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The Hall Effect
1 March 2014 21:18It’s like the universe was shattered once and then badly glued back together. The place is filled with cracks. At below-light speeds, it doesn’t really matter. The cracks are dimensional so anything sublight can’t detect or interact with them. Earth itself even passed right through one in 1987 and no one even noticed. It was until we got ourselves detection technology that we realized what had happened by tracking it back through the decades. Just a humourous curiousity for scientists, really. A story to tell the populace to prove how safe they were and not to panic.
But anything supralight? That’s a different story.
They can be detected and avoided but they move. Ask the Titanic, right? You have to be on it. You have to be hyper vigilant. The computer takes care of a lot but you have to keep goosing the arrays, always pinging the void just to be sure.
The cracks have tributaries. They make the cracks fuzzy with hair-line spline, like lightning bolts with fur and they’re the length of universes in some cases.
One theory is that the entire universe is always breaking down and then rebuilding. Like a giant heart beating with impossibly-long heartbeats. Except that errors have crept into the system and they’re getting worse. Either that or our universe is the only one that’s ever existed but it’s been damaged from the start.
Our ship is caught in a crack now. We were going 10c. We should have known better and been paying more attention but we didn’t realize that the crack had turned. Just a little but it was enough to flypaper us in. We nicked a tributary and it pulled us into the main shaft of the canyon. We’re stuck in a pocket of subtime.
It’s called the Hall Effect.
We are removed from the time stream. Or rather, we brought some of our time with us into the crack. It’ll dwindle and we’ll start to slow down. We’ll never come to a complete stop but we’ll get slower and slower and slower until our time half-lifes itself to something close to infinity. The horrible part of it is that we ourselves won’t perceive it.
To us, time will look like it’s going along normally while around us, the universe will trickle down into the heat death that’s always been predicted.
We’ll get to see if it’s true. We’re trapped here until the universe ends. Luckily, it’ll only take a few hours by our perception while trillions of years pass by outside the crack.
Pilots and crews like us are big believers in reincarnation.
tags
But anything supralight? That’s a different story.
They can be detected and avoided but they move. Ask the Titanic, right? You have to be on it. You have to be hyper vigilant. The computer takes care of a lot but you have to keep goosing the arrays, always pinging the void just to be sure.
The cracks have tributaries. They make the cracks fuzzy with hair-line spline, like lightning bolts with fur and they’re the length of universes in some cases.
One theory is that the entire universe is always breaking down and then rebuilding. Like a giant heart beating with impossibly-long heartbeats. Except that errors have crept into the system and they’re getting worse. Either that or our universe is the only one that’s ever existed but it’s been damaged from the start.
Our ship is caught in a crack now. We were going 10c. We should have known better and been paying more attention but we didn’t realize that the crack had turned. Just a little but it was enough to flypaper us in. We nicked a tributary and it pulled us into the main shaft of the canyon. We’re stuck in a pocket of subtime.
It’s called the Hall Effect.
We are removed from the time stream. Or rather, we brought some of our time with us into the crack. It’ll dwindle and we’ll start to slow down. We’ll never come to a complete stop but we’ll get slower and slower and slower until our time half-lifes itself to something close to infinity. The horrible part of it is that we ourselves won’t perceive it.
To us, time will look like it’s going along normally while around us, the universe will trickle down into the heat death that’s always been predicted.
We’ll get to see if it’s true. We’re trapped here until the universe ends. Luckily, it’ll only take a few hours by our perception while trillions of years pass by outside the crack.
Pilots and crews like us are big believers in reincarnation.
tags
