Anvil of Fate

The Time Theory:

The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories were just beyond the campus, up a winding way called Cyclotron Road. Born on the Berkeley campus, the facilities had grown considerably over the years, and eventually moved to the rolling green hills that overlooked the university. A host of scientific disciplines were rooted in the lab, which was a major center of research and a place where some of the most profound questions imaginable were asked, and sometimes answered, with the secret arts of Quantum Science. They took the universe apart, bit by bit, discovering atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons; and then breaking each one down into smaller and smaller particles, and watching how each one behaved. Once the physical structures of the universe were ferreted out and understood, science thought it would finally have the answer to how everything related to everything else. Soon, however, they began to encounter strange things in the corners of their vacuum chambers and cyclotrons. The deeper they looked, the more they found that the universe was playing with another set of rules altogether in the realm of the very small. Things that were once thought to be impossible, even unimaginable, suddenly became odd realities. Travel in time, long debated by physicists, was one of those unimaginable things.

One theory of time held that any given moment was simply a specific arrangement of every quantum particle that made up the universe. The particles, always in motion, created the perception of a forward progression in the flow of time, which was really nothing more than the constant variation of those particles, morphing from one state and position to another. To be in any place, or any time, all one had to do was find a way to tell all the particles of the universe to assume a given state or position in relationship to one another. Any reality that was ever possible could become this moment; this reality. The realization of the theory seemed impossible, however, for one could never know how to arrange each particle of the universe just as they were at the Globe Theatre in 1612. It was challenge enough to understand even one particle of the universe—but science held that the whole of the universe had sprung from one single point. If that were true, then any possible universe might arise in the same way.

The way, it was found, was through the seeming annihilation of a small black hole. Dorland found a theory, and the theory became an Arch. It was found that the crushing effects of gravity as one approached the singularity could be neutralized by simply getting the black hole to spin at a fantastic rate of speed. The resulting reality was like a dead spot of calm in a whirlpool, or the eye at the heart of a swirling hurricane. It was realized in the center of the Arch, and anything that passed within its aura was protected from the annihilation of the event horizon. The Arch opened and forged a safe pathway through the event horizon of a controlled black hole, and all that lay beyond it.

While it was impossible for humans to physically re-arrange the particles of the universe into a new pattern, a quantum singularity achieved this result effortlessly. Humans only had to tell the universe what they wanted—what shape and time to assume on the other side of the singularity. Mathematics was their voice, and the universe, being about nothing of any particular importance at any given moment, was kind enough to heed them and comply.