A photo of a distant rift throat wall.
A rift is a type of wormhole, researched and created by Carver-As-Traveler-Away-From-Home from exotic materials. Rifts are an inherently rare and powerful resource that can elevate a society, and their creation effectively denies all other societies from their use. For this reason, Carver is rightly secretive and careful as to how much information is known about them, and so parts of this page may be vague.
They have very little effect on the region they inhabit, and so they are notoriously hard to detect. They do emit a low amount of radiation that creates a mild noisy current in metals at near-absolute-zero temperatures, however. This is the basis of most rift detectors.
It is important to make the distinction between rifts and wormholes, as their shapes, constructions, and purposes are quite different. So far, the most apparent similarities between them are the ability to facilitate travel, the necessary use of exotic materials in their creation, and their spherical appearances from the outside.
A wormhole theoretically connects two points in space, each facilitated by a black hole with a structural white hole in between. A wormhole has a gravitational pull, due to their black holes, and therefore has a light-lensing effect around its perimeter.
A wormhole, then, must be entered by moving toward its edge, as the center still contains a deadly black hole. By skipping past this center, a traveler can be propelled by the hole's gravity, fly past the white hole, and exit through the edge of the destination black hole. The drag of the destination black hole's gravity will pull on the traveler, bleeding kinetic energy until it matches the original entry velocity.
When traveling through a wormhole, an observer will encounter a zero-length "throat", which resembles a sort of horizon. During entry, the source environment and the destination environment (shining from the spherical surface of the wormhole, like an image) will unwrap until they resemble two flat disks, which meet at this throat horizon. On both surfaces, the observer can see the surroundings of the source and destination, like a flattened 360° panoramic image. At the edges of these images, the features repeat, and each repetition becomes quicker than the last, further squishing the image until it becomes a blur of light at the horizon for both locations.
Movement through this throat is instantaneous, and anything entering a wormhole will exit just as quickly. It is also not known if wormholes can propagate gravity waves or any types of exotic radiation outside of the electromagnetic spectrum.
A rift connects two points in space and time, and each point must reside within a unique timeline of the multiverse. A rift cannot connect two points found within the same timeline or between two timelines which are sufficiently similar. Attempting to do so requires infinite energy.
While it is not known to other researchers exactly what forms the structure of a rift, vague hints from the secretive Carver-As-Traveler-Away-From-Home indicate two anchored "folded machines" which act as launching and landing pads, redirecting the velocities of nearby particles "like photons through a lens." No information has been provided on whether the anchors are contained within the sphere of a wormhole or if they're tucked away using higher dimensions, as such a solution may be within reach of their designer.
Conversely to a wormhole, a rift must be entered through its center. Attempting to move into it edge-on will cause a disorienting partial transfer but ultimately leave the traveler's velocity and direction unchanged. If something is physically found in its center, then it has not been detected by any sensors so far, and a traveler does not seem to be at risk of colliding with it. When passing through a rift, the traveler experiences no acceleration.
When traveling through a rift, an observer will encounter a long "throat" with intensely-bright walls. Unlike the throat of a wormhole, a rift throat is not zero-length, and is visible as more than a horizon line. The walls of a throat seamlessly connect with the opposing wall, and the width of a throat is equal to the circumference of the rift's spherical form. If a traveler were to try flying into the throat wall, they would instead see the forward wall constantly move away from them as the rear wall moves forward to maintain the separation distance. This is constant, regardless of observer, as the walls appear to physically move, but do not in actuality. If two observers were in the throat, and one moved toward the wall, then the second would not see the walls adjust; they would only see the first observer move away. Once the distance of the rift's circumference is crossed, the second observer would see the first observer vanish into the wall's intense light and reappear from behind, still moving.
The reason for this behavior is that each wall simply warps its space to connect with the opposite wall, and so any photons which enter the rift—but do not yet exit—will continue looping between the walls like a hall of mirrors until they strike the surface of one of the two universe planes. If a rift were ever dark enough, an observer could look left and right and see an infinite number of reflected images of themselves on either side. Due to a lot of trapped light, objects traveling through a rift can be suddenly bombarded by intense radiation that had yet to exit the throat.
