|Sci|: Multiverse Ship & Sea |Fi|: Reclamation of Eve Chapter 6
Science IRL: Your invite to Quantum Wonderland + Fic: Eve selects a home for her baby cyborg clone
Jump to Reclamation of Eve: Table of Contents
|Science IRL|: Multiverse Ship & Sea
In last week’s Science IRL, we talked about three theoretical pathways to other dimensions.
This week let’s talk about:
How any of this relates to you
the right multiverse pathways for Eve and Lucifer in this short story
So why should stuff like ships and pathways to other dimensions interest you?
You’re standing on the shoulders of giants and they’re about to take a huge leap. The lives of the next couple of generations could make today’s sci-fi look banal in comparison, sort of like the tech in your average Tuesday would overwhelm Abe Lincoln.
New waves of disruptive technologies like the smartphone are coming, and likely at a faster rate, and I’m just trying to give you the heads up. In a fun way.
Contemporary human ‘evolution’ can be said to be moving faster than what Earth and our DNA got up to millions of years ago because of technology. Back when our cave dwelling ancestors starting using tools, our species really started to take off.
We are getting better at controlling our environment, and that environment could stretch to include the vast cosmos.
Just look how far we’ve come with fire:
As with fire, we’ve come a long way with Newtonian physics to make our lives better, and it’s time for the new hotness in math.
In the 1300’s, Isaac Newton, helped us understand the way macroscopic things—things we can see—move. Armed with this mathematical language, we’ve made planes, trains, and automated manufacturing.
The magic of math and science is they help us develop mastery over our environment, and predict things we cannot sense. With Newtonian physics, we took a huge step imagining the invisible and learning to control it, like air. We conceptualized gases as conglomerate macroscopic forms with predictable properties that could be put to good use.
The next generation math takes us beyond what we can’t sense straight into Wonderland. Ye olde Newtonian physics jibes with phenomena you observe and understand—even the properties of invisible air can be understood through simple personal experience like the feel of it on your face as your run. The new math, Quantum Mechanics, predicts phenomena that is bewilderingly counterintuitive and hard to believe.
While Newtonian physics can tell a story that our experience confirms—the flight of a baseball after it’s thrown, a feather drifting on the wind, or a penguin on a slip and slide—quantum mechanics tells us things are not what they seem. Like a particle can be in two places at once. That they can pop in and out of existence. That nothing is truly solid, and time could very well run backward or stop altogether.
Quantum mechanics gives rise to possibilities that are absolutely not in sync with our intuition and offers us a chance to develop mastery over environments we can’t yet perceive. It’s brain busting stuff and it promises a wild future—like the teleportation machine we talked about last week whose seed technology is just sprouting.
It took about 400 years for Newtonian physics to change the landscape of society in the first Industrial Revolution. Quantum mechanics, only 100 years old, has already brought us the smart phones and lasers, and that seed of teleportation mentioned last week.
In conclusion, I guess what I’m saying is:
1st Step: plan to live another hundred years so you can see a huge chunk of wild innovation
2nd Step: get your cosplay of choice for time travel and/or teleportation ready.
I’ll see you in the future (or is then my now?). I’ll be the one with the blue police box and a huge collection of cool bow ties.
Photo credit: Radiotimes
Let’s turn to my current story to help us make some mental leaps about multiverse travel. See *Caveat below
How would a human, Eve, and a material manifestation of dark energy, Lucifer, travel between universes?
Eve’s Worldship & Sea: Eve would have to build a ship and stabilize a wormhole
Image created with Midjourney
Engine: harvests zero point energy from space for propulsion
Frame: a Starship merged with a blackbird with gobs of radiation shielding
Pathway: Black holes, freshly constructed of course
Eve’s Worldship Construction project:
Assuming the best advanced world Lucifer could find for Eve is our universe right now, here’s how she’d do it.
Image created with Midjourney
Eve’s process would mirror how the US used the Space Shuttle as a mobile construction vehicle to build the International Space Station. The Shuttle shipped up astronauts to the construction site and they welded bits of the International Space Station together.
