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Naysayers be damned. Today was the day we’d finally pierce it. The holy grail of physics. A closed time-like curve capable of being traversed. A wormhole. One that didn’t annihilate anything that went through it, unlike previous attempts.

The physical science had been worked out centuries ago. Objects of sufficient mass, rotating at sufficient speed, produce gravito-electromagnetic fields. The heavier they are, and the faster they rotate, the stronger the field. This field pulls matter in at its poles, similar to how a magnetic field pulls ferromagnetic material into its poles. The effect had been observed distorting the event horizon shape in rapidly rotating black holes, and giving rise to gamma-ray burst jets from quasars and pulsars.

The trick to making a wormhole was the gravito-electromagnetic field needed to form a tunnel, a sort of gravitational coil gun. The rail gun analogue could not work because there was no analogy to a single wire carrying current in gravito-electromagnetics, however, there was an equivalent for a ferrous projectile. And it was anything with mass.

It had been done before now, only on particle scales across short distances. The field was generated by donuts of matter rotating at relativistic speeds, speeds approaching the speed of light. Donuts because the wormhole passed through them. If they’re not hollow, the object will crash into the matter in the center instead of passing through, as in a black hole, although some black holes with sufficient spin still produce quasar jets. The absurd speed was needed because to create a true closed space time loop, they needed to replicate the gravito-electromagnetic field of a singularity, a point of near infinite density.

The rings themselves of the device did not actually rotate. The centripetal force of any solid at those relativistic angular speeds would create stresses exceeding the ultimate tensile strength and it would shed itself apart. The donuts had the outer diameter of a small moon and the inner diameter of a small spacecraft. Most of that space was structural trusses. The magic, though, was in the stellarator fusion reactor. Inside that immensely powerful magnetic chamber a toroidal star burned, and it burned in short busts, a sort of rotational supernovae in which fusion was allowed to proceed unchecked until it produced heavier elements which cooled. The plasma is what rotated relativistically and produced the gravito-electromagnetic field. The law of equal and opposite reaction forces would cause the station to rotate counter the stellarators rotation, but this was balanced by vent rockets out or the stellarator, which ejected some of the already fused fuel out rocket nozzles in the outer diameter of the device. When as the spacecraft passes through the donut, the first stellarator is fully vented to counter the rotational forces produced by firing the secondary stellarator, the plasma in which spins in the opposite direction as the first, producing a transient mass fluctuation in the spacecraft, which results in a sort of antigravity push away from the disk. The field of this push aligns with the gravito-electromagnetic field of the destination stellarator station, which pulls the craft in, and then does not reverse, resulting in standard non-relativistic speeds as it emerges out the other side of the stellarator. As all of this acceleration and motion is due to gravity, it is not considered proper acceleration and to the craft feels like zero-Gs, because gravity is actually a space time distortion effect, unlike, say, rocket propulsion. In laments terms, travel through the device felt like free fall, as opposed to the crushing accelerations of chemical, electromagnetic or nuclear propulsion.

 Early attempts at similar coil-gun type voyages used magnetic fields, which were proper accelerations, and as such, required extremely long acceleration and deceleration routes to avoid damage to cargo.

The first small-scale tests were done in what was known as The Gravitoid, an enormous below ground racetrack where the space time distortion formed a closed loop, and matter placed inside circled the track, entirely separate from time.

Theoretical physics allows for, given a singularity level gravito-electromagnetic field, travel back in time, however a true singularity, not a mere light singularity requires either the angular momentum of the body to be infinite, which is impossible, or the radius of the body be zero, which is only possible for a black hole. As a black hole’s gravitational field cannot be shut off or reversed, and they cannot be made donut shaped, they were of no use.

It had taken generations to build the first one, flawed in its lack of true singularity, and in an independent orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system, where its pulse would not disturb the movements of our worlds.

It was aimed and aligned precisely at another ring near our closest neighboring star, to allow shipment of goods between the colony in that star system and our home-world. Should the technology prove reliable, I expect they’ll pop up across the universe.

Much like the field between two magnets, if the poles of the gravito-electromagnetic field align, the field paths create a straight shot between them as though they are one gravito-electromagnetic field source. That is the wormhole. A path where space time has been distorted by gravity to allow movement of goods almost instantaneously.

Our field is not quite that strong. The journey would still take a few years. There is debate whether material science will ever be capable of allowing for generation of a field strong enough that the journey would only last a few days. The hardest part was setting it up such that the gravito-electromagnetic flux lines between the devices connected. Otherwise, there was no path between them, and the wormhole would instead function more as a gravitational whirlpool leading to deep space.

All we know is, when we turn on the device, we can see the destination system as though we were peering through the other ring, and that is good enough to send a shipment of tanks and starfighters through.

I actually harbor strong supportive feelings for the colonists and their rebellion, but the government never would’ve given me the funding for this project had it not been the military need to rapidly supply the besieged garrison there. The insurgent rebellion has been going on for nearly two hundred years now. I find it puzzling that a seat in the Human Senate could be worth so many lives, but I never put much thought into macro-economics or politics. My mind is better spent on the cutting edges of what is possible.

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