{"id":973,"date":"2009-01-28T21:02:26","date_gmt":"2009-01-29T05:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=973"},"modified":"2009-01-29T07:23:27","modified_gmt":"2009-01-29T15:23:27","slug":"travel-between-the-two-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/28\/travel-between-the-two-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"Travel Between the Two Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m back to thinking about a novel called Jim and the Flims<\/em>. I see two races\u2014the somewhat ethereal flims and our race, which they call, let us say fatsies. And the worlds are Flimsy and Fatland.<\/p>\n

How do they fit together topologically? I think we\u2019ll suppose that they share the same time axis. How about the space?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The obvious idea is to use parallel branes like in Postsingular<\/em>. But, just to change things a bit, one might suppose that the two branes are like the two sides of a sheet of paper, or the two sides of a wooden board.<\/p>\n

An related alternative would be some notion of inside-out. If we simply wrap the sheet of paper into a sphere, we get a balloon with a picture on the outside and a picture on the inside. But maybe somehow there is a \u201cballoon\u201d\u009d for each atom. You go from one world to the other by turning each of your atoms inside out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the moment let\u2019s stick with the sheet with two sides\u2014or, more accurately, a hypersheet bounded by a pair of three-dimensional hyperplanes: Flimsy and Fatland. How do you get from one to the other?<\/p>\n

I suppose you tunnel through. If we do this abruptly, then it\u2019s a matter of making a right-angle turn into the fourth dimension, drilling through the bulk, and then making another right turn to get back into the other universe. But I\u2019d like to see a more gradual transition, something more along the lines of Sheckley\u2019s \u201cThe Altar\u201d\u009d <\/a>, which I posted about last week.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I suppose there could be a sloping tunnel that leads through the bulk, and when you ease into it, you can see the source universe in certain directions and the target universe in the other directions. The tunnel might be quite short\u2014more like a doorway or a portal\u2014so that you don\u2019t have a lengthy zone of darkness in between the worlds. I used a portal of this kind in Mathematicians in Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In order to require the back-and-forth thither-and-yon bumbling of the \u201cAltar\u201d\u009d approach, we might suppose that our space is rucked up and folded over, so that the tunnel\u2019s mouth can only be reached by going along a certain path. I think of a process like scraping away paint\u2014you go back and forth past a certain alleyway, and each time you pass, the alley looks a little different, and finally it leads to Flimsy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We might suppose that my character Weena came through this tunnel, but that she can\u2019t find her way back from our side. My character Jim finds the way for Weena, aided by his dog Arf\u2014he hits on the Sheckleyesque spinor path between worlds<\/p>\n

Alternately, I might consider there being a whole range of ways to travel between Fatsy (our world) and Flimsy (Weena\u2019s world). I\u2019ll display some options in a bulleted list: <\/p>\n