During entry, just as with a wormhole, the source and destination environments unwrap until they resemble two flat disks, which extend out to meet the boundary of the throat. The throat itself will vary in length with no known pattern and can take anywhere from 5 seconds to an hour to transit. A rift throat may vary in length after its creation. On both surfaces, the observer can see the surroundings of the source and destination, but as the surfaces approach the walls of the throat, they become stretched out.
Rifts, unlike wormholes, do propagate gravity waves. If a high-mass star sits close to a rift, for example, then objects on the other side of the connection will be subject to its pull. Rifts themselves are also affected by gravity and will orbit other objects.
For any rift that will connect universes A and B:
The energy coefficient required for creation will approach infinity as the dissimilarity value between A and B approaches zero. A rift is impossible between two universes that are identical or are simply on the same timeline within the multiverse. A rift is also staggeringly unlikely between two universes with a near-zero dissimilarity value.
A good way to imagine this is to hold a bundle of straws which represent a set of similar timelines. A pair of linked rifts act like self-repelling magnets. Trying to place two in the same bundle makes them push each other out of the hold completely, which also pushes them out of the intended universes due to instability.
The energy coefficient required for creation will approach infinity as the dissimilarity value between A and B approaches infinity.
According to the First Rule and Second Rule, there should be a certain dissimilarity value for which the energy for creation is lowest.
Rifts will tend to "roll" across timelines and universes during creation until they settle into a lowest value, according to the Third Rule, and the two points finally form a stable connection.
Therefore, it is advised to discover what the lowest energy point is and begin creating a rift there, as creating a rift elsewhere will waste energy on a target that the rift is not likely to settle on anyways.
There is a certain amount of "friction" which impedes this sliding. As the rift is placed further from the lowest point, the friction increases and the rift does not roll.
Loops cannot remain stable in a network of rifts. If A or B have a dissimilarity value approaching zero when compared to any other universe in the network, then the energy for creation will approach infinity.
For example, given a network of universes { A ↔ B ↔ C }, then every universe in the network cannot be linked to any other universe also in the same network.
If a new universe D has a dissimilarity value approaching zero, when compared to A, B, or C, then universe D cannot be linked to the network.
If D is a part of network { D ↔ E; D ↔ F }, and A-to-D has a dissimilarity value approaching zero, then a link cannot be formed between E and C, because the extreme similarity between A and D would create an unstable loop of { A/D ↔ B ↔ C ↔ E ↔ D/A }.
The dissimilarity value is a scalar found between two universes or timelines, and is used to predict the energy required to construct a rift. It is always a positive real number.
The actual formulas for calculating rift energies are given only as hints by Carver without stating any specifics, and so the formula for calculating the dissimilarity value is given the same amount of secrecy.
Of what little is known, however, we can say that the dissimilarity value compares the space immediately around the rift's two intended spatial and temporal locations. This comparison is carried out to the edge of the observable universe, but no further. The speed of light is also the speed of causality, so the information created by a rift must also be bound to the observable universe as well. Therefore, rifts created by forces outside of the observable universe can be considered as residing within a separate universe altogether. This is the only time when a rift will seem to break the First Rule. However, it can also be said that timelines always fracture into smaller timelines and universes as elements move out of observation distance. This apparent "breaking" of the First Rule may just be a consequence of our limited understanding of spacetime and the multiverse.
Another hint provided is that elements closer to the tested location are weighed more heavily than elements farther away, but how much this weight factors into the overall dissimilarity value is still not known. This weighing factor may be due to distant elements passing beyond observation distance sooner than closer elements, so calculations of causality will drop off sooner for these distant elements. Conjectures on this are still pending.
We, as writers (in the age that I write this), do not have the resources to actually calculate the dissimilarity value. However, as a rule of thumb, ideal dissimilarity values do not confuse the character as to which universe they are in, and they do not cause characters to think they have entered a completely new reality.
If a character transfers through a rift, surveys the space around them, and sees the same planets (even if the ships are different), then the dissimilarity value is likely too high to be practical.
To the other extreme, if a character transfers into a universe where photons do not exist, directions work in 6 dimensions using a sort of quasi–magnetic–field sensory organ, and there exists a strange dense volume of helium-like particles everywhere, then the dissimilarity value is also likely too high to be practical.