Similarly, Eve would launch a lot of stuff and construct in space. Assuming we’ll have a commercial Low Earth Orbit space station by the end of this decade, let’s say she’d dock with one of them.
Most space station customer’s today are looking for time inside the habitable volumes, but Eve would be looking to use the outside. She’d anchor on a berthing restraint, a few robots and construction tools to the outside of the Station and launch two or three rocket’s up as the raw materials. She’d weld the rockets’ fairings together to build a long cylindrical volume.
Then she’d launch her Zero Point Energy engines and mount them to the ship. Last, she’d load the cargo bay up with space goop that will help her expand then stabilize a black hole.
Once she has a functioning ship, she would still need to layer in loads of radiation shielding, and even then the worldship wouldn’t be the houseboat she’s looking for. In order for this to be hospitable for humans to live in continuously, it would need artificial gravity.
Muscles, bones and other features humans cherish evolved with Earth’s gravity and don’t take kindly to being divorced from it. We don’t yet know what irreversible harm long-duration stay in micro gravity might cause. The longest continuous habitation in space is just over a year. Recently, NASA conducted a study on a pair of twins to assess health implications of a year of continuous habitation in space—find it here.
Lucifer’s Golden Globe:
Lucifer (*see caveat) isn’t human, so he can use a horse of a different color
Engine: he is his own energy—dark energy to be exact
Frame: doors between overlapping universes
Pathway: Lucifer singing to resonate with the harmonic frequency of the strings of each universe until the branes between them soften and matter can walk right through
None of that made any sense yet, I’ll wager, but all of it is based on multiverse theories with lots of creative license mixed in. Ultimately though, the nitty gritty on Lucifer is a story for my next novel.
Stay tuned if you’re into him ;)
*Caveat:
I’m presenting tech concepts as realistic futuristic possibilities, so I should disclaim that Lucifer and Eve are, for me, puppet characters I grabbed from the Bible and re-purposed to accomplish two goals:
Using Eve as a frame to question social issues and to ground readers in a human’s experience of a multiverse-faring future
Using Lucifer as an entity based on dark matter as a frame to discuss the weirder side of quantum mechanics and what we’re learning about the universe lately
|Science Fiction|: Reclamation of Eve Chapter 6–the Finale
Previously…Eve found complicated closure after spying on fifteen versions of Adam, but it left her feeling guilty about creating her cyborg clone baby. She asked Lucifer for advice—she asked him to tell her a story about reality...
"It's a bit of a downer, really. Human consciousness was built with a glitch in it--that whole free will thing. I think it's a bit cruel personally--I wouldn't have done it. Humans are miserable without the feeling that your choices matter, but with it, you don't appreciate the staggering amount of yourself that isn't in your control. Of course you're not like the other Eves, your lives have been so different. To start with, these incarnations all had mothers. They were born. You were made, then completely alone. Only your OG was also made, but then from day one, she had an oblivious, naked man to manage."
Eve's throat tightened, but she made the joke she knew would make Lucifer smile. "Well that's one stroke of luck for me, eh? …But that is quite the way to answer my question, Lucifer. You're telling me I need to choose a world—choose our future—and also that choices don't matter?" She unconsciously rested her palm on the rucksack, checking for the millionth time that c-AI-n's thermal blankets were still keeping her warm.
Lucifer frowned. "Not at all. I'm saying you've got a paradox in your operating system. You, your species, needs to feel you have agency, but your early childhood, your genetics, your mood—whether you're well fed or not—" he paused to kiss her ice-cream-sticky fingers. "These are all factors making up your mind most of the time without you being aware of it."
"You're saying humans are operating on programming and presets? You're saying humans are robots after all."
Lucifer reached out and put his hand atop Eve's resting on c-AI-n's. "I'm saying it should be freeing to know you're different because your life has been so different. The pressure is off to be like any other Eve. I wanted you to feel comfort, knowing if you give yourself time, you will feel guided by that big mass in your noggin toward a life you that fits you."
