Book 5: Chapter 15: Imposter Syndrome
Bill
March 2337
In Virt
Iignored the ping as another message dropped into my queue. It was very un-Bob-like behavior, ignoring messages. Even more un-Bill-like, come to that. We normally couldn’t concentrate, knowing there was an unread email or text. But I’d been frame-jacked as high as I could manage and still get anything done for the last six months, personal time. The offhand comment from Hugh about the cosmological constant had opened a floodgate of possibilities.
Two opposing scalar fields, almost but not quite canceling each other, produced a measurable and very tiny value for the constant. The small discrepancy in values was because one of the fields was slightly increased by the expansion of the universe while the other was slightly decreased. At least that’s what my math was telling me.
But the important thing, the truly massively critical consequence of this, was that there was a lot more vacuum energy available than we’d been able to extract with Casimir generators. You just had to know it was there, and how to extract it from one of the opposing fields.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know how. Yet. But if the numbers were right, I’d have access to enough negative energy to expand and stabilize wormholes. Actually, I’d have enough negative energy to rip apart a spiral arm if I got careless, so baby steps were definitely called for.
Another ping. I couldn’t actually be that popular, could I? Maybe it was someone’s birthday? With an internal chuckle, I decided it was time to rejoin the ex-human race. I needed a coffee anyway.
I jacked down to replicant normal and pulled up my in-basket. And noticed right away a whole lot of messages from Garfield, all marked urgent. Great. Same fan, more shit. On the other hand, I must have been really frame-jacked way up. There were only about sixteen hours of messages backlogged in total. Still …