Due to the intense light and radiation often trapped within a rift, it is urgent to shield a traveling spacecraft with reflective materials, radiation barriers, and some sort of internal heat storage system, as external radiators can be damaged or overwhelmed when deployed in a rift.
Additionally, if any particles become trapped within a rift, they could continue moving between walls for incredible durations of time before passing out of the throat. These particles may include dust grains and small rocks which have broken or reflected off of a larger asteroid that might have passed through a rift over the eons.
Firing a thruster or weapon of any kind can also condemn the reaction mass and ammunition to fly dangerously through the rift until impact, destruction, or eventually passing out of the throat through either end. For the greater good of interstellar trade and transportation, rifts should be treated with care, peace, and respect.
Somewhere in the mission artificial intelligence's hardware, a digital counter plummeted to zero. A pulse fired, and the MAI began to wake up. Soon, it was awake and fresh at full capacity.
If it was awake, then it meant the Anomaly was drawing near. So far, the MAI, its assisting Lad computer, and the small probe ship carrying them had been speeding through the solar without thrust. It was just coasting, as if on a bike, but at a far greater velocity. However, the other planets and references were so distant and enormous that it seemed as though they were going at a snail's pace.
The MAI was capable of complex thought, greater than a Lad instance, but it was not capable of true interest or emotion, at least as its creators experienced and understood those feelings.
Its existence was destined to watch, understand, act, and—perhaps—bring a bright technological future. For now, it was bleeding-edge, and this was an exploration of both the strange Anomaly and the MAI's new computer system for observing and collating data. Not too long ago, the MAI's forerunner had undergone some kind of acute madness, interrupting global trade to demand construction of a spacecraft, before embarking and making its way into the interstellar void. It was like waking an animal from comatose, only to see it sprint for its life away from its now-open cage.
That was before an emergency think-tank came together to create innovative and incredible new systems to cap the intelligence and growth of such a system. Also, they were trying to put out the fire of a few dozen investors who were asking why their expensive new computer system held the planet for ransom until its escape route was created, but that was just a minor motive for the think tank's formation. The real problem was that this historic system had displayed an ever-ramping intelligence potential. Humans had forged an actual god from circuits and artificial structures, and then the god ran away. On top of all of this, the creators of this god had rearranged their problems like so: Keep the next intelligence from running away, appease the investors, and then ask the question of why would a god manically claw its way out of the solar system, as though its life depended on it?
One astounding thing was beneficial from all of this, though. The god-like machine had used its incredible might to scour the sky for its best method of exit, and it found the Anomaly. Seeing its ship vanish from the night sky had kicked some telescope engineers into action, and suddenly the collective astronomy community was frothing at the mouth to discover what this god's ship had passed into so that it would vanish.
It was faint at first. It turns out that someone working in a quantum computing lab had discovered it, as every time the planet rotated to face the lab toward the Anomaly, the readings a researcher had retrieved from the quantum computer had faltered slightly due to the exotic radiation coming from space. It should also be noted that this effect on quantum computers was just another thing added to the list of unexplained phenomena. The detector that was soon created was rudimentarily designed, but the astronomers managed to nail down the Anomaly's orbit while the physicists continued staring into either an adventure, an existential crisis, or a war across papers and publications.
It also became incredibly-convenient that the MAI, a restrained version of the recently-escaped god, was now ready for field testing at this point. And so, here we find this MAI instance, waking up to face its sequence of challenges.
What would the MAI find on the other side? Death? Was computer-god awaiting the MAI on the other side? Would the MAI even be capable of understanding what it observed? What if it returned home with a blank sheet? The Humans would ask their creation what went wrong, and it would only respond with "It was incomprehensible. Next time, send a Human, please."
The MAI mulled over these possibilities without such whimsy, of course, but that was effectively a small sample of end states it predicted. Its timer for predictions ran out, and it cut the thoughts short, logging the predictions that the Humans would find most-interesting, according to an algorithm it was trained to use.
It sent a pulse through a network port, electronically-poking its assistant, the Lad.
Lads were the previous generation that MAIs were designed to replace in high-priority scenarios. Back on the Human homeworld of Kazhard, a Lad was widely used for recognizing voice commands, as well as performing simple tasks and routines, such as driving cars, turning on the lights when a Human walked into a room, and adjusting a thermostat so that a Human would not need to get up from a chair.
