Within the Universe
Saturday, November 06, 2004
  Chapter 6 - Multiverse
As it had been theorized by some of humanity's greatest minds, there was more than one universe. Unfortunately, as was proven with portal travel, it was impossible to reach the others because of the fundamental differences between each universe. This is what restricted humanity, it was impossible to go outside the universe they had been born in. Any attempt to lead to instant disintegration as particles from one universe reacted with those of another.

Other than that, the multiverse was not significantly different from humanity's own universe. In fact, some of the universes were almost exactly similar. Only minor differences set them apart from humanity's. In a way, calling one universe humanity's was incorrect, because humanity existed in one form or another in many of the universes. In some, there were other alien races as well. Obviously, with infinite instances, infinite different variations could occur. In one universe, it might be as little as a person wearing a red shirt instead of a blue shirt, or something much bigger, like the Milky Way galaxy not existing in any form... or stars being oppositely colored according to how hot their surface temperature was.

One thing that did stay the same in all the universes, was the fact that humanity could never escape out of one into another. Nearly all tried at one point, but could not. Each was stuck in their own respective universe and timeline. Some surmised that this was possibly a good thing, others began to believe that they were the only universe in existence. Whatever the case, no two identical people from different universes would ever be able to meet. Time travel on the otherhand, would be possible under the right conditions.

The multiverse, always was, and always would be, in existance. An entire universe could collapse upon itself, but the multiverse would always be. Once a universe collapsed upon itself, a new one would be born in a flash of light and heat to take its place. Conservation of mass and energy was always a factor. Even if all the universes collapsed upon themselves at a single point in time, it would do nothing to the multiverse. They would simply birth new universes to take their place. Time was irrelevant in the multiverse. Attempts to breach the universe and simply travel into the multiverse were impossible as well, since no object could exist in the void. Space in the multiverse was entirely black. No light existed. The multiverse did not have light, as it did not have stars. It had so many dimensions it would be impossible to exist in it as a three-dimensional object. It would simply cease to exist on materialization.

This barrier meant one thing... life would always go on somewhere, and it was not a unique occurence, at least, outside of a single universe. Anything was possible in the multiversal plane...
  Chapter 5 - (cont'd)
Star's End became the largest most powerful space station ever designed and constructed. Once the portal inhibitor was in place, most advanced research and ship construction took place at Star's End since it would be impossible to send spies in to view ongoing activities. Higher level military personnel and the leadership of the Universals also lived on the station, protected from assassination via portal. This inhibitor field also prevented conventional targetting systems from detecting the station as it orbited the Milky Way. It was literally a stealthified space station, impossible to detect until you were almost on top of it.

With enhancements to the inhibitor, it could prevent portal tesselations within a two light-year radius, more than enough to prevent any manned ship from reaching the station (at their top speed, it would take them seventy years to reach it, long enough for them to be detected and destroyed).

The other state-of-the-art capability of the station was an enhanced particle cannon. Capable of hitting pinpoint objects light years away, it was the other reason why no ships ever attempted to reach the station via normal travel. They would easily be fried long before they could enter detection range with their own weapons. Supplies came via portal travel when the inhibitor field was shut down, only for a few minutes at a time to prevent any attempts to portal in while it was down. Food, liquids, materials, and other goods were brought into a cargo holding area outside the station. Hydroponics bays were soon constructed to lessen the need for food shipments; the station could remain self-sufficient for up to three years if necessary...
Friday, November 05, 2004
  Chapter 5 - The Edge of the Milky Way
Once the edge of the known universe, the outskirts of the Milky Way trickled away into nothingness. Although other galaxies had been discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was never thought possible that someone would be able to reach them. The edge of the Milky Way was the the beginning of true "space". With no stars dotting the void, the distance appeared to be infinite.

Using the largest portal developed, mankind constructed a massive space station right on the outskirts of the Milky Way. Parts were transported from Earth orbit right to the construction zone. In less than ten years, a space station capable of housing eight hundred-thousand people was finished and operational. Using fusion cells powered by deutrium and tritium, available from H20, the station could run on a bucket of heavy water for months.

The Station, named Project Star's End, was constructed as a research station to locate potentially viable stars to visit. It would also come to house the most advanced portal ever developed, capable of transporting much larger vessels anywhere in the universe. Research was performed on all types of materials discovered on the edge of the Milky Way, as well as psychological research on human beings living outside the galactic rim.

Star's End orbited the Milky Way at around .1 light years an hour. It would easily take many generations for it to orbit the Milky Way, but by this time humanity had become a bit more patient, afterall, the galaxy would be around for many, many billions of years. It was unlikely that humans would even exist at that time, and if they did they would have probably transformed into something unrecognizable as being human.

