"Justina Robson - Quantum Gravity 01 - Keeping it Real" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

QUANTUM GRAVITY: 1

KEEPING IT REAL

Justina Robson
Copyright c Justina Robson 2006 All rights reserved
The right of Justina Robson to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,
London WC2H 9EA

This edition published in Great Britain in 2006 by Gollancz

13579 10 8642
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 9 780 57507 907 6 ISBN-10 0 57507 907 X

Typeset at The Spartan Press Limited, Lymington, Hants
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent

www.orionbooks.co.uk

The Orion Publishing Group's policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable
products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes
are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
For Stephanie Burgis-Samphire
COMMON KNOWLEDGE




In the days that followed the explosion at the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, at some unknown
point in the Lost Year, 2015, scientists discovered a hole in the fabric of spacetime over the blast site.
The collider itself - a ring some eighty-five kilometres in circum-ference built far beneath the Texas soil -
had utterly vanished, and only the surface buildings remained.
The explosion had followed an unknown quantum catastrophe inside the machine. However, it was not
the kind of explosion that blew matter to smithereens and laid waste to worlds. Its actions took place in
the near-infinitely tiny spaces between one raw energy flicker and the next. It transmuted fundamental
particles into new states, altering the fabric of the universe as if changing cotton into silk. In less time than
it takes to blink an eye everything had undergone subtle alteration, though the how and the what of it was
a matter which is still debated to this day - a matter not helped by the fact that nobody could remember
exactly or say with certainty how things used to be. In the meantime there were more immediate
problems to deal with, namely the stable but infinitely mysterious hole inside the circle of the old collider,
and the fact that it led directly into another world.
In the five years since the Quantum Bomb, as it is popularly known in Otopia (which was once called