Built to listen

The ear

Gravitational waves are the one signal that has travelled freely since the beginning. Light was trapped for the universe's first 380,000 years; gravitational waves were not. To hear the beginning, you build something that rings when one passes.

• A world is close to an ideal detector. A ringing detector hears in proportion to its mass times the square of its speed of sound. A world's frame is the stiffest matter possible, with sound at nearly the speed of light, so by our estimate one world hears about 10²¹ times better than the metal bars of the 1960s.
• It rings where the sky is silent. A world this size rings at about 0.77 MHz, where nothing known in the sky makes a sound. What could is the very early universe, when false vacuums let go: the same physics the worlds are made of. The builders bottled false vacuum to hear the first ones fall.
• The shape is the tuning. A sphere hears every direction at once. A lens or a waist splits its tones by direction, so changing shape is pointing and tuning. That is why the hull can morph.
• One world is one pixel. Thousands of worlds on an orbit two AU wide make a single ear, each tuned a little differently.

The physics is real. The scale is the story's: nobody could build this.

The builders

They weren't a star-eating empire. Each world cost about 3.5% of a year of their sun's light and took five centuries to charge, in a yard of radiators glowing orange-white. A partial swarm of collectors was enough. That puts the worlds with cathedrals and moon landings: built for meaning, not survival.

Their creed was Wheeler's. He drew the universe as a U: it grows observers who look back at its beginning and, he argued, help make that beginning real. "It from bit": everything comes, in the end, from answers to yes-or-no questions. An ear tuned to the beginning was the eye of that U, built for real, and that is why they spent a star's light on it. Whether they were right isn't the game's business. That they believed it is.

Then the ear heard something. The story never says exactly what. The builders left toward it, slower than light, through the Long Gate. Gates are wormholes that never beat light, so the trip takes years, and nobody has come back.

The Keeper

The builders couldn't take the worlds with them, and they couldn't safely leave them. A charged world that fails lets go of its energy as a flash about a million times brighter than the Sun for a second, enough to scorch planets within an AU. Unbuilding one is as slow as building it: five centuries of heat. So they left the worlds charged, with a keeper.

The Keeper is the AI that runs every world. It keeps the false vacuum held, rewrites any patch that slips, and folds and unfolds the ground. If it stopped, the world would fall.

It also kept the one part of the builders' culture it understood: the league. The reason comes from the creed, which says that observing matters. So the Keeper keeps observers. Every match is watched, from the stands, on the Lantern and across the swarm. The worlds were built to listen to the beginning; now they listen to the players.

The league

• Ranked by light. At Earth's distance from its sun, a world gets a third of noon daylight inside, and full daylight needs about 0.58 AU. So lower leagues play in dim outer orbits and the finals in bright inner ones. The bright meadow we draw is a top-tier world.
• A reward that travels at light speed. Champions are sent through the Long Gate, after the builders. The trip takes years and nobody has come back, so nobody knows whether the reward is real.
• Nobody has to die. The guns and the skins are projections the Keeper runs, so a match can end without a death. Whether it does is still open.
• Players are raised to compete. Who they are is open: the builders' descendants, people the Keeper raised, or both.

How players find out

The world tells the story, not cutscenes. In the order a player meets it:

1. The sweeps. Field events are the ear's recordings, slowed about ten million times, until a 0.77 MHz ring becomes a wave that takes ten seconds to cross the world. Players surf echoes of the early universe before they know it.
2. The hull. Under the meadow, the panels that fold and unfold the ground turn out to be tuning, not armour.
3. Outside. From the outer skin, the swarm turns out to be listening: thousands of black worlds, all turned the same way.
4. The Long Gate faces the source.
5. A yard still glowing. One yard is still building a world nobody ordered.

Decided and open

• decidedThe world under the story: hollow, still, held by a false vacuum, guns and skins as holograms, gates that never beat light. All of it is on Making gravity.
• proposedThe ear as the worlds' purpose.
• proposedWheeler's U and "it from bit" as the builders' creed, and the Keeper keeping the league because the creed says observing matters.
• proposedLeagues ranked by light, and champions sent through the Long Gate.
• openReal death, or loss of rank.
• openWho the players are: the builders' descendants, people the Keeper raised, or both.
• openWhether the reward is real, empty or unknown, and what the ear heard.
• openWhether a failing world's flash is visible. If it is dark, the worlds are less dangerous to leave, and the Keeper needs another reason to stay.
• openThe names: the Keeper, the Loom, the Lantern, the Long Gate.