When the war between the Unbelievers and Universals began, Star's End switched hands several times before coming firmly in the grasp of the Universals. Using gravitic warping, it was possible to prevent unexpected parties from teleporting into the area of the station. Anyone attempting to portal in would be flung to any possible location in the Universe. That was on a good day... they could also be flung into the Multiverse, ensuring instant death as they emerged from the portal. Star's End was the only place to have this advanced portal shielding. Not even Earth or the Universal's home planet were protected in this way. Eventually the Universal's leadership would move to Star's End, and enhance the position by turning it command center and bunker should the homeworld ever be overrun by Unbelievers.

This fact would make the Universals synonymous with the outer space, beyond the edge of the Milky Way...
Thursday, November 04, 2004
  Chapter 4 - Jupiter
Home to over fifty moons, Jupiter was one of the first systems to be fully explored by portal travel. Explorers landed on Ganymede, Io, Europa and all the other moons, searching for signs of life. Sadly, there wasn't any to be found. Humanity was alone in the solar system.

Jupiter, as sizable as it was, didn't take long to be explored fully. Night and day humanity worked to explore the Jovian system looking for clues to life and other things. The mysterious gases that swirled around Jupiter's dense core told no secrets, so scientists would have to develop solutions to extract the answers. While in the early days portal travel was limited to the solar system and a few local stars around it, the Jupiter project was one of the lesser funded projects. People were far more interested in discovering new star systems and the planets that they had revolving around them than the same old stuff revolving around Jupiter which had been known for centuries.

Out of all the old planets, Jupiter held the most secrets however. Even though Saturn was much more beautiful, it was Jupiter which generated more heat than it received from the Sun. Different methods were explored to see if it would be possible to increase Jupiter's mass enough for it to become a star as well. These ulitmately led to failure, but they helped revolutionize terraforming. Using new methods, entire planets could be terraformed for human life in just five Earth years. Almost any planet with a crust and sufficient distance from the star it orbited could be transformed into a beautiful Earth-like planet fit for Earth life.

Jupiter helped the human race evolve beyond its one planet home to countless worlds. Discoveries on Jupiter also lead to the first full terraforming project on the planet closest to Earth...
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
  Chapter 3 - Space
Once believed to be infinite, space shrank with the realization that the universe was finite. Dark, cold, and nearly endless... many lost their lives exploring the last frontier known to mankind.

When the first humans looked up at the sky millions of years ago, they had no idea just how far it extended. They believed the sun, moon, and stars all revolved around the Earth. It wasn't until the 19th and 20th centuries that advancements in astronomy proved this to be completely incorrect. It was much, much different...

Approaching absolute zero, but definitely not absolute, space is both finite and infinite. Trillions of objects litter it, and yet it still appears to be a huge empty area with nothing for hundreds of light years or more. Even with all the asteroids, dust clouds, stars, black holes, galaxies, galaxy clusters and dark matter, the place is still so empty.

With humans slowly expanding outwards, space was still the limiting factor. Portal travel made it easy to travel between distinct places, but there was still a lot out there that couldn't be explored because no one could either get to it, or even knew about it. Obviously, this limited exploration to known star systems, and entities within the home galaxy of Earth. Once new planets became effective jumping off points, humanity began to expand outwards again through other galaxies.

Blue giants, yellow giants, white dwarfs, red super-giants... humanity explored them all following the opening of the gate. Amazingly enough, primitive ships with nuclear fuel were used to power these exploration vessels. Humanity had advanced greatly with the ability to teleport instantaneously, but its ships were still very remniscent of early 21st century technology. Even with the largest portal in existance, humanity could only teleport a vessel the size of a 20th century nuclear aircraft carrier into space. These problems lead to great innovations, and soon small portals were put on the largest vessels, allowing food and personnel to be teleported back and forth from Earth to the vessel. No longer were families seperated by the great distances...

Space... the first frontier, the final frontier, and the frontier that would take thousands of generations with trillions of people to explore and exploit to its fullest...
  Chapter 2 - The Three Laws of the Universe
The three fundamental laws of the universe were created by the Universals to set their most fundamental of laws and believes. These laws are the absolute cornerstones of the belief, to disagree with them means one was an "unbeliever".

The three laws of the universe are simple enough to follow. Everyone wishing to become a Universal had to believe them, and swear to them.

1. The universe is the all powerful.
2. Life exists to live, to extinguish your own goes against the universe.
3. The universe exists for humanity, but like the Earth before it, it must be protected at all costs.

