Thursday, June 17, 2021

Microstory 1649: Birth of a Brane

This will be the last new universe that I tell you about. The next fifty little stories will give you some more information about the previously discussed universes, in the same order. They may just contain more details that I didn’t mention before, or specific stories that, in some way, encapsulate what it’s like to live in these places. I’ve talked about the Maramon before, and told you that they come from a universe called Ansutah, but I’ve yet to describe that universe for you. It’s one of the smaller ones, and I mean that literally. Natural branes are infinitely large, meaning that they keep expanding as time within the membrane persists. Where one ends is synonymous with when it ends, because the size is a function of time more than it is space. C-branes operate differently, however. They’re only as large as they need to be in order to fit the story within, and to satisfy its characters. If said characters have no need to travel to the next star over, then that star will not exist. They may think that it exists. They may even be able to observe it. But it will not really be there. It will be a hologram, and only when something changes about their future will that universe expand in order to allow them to go there. Until that happens, this hologram is being projected on the inside of the membrane. It’s like a big wall that would kill you if you crashed into it, but as I said, that doesn’t matter, because it’s impossible to reach that wall. The universe will grow at least as fast as you can fly through space. Unless you’re in Ansutah. This is because Ansutah is not entirely a c-brane. It’s not entirely natural either, but it is complicated, and its limitations provide for a terrible little exception, which forced the residents to reassess their values.

Salmonverse is both a natural brane, and a c-brane, because of The Superintendent’s access to it, and his uses for it. At one point, a spaceship left a rogue planet called Durus, bound for a return trip to Earth. This ship was only designed to accommodate a small crew, and maybe a few passengers. It just wasn’t that big, because it didn’t originally need to be. Due to some socio-political issues, the crew decided to adapt the ship, so that it could fit dozens more people. They couldn’t build extensions, because the engines wouldn’t be able to handle more mass. They installed pocket dimension generators, which gave them extra space, without making the ship proper any larger. Something went wrong in one of these pockets. A girl was born with the power to make the pocket grow, and a boy was born who could conjure entire beings. Now, even a pocket dimension generator has limits, so the only solution—if they couldn’t simply put a stop to the growth—was to separate the pocket from the ship, and indeed, Salmonverse itself. This was how Ansutah was born. It should have continued expanding from there, but the girl was taken from the world just before the connection was destroyed. This started causing problems for the ship, and also stunted the growth of Ansutah, limiting them to a very tiny solar system, and a wall that actually could be reached. The boy, meanwhile, continued to breathe life into the world, and these Maramon started to procreate on their own, and over the millennia, the population rose to the billions. They didn’t know that their universe was limited, or that they would collide with the membrane in an attempt to explore the stars. Once they learned this, they grew angry, but it didn’t stop them from propagating the species. As they were hunting for a workaround, the population continued to climb, making their efforts all the more vital.

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