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Impossibility Engine

I might use it as a title of a book, so don't use it as a title. James Robilliard.

Object in Ships

The Impossibility Engine is a device used to speed up a local time bubble to 8x normal speed. It is a large steel coloured cuboid that is similar in shape to a large refrigerator on its back. From the outside it just looks like a block of steel and weighs about the same. Only three people in the universe know how it works and one of them is a planetary EI called Prime, who manufactures it without human help. All three people are part owners of REC. Anyone who’s tried to cut any deeper that 2.6cm’s has found that the device stops working and is nothing more than an entirely inert lump of steel coated iron that mysteriously weights less than it did before it was cut. As these engines are exceptionally expensive, about that of a small ship, and so not many have been opened. All attempts to back-engineer one have been an expensive failure.

Imp Engines

The REC are believed to be able to produce these engines in any size, but only manufacture two sizes at two prices. The size of the IE dictates the size of the field it can encompass but nothing else. The smaller engine is used on smaller ships and has a copper shell, rather than steel. Mysteriously, the copper shell does not oxidise unless it is cut into in a way that kills the engine. As it is a smaller Impossibility Engine it has become to be known as an Imp Engine.

Control

Starships place their Impossibility Engine in a magnetic field. The size and shape of the time bubble is directly proportional to the size and shape of the magnetic field. The time multiplier is directly proportional to the intensity of the magnetic field.

Interference

Electrical current used to generate the magnetic field, AC vs DC is irrelevant in all aspects except for interference. Small spinning magnets around the main field generator encode a ‘frequency’ to the time bubble. If two ships run the same frequency then they can merge bubbles and maintain their time multiplier. If ships (such as those at war with each other), are running different frequencies, then both bubbles collapse returning the ships to normal time. Two typical war ships will interfere with each other’s bubbles at about 100km separation, even though the time bubble only surrounds the ship. Frequency encoding and interference begins before bubbles form, therefore it is possible to put out interference while the engine is ‘off’.

Inner Bubble

There is an inner bubble that is always the inverse of the outer bubble. As it is within the outer bubble it therefore always maintains normal time. It is possible to throw the outer bubble around the fusion engines so from the outside, the observers sees the engines burn for 1 hour while the engines in fact burn for 8 (traveling further in the same external time). The inner bubble can be within the engines but around the crew so the crew will only experience 1 hour. The inner bubble is ‘inertially detached’ from the outer bubble so the crew experience weightlessness.

History

All things in the universe, including conventional rockets, are restricted to Newtonian physics of Speed = Distance / Time. Most methods of crossing the vast distances between the starts within the lifetime of an astronaut, actually involve playing with the distance element. Worm holes in space bring to far locations next to each other so in the same time, a large distance can be travelled, giving the relative very high speed. The Impossibility Engine actually plays with the time element. Scientists of the day formed a consensus that such a thing was impossible and began sarcastically to call the REC Time Engine 1 the Impossibility Engine. The REC business actually liked this name and copyrighted it, and once it was proven to work, the name stuck.

The prototype was tested as follows. A tuned rocket engine was given 1kg of fuel, which it took 1 hour to burn and travelled 10km in 1 hour with a deactivated Impossibility Engine attached to it. The tuned rocket was then given another 1kg of fuel. The IE was activated and programmed to deactivate once it no longer felt acceleration. In 10 minutes a sausage like stretched image of the rocket was observed where it travelled 10km before deactivating. On inspection, the full 1kg of fuel was burned. The first run was repeated to the same result. A clock placed on the rocket had said after each run that the engine had burned for an hour. It was concluded that on each run, the engine had burned the same fuel for the same time and travelled the same distance. When the Impossibility Engine was activated, the rocket experienced more time relative to the rest of the universe and so where s=d/t, the time was a tenth so the speed was ten times faster to an observer.

Canicott Tec worked with REC to speed up the relative speed of computers and developed AI’s specifically able to communicate to a regular computer from within a bubble. Version 1 of the Engine was exclusively used around probes and a law was passed banning humans from being allowed inside a bubble (repealed at a later date). Fiction was abound with tales of people getting stuck in a bubble and finding themselves three hundred years older, insane from boredom but somehow still alive, despite not having any food for 300 years (poor writing but that kind of writing is still popular amongst Belters). Resulting from this, another law stated that all Impossibility Engines must have a deactivation button on them so if you get stuck in a bubble, you can escape.

Later testing noticed that there was a very thin inner bubble that was always inverse that of the exterior bubble and therefore always at normal time (a bubble at half speed inside a bubble at double speed has a relative speed the same as the outside observer). The bubble was grown to encompass the inner workings of the ship but to leave the engines on the outside. The net effect was seal a crew outside the G of the outside universe so all inner bubbles have zero G.

Secret Keepers

There are only three people that know how they work, all in the Robilliard family. No one knows who the three are except the EI called Prime. Prime runs the factory so no other intelligence is involved; not even AI.