Jump

"We have passed the secondary litigation limit. All systems clear, sim-lawyers green, fusion power according to spec, cores withdrawn. We're set to jump."

I watched the complex navigation diagram on the screen. The ship had just passed a dotted surface a few diameters out from Atlantis, marking the range where litigation costs would be below a pre-set level. Ahead there was only empty space, with a few highly annotated dots denoting detected pieces of space debris. Time to change that.

"Roger. I'm starting up Oscar. Charge up the ram". Interfacing with Oscar is an unusual experience. Compared to other AI it is not a great conversationalist, it is nearly a huge expert system. But when it comes to handling the complexities of space-time it is brilliant. It is not just that it can superpose itself to study all possible paths and actions, it is also quite creative in how to use the quirks of the higgsram and space-time foam to get the most out of a jump. I'm just its handler, not the boss during the jump.

"The ram is blazing. We have enough charge now to blast a 10 hole if you want."

"Fine. Oscar, are you there yet?"

"Yes, Peter, I can feel the foam. It is somewhat weylish right now, but we can isotropize it by retro-cheating"

Not even I know quite what Oscar means, at least not on an intuitive level. "In that case, initiate countdown."

The jump is quick. A warning siren throughout the ship, a countdown so everybody has the time to find a place to buckle down (as if that would help in a mis-jump). Then Oscar goes online, into the realms ordinary humans cannot see. For a brief moment I'm given the vision through my interface of the space-time itself as Oscar sees it through the ram: a labyrinthine four-dimensional foam of wormholes, topoi and virtual particles that both exist and non-exist at the same time. Oscar probes all the possibilities with the tip of the ram, exploiting quantum interactions and the lack of causality on this level to find a potential wormhole. It is as much an art as a science, and Oscar is quite good at it. One weirdly knotted hypersurface becomes real, and gigajoules suddenly pour into it. The vision blurs as ram field return space-time to the state it was in during the Big Bang, and the wormhole explodes outwards at the speed of light.

Another visualisation, this time macroscopic. Ahead the stars scatter away like a school of frightened fishes, and the wormhole rushes towards us. In the visualisation concentric spheres start to turn inside out, and we feel the tidal forces as we squeeze through. First a pressure as everything (especially our internal organs) try to move together as closely as possible. A styrofoam cup some idiot left behind loudly crumbles. Then a feeling of suction as everything instead tries to expand in all directions (styrofoam pieces everywhere). The spheres have turned inside out, the starfield is normal. Behind us a 9 kilometre large wormhole collapses in less than a millisecond, releasing its energy as gravity waves and returning to the imaginary land of the quantum manifolds.

"Great jump, Oscar."