nine increments, each consuming more energy than the last.  That is because stable wormholes are “quantized”, and intermediate energy states are not stable.  Unless you currently orbit a supermassive black hole, the center of a globular cluster, or an unusual dark matter galaxy such as Lundmark’s Nebula, you probably have from one to six hyperspace routes available to you.  I can guarantee, there are additional routes you are not aware of.

Some creatures are blessed with truly pan dimensional sensory awareness.  On Palain, the inhabitants can sit on an icy spire and extend a tentacle into a neighboring universe as easily as one of us might rise to the surface for a breath of air.  To a Palanian, we are as blind as worms.  Palanian evolutionary history occurs in a distant universe with much different parameters than our own, where a sense of the z dimension, sensory organs that function in hyperspace, was a needed for everyday survival.  You are probably not this type of creature.  Palanians and their kind never build starships.  Technology develops out of need. Where there is no need there is no desire to innovate. 

By convention, hyperspace wormholes are classed by the energy needed to create them.  Among the Syndot speaking human worlds, these are classed by archaic numerals, I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII, each increasing by an order of magnitude in terms of the energy density needed to create it.

Let us review the terminology of the Void Matrix.  It is a continuous manifold, but for purposes of mapmaking, it is broken into “nodes” of various sizes.  A node is a tangle of worlds connected by hyperspace jumps of relatively low intensity, usually I to III.  There is usually a very loose correspondence between the worlds of a node, and their astrographic location in the cosmos.  Only certain jumps are possible, and the denizens of a starfaring world may stare at the heavens and never reach the nearest stars, but travel by hyperspace to other galaxies.

Nodes are connected by a limited number of higher energy jumps, usually 1V to VII or higher.  Many of these jumps are only possible in the vicinity of unusual stellar objects, such as neutron stars or black holes. 

A number of nodes, sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds, make up an octant.  Octants of the void matrix are separated by unusual jumps-ones that bridge large distances of spacetime, or alternate or parallel universes.  Your 66 Suns, by our reckoning, rest within the sixth octant or the first sector of the thirteenth zone of the first domain of the Void Matrix.


You enter the void matrix with at least six thousand other known sapient species.  Humanity is only one.  Perhaps you are engaging in interstellar trade.  Perhaps your vessel is military.  Perhaps your mission is scientific or intended to promote the survival of your species.  Perhaps you seek adventure among the stars for its own sake.  The Void Matrix connects more than sixty one trillion worlds, in Several Domains of sixteen zones, of four quadrants, of eight sectors and eight octants each.  It crosses ninety-three known universes and sixteen hundred known galaxies.  Of these, humans are known to occupy four octants, which encompass a handful of galaxies in three universes.   Very few human ships ever get very far from home, but the Void Matrix awaits you.