I think it’s about time I talk about the universe where bulkverse travel
originated. Right now, I won’t say a whole lot about how they first ventured
out into the bulk, but I’ll give an overview of the universe itself, and why
they felt the impulse to explore beyond their borders. The humans of this
universe originated on multiple planets simultaneously, and destroyed them
all. Every global civilization did so much damage to the environment that
they had to leave, and settle on new worlds, except for one of them, which
didn’t survive their apocalypse. This was how the survivors found each
other. They all had faster-than-light travel, but two of them independently
invented something they would later call an infinity drive. It allowed them
to jump anywhere in the universe instantaneously. It wasn’t technically
instantaneous, but with a little bit of time travel, it felt that way, and
it resulted in that. In order to travel from one universe to another, one
must be able to pierce the membranes that hold them together. These
membranes are semipermeable, like cellular membranes, so microscopic tears
open up all the time, which is what allows bulk energy to leak through.
That’s not the hard part, though. The hard part is navigation, which is why
bulk travel is so rare. The precursor to this technology is the infinity
drive, which pierces the universe’s membrane about halfway, allowing a
vessel to slip in between the layers of that membrane, and slide wherever
the crew wants to go. Even here, time operates as a spatial dimension,
rather than a temporal dimension, which is what makes it feel instantaneous.
Travelers can go wherever they want to, and arrive whenever they want to,
even in the past—though both cultures decided long before the technology was
viable that time travel was irrational, and dangerous. They only used it to
explore, map, and seek out others in present-day.
In order to find the best new world to call home, those with the infinity
drives dispatched probe factory ships all over their galaxy, and a little
beyond. They dropped their probes in key locations, which automatically went
around, and started generating a map of the universe. These probes detected
the other wanderers and settlers, which served to bring everyone together
under one umbrella, as a megacivilization. They pooled their knowledge, and
unanimously agreed to do things better than their ancestors did. They found
more efficient ways to live, which protected planets, and the wildlife upon
them. They focused heavily on gathering as much information about the
universe as they could, while making little impact on it. They sent more
probes, now even further out in the universe, but encountered no other
lifeforms. Everyone was here, and everyone was either human, or descended
from humans. They were disappointed and bored because of this. How could
they be so alone? Why were humans the only intelligent species, and how was
it even possible that they evolved separately on multiple planets? This is
what drove them to expand the scope of the infinity drive, and explore other
universes. They sent one more batch of probes, this time completely through
the membrane, and into the outer bulk. Powered by bulk energy, and designed
to last forever, they were essentially aimless; just floating through the
bulk, collecting whatever data they could find, and sending it back home. It
took millennia to synthesize this data, so a real and usable map could be
drawn from it. Once they were ready, the crew of a ship with an upgraded
infinity drive called The Besananta took off. They didn’t get far.
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