Subspace Engine

Subspace Engine is a prime mean for interstellar travel that is used by human civilizations. It works on a principle of quantum phasing when a spaceship becomes “weightless” and ignores the fundamental laws of physics while being enveloped inside a relativity field. Among scholars there is a consensus that the re-discovery of the Subspace Engine technology has begun the First Era of human history.

Development of the first Subspace Engine

Year 2122 first prototype of a Subspace Engine was ready to be tested in the Oort Cloud, on the brink of the Solar System. It was designed by a private Limited Liability Collaborative Corporation (LLCC) InfinityGate, under the guise of its founder and CEO Andrei Poddubny. One of the biggest marketing points around this exciting new technology was the fact that Subspace Engine was both developed and tested in tight collaboration with a groundbreaking Artificial General Intelligence called the Silver Cloud. This collaboration between human personnel and the artificial mind made the trial look like a double scientific revolution.

Unfortunately, it all ended up in a disaster: The initial unmanned trial of the Subspace Engine was successful, and the test vessel, Voyager-M12, has performed a 6-seconds long subspace jump between two points in the empty space beyond the Oort Cloud. The livestreaming audience of the event has voted to perform a manned trial almost immediately thereafter. When requested to analyse data from the jump, the Silver Cloud did also acknowledge the complete safety of a hypothetical manned launch.

In a week, a crew of seven volunteering astronauts was assembled, and shipped to the testing facility at the Oort Cloud. For convenience and safety reasons, the crew of three was supposed to launch in Voyager-M12. The rest were ready back at the testing facility to man Voyager-M14 as a possible replacement vessel.

At the beginning, the launch of Voyager-M12 was going as planned, to the point that all automated processes were functioning perfectly identical to the previously successful unmanned launch. Nothing was foreshadowing a danger, until the Subspace Engine was activated – not just Voyager-M12, but the whole testing facility has disappeared into the subspace for a whole minute. Immediately, all contacts between the audience on Earth and the testing site were lost.

On arrival, emergency services found a giant amalgamation of organic- and inorganic material: Voyager-M12, its testing facility and over 200 souls of research personnel have merged into a large clump consisting of metal strings and biomass from the deceased bodies. After the Silver Cloud have pleaded not guilty for making any mistakes in calculations, the only end for Andrei Poddubny was to stand the trial for deaths of all those people and loss of company value. 

This “trial of a century” led to a complete liquidation of the LLCC InfinityGate and abandonment of the technology behind the Subspace Engine as it was deemed unpredictable, unsafe and thereby impossible to use. This failure began a technological “winter” regarding all research in faster then light space travel among the governments and private companies of the Old Earth. 

The Ultimate Hoax

Subspace Engine has resurfaced only in the year 2155 when the world governing Silver Cloud began commissioning interstellar colony ships as a part of its Star Reach Initiative. This initiative to provide people with an option to live on distant colonies, was met with praise and support by almost 45% of Earth’s population. 

The first colony ships of model PETAV (Population Extraction and Transportation Autonomous Vehicle) were supposed to be propelled by traditional neutron engines and maintain extremely high speeds without breaching the lightspeed threshold. Colonists onboard were supposed to be frozen during for decades until the PETAV reaches its destination. In secret though each PETAV was supplied with an updated and perfectly operational version of the original Subspace Engine in order to make its trip a fraction of what was previously expected. 

It remained unknown to the public that back in 2122 the Silver Cloud has sabotaged the manned trial of Subspace Engine on purpose. The rogue AGI did it to withhold this powerful technology from humanity’s reach, and hinder their uncontrolled expansion across space. The Silver Cloud always saw humanity as a failed civilisation that marches towards its complete technological extinction. Still such grim outcome for the humanity was completely unacceptable for an ultra-humanist  fledgeling machine god. 

In order to preserve human species, the Silver Cloud conceived a secret plan to “cleanse” it from the burden of overly developed technology and culture. The key part of this plan was to send humans away to colonise thousands of new worlds, with no means to bring anything tangible from Earth except for their memories. This way it wanted to create a fresh start for every single human being.

When over a hundred of giant PETAV colony ships were ready for their maiden flights, the Silver Cloud began with rallying the first wave of colonists for the Star Reach Initiative. Since the first departure it was unclear, how many of people frozen onboard colony ships were willing colonists, and how many were blatantly abducted from their livelihoods, stripped of all possessions and send out into space against their own will. Regardless, the Star Reach Initiative turned out to be the Exodus event that made humanity an interstellar species and severed their bonds with the Old Earth forever.

Re-Discovery of the Forgotten Technology

Year 935 After the Exodus (A.E.), an Imperial scientist, Rufus Haddat have presented the Limmean Monarch with a working prototype of a Subspace Engine. 

Somewhere around the same time, a small startup on a planet in the heart of current Federal Space have also recreated this forgotten technology of the Subspace Engine. 

Both of these completely unrelated discoveries have happened so close to each other that after the the chance of such a coincidence seems as almost impossible. Later, when people of both interstellar nations learned the history of these parallel discoveries, many conspiracy theories have arised. 

Some of these theories were speculating about an alien origins of the Subspace Engine. Others were blaming the government for concealing the technology for centuries, or for using forbidden artificial intelligence to develop it in the first place. Regardless, the was no way back and humanity became free to roam the stars once again.