Schild's Ladder

"There’s a concept in real-life physics called false vacuum decay… Let’s say the universe is a room, and the vacuum – the lowest energy state, just empty space – is the floor. It is possible that the vacuum around us that we live in is not the true floor of the universe that we’re standing on, but something like a blanket; and if it rips, which could happen through a particularly high-energy event, that floor will collapse into what’s underneath it, and everything above it will fall down too. I know this is a little hard to wrap your head around. One way it’s often described is: imagine the beginning of the universe is the top of a hill. It’s a really high-energy state with lots of potential – it’s hot, with not a lot of structure yet, but so much could happen. And a ball, which in this analogy is basically the laws of physics of the universe, rolls down off the top of this hill, and you would expect it to hit the bottom, but maybe along this hill, there’s a little dip, and then a rise, and the ball gets stuck in that dip and doesn’t finish rolling all the way down. That’s a false vacuum, like the false blanket floor in my earlier metaphor. And if someone were to come along and flick that ball – which in physics would be a very energetic event (people were worried the Large Hadron Collider would do it – it wouldn’t ever have) – it might flick that ball out of the little dent it’s stuck in, and keep it rolling down the hill. What does that mean for us? Well, it would mean that probably the laws of physics we live in would change. Not because the laws of physics are fake or made up, but because we live in one possible configuration of a larger, supersymmetric physics. Imagine origami paper: basic physics is the sheet you start with. You can fold it up into a lot of different shapes. We live in one of those shapes, and if there were false vacuum decay, the paper would change into a different shape. That would occur in a bubble, starting at wherever this event occurred, spreading out at the speed of light. So if this has already happened in the universe, we would never see it coming. It would just hit us one day, and we would all be destroyed. There’s been a lot of debate about whether new existence could come into being on the far side of the false vacuum – but that doesn’t really matter to us anyway. Schild’s Ladder begins in the future, where they have solved physics. They’ve figured everything out; they know how it all works. People in this world routinely upload their brains to computers so they can run super-fast and observe weird processes happening at incredibly low timescales. Some people on a space station in this universe are doing a physics experiment, and it does not go the way they expect – which is weird because they’ve figured out physics – and it triggers false vacuum decay. Since their consciousness is running really, really fast, they’re like, ‘Oh, man, we really screwed up.’ That’s a compelling scene, because they know they’re about to be consumed, and they have nanoseconds to decide what to do about it. The result is a bubble of new universe growing inside our galaxy. For purposes of the book – I don’t know if there’s physics behind it – it only expands at two-thirds the speed of light. So if you live on a planet twenty light-years from the bubble, in thirty years, your planet’s going to be destroyed. The only thing you can do is get on a spaceship and fly away faster than two-thirds of the speed of light, and it looks like humanity is just going to have to do this forever: we’re going to be running away from this bubble for all time, which kind of sucks. And along the way, our homes are going to be fed into it, and we’ll have to make new homes and abandon them, and that sucks too. The book picks up the main character arriving at a station that flies just above the surface of the bubble. It’s flying away from the bubble just slightly faster than the bubble’s expanding, and they study the bubble of new universe. This alien universe has provoked two very different factions. One says we have no right to try and stop it, because there’s something new in there. We can’t destroy it, we can’t even arrest its spread, because for all we know, there’s life going on in there. And then another faction, which I think is much more relatable to most of us, says that this is a natural disaster, like a tsunami, and we have a responsibility to stop it. They’re working on a way to collapse this new universe, or at least freeze it. Being nerds in a Greg Egan book, the people on different sides of this debate care so passionately about these issues that they see the other side as monsters. You can imagine an abortion debate, basically, over an entire cosmos. To give human drama, the protagonist and his lover are on opposite sides of this divide. As it becomes more and more likely that there is a way to stop this bubble, the two sides become more and more violent in their disagreement. This goes beyond them fighting each other, and towards attempts to destroy or not destroy this expanding new universe. And if you’re wondering what’s actually in there, you do get to find out, and it is very weird. It is maybe the most alien you can make an alien invasion story. I don’t think it’s possible to understand what’s going on inside this new universe without higher