Unintended Consequences

I don’t get along with myself.

The greatest feat of astroengineering yet devised is the energy bridge. Picture a woman in a long, trailing dress. Suddenly, she grabs handfuls of cloth and reels in the train, compressing the cloth into folds. This says something of how the device works, only the woman is really a-battery-of-suns-in-a-Dyson-sphere-swarm and the dress is really the-fabric-of-space-time-itself.

The effect of the untold quadrillions of dollars invested by the U.F.P. is that you can point the gymbaled attractor in any spherical direction, and reel in that section of space like so much whole cloth. Then your puny spaceship can jet across on last-millennium’s NERVAs. Interstellar travel of practically infinite distance, faster than light.

A problem for Physics? Absolutely. In fact, there were some comic chronological capers involving the project director himself and his own daughter, which are too bawdy for official channels. Suffice to say, the universe doesn’t give a pulsar’s ass about self-consistency, and chronopol had its work cut out for it determining such issues as what timeline should be used for claims of statutory rape, and whether it’s legal to steal money from yourself.