Eve sat in silence, feeling a pressure building in her head. She missed the simplicity of commands, the black and white of schematics, the giddying feedback loop of a good experiment that told you frankly what would work and what would not.
"I'm sorry, Eve, I don't think I'm helping." Lucifer sighed. "All I can tell you is what I hope for you, and that I will be with you no matter what."
"What do you hope for me, Lucifer?"
"I hope you can be patient about who you are and let her just become. I hope you take a page out of naked painter Eve's book and learn what you want brushstroke by brushstroke with that same patience and wonder you adored in her. You spent most of your life alone, doing what Adam wanted. What have you done just because you wanted to?"
Making EveSpecs.
c-AI-n.
Hacking the airship autopilot.
Leaving that barren world with Lucifer.
In each of those cases, she'd been trying to build something new, something fantastic. Inventing things that could help her see and know what there was to be known. To help her connect--to find people that would care and let her care about them.
A tiny flutter of pride tickled her chest. She had plenty of experience making choices for herself. The pressure in her head eased.
She closed her eyes and let herself feel what she wanted. Now that she was connected. In love with Lucifer. Now that she was beginning to understand how to move in the worlds.
She wasn't ready to stop exploring.
Squeezing Lucifer's hand, she stood up. Asked for moment alone. Strode off down the path along the river. She fished EveSpecs out of her jacket pocket and donned them.
"Rosie, create new note labeled 'Wants'."
"Created!" Rosie chirped.
Eve grinned. "One: Experiment with Lucifer to expand quantity of sentients that can transverse worlds simultaneously so he, c-AI-n, and I can travel together without threat of detection."
"Noted. Oooh, you're not choosing a world? What about that home thing? That 'c-AI-n needs routine' thing Lucifer said. He's right--you were impossible without yours."
"I'm getting to that! Sure, I was sometimes impossible, you've always been impatient. Two: Build a new ship that can traverse worlds and covertly exist in the in-between space for long periods of time. A traveling home that can connect to many worlds. Find a world where c-AI-n feels she belongs."
"Noted! I've always loved your basic human brain. Always with the ambitious ideas."
"I've always loved you, Rosie. Three: Build a body for Rosie. Give her back her autonomy, like I promised." Rosie was silent for a long moment. "Noted," she said finally, and flashed a photo of a very young Eve cuddled up to the steel of Rosie's nursebot chest.
When Eve rejoined Lucifer, he was holding the rucksack to his chest and telling c-AI-n a story. He broke off mid-sentence when he saw her face and stood to embrace her.
Eve told him her three goals. Lucifer cleared his throat and threw his hands wide as if to announce something important to the whole world.
"Eve: Inventor and Pilot of the first Worldship--mother of cyborg, defender of synthetic intelligence rights." He lowered his voice, turning back to Eve who was grinning helplessly. "Anything else, love?"
"For starters, we need a high-tech lab on some world so we can get started experimenting."
"I know just the place." Lucifer shouldered c-AI-n's rucksack and stood.
He sang the song asking the doors to all the universes to open for him. He winked down at Eve, and then he and c-AI-n were gone.
Eve looked up at the sky of this world and waited for Lucifer to come back to take her and Rosie to a place where she could get to work.
THE END
Author’s Note—Eve’s Finale Thoughts
Hope you enjoyed the Reclamation of Eve and all the parallel universes stuff! This is the end of my second short story serial publishing online, and it has been quite the instructive project for me. Thank you for coming along!
As a heads up, I’ll be taking August off so I can work ahead to improve the quality of the work you see and of my life—posting weekly is a breakneck speed for this newbie! I’ll be hard at work on stories with sentient space ships, Earth-saving aliens, and maybe even some stories that are closer to home.
Let me know what you’d like to see more or less of? I’d love to hear from you!
Table of Contents for Reclamation of Eve
Chapter 2 + Science IRL: How To build a Worldship
Chapter 3 + Science IRL: Our Closest Neighbor Universe
Chapter 4 + Science IRL: How to Power a Worldship