Free Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative by Owen R. O'Neill, Jordan Leah Hunter Page A

got better. There was a comprehensive encyclopedia and several tutorial
packages in the library; no doubt installed by the original owners and never
purged. Kris worked herself through calculus and analytic geometry, and all the
physics she could get out of the encyclopedia. Gradually, the navigation text
began to make sense.
    She learned that three things were essential to hyperlight
travel: a wormhole, a statis field and a manifold. A wormhole was simply the
path taken by a mass that collapsed into a black hole when its trajectory was
plotted in N -space; the N-dimensional overspace in which the familiar
four—real space-time or RST—resided. The encyclopedia said that the exact
value of N remained unresolved. Competing theories argued for either
eleven or thirteen and the encyclopedia implied that there was blood on the
walls whenever cosmologists gathered to try to resolve it.
    Wormholes resulting from collapsing star cores were common in
nature but not at all useful. Though once thought of as a likely means of
hyperlight travel, they presented insurmountable difficulties from the
practical standpoint. The encyclopedia said this was actually realized long
before the popular notion died out, and practical hyperlight travel was
considered impossible until the hyper-Lorenz transformations of Benjamin’s
Second Modification of the Grand Unified Theory were discovered. Those provided
the theoretical basis for gravitic technology: the artificial creation and
manipulation of gravity and antigravity fields. The first practical gravitic
technology was the bipolar gravity lens which collected gravity waves
passively, and focused them to create enough virtual mass to make a wormhole.
Much later, antimatter drives were invented that could create enough virtual
mass on their own to make a useable wormhole.
    But making a wormhole was one thing; surviving a trip
through one was something else entirely. Objects falling into a wormhole
experience extreme tidal forces that at the event horizon destroy ordinary
matter. What emerges is a burst of energy and uncorrelated particles that
resemble decay products. But from the human perspective, that wasn't the only
problem. Although wormholes do traverse N -space’s other dimensions,
those dimensions are conjugate spatial, meaning that topology is conserved.
This causes dimensional scaling effects and since a particle transits a wormhole
at the relativistic velocity at which it entered, the trip’s duration from the
traveler’s point of view was exactly the same as it would be in RST. Only from
the point of view of an external observer did the wormhole traveler exceed the
speed of light.
    The solution of both problems was the stasis field, a branch
of gravitic technology. A stasis field created what was, in effect, an event
horizon around the ship, encapsulating a “time bubble” that allowed the ship to
subjectively experience its RST timespace. This not only canceled the
dimensional scaling effects, but also protected against the wormhole’s extreme
tidal forces. By preserving the RST timespace, the stasis field reduced the
period of extreme gravity shear to near the Planck time, enabling the travelers
to survive it. (An alternate explanation held that stasis fields scaled the
electroweak force so that ordinary matter acquired the tensile strength needed
to resist the shear forces. Although supportable by an adaptation of the color
confinement principle of quantum chromo-dynamics, the encyclopedia said this
theory was not widely accepted.)
    The final piece of the puzzle was the cosmic manifold: a
2-dimensional membrane vibrating in the N-dimensional overspace. Cosmic
manifolds grew out of M-theory, an ancient fore-runner of the GUT that was
wrong but led to this useful insight. The formal description was a mess but the
key was that wormhole trajectories followed cosmic manifolds in predictable
ways. It was by mapping manifolds that wormhole travel became more than a blind
jump into the