The Collapsium (49 page)

The robots sneaked in with more food and drink, which he paused once more to consume, and then fell—most unwillingly—asleep.

Antiautomata
(adj) Describes any weapon intended for use against robots.

Arc de fin
(n) A hypothetical device for diverting photons from the fourth-dimensional extremum of spacetime.

Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Archimedes
(prop. n) Greek physicist from the Classical era.

AU
(n) Astronomical Unit; the mean distance from the center of Sol to the center of Earth. Equal to 149,604,970 kilometers, or 499.028 light-seconds.

Autronic
(adj) Capable of self-directed activity. Commonly used to differentiate robots from teleoperated or “waldo” devices.

Blitterstaff
(n) An antiautomata weapon employing a library of rapidly shifting wellstone compositions. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Bondril
(n) Copyrighted wellstone substance employed as a glue. Much stronger than atomic glues.

Bunkerlite
(n) Copyrighted, superreflective wellstone substance employed as protective cloth or armor. Attributed to Marlon Sykes.

Casimir, Hendrick
(prop. n) Dutch physicist of the Old Modern era.

Casimir effect
(n) The exclusion of vacuum wavelengths by closely spaced, uncharged, conducting plates, causing the plates to be pressed together. Earliest evidence of the zero-point field.

Catalonia
(prop. n) Former Mediterranean nation at the northeast of the Iberian peninsula, historically a part of Spain.

Centroid
(n) The geometric center of an object or figure.

Cerenkov, Pavel
(prop. n) Russian physicist-laureate of the Old Modern era.

Cerenkov blue
(n) Characteristic spectrum of electron-emitted Cerenkov radiation.

Cerenkov radiation
(n) Electromagnetic radiation emitted by particles temporarily exceeding the local speed of light, e.g., upon exit from a collapsium lattice.

Chromopause
(n) The outer surface of a stellar chromosphere.

Chromosphere
(n) A transparent layer, usually several thousand kilometers deep, between the photosphere and corona of a star, i.e., the star’s “middle atmosphere.” Temperature is typically several thousand kelvins, with roughly the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere in low Earth orbit.

Cislunar
(adj) Within the gravitational sphere of influence of the Earth/Moon system.

Collapsiter
(n) A high-bandwidth packet switching transceiver composed exclusively of collapsium. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Collapsium
(n) A rhombohedral crystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Since the black holes absorb and exclude a broad range of vacuum wavelengths, the interior of the lattice is a Casimir supervacuum. See
Appendix A
: Collapsium,
this page
. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Collapson
(n) A cubic structure of eight neuble-mass black holes in sympathetic pseudo
-zitterbewegung
vibration. The most stable collapsons measure 2.3865791101 centimeters edge to edge.

Collapson node
(n) A neuble-mass black hole that is part of a collapson.

Componeer
(n) Any person bearing royal certification in gravitic engineering. Descended from late U.S. Army Corps of Engineers training standards.

Converge
(also
Reconverge)
(v) To combine two separate entities, or two copies of the same entity, using a fax machine. In practice, rarely applied except to humans.

Copy-hour
(n) One hour’s labor from a single instantiation of an individual. A standard human resource measure during the Queendom era.

Corona
(n) The deep, sparse, superhot “upper atmosphere” of a star, responsible for most X-ray emissions. Variable in size with the solar “seasons,” the corona of Sol extends 5 to 10 light-seconds above the chromopause, at near-vacuum densities.

Datavore
(n) Any rogue autonomous software capable of inhabiting telecommunications networks. Several distinct phyla are known to have existed in the Iscog prior to its demise.

Declarant
(n) The highest title accorded by the Queendom of Sol; descended from the Tongan award of Nopélé, or
knighthood. Only twenty-nine declarancies were ever issued.

Desaturation
(n) In sailing, the firing of rocket thrusters to balance cumulative attitude errors absorbed by reaction momentum wheels.

Di-clad
(adj) Sheathed in an outer layer of monocrystalline diamond.

Disassembler fog
(n) A suspension of microscopic deconstruction mechanisms, sometimes employed in the recycling of objects too large to fax.

Downsystem
(adv) Toward the sun.

Electrogravitic
(adj) Synonym for electromagnetic.

Electromagnetic grapple
See
Grapple, electromagnetic
.

Ertial
(adj) Antonym of inertial, applied to inertially shielded devices. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Fax
(n) Abbreviated form of “facsimile.” A device for reproducing physical objects from stored or transmitted data patterns. By the time of the Restoration, faxing of human beings had become possible, and with the advent of collapsiter-based telecommunications soon afterward, the reliable transmission of human patterns quickly became routine.

Faxware
(n) Anything produced by a fax machine. Colloquially, the control systems and filters employed by the Iscog.

Feigenbaum, Mitchell
(prop. n) American physicist-laureate of the Late Modern era.

Feigenbaum’s number
(n) Physical constant with the dimensionless value 4.6692016090, representing the rational spacing of frequency doublings along any relevant axis of a system in chaotic transition. See
Appendix A
: Feigenbaum’s number,
this page

Fibe-op
(n, adj) Abbreviated form of “fiber optic.” Any thin, flexible conduit for the transmission of visible light.

Fibrediamond
(n) Composite material of whiskered crystalline carbon in a resin matrix. Unless sheathed in a superreflective coating, fibrediamond is notably flammable.

Flatspace Society, the
(prop. n) Queendom-era lobbying organization dedicated to the prohibition of collapsium.

Ghost
(n) Any electromagnetic trace preserved in rock. Colloquially, a visual image of past events, especially involving deceased persons.

Ghosting
(n) The process by which a ghost is formed.

Girona
(prop. n) A minor city in the El Gironès comarque of Catalonia, situated at the confluence of the Ter, Güell, Galligants, and Onyar rivers, some 80 kilometers from the nation’s former capital at Barcelona.

