Topic: Notes
For countless cycles the universe has been born, has lived, and has died, to be spawned again from the corpse of an unstable singularity—the Phoenix rising—and with each iteration came a loss of energy, a loss of matter and mass. Intelligent life rose and fell with them, and one such elder race in the universe prior to ours, realized that theirs would be the last one. Their universe would go on expanding forever, never collapsing back on itself. It would become nothing but a static sea of virtual particles, lifeless, and utterly void, with only the hope that after unimaginable periods of time, something in this nothingness would happen, that some quantum event would trigger a process of regeneration.
The elder race had learned the secret of escaping the death of their universe by pinching off a bubble of their own spacetime and allowing it to burst open into the next nascent one. And such a method would not be feasible when there was no way to determine the end of one universe and the beginning of another. They would not be able to keep the life-pod of the bubble inflated forever. They had to act.
They created a device, a multidimensional machine—we'll call it for the lack of a better term, the Wellstone—that once activated would generate enough gravity to start the terminal collapse of the universe. The elder race ran into opposition from another prominent race of beings that inhabited higher dimensions. They argued the universe should run its natural course, and that if the elder race's species was to end, then it was to end. The hyperdimensional's argument was met with war.
The war was millions of years long. Galaxies were consumed in the conflict, destroyed, solar systems flung out into the intergalactic void. The hyperdimes were losing. Though they had the means to submerge parts of themselves into three dimensional space, and to create physical bodies to interact with matter by shaping spacetime, they were not all powerful, and the elder race was clever enough to disrupt their intrusions and diminish their number.
It is generally unknown how many hyperdimes there truly were, but at the end of the war, only four survived. Bitter at their loss, they too would survive the Event and deal with the survivors of the elder race in the new universe.
The elder race knew enough to design and protect the Wellstone from tampering by the hyperdimes. It would be a device beyond the hyperdime's ability to physically handle. The Wellstone would repel their kind. The elder race sent the Wellstone via something much like a wormhole, but closer to manufactured artificial spacetime, deep into their future, into the heart of the last star to shine in rebellion against the moribund universe. Then they pinched themselves off and sped into the distant future, burrowed through the Event of chaotic space and time, and waited for the birth of a new universe.
The new universe inflated in a sea of eager radiation. Millions of years later, the bubble of the elder race entangled with the expanding universe (though their bubble can't be said to be of any distance away from the 'edge' of the universe as concepts of distance, space, and time do not exist beyond the horizons of spacetime 'enclosures', so it is not like two bubbles merging into one, but more like the states and attributes of both become closer to equalizing and becoming as one) and they made their homes in the dark clouds of gas and dust, making stars and designing solar systems.
The Wellstone? It was not meant to survive the Big Bang, yet the attributes given to it to make it impervious to the hyperdimes also infused a robustness the elder race had not considered. Instead of vaporizing, the Wellstone shattered into a number of fragments. As these fragments were attracted to one another, many of them coalesced into four remaining shards.
But these were not shards like the blades of shattered glass, these were shards of an multidimensional device; these were spherical, as blue-violet as gamma rays, imbued with mysterious powers. The hyperdimes sought the pieces.
Their first intention was to use the shards as weapons against the descendants of the elder race, but they noticed something about the new universe: from their point of view where our dimension of time is, to them, a dimension of space, the universe was a static, unchanging place. The very presence of the hyperdimes, and their ability to move through our dimension of time had the effect of freezing the world-lines, those passages spawned by three dimensional objects moving forward in time. Since they could travel the universe from its beginning to its end—and had in their search for the shards—their effect was as if a traveler from the deep future went back to the deep past, and so the whole history of the universe was set immobile because it was the history of the traveler, and to avoid paradoxes, the past became immutable.
The hyperdimes thought the universe should be alive in fluid motion, its world-lines dancing, with past and future in constant change. Instead the universe was before them like braided cable of hierarchical scales, looped and dropped on the floor, like a forgotten discarded thing.
But perhaps they could do something about this. Perhaps they could enliven the universe. Such a feat might even change the past of the descendants of the elder race. If they could alter the properties of the shards, perhaps they could unite them to put an end to this static, tempered universe.
They found three shards. The galaxies teeming with life, the hyperdimes found intelligence races capable of altering the three shards they had. The shards were kept safe and under vigilant watch by three of the hyperdimes. Kha, the fourth hyperdime, set out to find the Last Shard.
But other races had found the Last Shard. They had also discovered the elder race's children. They had learned about the hyperdimes and the war, and eventually learned of the Kha's plans. They decided to keep the Last Shard from Kha.
Their survival depended on the temperance of the universe. . .and their gamble on humanity, that if guided right would see them through to victory, or if intrigued into Kha's plans, could destroy them all.
That's the premise. I hope it sheds some light on what the Temperance Well is meant to be in context of the story and the goals of the chief protagonist, Kha.
It also explains the art on this blog. The world-lines are to the left, and the Last Shard in the title image.
