“SF Writer Invents Brand New Thingamajig!”

To mangle a popular witticism, “invention is the mother of necessity.”

Science fiction writers are always inventing new worlds, new species, new technologies, bigger and faster spaceships, etc.  I’m no exception.

For my new SF novel The Farpool, I invented a device called a Time Twister.  The Time Twister is actually a weapon.  It’s designed to be based on a stable world and search out enemy forces, then yank those forces into another timestream.   At the time of this story, humans can travel back and forth in multiple time streams and so can the enemy.  To preserve human settlements in the Galactic Halo, these timestreams have to be regularly policed and swept clean of enemy forces.  One of these Time Twisters is physically located on Seome, the oceanic world that is at the center of The Farpool.  In fact, the actual Farpool is a spinoff phenomenon from operating the Time Twister.

Here’s what I wrote in my Notes describing the Time Twister:

The Time Twister and the Farpool

1.     The Time Twister is a device designed and installed by Umans (star-faring descendants of Earth and solar system Humans) to manipulate space and time over short volumes of space.  Any object caught in the Time Twister’s field of influence is accelerated out of the existing space –time field and flung through a wormhole into unknown and hopefully very distant reaches of space, perhaps even into other universes. 

2.     The Time Twister contains a naked singularity at the core of its field.  Umans have learned how to use existing stars and their extreme gravitational fields to compress matter enough to create such a singularity.  The distorted space-time field around this singularity core of the Twister is known as a twist field.  It’s like the warp field in Star Trek.

3.     Uman engineering has developed a way of both creating, maneuvering and regulating the effects of the twist field.  This is done through a screening field and series filters known as twist buffers, or just T-buffers. 

4.     Like a nuclear power plant with its core always on, but regulated by control rods, the Twister is also always on.  The singularity engine at the core, once created and activated, can’t be turned off.  But it can be regulated through a series of T-buffers.  These moderate the twist field.  The control station manned by Umans on Kinlok Island (Seome) essentially operates a system of T-buffers. 

5.     The military purpose (defensive) of the Twister is to protect a defined volume of space from intrusion or encroachment by enemies or adversaries.  The principal enemies of the Umans in the 24^th century (the Earth-centered time of the story The Farpool) are the Coethi. 

6.     The Time Twister is a Space-Time Displacement weapon.  It reaches out into space several parsecs and accelerates any unidentified object either forward or backward in time. 

7.     The Coethi are (thought to be) a race of sentient semi-robotic aliens whose main weapon against Uman forces is something Umans called a starball.  It is directed against the sun or star of a targeted Uman planetary system.  The only known defense is a Time Twister.  When a starball enters or is pulled into the twist field of a Twister, it is flung out of local space-time into the farthest reaches of the Universe.

8.     Umans and Coethi are contending for influence and territory in a region of the Milky Way known as the Galactic Halo.

9.     The main-sequence star Sigma-Albeth B is near the center of a key sector of the Halo.  It has four planets, one of them Seome.  Seome is an ideal site to build and operate a Time Twister to defend this sector, known to Humans as Halo-Alpha. 

10.  One of the side effects of Time Twister operation on a mostly oceanic world like Seome is a series of whirlpools near the base at Kinlok Island. 

11.  One of these whirlpools is especially deep and intense.  In this whirlpool, the twist field has spun off a sort of miniature or daughter wormhole.  It isn’t very big.  It isn’t very stable, fluctuating daily in intensity and location.  But it will send objects that enter to other places in the Universe, other places different in both time and space.

12.  The Seomish call this mother of all whirlpools the Farpool.  By accident, they have learned that at certain times of the year, under certain conditions created by operating the Time Twister, the Farpool can send small objects…a few Seomish and their gear…to other places and times.  One of those places turns out to be 22^nd century Earth itself. 

13.  In effect, the Seomish have learned how to travel back in time and space to the ancestral home planet of the Umans.  The Umans don’t know this.  And they don’t care, as they are engaged in running duels with local forces of the Coethi. 

14.  Using the Farpool to reach Earth and return to Seome requires exquisite timing and control of the whirlpools generated by the Twister.  Use of the Farpool is basically at the mercy and sufferance of the Umans and how they operate the Twister.  But the Seomish are smart.  They have catalogued the conditions they need and built an algorithm to help predict when these conditions will occur.  When the right conditions appear, the Seomish know to be ready to enter Farpool. 

15.  There have been several occasions when the Farpool didn’t work as the Seomish predicted.  In all these situations, the Seomish travelers failed to make it to Earth, or failed to return to Seome.  Where or when they went is unknown.  When this has happened, the Seomish have memorial services and try to learn what went wrong.  This process has led to their ability to predict and manage how to use the Farpool.  In recent months, the Seomish have been able to reliably go and return from 22^nd century Earth. 

16.  The Seomish hope to use the knowledge they gain from these expeditions to either shield their world from the destructive effects of the Twister or, failing that, drive the Umans from Seome and destroy or disable the Twister.  It’s wrecking their ocean waters.  They know that if the Twister is destroyed, they will lose this link to another world of intelligent people.  That would be a loss of inestimable value.  But the Twister and the noise and vibration it creates on Seome is an existential threat.

17.  The Time Twister must go.

18.  The dilemma is that Seome lies in a disputed region of space, the Middle Galactic Halo.  The Umans have sited the Twister on Seome because its vast oceans help cool the machine and help conceal its purpose.  There are 3 reasons why Seome is the best location for this weapon:

a.     Its strategic location in the Galactic Halo

b.     Stability and cooling properties of the oceans

c.     Concealment possibilities of the ocean

19.  The Umans want to prevent the Coethi from entering the Halo in force.  By controlling the Halo, the Umans deny the enemy effective reconnaissance positions for galaxy-wide operations.

20.  The basic structure of the Twister is that of a truncated cone surmounted by some 72 hemispherical caps and resting on a shallow conical floating platform.

21.  The Twister is approximately 12 km in diameter, about 38 km in circumference and nearly 1 km deep.  The caps are time displacement nodes and are above the surface of the ocean.  The rest of the structure is below the ocean surface.

22.  In operation, the Twister oscillates at a high-frequency, sending strong vibrations around Seome’s oceans, which help to dampen the machinery.  These vibrations are deadly to Seomish life.

23.  There is some ‘spill’ of time displacement effects around the Twister.  These leaks take the form of deadly temporal flux currents—zones of time displacement—where an intruder could find himself momentarily shot forward in time a few minutes or hours, or even days, or millennia, depending on the leak.  One of these leaks is especially long-lived, and is the source of the Farpool.

24.  The Twister functions by creating a warping or twisting field in space-time, and rotating that field into the future (or past).  The hemispherical caps are the origins of the twist lines of force and they drag space time into an extreme curvature before translating it out of stability.  The Twister creates a vast cone of displaced space-time, in effect, a sink, some ten parsecs in axial effect.

 

Now the question for a writer is how much of this detail to use in the story.  In The Farpool, I have another device called an echobulb.  It’s basically a universal translator that enables our human hero Chase Meyer to be able to converse with intelligent marine creatures like the Seomish.  In addition, the echobulb functions as a sort of encyclopedia and dictionary, like a smartphone.  Chase can download and listen to explanations of things.  Convenient, huh?  I’ve used this technique to include some (but not all) of the text above right in the story. 

Next week, I’ll delve a little more into the backstory of The Farpool.  I just finished the first draft (it took about 8 months) and now I’m into re-reading and reviewing and editing.

 

See you on June 20.

 

Phil B.