We stopped to look. · 5:41am May 21st, 2012
We stopped to look. Oh god, we stopped to look.
The drive had been tuned past the limits of what was considered safe, much less even tested. But as it turned out, it wasn't the ship that was spinning. It was the galaxy behind us. Our Milky Way.
As it receded behind us, to the point where we needed a telescope to distinguish it as anything more than a bright blurry speck, we had watched it spinning. Captain Richards said this was normal, and we thought nothing more of it. He's had more than a few trips around the rim, so we didn't think to question his judgement.
We were wrong.
Yes. Yes, there is some modicum of truth in what he said. We're sailing away from the local group fast enough that each time we hop into normal space, we see the light from there. And with each skip, we're farther ahead than the the light that we had just seen moments before. It's like a flip book, with us going fast enough to see each historical iteration hitting our eyes, giving the illusion that the galaxy was spinning in reverse.
But it was going in the wrong direction. Easy matter to fix. Just had to tune the drives. But the as time passed, it kept speeding up. Surely an illusion caused by an aberration of our pseudo-superluminal flight.
But we were still wrong. We stopped to look. We skipped back into normal space, and we looked.
It was still spinning.
I have never seen so many jaws drop at once.
A meeting was held. One with Richards and Branson behind closed doors. No idea what came from that, despite the muffled screaming. A second meeting was held a bit later, with all six of us.
For anyone reading this, I apologize if this doesn't make sense.
Our trajectory is far outside of a standard light cone. Almost nearly flat when you compare the two. And like a regular light cone, the curve is flat too. A straight line.
We are being chased.
What chases us does not have a flat cone. It's curved. Something like Gabriel's Trumpet graphed on a Y axis. While it's not faster than us right now, it will be eventually. And eventually, we will run into it. Whatever it is.
This leads me to the second point. The Milky Way is not spinning. The Milky Way is gone.
They say that FTL is like skipping a stone across a pond. You'll get to the other side, long before the ripples ever catch up. That's the speed that information travels in the universe.
The ripples are going to catch up with us. That's all I took from the meeting. They debated it for a while, because what's happening is pretty damn well impossible on all fronts. But, they had an idea.
Information can't travel faster than the speed of light within a given medium. That's our starting point. Only way around that is to say that the medium is allowing information to travel faster.
That's impossible. Back to square one.
Or so we thought. Branson blurted out the idea that time could be going faster, starting at a localized region. Richards just about strangled him.
Not because it was nuts. Because it was right. There was a bit of a fight after that. Turns out the two were holding back some particularly relevant information that the rest of us would have been happy to know prior to signing up to this milk run. Cat's out of the bag now.
Kind of funny to see the Captain being held down by three guys across the table, shouting at Branson that his clearance and commission had been stripped, and he was going to drop him off at the next nearest semi-habitable place. Not his exact words, but you get the idea. Still makes me laugh at the absurdity of it. Blood and spittle flying out of his mouth after the two traded blows. Finding a place to drop someone off. Out here, of all places. The nearest galaxy looks like a twinkling star to the naked eye. I guess we all needed a good laugh.
We're all going to die.
The stars, planets, and people we knew are long gone, despite all appearances to the contrary. Those ripples make a good analogy. It's a gradient. Sort of like the tidal forces of gravity around a black hole would pull some poor dumb hypothetical bastard's legs a million times harder than it would pull on his head. Except it's not gravity that's chasing us. It's time.
Instead of getting stretched out like a strand of spaghetti, we'd end up with our left arm suddenly being a few billion years older than the right arm. Suppose we wouldn't really feel anything.
After we figured that out, the doc retired to his room, with the next three months of his alcohol rations. Nobody really stopped him. In retrospect, he seemed to handle it better than the rest of us.
We turned the drive back on. It's not going to do any good though. Funny thing about FTL. You can arrive at your destination long before you ever left. Funny how the propegation of information works.
The farther we go, the faster we're going to run into it. No way out. It's like being trapped under a sheet of ice. It doesn't matter how long you can hold your breath.
An experiment. Hand picked for an experiment.
God damn you, Trent.
Trent-The evil mastermind.
126728
he doesn't know yet.
126737 *Rephrasing... DONE*
Trent-The evil mastermind... That doesn't know he's evil.
Beautiful, and terrible.
Science swag.
Woooaaahhhh....
How is the creepypasta value here?
Just had a few nice ideas come out of this too. Plausible explanation as to why they didn't take their escape route.
Also, this is a good way to get into the physics without making trent try to describe everything.
It gets worse btw.
Love it :D
I love this kind of stuff. It's like an ARG for a freaking Fanfic. Brilliant!
This is going to be expanded a bit. These little blurbs are generally what I'm thinking about a few chapters in advance, so by the time that I've written up to that point, there's a good chance that things could be expanded or twisted around significantly. Good way to keep notes, and a good way to keep from forgetting interesting ideas.
Good to see ya again Cirrus
so do I get this right: this is going to be part of the story, somehow? should I avoid your blog to avoid spoilers?
141619
Yes, although for the sake of the story, this will probably be split up into chunks, and revealed in a dramatic / spooky out of order context.
Also - this is only a minor spoiler. The good stuff gets saved for later.
141904
Spasm. Really. Woops, there's another!
If you don't already, you should read Stephen Baxter. Some of his plots are pessimistic, but the science is right up your alley.