As far back as the twenty-first century it was suspected that space and time were simply emergent phenomena of a more complex underlying process, like the earth's crust floating on its mantle. And three decades ago, that layer revealed itself by accident during a routine Higgs collision experiment at the Massive Heavy Boson Collider (MHBC) at Huineng, China. Due to an aberrant fluctuation affecting the normal phase shifting of entangled parameters, exotic tachyon particles interacting with heavy neutrinos, post-collision, produced an unheard of form of energy not predicted by causal string-field theory, that is to say, the equations don't allow for its possibility. The experiments were repeated with the dials set at the same positions, but with only occasional successes. Apparently, the interdependence and degree of complexity of calcuable variables are sensitive to factors of which we are not yet aware. Nonetheless, a window had opened onto a homogeneous immaterial realm previously unimagined.
This mysterious nether world was dubbed Mind Energy by the media; it fell into the same category as Big Bang, Black Hole, and Cosmic Fabric. Scientists working in the field thought of it in varying ways, from 'the great abyss' to 'string soup' to 'Pluto's basement.' But the most apt consolidation presently in vogue, compliments of Professor Herman Melville, is 'potential well of pre-archetypical generative cognition functors.' In casual discussions, however, it's referred to simply as The Deep.
For the past twenty years Doctor Melville has led a team exploring the possibilities of using the Deep as an ocean on which to traverse the universe. They've been ensconced in a warren of labs under Mount Hood, not so much for the shielding from potentially disruptive influences--cosmic and gamma rays--but rather for the isolation from the distractions of society.
Basic questions had to be answered. What's the nature of the Deep? Does it possess physical properties, properties like those we're used to in the real world? What IS the real world? Is the Deep devoid of any kind of metrizable landmarks, and if so, how do we navigate, how do we determine where we are? It was realized early that the ordinary questions asked of ordinary space would probably not be worth pursuing. New unimagined processes--if so there were--needed new unimagined questions. The investigating team had to put themselves into a totally different headspace, one more conducive to understanding this vast sea of potential.
The Deep has no underpinnings or cause; it was not produced or emergent or fabricated. It exists, but only in the sense that we humans are aware of it. Those with a more philosophical bent thought of it as the Unconscious, a boundless expanse wherein chaotic raw psychic material dwelled, waiting for the consciousness of all living things to use it, give it order, purpose, manifestation. In the scientific community it was seen as the source of creativity, whatever that may mean in the framework of scientific endeavor. As no structure or forces were perceivable, the question of dimension had no significance.
However, beyond considerations as to its nature and import, the practical question took precedence: Was it something that could be traveled through, in some sense akin to traveling through ordinary spacetime? When we move through ordinary space, we also move through the quantum realm, they interpenetrate and support mutually. One gives life to the other, symbiotically. But, is Mind Energy also immersed and inseparable? Is it one with the others throughout? How else could we know of it if it was not somehow connected?
The cognition functor mapping topological spaces and continuous maps to linear spaces and transformations represented the action of creation. That much was understood in the abstract. But unless a metric could be imposed on this amorphous nothingness, nobody was going anywhere.
It was a thursday, six months ago, sitting on a bench in the light drizzle, in the garden outside the Mount Hood facility, deep in thought, careless of the weather, when Doctor Melville saw what needed to be done. Later that afternoon he called a meeting of his team. It was time to push what they'd accomplished thus far to the next step. He asked for volunteers, but only from those who were single; the danger was undeniable and unforeseeable, as are most ventures into the unknown.
Over the years of research they released news items to the public, not so much to keep them informed--God knows most people are preoccupied with their own lives and couldn't care less--but to keep the budget for the project flowing. However, what they revealed was only of superficial importance, mere general descriptions based on comparisons between the known universe and the Deep. Their more significant breakthroughs they kept to themselves. This policy served to thicken the bond among them, they became a family, sharing thoughts and attitudes at daily meetings where they'd sit in the central conference room holding hands in a circle, feeling and knowing the oneness of mind. This practice wasn't just intended to solidify the group allegiance to the mission, but had been deduced to be a necessity in order to resonate with the Deep. This practice engendered a cross-product of individual minds blurring the distinctions between them, fostering one whole complex interwoven mind, a group mind having at its central focus a single purpose.
