Microstory 796: Bower

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A c-brane, which is a particular class of universe, is only as large as it needs to be in order to accommodate its inhabitants. This is the cause of so much strife in the Maramon’s brane, for they were never meant to travel beyond their solar system, but something went wrong. Capitalizing on this idea, however, of an extremely limited scope universe, a group of some very powerful people decided to build their own universe. Now, normally, natural universes have near unlimited scope. They’re created by some kind of cosmological expansion event, like a big bang, and grow larger from there, as time progresses. C-branes, on the other hand, are created by the force of creativity. They manifest through imagination or dreams, and more often than not collapse upon their own instability. If no one continues believing in them, then they won’t exist. In the history of the bulkverse, which is the collective dimensional substructure all universes, no one has gotten together to make one from scratch, but these people managed to figure it out. Deemed The Bower House, it was designed to confine the most notoriously dangerous people from all over the multiverse. Most universes, including standard natural ones, have incredibly spectacular physical laws, which can be exploited to accomplish fantastical goals. In some, death can be subverted through transference to new substrates. In some, objects can be moved from great distances, through telekinesis. Some have slower aging, or faster-than-light travel, or even demons. The Bower House has none of these things. An individual transferred to this prison universe from their own will find themselves completely without whatever special abilities, or technologies, they were able to use before. There is no electricity, and no superpowers, and death is final. The idea here was to have a place to incarcerate the worst criminals in the bulkverse, who have used some unfair advantage against others. It is the smallest c-brane ever, with its sky being a low-hanging firmament, rather than light waving through empty space. It is impossible to escape from the Bower House, because there is nowhere to go, and no technology capable of creating a way out. Yet somehow, one woman found a way, and then all hell broke loose.