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To understand why everything changed early in the 22nd century I need to do the sciencey explanation thing. Normally I would avoid this - sciencey explanations are dull as Deimos (the moon, not the God. Diemos the god was terrifying) - and I'll try to keep it in layman's terms. But I hope to give you some concept of the profundity of the changes.

The first upheaval was caused by essentially limitless energy.

Julia Childs showed us that the energy in your one stick of butter is enough to make you fat and contribute to your diabetes.

Einstein showed us that the energy in your one stick of butter in kilojoules is the number 9, followed by something like 12 zeros. I'll write that out for you:

9,000,000,000,000 kJ of energy. Nine quadrillion kilojoules of energy (approximately...), if you could convert the mass of your entire stick of butter into energy.

Nine Quadrillion kilojoules of energy is (very approximately) enough energy to power the entire world in the year 2000 for an hour. Or your one stick of butter is enough energy (more or less) to put yourself and two friends into orbit around earth. You probably want to bring along some sort of space capsule and a bit of air so you can stay there for awhile. Better toss another stick of butter into the Ripper. And while I certainly would never suggest it, if instead of taking one of your friends with you you tossed *them* into the Ripper you'd have ample energy to leave the solar system entirely.

And that's assuming your stick of butter is sitting on the countertop and not being hurled at your partner who suggested your baking is a failure. Butter in motion gains Lorentz characteristics proportional to your throwing arm.

If instead you took their comments with a grain of salt, and converted that grain of salt into pure energy you'd have close to a GigaJoule of energy. With that you could make around 1000 pots of coffee. These numbers are all vague because it's difficult to understand how simply unimaginably huge the amount of energy stacked around you is. If you could make a thousand pots of coffee by burning one grain of salt you start to get an idea that it really is more than you can imagine. If you still cant imagine it, congratulations you are beginning to understand exactly how much there is.

The invention of the Ripper Power converter in 2094 by Unicorp meant getting out of the gravity well of Earth was cheap, easy, clean. Humans could routinely take up residence in space.

Unfortunately space is really REALLY big. The second thing thing Einstein demonstrated was that space has an unbreakable speed limit: 300,000,000 metres per second. That's it. And that's a really small number - a really low speed. In Old Units that's only around 670 million miles per hour. And the *nearest* star (other than, you know, our Sun) is 25 trillion miles away. The nearest. Your car, travelling at the impossible speed of light, would still take you four years to drive there. If you wanted to drive your impossible light-speed car to the next nearest galaxy well that's a decent 25,000 years. Better pack a water bottle.

A bright young mathematician named Antoly Yahontov realized sometime around the year 2210 that light is neither a wave, nor a particle, nor both, nor neither. It is a piece of rope. Our impossible car has several impossibilities that just threw a bucketload of math out the window. For one as your velocity increases so does your mass (this is where the extra energy comes from in our hurled butter) and for another time slows down (for the butter, not your partner. The butter just watched a glorious slow-motion of your partner ducking a moment too late). In our imaginary impossible car we were thinking we'd get to have damp vinyl sticking to our clammy buttocks for the 8 year round trip to Proxima Centauri.

Light travels at the speed of light in a vacuum. And that means that for light time has no meaning. So far as a photon is concerned in its personal reference of time it leaves its source and arrives at its destination at *exactly* the same moment.

You're walking along in the forest and you find a piece of rope tied to a tree. You follow the rope and find the other end is tied to another tree. The rope isn't travelling between the trees - the rope is at both trees at the same time. You, as a classical observer, can walk along the rope to see where it goes - you have to walk between the two trees. But the rope is always there. Now, here's the scary thing... the rope as we observe it has to exist in our classical universe. So while the rope is at both trees, one of the trees is in the future and one is in the past. Go back to thinking about the photon as a photon. We drove our impossible car to the nearest star and set up a perfect mirror. Then we drove our impossible car back again - the round trip took us eight years. We're grumpy, need a toilet break, and our skin feels oily and taut. We're so sick of hearing "Are we there yet?"

Except that it didn't take us eight years, because we're travelling at the speed of light. To us, it didn't actually take any time. Our friends missed us for eight years because time passed for them, but no time passed for us because we're travelling in our impossible car (and decided to embrace that one bit of real math). That's just the maths, I'm afraid. The closer you get to the speed of light the slower time passes for you until at the speed of light time becomes zero. Unfortunately the closer to the speed of light you get the more your mass increases. This has two problems - the energy it takes to accelerate you that last little bit becomes infinity, and your mass becomes infinity. Light gets away with it because its mass is zero, so no matter how many times you multiply it, fortunately, the mass doesn't increase.