Nothing of spacetime could transit the barrier separating their corporeal being from the Deep. It was of an entirely different nature. Their major discovery was what they called the Hawking Field in honor of the physicist Stephen Hawking, who, in the early 21st century, unraveled the mystery of Time. Sentient minds had been found to possess this field which could be accessed under certain specific circumstances. It allowed people to enter the realm of timelessness, the space of the psyche. Extensive experimentation proved that the only means by which a living being could enter the Deep was by becoming pure thought. Based on the hypothesis that Mind permeated physical being--matter--they learned that organic material was able to project this mysterious and previously unimagined field, a field that, once activated, reoriented corporeality to correspond to the nature and identifying matrix of pure thought. It had been there all the time.
At the onset of the project, the idea was to construct ships capable of traveling through the Deep, ostensibly to appear at a preassigned designated point under, so to speak, the known universe, and then to poke through to the surface of spacetime. But all such naive notions were drawn from conventional ways of perceiving reality and were scrapped early on. The Deep had no such restrictions or requisites or capabilities. Once inside the Deep, they surmised, travel itself would be meaningless, as meaningless as traveling in dreamland. So, the original motivation for the project--to use the Deep as a medium of physical transit through the universe--was abandoned. However, no one outside the group knew this.
Everyone volunteered, eagerly, for the assignment, dangerous as it was. But Doctor Melville accepted applicants based on a criterion he'd devised. First of all, they had to be single, no attachments whatsoever, not even strong friendships outside the group. He felt this would be a distraction to the intense focus demanded. Their psychologial and emotional profiles were even more important. Three of the volunteers possessed a singlemindedness bordering on obsession he required, and emotionally were empathetic to the point of an incapacity to assert their own desires above those of their fellows. In the social world, these two traits made for a dysfunctional person, but here and now, it presented the optimal configuration.
Two men and one woman, names withheld, at least for now, were chosen. The rest, however, would not idly stand by. They would have to act as psychic support, bonding together during the procedure, amplifying their collective mind energy, directing it towards their teammates.
The clean room was just that, no organics existed, removed by ultraviolet light and resonating sound waves of a frequency disallowing for growth. The surfaces of the walls, floor, and ceiling were of a carbon-free material long-known to resist oxidation or corruption of any kind. It gleamed, producing disorientation when walking through, as though immersed in liquid. Once confined in their suits to the body-conforming chairs, securely anchored to the floor, the gravitational field would be nullified, and every molecule of air pumped from the room. As much as possible, no traces of ordinary spacetime were permitted to interfere with the procedure.
The three stayed in the purifying room that night, consuming only those nutrients found to foster acute mental intensity, physical well-being, and emotional stability. Nothing that might offset their perfect physical condition--the third and final requirement of Doctor Melville--was allowed to enter their bodies. The following morning they donned their suits. These were not the familiar astronaut suits with which everyone is familiar, they were not going into ordinary space, but rather consisted of a fabric extruded through rotating spinnerets set into the walls and ceiling of the suit room. However, it was not a liquid-like material, but rather more closely resembled the quality of an inert plastic-metal alloy, a material so light weight and impervious to cracking as to seem more like skin than something worn. It immediately conformed to their body shape and was elastic, stretching and contorting as though alive, and, infused as it was with an organically generated Hawking field, possessed the capacity for rudimentary awareness.
After the merger, the separate components became indistinguishable, having crystalized into a single uniform material. A synthesis so completely interpenetrating that the resulting thought-sensitive feature, compliments of the genetically altered organics, automatically tuned the suit to sympathetically resonate with the distinct subject it enwrapped. Conseqeuntly, a feedback loop was established, enhancing and reinforcung the wearers own mental signals. A helmet of one piece, devoid of the usual openings for eyes, nose, mouth, and ears--these would not be necessary--composed of solidified argon-36 covered the head snugly, but without any sense of tightness that might induce claustrophobia or discomfort. Breathable air was unnecessary, the three would consume a sufficient amount of time-released air-producing pellets, long ago developed for astronauts.