mathematics. Greg Egan does his best to explain it to you, but you’re basically engaging with it in a poet’s way: you grasp the emotional logic. It’s an extreme point in how weird you can make something and still care about it – it’s easy to care about the destruction of everything you know and love, but how do you weigh that against something you don’t understand at all and probably aren’t trained to think about, this whole new cosmos and creation? Can humans do that? So I admire it as a long shot at the far extremes of human emotion and intellect. It’s not a tough book to read at all. It’s not complex on a linguistic level. I think you can read it and understand it fine, but the ideas in it are so big and weird that I got a lot out of it. I really liked it. MotherHorseEyes , like the SCP Foundation wiki I mentioned earlier, is basically internet art. But unlike the SCP wiki, which is many people working together, it’s outsider art: a guy showed up on Reddit, and he just started telling his story in comments on other threads. People were annoyed: why are you commenting on this thread about football or a celebrity’s dress with your weird rambling? But then people started putting them together, and it was a shockingly coherent story. I don’t think anyone’s heard from this guy in years. He basically wrote it all and then disappeared. I suspect this was a creative binge: I don’t think he had anything outlined; he probably started with the first little snippet and just jammed from there. And at some point in the story, you can see him saying, ‘Oh, boy, I need to pull everything together and make it all fit and bring it to an ending’ – which he does. I really admire it. It’s like a tightrope act where you don’t have the tightrope when you start; you’re throwing it ahead of you, like a grappling hook, and just running across it and hoping you can throw another tightrope before you run out. The premise is that in the 1960s, the CIA gave people huge amounts of LSD. This really happened. But what, as far as I know, didn’t happen in our reality, is that some of the people on LSD created with their bodies these things called flesh interfaces, which are weird and so much like the tunnels to the Upside Down in Stranger Things that people thought it was viral marketing for Stranger Things , because it came out shortly before the first season. You can go into these interfaces and go somewhere else, and come back very weird and screwed up. That’s it: that’s the whole premise. You give people a bunch of drugs, they make portals, and people can go through them. The rest starts out as a series of secret histories about where these portals were created and what was done with them. There’s one about American soldiers finding one on Iwo Jima during World War II . There’s one about the North Koreans building a giant underwater one with whales… It’s a steady, very ADHD-friendly series of tiny story fragments, where every time you think you’re bored, it goes to a new one and introduces something new. Like many people, my attention span is shot. I cannot get through a chapter of a book without checking my notifications or switching browser tabs. So I’m really curious about stories that do manage to keep my attention. Ironically, I think now the best way to experience it is to find a YouTube video where someone just reads the whole thing, and put that on while you do dishes or whatever. It goes to some very weird places. In addition to the initial story, which is just a narrator describing things that happened, you get first person stories from an alcoholic in a halfway house, who remembers spending a summer with a parent who had horse eyes, thus the mother horse eyes of the title; and things from back in pre-history; and then a near future narrative where a good chunk of the human population lives their whole life in these beds that keep them clean while they do virtual reality stuff… And it’s implied that this technology was derived from the flesh interfaces, and maybe has a sinister purpose. So, in addition to being great – and I hope you’re convinced you should check this out because it’s creepy and amazing – this is the kind of alien invasion story where we invite the aliens in. We create the invasion, and we fail to stop it because of our human weakness, the same way we fail to do anything about climate change. I think this is a very frustrating part of alien invasion stories for many readers: the invasion begins, and people don’t believe it, or there are lies, or there’s a cult that says the aliens are here to help us. Unfortunately, we found out over the past five years that’s exactly what would happen. People would latch onto lies and do the wrong thing or fail to act. MotherHorseEyes isn’t really about that – it’s about creepy LSD stuff and dealing with addiction and all kinds of other weird stuff – but it contains that truth: that if the alien invasion were slow enough and sweet enough, we would not stop it. It’s the same reason that I don’t go out and try to start a revolution, despite seeing many things wrong with the world. I have air conditioning, I have Seamless delivering food, I have LEGO sets, a laptop, and streaming services. I’m getting enough treats to not do anything. If an alien invasion gave us treats, we would probably let it happen – which is a running theme in a lot of these stories."