Letters from the Spiral Arms

Rani's Worlds

Rani's Diary/Unfinished autobiography.

Fragment retrieved by a deep network sweep on [DATE AND LOCATION ERASED FOLLOWING USER REQUEST].

I have vivid recollections of the evening where we realized what the geometry drive could actually do. We had spent the last two weeks eliminating every single potential bias in our measurements, every single human or technical error that could have fooled us into feeding false data to our computers. Hell, I had even scoured pre Low-Age papers on physical storage to make sure I had not missed anything we could have taken into account. But there was nothing. We had submitted the results of our experiments to the thermonuclear version of Occam's razor and all that was left was the original interpretation.

Ten times out of ten, the geometry drive would beat light in a straight run by a factor of nearly one billion.

I remember sending a group message with the latest results attached and something like let's take a few days for ourselves and our families and discuss that in a week, then closing my laptop and letting my eyes wander towards the ceiling. That's it, I thought. Our society. Our civilization. Our Earth. This, right here, right now, is as good as we are going to get. We've won. Game over. Within a few years, we will be an interstellar species. Give it a decade or two, and we will have our first settlements outside the solar system. A century and we will be a true multi-stellar species. We've passed the Great Filter. Not through technological prowess, not through hardship and sacrifice but through sheer, dumb luck.

Then I took another look at the drive. The crystalline cube was lying on the table, still wrapped in the apparatus I had used to protect it during our translation experiments in cislunar space. It gleamed slightly albeit there was no power running through its structure at this moment. For a moment I considered its mundane shape as if I had been looking at some kind of rubble left alongside the road. And then a shiver went down my spine and another thought burst through my mind.

This has the potential of breaking physics in half. If what the geometry drive does is indeed spontaneous faster than light travel then we are going to run into a massive wall of problems. Relativity and causality, one of these has to go. Calm down, Rani, and think. After all, we could get rid of relativity. That's an option. If relativity indeed doesn't work, it won't have tremendous consequences for slower than light physics. But what if relativity stands the test of the geometry drive? What if it's the other variable that breaks? What if there is no preferred frame of reference? Then causality paradoxes can exist. Then we can have causality loops. Out of sequence events can happen. Time travel can happen. Magic can happen in the most literal sense of effects that have no causes.

I pray that relativity doesn't hold.

That prayer was never answered.