Grapple, electromagnetic
(n) An industrial gravity projector specifically intended to anchor or manipulate massive objects.

Grappleship
(n) A vehicle propelled by means of electromagnetic grapples. Use of grappleships was considered impractical in the Queendom until the advent of ertial shielding, though high-powered inertial devices were capable of attaining enormous accelerations.

Gravity laser
(n) A gravity projector whose emissions are coherent, i.e., monochromatic and phase-locked. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Gravity projector
(n) A revpic-driven device for simulating the secondary fields emitted by charged particles under
zitterbewegung
vibration. Attributed to Boyle Schmenton.

Haisch, Bernhard
(prop. n) American physicist-laureate of the Old Modern era.

Haisch effect
(n) The increase in “mass” experienced by an object—usually a subatomic particle—under vibration at gravitic frequencies.

Hawking, Stephen
(prop. n) British physicist-laureate of the Old Modern era.

Hawking radiation
(n) Photon and particle emissions of a hypermassive object, resulting from Heisenberg tunneling across the event horizon.

Holie
(n) Abbreviated form of “hologram.” Any three-dimensional image. Colloquially, a projected, dynamic three-dimensional image, or device for producing same.

Hypercollapsite
(n) A quasicrystalline material composed of neuble-mass black holes. Usually organized as a vacuogel.

Hypercomputer
(n) Any computing device capable of altering its internal layout. Colloquially, a computing device made of wellstone.

Hypercondensed
(adj) Condensed to the point of gravitational collapse, i.e., until a black hole or “hypermass” is formed. Colloquially, condensed to any level the speaker finds impressive. Also “hypercompressed.”

Hypermass
(n) A mass that has been hypercompressed; a black hole.

Immorbid
(adj) Not subject to life-threatening disease or deterioration.

Impervium
(n) Public-domain wellstone substance; the hardest superreflector known. Attributed to Marlon Sykes.

Instantiate
(v) To produce a single instance of a person or object; to fax from a stored or received pattern.

Iscog
(n) An acronym for the Inner-System Collapsiter Grid. The first broadband interplanetary telecom network
capable of transmitting live human patterns. Attributed to Bruno de Towaji.

Isotropic
(adj) Exactly the same in all directions. A theoretical construct which may not occur in nature, although the zero-point field is often regarded as isotropic.

Kataki ha’u o’ kai
Traditional Tongan encouragement to begin a meal. Literally translated as, “Please come and eat.”

Kuiper Belt
(n) A ring-shaped region in the ecliptic plane of any solar system, in which gravitational perturbations have amplified the concentration of large, icy bodies or “comets.” Sol’s Kuiper Belt extends from 40 AU at its lower boundary to 1,000 AU at its upper and has an overall density approximately one-fourth that of its much smaller Asteroid Belt.

Laminar
(adj) Completely predictable by closed-form equations. A theoretical construct that does not occur in nature but is extremely useful as an approximation. Most dynamic systems are considered to have a laminar range. (Literally: “layered.”)

Laureate
(n) An honor bestowed by the Queendom for extraordinary service. Descended from the Nobel citation of Swedish monarchy in the Old Modern era.

Lepton
(n) A member of the class of low-rest-mass, spin ½ “elementary particles” or charge-zpf resonance states that include the neutrino, electron, muon, and tau. Leptons are not subject to the hypothetical “strong nuclear force” of quantum-age physics.

Light-hour
(n) The distance traveled by light through a standard vacuum in one hour. Equal to 3,600 light-seconds, or 1,079,252,848,8 kilometers.

Light-second
(n) The distance traveled by light through a standard vacuum in one second: 299,792.46 kilometers.

Lithosphere
(n) The rocky outer crust of a terrestrial planet, composed primarily of silicon dioxide.

Lorentz-invariant
(adj) Exactly the same at all velocities. The zero-point field is thought to be Lorentz-invariant.

Malo e lelei
Traditional Tongan greeting, widely used within the Queendom. Literally translated as, “Thank you, hello.”

Meson
(n) member of the class of high-rest-mass, integerspin particles that include the pion, kaon, rho, omega, eta, psi, B, and D. Mesons are composed of a quark-antiquark pair, and are subject to the hypothetical “strong nuclear force” of quantum-age physics.

Milligee
(n) One one-thousandth of the acceleration experienced by a body at rest on either pole of Earth’s reference ellipsoid (i.e.,
¹
⁄
₁₀₀₀
of one gee); 0.0098202 meters per second squared.

Monocrystalline
(adj) Composed of a single crystal, without seams and, ideally, without flaws. Sometimes used colloquially as a term of admiration.

Morbidity filter
(n) One of dozens of software filters applied to human patterns in the Iscog, intended to eliminate mortality by disease and age-related deterioration. Attributed to Ernst Krogh.

Muon
(n) An unstable lepton possessing charge +1 and mass
¹
⁄
₉
that of a proton, with a half-life of 10
^–6
seconds.

Nanoassembler
(n) Any device capable of assembling objects at the atomic level. Most nanoassemblers (e.g., the standard fax machine) are of macroscopic size.

Nasen
(n or adj) An acronym for “neutrino amplification through stimulated emission.” A coherent neutrino beam sometimes employed for interplanetary communication thanks to its extremely small divergence angle. However, the
difficulty of generating such a beam, plus its ready interactions with matter, limit its usefulness.

Nescog
(n) Successor to the Iscog; a high-bandwidth telecommunications network employing numerous supraluminal signal shunts.

Neuble
(n) A di-clad neutronium sphere, explosively formed, usually incorporating one or more layers of wellstone for added strength and versatility. A standard industrial neuble masses one billion metric tons, with a radius of 2.67 centimeters.