At the center of the clean room sat three high-backed wraparound chairs arranged in a circle. Except for the cameras embedded in the walls and ceiling and one speaker near the door, the room was empty. The three volunteers were escorted into the room through a door that connected to the suit room, itself as clean as possible. After making themselves comfortable, they put their helmets on and were strapped in, just in case. Their colleagues wished them luck, then retired to the monitoring area. In due time, the three were asked if they were ready. As one, they replied in the affirmative. A countdown began from ten. At five, the gravitational field in the room was neutralized, thus completing the experience of sensory deprivation. At zero, the Hawking field kicked in, emanating from the enveloping chairs. Immediately, their internal Hawking field, reinforced by the suits, effectively suspended their material existence. That is to say, it was lost to them as though never having been, leaving them cast adrift in a sea of pure thought.
Initially, all moorings with the world of sense and feeling bewildered them completely, the threat of panic tempting at the periphery of consciousness. But their training had been intense. In the surrounding darkness, they found one another's thoughts, and through the mingling of minds, formed an identity of purpose.
This was their first discovery in the nether realm of the Deep: They could control a joint sense of self through sheer will power. Will, thus, had to be of the nature of the Deep. Thoughts meandered, images appeared: a jellyfish floating free in the ocean, an asteroid tumbling through space, a leaf caught in a stream. All were being drawn in one direction. Shapes began to appear in the bleak empty darkness. Pieces of barely perceptible impressions spread out around them over the entire voluminous mindscape.
At first they were dim, then, as other more complex patterns emerged from the void further on or suddenly appeared seemingly in the background, the unclear, disjointed ones began to stretch and extend like tendrils of ivy, finding one another, touching, then smoothly fusing together. Eventually, they joined completely as one convoluted interlaced whole, fingerpaints of light, almost blocking out the complex figures beyond. Abruptly, or so it seemed, the complex designs spliced themselves into the interwoven sphere as though they'd always been there, lifting the entirety to a tangled intricacy that was painful to behold. The unimaginably bizarre arrangement, too involved to ever separate into basic units, continued to grow in complexity as though a colony of microbes in a petri dish, enveloping the three deepnauts in a sphere of interconnected imagery, a tapestry of twisted thought.
Inside this cathedral of geometric madness, they willed themselves to think. One suggested the bubble had always been there, it was they who were adapting to the Deep; they should, therefore, expect other apparitions and novel features. As though on cue, a tingling sensation vibrated through their one mind, followed by others of a more dramatic character. They were being contacted, touched, by other beings who also were immersed in the Deep. Aliens, groups of them, attempting to communicate by means of changes to the surrounding unfinished globe, now seen as a community medium of expression. They knew this by a means unknown, but openmindedness was the catchword for this expedition, literally and figuratively; all usual expectations and assumptions had been left at the gate. The logic of classical macro-spacetime ran into trouble when quantum mechanics came on the scene. Likewise, this new realm had a logic of its own, if indeed, it had any at all.
The tentative mingling subtly changed to an integrated mixture; distinctions were yet noticed, however, and clearly defined. But that was not to last. As they watched, fascinated, the separate identity of their threesome passed a barrier of recognition. The inner sphere no longer expressed the thoughts of the members of this vast ad hoc community of alien minds, with each type uniquely isolated, as though each had a team-color designation, but rather it morphed, blended, unified until all dividing lines lost meaning and significance.
They found this shift in perspective alarming. A sense of self, at least for humans, necessitated an equally definite sense of other. But that had dissolved away like snowflakes in the sun. However, the loss of a sense of separateness was quickly compensated for not only by an all-abiding intellectual feeling of peace and security, but also by an exponential increase in the sense of size. They, that is to say, they/others made another discovery: Each set of aliens in the galaxy--to be sure, they felt confined to galaxy--represented a perspective unique to a type of sentient and an aspect of universal reality, and their corresponding images depicted their mind essence. On the heels of that, a thought projected the image of a fan of different colors of tree wood spanning the spectrum from the lightest pine or aspen to the darkest teak or mahogony. Of its own, the question formed and was immediately speculated upon by the group: Even though separated by untraversable distances in spacetime, perhaps the sentient population of the universe was of one mind, here, in the Deep, jointly interacting, sharing, collaborating.