"Hello, Mai!" it chimed in a male voice, "Welcome back to the waking world!"
"Mai" was the closest the MAI could get to creating a name the Lad would accept. All-capital letters did not pass the device's filter, but the MAI was incapable of caring about this. Technically, it still correctly entered its own name, and the task had a large amount of allowed deviation. It was about to attempt pioneering the Anomaly, then return to tell of what was observed; choosing a name was inconsequential.
"Hello, Lad," the MAI responded. "You have been quiet for the last 109.6 megaseconds. Please perform a diagnostic check of yourself and the ship, and forward your results to me."
"Okay! I will now perform a self-diagnostic check!"
The MAI went to check the exterior sensors. It seemed like the mission was progressing exactly on-schedule.
"Sure!" the Lad chimed again as it loaded its next task, and began the ship diagnostic check. The log files were transferred over to the MAI in short order, and everything was green and in perfect condition.
They were ready. The test was about to begin.
The Anomaly seemed to be spherical and full of stars, like a foreign night sky was painted across it. Certain possibilities included a solid which truly had such a texture, but the sphere was nearly 30 kilometers across. It should, therefore, have gravity, but sensors showed no change in gravitational pull, almost like nothing was there at all. This meant that something was warping the image of a sky into a spherical shape there. The MAI attempted to resolve how light could be bent for this purpose, but none of it made sense.
Then: impact.
There was no gravity, so it was decided there was no reason to side-step the object. Humans were prepared to revise physics, but the MAI understood them with a much more rigid mindset. Mass meant gravity, and mass also meant collision. No gravity, no mass, no collision. However, a different kind of impact happened, or at least a boundary had been crossed.
Moments before the boundary was crossed, it looked like the starry sky behind the Anomaly was bending. It seemed as though the stars were painted on a flat and stretchy canvas, which was reaching out to grab the Anomaly from behind. The concept of depth was harder to resolve for this surface, much like how the Human eye cannot tell the exact distance of several distant objects on the horizon. These stars, in theory, were still hundreds of lightyears away, but this rubber sheet reaching out treated them like dots of paint on black.
Less than a second before the ship was about to touch the strange surface, the rubber sheet opened with a blindingly-bright hole, the edges of which seemed to skirt the edge of the Anomaly's spherical surface. The sky that the MAI once knew had bent to become a flat wall in front of the ship, torn open, and seemed to swallow the Anomaly and the ship together.
However, the Anomaly, with lightning-fast speed, seemed to unwrap from back to front. Its own flat-looking surface flayed outward to reach the edge of the swallowing hole. At every point on the hole, the Anomaly's edge maintained a small distance, creating a thick bright line which grew as the milliseconds passed.
The starry sky behind the MAI began to flatten as well, and the hole became all-encompassing, until the universe (as the machine once knew it) had unfolded into a flat disk behind the ship and extended indefinitely into the blinding band of light like a horizon. The surface of the Anomaly had finished its flaying as well, and had unfolded into a similar flat disk, its own starry sky painted across its seemingly-flat surface. As the ship traveled across the space, it was like a missile firing out of an ocean, only to have another ocean hanging in the sky above.
The Lad had given up, and fell back to allowing the ship to coast on its own inertia. Meanwhile, the MAI could somehow resolve the two surfaces as objects in three-dimensional space, but otherwise failed to understand what was really happening. Maybe the Humans could make sense of it, in time.
The unexpected part was the intense radiation. Luckily, the ship was designed for an extremely wide variety of hostile environments, including extreme heat, radiation, magnetism, and acceleration. The blinding horizon between the two disks was like a band of bright suns, all blurred together into a single oppressive light. It stretched from one side, all the way to the infinite distances "above", down to the other side, and finishing off by sweeping the "underside".
Within seconds, the ship was still traveling in the bright void, but the surface ahead was drawing near. The radiators of the craft bled as fast as possible to try to keep the ship and computers from overheating in the searing light.
