Chapter 12

“How much power does it take to create a pearl?” Mithra asked.

“It varies on the size of the bubble universe. Bigger takes more, but it has an energy equivalent of about 15 tons of mass to form a 1mm wide universe. The actual pearl, the three dimensional doorway between that universe and ours is minimal.”

“You make universes!”

“Just little ones. I made one universe that only electromagnetic waves can exist in,” I conjured my chromed steel ray gun, “When I pull the trigger, it forces one tenth of a microgram into that pearl, which becomes coherent radiation.”

“How powerful is it?”

“It’s about 2.5kwh of power in each blast.”

“Can it be more powerful?”

“Sure, I made one that fired 1 gram bullets into a similar pearl. It is just under 25 gigawatts per blast. It’s actually mounted to this craft, as a defensive weapon.”

“I really want to see that fire, but I’ve been thinking, do pearls, that is the three dimensional gates, have mass?”

“Kind of a hard question to answer. I usually wrap them in a protective layer to keep them from having random things pass through them. Why do you ask?”

“The light speed limit is the result of mass. Massless things move through space at the speed of light. We theorized that negative mass will go faster than light, but if something is massless, and not an electromagnetic wave, could it go faster than light?”

I conjured a pearl that wasn’t connected to anything. My power removed the covering, and we both leaned in to look at it. It was nearly perfectly transparent, we could see thru the tiny 1cm orb, betraying its existence only by a slight visual disruption. He picked it up, feeling that it had no weight, but a sense of momentum.

“Your fingers will sink into the pearl for only a little bit, the interior is only 1mm, so only items under 1mm can actually enter the pocket universe.”

“This one doesn’t convert things to energy?”

“No, it had the same rules as this universe.”

“What’s the point of this?” he asked setting it down.

“An indestructible pressure valve.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s the best use I’ve come up with so far. It was an experiment. Anything going on in one side, is squeezed down to a 1mm opening. So no matter the pressure and flow inward, only a stream of 1mm can exit, but it exits expanded to the 1cm width of the pearl.”

“That’s hard to wrap my brain around.”

“What’s hard to wrap my brain around is that any kind of universal constant I can imagine, that doesn’t violate entropy, can be imbued into a pocket universe. For example, the air supply on this Spaceship. It pumps all the air through a pearl that has an internal universe where nitrogen and oxygen are the only elements that can exist. Everything else converts to electrons, which are collected to run the ship’s ventilation systems, power the heating and cooling systems, and the rest of the environmental systems.

“The more crew, the faster it works. If I let it run on its own, just the random VOC’s in the air would be enough to keep the system slowly running.”

“That seems impossible.”

“I agree, but it works. It keeps the air clean, and requires no maintenance, or filters to replace.”

“Ok, before you blow my mind anymore, imagine for a moment a pearl, smaller than an electron. You conjure it with a velocity of a hundred light years an hour. Does it have mass? Does it rip a hole in spacetime? Does it go shooting off and we get to that twin of Earth in under an hour?”

“I don’t know, but I think we can try it. I can always keep the second pearl in a conjuring slot, so no residual radiation leaks back during flight.”

“That’s why I want it tiny, reduce impact with interstellar gas, and keep anything it does hit from coming thru.”

“Do you have a preference on the interior dimensions?”

“If interior mass affects the exterior, it should be either empty or tiny.”

I picked up the pearl on the table, and filled the interior with a 1mm gold ball, then I handed it to him. “I just filled this with gold, does it feel heavier?”

“No, but it still has this odd inertia to it, when I move it.”

“It’s caused by the smaller inside, bigger outside shape. I don’t have an explanation, but that variable always results in the same effect. Equal sized pearls don’t have that problem, neither do those pearls that are bigger on the inside.”

“Ok, that is strange. So how tiny can you go?”

“I don’t know, let’s find out,” I told him, closing my eyes, and concentrating.

I just needed a pocket universe just big enough for my power to pass thru to the inside. It’s outside needed to be smaller than the smallest bit of particle I could resolve down to with my power. My power firmly refused the creation of such a tiny particle. The smallest I could actually achieve was the size of a single quark.

I conjured a small diamondillium orb to try to hold the pearl, but it slowly fell thru the compressed carbon crystals, failing to interact with them. I stored it.

“Alright, I have a quark sized pocket universe, but I had to store it. I couldn’t hold it in anything, as it is nonreactive to the matter around it.”

“That’s great! That means that it’s affected by the shape of spacetime as it is twisted by gravity, but immune to particle interactions.”

“So do I fire it off from here?” I asked.

“No, let’s go as far out as you’ve reached so far.”

I stored and conjured us into interstellar space. “Ok, we are now in interstellar space between Sirius and Procyon. There is another spot farther out, but it’s closer to a local star system, here we are more than 10 light years from Earth, and nothing within 2.5 lightyears of us.”

“Ok, don’t point towards HD 70642. Pick a random direction away from Earth, and away from any nearby stars.”

“What speed do I conjure at?”

“Try 1.5 times light speed. Conjure a radio beacon after a few seconds and we can measure the distance.”

“My reach is over 800,000km remember? I’ll know it’s exact speed when it leaves my sphere of awareness.”