We whip out our photon canon and fire a stream of high-energy particles at our perfect mirror at the other star (we pointed a torch at the sky). The photon races off, hits the perfect mirror, and races back to us. We've been here for eight years waiting for it to make the round trip. But to the photon it has left the torch and arrived back at our eye *instantly*. Just that the world aged eight years during the trip. Or, as far as it's concerned, it is a rope tethered to your torch of 'then' (eight years ago), and your eye of 'now', and has a length of eight years.

Which means that photons have been lying to us all this time. Savor that anger - we're going to need it later...

Don't resent the photons too much for lying - they were just doing what they do. But we biological creatures who evolved using classical physics survived because all the other things evolving using classical physics wanted to eat us. So the best user of speed, light, and an understanding of causality (why did you throw a rock at the tiger again??) survived with even more classical physics hardwired into our understanding of the universe.

The photons just played along like everything was normal. Bastards.

The speed limit of the universe is a number you simply cannot pass through. Ever. Stop talking about it - it's not going to happen.

Except... The maths for the universe actually works, sorta kinda, for velocities *faster* than the speed of light. Things going faster than the speed of light cannot slow down to the speed of light for exactly the same reasons that we cant speed up to the speed of light. As supra-light things slow down their mass increases, their energy increases, and it becomes impossible to slow them that last tiny bit. If you reciprocal invert the time component of supra-light speed it becomes sub-light speed, and infinite speed becomes stationary. But that's just silly.

So our photon left the torch, hit the mirror four years away, and bounced back. This time it missed our eyeball and hit the torch again. Our piece of photon-rope tethered the torch to the past and the future. Yes, we're pretending the torch hasn't moved relative to the star in the intervening years. We need to play pretend quite a bit to understand this. The torch hasn't changed much in the intervening eight years. The photon bumps into the exact same atom that emitted the photon in the first place, and is reabsorbed. Time didn't pass for the photon, the atom is (more or less) in the same state as when it left. But "Time has passed" outside of the photon. The atom is exactly the same except that its property for age, for time passed, is different to the photon.

This was where the mathematician realized two things about time: Our perception is a byproduct of living on this side of light speed, and that it is a *property* that is subject to being altered in a particle. But because we're trapped on this side of the impassible barrier of light speed, we can only ever send stuff into the future. Like, yay, I can do that by putting lasagna in the fridge for later. But, you know, a machine that appears to hold a mass in perfect stasis as far as the observers are concerned is quite a technological feat, good for more than just your weekly meal preparation.

Time and space are more or less the same - at least to our photons. If time is a property we we can manipulate on our particles - we can send them in to the future ahead of us - what if 'space' was similarly just a property of the particle. And the fact that we see things 'here' or 'there' is an artifact of our biological brains evolving in a universe where photons have been lying to us. We only 'see' things as here or there because the photons tell us, and we invented math to prove the photons right.

In fact, take 'time' out of the equation and there's nothing stopping a thing from changing from being 'here' to being 'there' without having to go via the intervening space. When time is zero, mass is irrelevant, energy doesn't matter. So long as we never have to accelerate, travel, and slow down, you can go from 'here' to 'there' without breaking the universe. Your math looks a bit odd because your computer program throws out a bunch of #NaN errors and you get Floating Point Overflow exceptions up the wahzoo. But cross out all the silly-looking numbers from your formula and you're left with a simple description of instantaneous travel.

Yes, it breaks causality. We knew it breaks causality. But that actually doesn't really matter. At least, not to us in the classical universe. But lawdy does it piss off the photons who discovered they can arrive at their destination despite someone going to their source and switching off the transmitter before they left. Their effect lost their cause. The rope has a destination, but never had a source. It just, kinda, fades off into a past that never existed. Or, more accurately, it fades into a frame of the universe that we no longer inhabit. And we only know because we, the observers, are in the classical 'time is passing in this direction on this side of the light-speed barrier' universe. We can observe that the photon is broken.

And we laugh at it. We laugh.

(The mathematics for why we don't end up with a universe full of infinite energy resolves because we didn't create or destroy anything, and the artifact of having two particles of the same light simultaneously existing in two places cancels out by the intervening human-observed time in a single frame where the photon is in multiple frames. That showed the smug bastards)

Transmat Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of Unicorp) built their first machine in 2235 to translate your coordinate space instantaneously from any point in the universe to any other point in the universe. After a few causality hiccups which were quickly resolved the second Transmat machine was built in 2234. The energy cost of instantaneous travel was negligible. Actually the energy cost of the transfer is exactly zero except accounting for differentials in gravity gradients. If you go between points at the same curvature of space the energy is zero. You can go anywhere on your planet. Or you can go anywhere in space. You can go to another planet at the same gravity. But if you want to get out of your gravity well into space you still need to spend those kJ we mentioned earlier. Even so, bring along a stick of butter or a salt shaker and you can go anywhere at all in the universe.

Thank you for attending this Transmat Corporation orientation presentation. The lunchroom closed an hour ago but if you'd all like to see a live demonstration of our very first Transmat prototype there was lunch for you earlier.