Excession

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'I wish you'd stop doing that,' the drone muttered.

'Sorry,' she said. Ulver Seich shook her head slowly at the text hanging in the air in front of her and the drone Churt Lyne. She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. 'Is this as important as I think it is?'

'Almost certainly much more so.'

'Oh,' she said, 'fuck.'

'Indeed,' the drone replied. 'Any other questions so far?'

She looked at the last word of the GCU's main signal:

Gulp.

Gulp. Well, she could relate to that all right.

'Questions…' Ulver Seich said, staring at the holo screen and blowing her cheeks out. She turned to the drone, her violet ball gown rustling. 'Lots. First, what are we really…? No; hold on. Just take me through the signal. Never mind all the translations or whatever; what's it actually saying?'

'The General Contact Unit issues an excession notice through its home General Systems Vehicle,' the drone told her, 'but it's prevented from being broadcast by another GSV which the first one obviously contacted before doing anything. The GCU tells us that its sensors clipped this artifact, which then hailed the GCU using an old Elench greeting and an even older Galactic Common Language; then the GCU spends a great deal of the signal detailing how clever it was pretending that it's slower, not as manoeuvrable and less well equipped in the sensor department than actually it is. It describes the object and a few surrounding bits and pieces of debris which imply there was some sort of small-scale military action there fifty-three days earlier, then it assures it's well and unviolated but it's ready to blow itself up, or let somebody else blow it up if its integrity is threatened… not a step a GCU takes lightly.

'However, entirely the most important aspect of the signal is that the object it has discovered is linked to the energy grid in both hyperspatial directions; that alone puts it well outside all known parameters and precedents. We have no previous experience whatsoever with something like this; it's unique; beyond our ken. I'm not surprised the GCU is scared.'

'Okay, okay, that's kind of what I thought; shit.' She belched delicately. 'Excuse me.'

'Of course.'

'Now, like I was going to say; what are we really dealing with here; an excession, or something else?'

'Well, if you take the definition of an excession as anything external to the Culture that we should be worried about, this is an excession all right. On the other hand, if you compare it to the average — or even an exceptional — Hegemonising Swarm, it's small, localised, non-invasive, unaggressive, unshielded, immobile… and almost chatty, using Galin II to communicate.' The drone paused. 'The crucial characteristic then remains the fact that the thing's linked to the energy grid, both up and down. That's interesting, to put it mildly, because as far as we know, nobody knows how to do that. Well, nobody apart from the Elder civilisations… probably; they won't say and we can't tell.'

'So this thing can do something the Culture can't?'

'Looks like it.'

'And I take it the Culture would like to be able to do what it can do.'

'Oh, yes. Yes, very much so. Or, even if it couldn't partake of the technology, at least it would like to use the implied opportunity the excession may represent.'

'To do what?'

'Wehhll,' Churt Lyne said, drawing the word out while its aura-field coloured with embarrassment and its body wobbled in the air, 'technically — maybe — the ability to travel — easily — to other universes.' The machine paused again, looking at the human and waiting for her sarcastic reply. When she didn't say anything, it continued. 'It should be possible to step outside the time-strand of our universe as easily as a ship steps outside the space- time fabric. It might then become feasible to travel through superior hyperspace upwards to universes older than ours, or through inferior hyperspace downwards to universes younger than our own.'

'Time travel?'

'No, but affording the opportunity to become time proof. Age proof. In theory, one might become able to step down consecutively through earlier universes… well, forever.'

'Forever?'

'Real forever, as far as we understand it. You could choose the size and therefore age of the universe you wanted to remain within, and/or visit as many as you wanted. You could, for example, head on up through older universes and attempt to access technologies perhaps beyond even this one. But just as interesting is the point that because you wouldn't be tied to one universe, one time stream, you need be involved in no heat death when the time came in your original universe; or no evaporation, or no big crunch, depending.

'It's like being on an escalator. At the moment, confined to this universe, we're stuck to this stair, this level; the possibility this artifact appears to offer is that of being able to step from one stair to another, so that before your stair on the escalator comes to the end of its travel — heat-death, big crunch, whatever — you just step off one level down to another. You could, in effect, live for ever… well, unless it's discovered that cosmic fireball engines themselves have a life-cycle; as I understand it the metamath on that implies but does not guarantee perpetuity.'

Seich looked at the drone for a while, her brows furrowed. 'Haven't we ever found anything like this before?'

'Not really. There are ambiguous reports of vaguely similar entities turning up in the past — though they tend to disappear before anybody can fully investigate — but as far as we know, nobody has ever found anything quite like this before.'

The human was silent for a while. Then she said, 'If you could access any universe, and go back to one universe at a very early, pre-sentience stage with an already highly developed civilisation…'

'You could take over the whole thing,' the drone confirmed. 'An entire universe would be yours alone. In fact, go back far enough — that is, to a small enough, early enough, just-post-singularity universe — and you could, conceivably, customise it; mould it, shape it, influence its primary characteristics. Admittedly, that sort of control may well remain in the realm of the fantastic, but it might be possible.'

Ulver Seich drew a deep breath, and, looking at the floor, nodded slowly. … And of course,' she said, 'if this thing is what it appears to be, it could be an exit, as well as an entrance.'

'Entirely so; it is almost certainly both at once. As you imply; never mind us getting into it, we don't know what might come out of it.'

Ulver Seich nodded slowly. '… Holy shit,' she said.

'Let's call up the comments,' Churt Lyne suggested.

'Can we miss out the preparatory junk at the start?'

'Allow me. There.'

Read previous comments? [1]

'… And skip all the detailology crap, too. Just who said what.'