As though in response, the globe around them pushed further away, expanding to include more alien embeddings and configurations, the images of which transformed quickly, changing as though melting to form new elaborate patterns here and there, contributions to the whole, thoughts asking and answering, never remaining fixed for long. The three deepnauts shared the exhilaration and the communion. Asking questions formerly unimagined, somehow easily comprehending answers to mysteries never before recognized as such by humans, their minds free from the constraints of knowledge acquired in the ordinary world, the frame of predisposition erased.
At the start, they were limited by the prism of humankind--the human universe--but now they were liberated, now they were joined with other alien minds to gain an all-encompassing communal perspective and see a larger truth, a mosaic of truths, a more complex structure describing the inner workings of the universe and what lay beneath its manifestation. If they were still in touch with their bodies, they would have cried with sheer joy at the grandeur and beauty of it all, the unbelievable vista, the everchanging sphere of thought-images before and around them.
In the midst of this revery and mutual exchange of knowledge, this celebration of discovery and revelation, it all suddenly vanished like so much gossamer webbing caught in a fire. The lights had come on and they heard voices. Their first sensation was the weight of their own bodies, strangely unfamiliar. Initially unintelligible garblings and mutters gradually changed bit by bit to words they understood. Their helmets were removed and the restraining straps undone. Their colleagues surrounded them, smiling and offering congratulations and warm feelings of gratitude for their apparent well-being. Somewhat shaky on their feet, the three were escorted to the suit room. Perplexed, still joined as one mind, they were unable to speak, to form words of their own. Gradually, as their suits were removed, their individuality returned, accompanied by a deep sadness welling up. The woman cried, and although the men appeared stoic, they too were obviously suffering the intense emotion of separation. After a thorough medical exam, they were given food and drink. Withdrawn and still quiet, the others wondered if they had experienced some serious psychological or emotional damage. Anything could've happened, that had been the danger. Pensive, they ate in silence, savoring each morsel and sipping water as though their sense of taste was a newfound pleasure. Afterwards, they were allowed to sleep; the debriefing could wait.
Under the watchful eyes of the doctor and a few of their closest teammates, they slept in the infirmary. They'd been given a mild sedative, so in no time, fell into a deep slumber. In Dreamland they found one another on a white-sand beach, waves gently rolling in, soundlessly. The sun, barely over the horizon, shone through wispy, wind-streaked clouds; cotton-ball islands of saffron, lavender, bright pink, and the palest yellow. The woman stood between the men; looking out to the endless blue-green sea, they held hands, saying nothing. The crisp morning air smelled of briny life; the sand was damp yet soft under their bare feet; the lapping of the waves intensified. As the sun rose, diamond-sharp specks of light sparkled and danced across the calm sea like fireflies flickering on a summer's eve.
Gradually, the scene composed itself; the elements of its creation filled in and overlapped, blended and harmonized, like an orchestra warming up for the big show. As though on cue, continuing to hold hands, together they walked into the sea; the sound of the waves rose and fell; the sun, now past the clouds, warmed their skin; the cool water enveloped them, its touch tingling and invigorating. When they were almost submerged, they took one long look at one another, smiled lovingly, then stepped beneath the surface.
The following morning's debriefing didn't go so well. It was like trying to remember a dream. Once again in their normal everyday consciousness, their experience was impossible to translate. All they could recollect with certainty was the overwhelming sense of wholeness and oneness with the universe, and that, as hoped, they were able to keep in mutual contact. Losing physical sensations was expected. Beyond that, it was a blur of outrageous, incomprehensible sights and stray images. Not much more of any note.
What was the Deep? They couldn't define it or properly--scientifically--characterize its nature, except for words like nebulous, vast, non-dimensional. All they knew for sure, and it was unanimous, was that they had to go back. Had to.
Indeed, another level lay beneath that of the quantum, a reality where the notions of particles and waves, fields and forces, were meaningless, having their existence confined to space and time. It was a reality of formlessness where vague apparitions of form seemed to appear, as patterns sometimes do in the clouds. Current understanding is that the tension involved creates space, which, in turn, by virtue of its inherent property of motion, generates time. It was the substance of emptiness, the texture of nothingness, the weave of a void within a void. Since its discovery, form and action have been recast as pure, non-specific mathematical entities at the basis of this 'Mind Energy.' That, pretty much, brings us up to the present--2206.