These laws were developed in the early 21st century by Kenneth Lynn and his early followers to ensure that the mistakes of the 20th century could never be repeated again, even on a much larger scale.
Monday, November 01, 2004
  Chapter 1 - Warming Up
Alpha Kentaurus, four light years from planet Earth is a place of mystery. No human has ever set foot there. It's closest to Earth, and yet still far from our reach. It would take four years at light speed to make the journey. Planets orbit Alpha Centauri in a strange pattern, totally unheard of for a solar system with just one star.

Reaching Alpha Centauri was impossible until it was discovered that space could be warped in such a way that no one would ever have to leave the surface of a planet in 2037. Using advanced particle accelerators, it was possible to make a portal that could travel to any world or any point in space. With enough power, large spaceships could fly through the portal. In order to return home, the portal would have to be reactivated to open a hole to another destination. This had downfalls and advantages. It would be impossible for an invader to travel through the portal and strike without warning, but if the technology were to fall into a dangerous forces' hands, they would be able to tesselate to any point in space, making defense impossible.

The portal has other disadvantages... objects can only travel to a point in this universe. Any attempt to travel across boundaries into the multiverse led to disasterous results. In one mission, several human explorers went through the portal to another universe and instantly vaporized as they touched the molecules in the other universe. Forced to explore within their own universe, the explorers deployed outposts on far-off world, none of which were even heard of at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Opening this door to the heavens forced the people of Earth to band together into a single organization known as the United Earth. A United Earth spent much of its resources exploring these new worlds for minerals and other valuable resources needed back home. Massive trade vehicles were constructed to transport these valuable goods home, and soon the one portal wasn't enough to keep everyone connected. Portals were soon located in major cities all over the globe. They could be used to transport from city to city, as well as off-planet.

New innovations sprung up almost daily as the human population ballooned off-planet. People were cooperating in a way not seen in the entire history of man. Aftet tesselating to many planets, it was assumed that man was alone in the universe, and that in order to be happy, he needed to be with others of his own kind. To be alone meant the death of the organism, and extinction. In the year 2127, the human population quickly grew to more than forty billion people all over the universe, all connected to Earth instantaneously.

This became known as the Age of Exploration, a time when anyone could become nearly anything they wanted. Explorers staked out entire new worlds, and many became very rich doing so. Money, being the root of all evil, quickly corrupted the richest, leading to the destruction of several inhabited planets when owners would not compromise with their inhabitants.

Old religions died when it was realized that there really was no God controlling them, leading to turmoil among all of the human settlements, even on Earth. A new explanation had to be found to explain the fundamental question, "Why do we exist?" The roots of the theology that would lead to wars using the new portal began over a century earlier, right after the discovery of the meaning of life. This theology could explain it all, but to believe in it meant being humble, something that the richest most powerful people in the universe were anything but. Thus, it would spark a war to last centuries.

To those who believed in "The Universe", it did not matter if there were unbelievers, as they simply didn't understand that the God they spoke of was not above them, but all around them, and everywhere else too. The unbelievers would have none of this, and thus portals all across Earth were seized or destroyed to cut off those who believed in the new religion. They would exterminate it, even if it meant genocide. Only two portals remained in the control of the United Earth, and one was used to transport the other off-planet to a safe haven. As they escaped through the portal, the believers destroyed the other portal, hopefully buying them time in the war.

As with every other tool humans have ever made, the portal could be used for both good and bad. As with every other new significant advancement, it was corrupted to be used as a wartime weapon; unstoppable and capable of helping to decimate entire worlds. This war would be a long hard one, and to win it, the Universals would have to redesign their portal, at great risk, to go back in time and bring the founder of their religion forward, Kenneth Lynn. Only with his help would they be able to win against the superior unbelievers...
  Preface
Consider this the Preface for the novel I may or may not be able to complete this November. It's partly a placeholder for where the novel is going to be located.

This novel is more of a test than anything else. The point is to be able to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of one month. The only problem is that I have several other projects I have to do for school at the same time. Of course, school is the priority, but I would like to be able to do this as well... so I'm going to give it a shot.

I have no idea what it will be about at this point... the title leaves it open to almost anything. Maybe I'll write some sci-fi... or maybe even something a little theologically inclined.

The project will begin Monday, I hope to have a decent amount of it written each day. Wish me luck!


Site Navigation
My ongoing novel for the month of November, 2004. It's all about what's going on in the universe... from Planet Earth to the farthest reaches of space. Something exciting should be happening somewhere in the universe at any time, right? Feel free to check it out and leave comments! (Visit http://prezkennedy.org/ for the latest additions)

PROGRESS

NaNoWriMo Progress Meter

ARCHIVES
10/31/2004 - 11/07/2004 / 11/07/2004 - 11/14/2004 /


Powered by Blogger