Death's End

It really did seem as if the pilot should have been wrong. Everyone on the ship was pressed against their seat by hypergravity, which indicated that the ship was in the process of extreme acceleration. It was visually impossible for a passenger to tell whether the ship was moving in space because all celestial bodies that could act as reference points were too far away, so they couldn’t see parallax in a short time frame. However, the ship’s navigation system could detect even tiny amounts of motion and acceleration; it couldn’t be wrong.

Revelation was under hypergravity, but had no acceleration. Some force had nailed it to this point in space.

“There is acceleration,” said 白 Ice weakly. “But the space in this region is flowing in the opposite direction, thus canceling out our motion.”

“The space is flowing? Where to?”

“There, of course.”

白 Ice couldn’t lift his hand, which was now too heavy. But everyone knew where he meant. Revelation sank into a deathlike silence. Normally, hypergravity made people feel safe, as though they were escaping from danger under the embrace of some protective power. But now it seemed as oppressive and suffocating as a tomb.

“Open a channel to Command,” 白 Ice said. “There’s no time, so we’ll treat this as our formal report.”

“Channel open.”

“General, you once said, ‘I don’t think it’s anything. There’s nothing inside.’ You were right. That slip really wasn’t anything, and contained nothing. It’s only space, just like the space around us, which isn’t anything and contains nothing. But there’s a difference: It’s two-dimensional. It’s not a block, but a slice. A slice without thickness.”

“Hadn’t it evaporated?”

“The protective field around it evaporated. The force field acted like packaging that separated the two-dimensional space from the three-dimensional space. But now the two are in direct contact. Do you remember what Blue Space and Gravity saw?”

No one answered, but they all remembered: the four-dimensional space falling into three dimensions, like a waterfall off a cliff.

“Just as four-dimensional space collapses into three dimensions, three-dimensional space can collapse into two dimensions, with one dimension folding and curling into the quantum realm. The area of that slice of two-dimensional space—it only has area—will rapidly expand, causing more space to collapse…. We’re now in space that is falling toward two dimensions, and ultimately, the entire Solar System will follow. In other words, the Solar System will turn into a painting with no thickness.”

“Can we escape it?”

“Escaping this is like rowing a boat above a waterfall. Unless we exceed a certain escape velocity, we’ll tumble over the cliff. It’s like tossing a pebble up from the ground: No matter how high you throw the rock, it will eventually fall back down. The entire Solar System is within the zone of collapse, and anyone trying to escape must reach escape velocity.”

“What is the escape velocity?”

“I’ve computed it four separate times. Pretty sure I got it right.”

“What is it?!”

Everyone aboard Revelation and Alaska held their breaths and listened to this final calculation as representatives of humanity.

白 Ice calmly announced his judgment. “Lightspeed.”

The navigation system showed that Revelation was now moving in the opposite direction from its heading. It started by moving slowly toward the two-dimensional space, but gradually accelerated. The ship’s drive was still powering Full Ahead. This would at least slow down the rate of the ship’s fall and delay the inevitable.