Excerpt: The Gemini Encyclopedia

(Note: if this looks like an infodump, it is. See the synopsis.)

Introduction

It is, more than anything else, the discovery of underspace that shaped the human race into what it is today. Before underspace travel, mankind was confined to what would eventually be called the Sol system, the very frontier of civilization comprising a few lonely moons of Saturn. The capability of man to extend his reach to the stars was limited by the technology of interstellar travel, which, while capable of depositing a colony or two onto an alien planet after generations in transit, was insufficient for the needs of Earth’s empire. It was a great blow to humanity’s collective ego that it could find no way to surmount the barrier of extreme distance, and as the number of uncolonized moons and planetoids native to the Sol system dwindled, it was with relief that the scientists of Earth stumbled across the technology that would introduce humankind to the stars.

It was called the “psychopompos boson” by those physicists who sported purple proclivities, while in lay environments it was referred to simply as “the particle.” It was an artificial particle, emitted unexpectedly from the decay of a number of more massive ones, and decays again, in turn, if it is not captured and stored properly. Its discovery was, as any good scientific find is, entirely accidental, but the good use to which it could be put was soon recognized. The psychopompos boson (charge +1, spin 1, nonzero mass), the scientists quickly noticed, vanishes from existence when accelerated to relativistic velocities – more exactly, it pushes the spacetime immediately around itself into another spacetime, another universe, which came to be known to the citizens of Earth at large as “underspace.” Of course, it wasn’t long before someone proposed that it might be possible to have something tag along with the particle: gather a whole bunch of them together and send them all off at once, and see what happens to any macroscopic object that follows shortly thereafter. Naturally, the speculation proved to be well-founded, or else the particle’s discovery wouldn’t have had the impact on humanity that it did.

And so one thing after another was sent off to chase our guiding particle into the great unknown. A watch, a tin can, a basketball. And they all vanished, one after another, into the black expanse that our new discovery had opened the doorway to. To their initial disappointment, underspace is quite empty, completely bereft of any matter or color, a true void – but they were appeased to discover that it paid to send a camera into the black, for scant minutes after sending the first robotic voyager into underspace, it reported back with an unexpected image of Earth from several million miles away. It is impossible for the human mind – even those most brilliant minds present at the event – to comprehend the significance of that moment, that birth of an era, when, in the time it took for our planet’s sun to rise, frying the camera’s circuitry with its radiation, all shackles binding our race to her fell free; humanity was at last no longer constrained by distance, as the science of underspace travel was born. One more inconvenience levied against us by the universe was remedied, and man reached across the galaxy.