Holon Chamber (CivBE)

QuoteEdit

"'Well, mebbe you ain't heated it enough yet,' said Paul Bunyan, and he took the plasma out of the hohlraum, rubbed it hard between his hands until the Aleph-field de-resolved itself, and put it back in the Holon Chamber. 'I reckon that'll be warm enough to dry your boots,' he said." - The Uncle Nevercloned Stories

HistoryEdit

The great paradox of Pre-Mistake civilizations is that their sophisticated experiments with high energy physics were ultimately overshadowed by the more pressing needs of the Seeding, and thus energetic physics languished for centuries until colonial science facilities had enough breathing room to continue these resource-intensive exercises on a new world. Of these experiments, the Holon Chamber is remarkable because it not only brought experimental particle physics back up to that ancient peak, but exceeded it in all possible respects. That did not preclude a certain awareness on the part of its builders; the charismatic Chamber Director Hui van der Waald opened the First Proceedings Conference by quipping: "We can now fail at the same level as ancient Earth."

The immense, spherical structure of brilliant white transceramic commanded the landscape, and contemporary scientists remarked that it either created a feeling of optimism or profound unease set against the landscape of the new planet. Its generators spanned hectares around the structure with power feeds whose current distorted the planet's magnetic field observably. Its operational AI was repurposed from a military battlefield integrator, and its simulational/analytical AI was so dense that it was almost disconnected on security grounds. And within its heart, past the banks of diamond refractors and plasma pinch magnets, was the hohlraum, whose walls were the smoothest substance that can exist in this universe. And within the hohlraum were contained the hellacious energies of primordial creation, streaming strangeness out to waiting detectors.

But strangeness eventually is combed into meaning, and meaning into application. From the fiery axis of the Holon Chamber humanity created wonderful things: The Alcubierre Principle for FTL communication, stabile transfiraxian elements, xinjushu construction. The Holon Chamber was mankind's last and best high-energy crucible of its kind.

And sometimes strangeness abides: Recent metachronofield analysis of the Primary Hohlraum Detector Array Dataset has led some theorists to suggest that this universe may be nothing more than a highly realized simulation in a Turing machine of unimaginable complexity.