Greetings, people with mundane lives. You may recall that last week I was alarmed to discover what seemed to be a plot to kill me by opening a portal into the core of the Sun and enticing me to step through it. It’s not the first time my life has been threatened, but I have to say this is probably the most melodramatic murder plan I’ve ever had directed at me. Somebody out there, I reasoned, had no sense of subtlety or style.
But now I’m beginning to doubt that this is about me at all.
Last week, after I had calmed down a little, I began to study the locations of the mountains into which the portal opened, each one housing a copy of my base. All of them were in Scotland, and the pattern was therefore constrained by topography, but we aren’t just talking about three dimensions of space here. A hyperspatial branch structure such as this can only exist in four different geometric configurations, and I wanted to look more carefully at the overall shape I was dealing with because I had begun to suspect something.
Both divergent 18-cell lattices were ruled out, being unsuitable for irregular sections in space-time (they couldn’t have fit a random pattern of mountains that was in constant motion as the planet rotated). That left just two possibilities: a stellated entropic six-dimensional n-hedron and a nine-dimensional Möbius manifold. The latter, I soon realised, was also ruled out because the probe had returned from its journey many times and had not been turned inside out once.
So we were dealing with the stellated entropic 6D n-hedron, which confirmed my worst fears (I’ll come to that). That meant it wasn’t easy to tell how many “faces” it might have (a face in this case being an entire instance of my base). On the other hand, such an object has a definite centre, and that would make an ideal location for a control room. After a rather difficult session working through the mathematics, I came up with a location for the centre. Of course, I had to take into account the face that was in the heart of the Sun, but that was all to the good because without that one the centre would have been inside the Earth, which would have presented some logistical challenges. Instead, the actual centre was just inside the orbit of Venus.
The thing I’m afraid of is that this weapon was not designed to kill me – after all, it seems far too elaborate; a sledgehammer, as they say, to crack a joke. If that’s true, then I can only suppose that the intention is at some point to open a valve and connect the solar core to all the other faces at once, flooding Scotland with brief eruptions of hypercompressed fusion products. I say brief because the event would quickly destroy the weapon itself – but it would operate for long enough to lay waste to the beautiful wilds of the Highlands. I have to stop this!
I’ve observed the putative hub location carefully for the last few days, and I believe there might be something there. I can detect hyperspatial power conduits running along the radius, based on the faint effect they have on interplanetary dust. I think I was right: there’s a power source there, and tomorrow I’m planning to pay it a surprise visit. I’ll get to the bottom of this, mark my words. I just hope I’m in time. I expect the weapon hasn’t been completed yet, or it would have been used… unless they’re planning to blackmail the government? Unlikely. I mean, what do humans have that anyone else would want or need? Don’t get me wrong, I like you funny little creatures, but whimsy doesn’t have much of a market value in the galaxy.
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