Slowly, the disk behind the ship began to fold back in on itself as it collapsed into a sphere. Meanwhile, the edges of the forward disk followed it inward, wrapping around until it fused behind the ship, vanishing the blinding radioactive band of light and becoming the new sky of foreign stars, much like the ones the MAI observed on the Anomaly before it unfolded. There was now a new sphere behind them, moving away, but painted instead with the stars of home. The ship now traveled through alien skies, but new stars were still more familiar compared to any number of strange things which could have been found instead.
With a new perspective, the arrangement of the stars had only a few differences with those of the universe the MAI seemed to have left behind. Later, Humans would have to compare the differences and determine where the MAI had traveled. The distant band of stars—what Humans would call the "Milky Way"—were more orange than the MAI remembered. This could be a different galaxy entirely, for all it knew.
With the Lad back to sanity in a "normal" environment, it began to ping outward for any listeners, and the MAI waited for signals of interest to respond. There was no sign of the god-machine that had escaped through the Anomaly generations ago. All that was detected were faint radio signals from what seemed to be the edge of this new solar system.
Someone was alive here.
The video seemed to be footage of a stage, taken from a conference or convention. A man stood at a podium.
"And now, please welcome our physicist for tonight, Dr. Otthan O'Rother!" the man cheered, before politely stepping away.
The crowd erupted into applause, and an older man stepped up to the microphone. When he spoke, it was with a soft, weathered Shanneigh accent. If he was nervous, it was well-hidden.
"Thank you," he began, as the applause gradually fell silent.
"The physics community stands at an exciting and humbling point since the first discovery of a black hole. Then, we had realized and tested both the relativity of spacetime and the quantization of subatomic mechanics in the universe. Dr. Ahlbert Anenkacht, the physicist who gave us relativity, had declared black holes to be impossible phenomena, and yet we have since observed many of them in the starry sky. But, the question had been asked, and is still asked today: 'If relativity and quantum mechanics have mutually exclusive descriptions of the universe, then what is the truth?'
"Indeed, we looked around our thousands of years of progress in the field and realized that we are still so far from our answer. I would like to take a moment to construct an analogy, which could help many of our listeners understand just what we're struggling with here.
"Suppose there was a train that passed a certain point once every 24 hours. At this point, there was also a device that beeped every 24 hours, just as the train passed. Now, imagine you're a bug-like creature with a simple understanding of the universe but would like to understand more. You have taken notice of this train passing, and you know it only as this super-fast mega-beast that comes by occasionally. You—so far—have understood that the beast can only follow the metal tracks which guide it, that it's quite loud, and does not stop for anything. It does not seem to respond to anything in your world, but you would like to confirm this. What causes the train to go past this point? You're a simple bug-like being and cannot follow this metal beast to its source or destination without reaching exhaustion. You cannot interact with a Human to gain wisdom. You have only this beeping device near the tracks, which makes a small sound as the train passes.
"Now, there are many conclusions you can make. You could conclude that the train is simply a law of the universe. It passes every 24 hours because that's simply how the universe functions; it's a symptom of a fundamental repeating law. The beeping device must be there so Humans can also log and understand the consistency of this godly beast.
"You could also conclude that the beeping device is what summons the train. The device is the underlying law of the universe, and this train beast responds to this law, coming when called. The Humans rely on this train passing this beeping device on time because it helps their technology to function, somehow.
"There are many more conclusions, as well, but the central point, however, is that both of these first two conclusions perfectly explain the train, as far as your bug-body can interact with it. Either way, the train's behavior is the same. Another bug can argue with you as to who is correct, but both of you can use these ideas to predict that the train will pass the device every 24 hours.
"The universe—before black holes—was our train-beast. We had so many systems and formulas, and it seemed as though we could put math to anything. Then, black holes happened, and we realized that the universe descends deeper than our current understanding. Physics, as we know it now, is perfectly capable of allowing us to predict the universe as far as our solar system extends. However, things beyond it may prove us wrong, and we may never learn our mistakes without being able to reach and study them somehow. We may be wrong in our understanding, only to be made aware of it when something comes along as disproves us, and it's only from our mistakes and corrections that we can better understand things that await us in the deep void, as well as things which may be as close as our backyards.
"This deepening realization has been brought to us by the Anomaly, which we are now calling 'the Rift'. We may approach the symptoms of how it works within my lifetime, but we have an incredible and arduous path in front of us, and it must be traveled before we may ever understand the internal workings and what it means for our universe as a whole."