| NaNoWriMo, day 21 |
[Nov. 22nd, 2005|12:02 am]
Darth Paradox
|
Jumping through hyperspace resembles regular spatial travel about as much as being suddenly picked up and set down somewhere else resembles walking. Only that metaphor doesn't really work, because being picked up and set down somewhere else still requires that you cover the intervening distance somehow, and hyperspace travel doesn't really work that way. Hyperspace travel perhaps resembles, more than anything else, the "Go To Jail" card in Monopoly, in that you don't really travel in the normal way like you do the rest of the game. When you get sent to Jail, you don't pass Go, you don't get your two hundred dollars, you don't cover the intervening spaces. You're just all of a sudden in Jail, and as far as the game is concerned, the travel occurs outside of the normal geography of the game board. Except, in hyperspace travel, you don't generally end up in jail. If you were to try, apart from the fact that hyperjumping into space already occupied by another object tends to be disastrous for the object doing the jumping, you'd find when you got there that all the other prisoners and guards had been irradiated fatally. Hyperspace travel lets off fantastic amounts of radiation, which is among the reasons that it is forbidden to do so anywhere near inhabited worlds and offworld habitats that lack sufficient radiation shielding.
Luckily for the original researchers, their calculations and simulations had already shown that the hyperjump process would cause that sort of radiation. This really didn't keep them from being sterile from the rest of their lives, or the majority of them from dying of cancer by the age of fifty - "luckily" here is a relative term - but an unshielded hyperjump on Earth would have easily killed every person in a large city.
Anyway, no group of space travelers has ever really been able to consistently describe what it looks like to undergo hyperspace travel, though many have tried. To some, it looks like the world melts away, while simultaneously the world melts back into place, looking much the same as it did before (unless one is paying attention to the starfield outside the hyperjumping ship). To others, it appears as a flash of lights and colors. Others don't even notice when a hyperjump occurs (again, unless they're looking at something other than the jumping ship as a frame of reference), and still others perceive it as a brief moment of utter disorientation. One traveler described it as a sudden flash of that sensation you would get if you walk into a room in the house you've lived in your entire life, only to find that everything in the room, and the room itself, had been removed and replaced with an exact duplicate.
Whatever their sensations, each of the people on the Pallas Athena felt the hyperjump in their own way, and knew that they were now in the Borealis system.
Current pace: 47741
| Oct. 30 |
Oct. 31 |
1
2308
2000
(1667) |
2
4011
4000
(3333) |
3
5439
6000
(5000) |
4
6460
8000
(6667) |
5
8461
10000
(8333) |
6
11809
12000
(10000) |
7
12204
14000
(11667) |
8
13636
16000
(13333) |
9
14664
18000
(15000) |
10
16176
20000
(16667) |
11
~18000
22000
(18333) |
12
18663
24000
(20000) |
13
23590
26000
(21667) |
14
23801
28000
(23333) |
15
25027
30000
(25000) |
16
32000
(26667) |
17
34000
(28333) |
18
36000
(30000) |
19
27414
38000
(31667) |
20
32453
40000
(33333) |
21
33419
42000
(35000) |
22
44000
(36667) |
23
46000
(38333) |
24
48000
(40000) |
25
50000
(41667) |
26
DONE
(43333) |
27
DONE
(45000) |
28
DONE
(46667) |
29
DONE
(48333) |
30
DONE
(50000) |
Dec. 1 |
Dec. 2 |
Dec. 3 |
|
|
tired