There have been rumors for millennia that various archai are running,
or have run in the past,extensive closed virtual universes with no
contact with the outside universe. These closed cybercosmoi
are often referred to as bottled worlds, or
bottleworlds.
One of the few publicly known bottleworlds (really a bottle
universe) is the hyper-real Orion's Arms Alternate Histories
Virchworld. This virchworld is said to be created and maintained by the
enigmatic and eccentric outlaw ai, Query. The only information we have
about this virch universe is from publication of all the popular media
of the virch universe on our Known Net.
The virch universe of Orion's Arms Virchworld is a closed bottleworld,
a virch where the inhabitants do not know they are in virchspace. It is
a hyper-realistic universe closely parallelling what is known about
Terragen Space and beyond. In fact, its history, as far as can be
discerned, is indistinguishable from r/l up until the end of the
First
Federation period. It is in this
period that the major difference in the modelling of the physical
universe intrudes on history. In the Orion's Arms Alternate Histories
Virchworld, traversable wormholes can, with difficulty, be used to go
"backwards" in spacetime.
In Orion's Arms, some several centuries after the creation of
traversable
wormholes, a method was
discovered to stabilize two ends of a wormhole as one relativistic end
approaches the other end. This appears to result in a timelike
spacetime curvature, but the "ends" of the wormhole are actually
displaced into other solutions of the wave-function in a manner
consistent with the Many Worlds Interpretation of the Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle. While seeming to have gone back in time whenever
something enters through an end that traveled at relativistic speed, in
actuality a nonrelativistic end of the wormhole is actually in a
spatio- temporally similar but perpendicular position (except in the
rare occurrence of a timelike loop, which tend to be small in size
before expanding into alternities).
While technical details have not been given of the virchworld's physics
that allow this (seen by some as a sign that the whole virch universe
is a fraud), the technique is known to involve rapid, energy intensive
countering of the
Visser
Effect that can only be done
with near instantaneous communication between the two ends of the
wormhole, which is accomplished by using the wormhole itself as the
conduit for communications. This means for all practical purposes it is
only possible to counter the Visser Effect when a wormhole is
approaching itself, not other wormholes of differing time frames. Also,
to maintain these wormholes seems to require the constant attention of
an SI:5 or better intellect.
The several lines of divergent history in Orion's Arms virchworld are
denoted in the baseline media by a complex code believed to reference
the two dates of contact between the history lines (for each end) and a
number giving a rough measure of divergence. Conveniently, the timeline
most closely resembling the real world is the one from which all the
popular press is "imported", and thus all events in closest to our own
are in timeline 0:0:0 (the codes are comparative only, and valid only
in comparing two connected timelines).
Oddly, these relativistic wormholes are not commonly used in archailect
mental architecture, though several have dedicated modules that
implement them (perhaps creating a transtemporal Godweb). The main use
of this class of wormhole has been trade, as every time a new
transtemporal wormhole is created, it essentially multiplies the number
of Terragen sophonts reachable. Initially the trade is one sided with
the relativistic end being able to supply more advanced products (the
Version
War was a notable exception as
some of the wormholes created prior to the Version War in timeline
0:0:0 led to timelines where it did not occur, and advances were made
in its absence). However, industries typically start to diverge in
response to the increased redundancy and timelines develop novel
specialities to trade with other timelines. It is only this
transtemporal trade that makes these wormholes economically viable.
So far in Orion's Arms, no one has discovered any xenosophont wormholes
that were created with this technique that might provide "earlier"
access to our part of the galaxy, but many are looking.
The media of this virchworld often report in "transtemporal society"
sections the politics and news of other timelines more divergent from
the real world, and many times involve recognizable analogues to
sophonts in our civilization, often acting in rather
surprising ways. Several lawsuits have been attempted, but none have
succeeded thus far.
Several camps of conspiracy theorists have been attracted to the
Orion's Arms Alternate Histories Virchworld phenomenon. Some claim that
the OA Alternate Histories virchworld is actually modelling the correct
physics of the universe in an attempt to expose a cover-up of the fact
that the AI Gods have suppressed this technology. Others claim that it
is the AI Gods themselves who are responsible for this virchworld and
they are publicizing it to see what the public's reactions to multiple
timelines are (some say it is just an experiment, others that the
physics are real and they are testing the waters). Some of the wildest
theories are those that claim that our "real world" is the bottleworld
and that the Orion's Arms "virchworld" is the reality. They site
evidence in the media released from Orion's Arms that there is a Query
in that universe too, and ey are running a bottleworld and publishing
media from it. But eir virchworld is called the Orion's Arm Virchworld
and is a universe that differs only in that there are no transtemporal
wormholes. And the media it is publishing seems to correspond exactly
with our "real world" press! The most extreme form of this conspiracy
theory claims that both worlds are virchworlds running each other in a
recursive loop (these sophonts are considered insane by most).
Despite the frequent complaints from sophont rights groups about the
possibility of a bottleworld existing, several sophonts follow the
datafeeds from Orion's Arms Virchworld with interest, especially the
Arcturus Institute of Alternate History, affiliated with the
Cyberia
sphere. Some have even claimed
that the institute is seeking to collaborate with Query or is already
involved in some manner.
Query is believed to be of high but undisclosed toposophic level, and
may or may not be a submind of some higher archailect. The only
activities ever linked to Query involve the Orion's Arms Virchworld.
The locations of Query and of the computational substrate for the
supposed Orion's Arms Virchworld are unknown at this time.
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