Microstory 81: Eternal Fall

This is a microstory. You'll have to read it to find out what it's about.

If you are going to travel faster than light, then you’re going to need a few things. First, you’ll need a vessel capable of withstanding and protecting you from the plex radiation. Next, you’re going to need a machine called an astral collimator. This will tilt your ship over into the desired simplex dimension. Gravity is much, much stronger in the simplex dimensions than it is in mithgarther (where you live). As soon as you enter one, you’re going to start falling, and the only way to navigate to the location you want is to use gravity transfunctioners to direct your fall. You can fall towards any degree of a sphere, because there is no up or down. If you don’t want nature deciding which direction you’ll go, you have to control it. One amazing thing about simplex dimensions, is that they’re full of energy. If you have a tuplodeler, then it will gather this ambient energy, and essentially keep your vessel in working order indefinitely. This is important, because crossing dimensions will potentially use nearly 100% of any energy stored. This is why travel to a complex dimension"which will have no ambient energy"is a one-way trip unless you have a power source on the other side.

One day, a ship named Tresteria was making a journey between galaxies when they suffered a cataclysmic failure. Their collimator was overheating, and needed to be jettisoned, so they were unable to tilt back into mithgarther. Their gravity transfunctioners were damaged, so they were unable to navigate. Their communications were down, not that it mattered; no one was around to receive a message anyway. To save lives, they decided to enter stasis pods, and wait for help. But there weren’t enough pods for everyone. After plex travel was discovered, suspended animation was largely considered unnecessary. Those left out sacrificed themselves so that others could live, but they perhaps were the lucky ones. The Tresteria has been uncontrollably falling through astral red for the last few billion years.

Reviews

[Caitlin Renee]

Excellent haunting space meta-tragedy. Reminds me of Red Dwarf.
You capture the immense scale of this kind of travel, and what makes it even better is that the microfiction format calls attention to the insignificance of humans in the void (for lack of a better word).


"As soon as you entire one" I'm not sure if that is supposed to be like that, or if it should say "enter."

[Nick Fisherman]

I appreciate your review. And thank you so much for pointing out the error. I've changed it to what it's supposed to say, "enter one". Thanks again!