The universal light grew in intensity, and it climbed the spectral scale to a glaring violet with startling speed. Clumps and eddies in that sea of hydrogen swirled about, like flames within a furnace; the Time Ships, connected by their ropes, were barely visible as gaunt silhouettes against that uneven glow. At last the sky was so bright I had only an impression of white-ness; it was like staring into the sun.

There was a soundless concussion—I felt as if I had heard a clash of cymbals—the light rushed in towards me, like some encroaching liquid—and I fell into a sort of white blindness. I was immersed in the most brilliant light, a light which seemed to suffuse my being. I could no longer make out those mottled clumps, and nor could I see the Time Ships—not even my own!

I called to Nebogipfel. I cannot see. The light—

His voice was small and calm, in that clamor of illumination.

We have reached the Epoch of Last Scattering... Space is now everywhere as hot as the surface of the sun, and filled with electrically charged matter. The universe is no longer transparent, as it will be in our day...

I could see why the Ships had been joined up by those ropes of Constructor stuff, for surely no signal could propagate through this glare. The dazzle grew more intense, until I was sure that it must have passed far beyond the range of visibility of normal human eyes—not that a man could have lasted for a moment in that glowing cosmic furnace!

It was as if I hung, alone, in all that immensity. If the Constructors were there, I had no sense of them. My feeling for the passage of time loosened and fell away; I could not tell if I was witnessing events on the scale of centuries or seconds, or if I was watching the evolution of stars or atoms. Before entering this last soup of light I had retained a residual sense of place—I had kept a feeling of up and down—of near and far... The world around me had been structured like a great room, within which I was suspended. But now, in this Epoch of Last Scattering, all of that fell away from me. I was a mote of awareness, bobbing about on the surface of that great River which was winding back to its source all about me, and I could only allow that ultimate stream to carry me where it would.

The soup of radiation became hotter—it was unbearably intense—and I saw that the matter of the universe, the matter which would one day compose the stars, planets and my own abandoned body, was but a thin trace of solidity, a contaminant in that seething maelstrom of light and stars. At last—I seemed to be able to see it—even the cores of atoms fizzed apart, under the pressure of that unbearable light. Space was filled with a soup of still more elemental particles, which combined and recombined in a sort of complex, microscopic melee, all about me.

We are close to the Boundary, Nebogipfel whispered. The beginning of time itself... and yet you must imagine that we are not alone: that our History—this young, glowing universe—is but one of an infinite number which has emerged from that Boundary; and that as we retreat all the members of that Multiplicity are converging towards this moment, this Boundary, like swooping birds...

But still the contraction of it all continued—still the temperature climbed, still the density of matter and energy grew; and now even those final fragments of radiation and matter were absorbed back into the shearing carcass of Space and Time, their energies stored in the stress of that great Twisting.

Until, in the end...

The last, sparkling particles fell away from me softly, and the glare of radiation heightened to a sort of invisibility.

Now, only a gray-white light filled my awareness: but that is a metaphor, for I knew that what I was experiencing now was not the light of Physics, but that glow hypothesized by Plato, the light which underlies all awareness—the light against which matter, events and minds are mere shadows.

We have reached the Nucleation, whispered Nebogipfel. Space and Time are so twisted over that they are indistinguishable. There is no Physics here... There is no Structure. One cannot point and say: that is there, such a distance away; and I am here. There is no Measurement—no Observation... It is all as One.

And, just as our History has shriveled to a single, searing point, so the Multiplicity of Histories has converged. The Boundary itself is melting away—can you understand it?—lost in the infinite possibilities of the collapsed Multiplicity...

And then there was a single, very brilliant, pulse of light: of Plattnerite green.


[4]

The Nonlinearity Engines

The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about—stretched and battered—as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.

Nebogipfel?...

His voice was joyful—exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors...

The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the gray-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unraveling of Space and Time.

I was traveling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the center of the sun.

The Time Ships no longer accompanied me—perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation—and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me—like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp's burst—were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.

Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?

... Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?

I am here.

What is happening? Are we traveling through time again?

No, he said. Still he had that note of exultation—of triumph—in his disembodied voice.

Then what? What is happening to us?

Do you not see? Could you not understand? We passed beyond the Nucleation. We reached the Boundary. And—

Yes?

Think of the Multiplicity as a surface, he said. The totality of the Multiplicity is smooth, closed, featureless—a globe. And Histories are like lines of longitude, drawn between the poles of the sphere...

And, in the Time Ships, we reached one pole.

Yes. That point where all the longitude lines converge. And, in that precise instant of infinite possibility, the Constructors fired their Nonlinearity Engines...

The Constructors have traveled across the Histories, he said. They—and we—have followed paths of Imaginary Time, paths scrawled sideways across the surface of the Multiplicity globe, until we have reached this new History...

Now the cloud of Constructors—there were millions of them, I thought—drifted apart, like fragments of a child's firework. It was as if they were trying to fill up the infant vacuum with the light and awareness we had brought from a different cosmos. And as the new universe unraveled, the afterglow of Creation faded to an immense darkness.

It was the end-result—the logical conclusion—of my own dabbling with the properties of light, and the distortion of the frames of Space and Time that went with it. All of this, I realized, even the collapsing of the universe and this great progression across Histories—all of it had come about, growing inevitably, from my experiments, from my first, dear machine of brass and quartz...

It had led to this: the passage of Mind between universes.

But where have we come to? What is this History? Is it like ours?

No, Nebogipfel said. No, it is not like ours.

Will we be able to live here?

I do not know... it was not chosen for us. Remember that the Constructors have sought, he said, a universe—out of all the in finite sheaf of possibilities that is the Multiplicity—a universe which is optimal for them.

Yes. But what can "optimal "mean for a Constructor? I conjured up vague images of Heaven—of peace, security, beauty, light—but I knew these imaginings were hopelessly anthropomorphic.

Now I saw a new light emerging, from the darkness all around us. At first I thought it was the returned glow of that fireball at the beginning of time—but it was too gentle, too insistent, for that; it was more like star-light...

The Constructors are not men, the Morlock said. But they are the Heirs of Humanity. And the audacity of what they have accomplished is astonishing.

Nebogipfel said, Among all the myriad possibilities, the Constructors have sought out that universe—the single one—which is Infinite in extent, and Eternal in age: where that Boundary at the Beginning of Time has been pushed into the infinite past.

We have traveled beyond the Nucleation, to the Boundary of Time and Space themselves. And ape-fingers have reached out to the Singularity that lies there—and pushed it back!

Star-light, now, was erupting from beneath the darkness, all around me; the stars were igniting everywhere; and soon the sky blazed, as bright everywhere as the surface of the sun.

 

 

-------------------

 

먼저 우주가 있고 무한한 우주의 시초점이라 묘사되는 멀티버스격의 boundary 라는게 있고 

 

그 boundary가 infinite possibility가 있는 멀티플리시티 라는거에..  무한한 가능성이라 묘사했으니 무한히 속해있는듯 하니 

 

멀티플리시티가 다운스트리머 세계관 수준인듯 하고

 

그 멀티플리시티가 무한이 쌓여서 하나의 축을 만들고 그 축이 무한히 모여서 구가 된다?

 

뭐 이딴 소리인듯 한데 일단 세계관 크기가 다운스트리머를 능가하는건 맞는듯..