Xeelee: Endurance

A century and a half later, the future invaded the Solar System.

It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognised that. Under the leadership of Michael Poole, the ‘Interface project’ – a link to a future a millennium and a half ahead, created by towing a wormhole mouth across interstellar space behind Poole’s GUTship Cauchy – had been completed. Why had Poole’s wormhole time bridge been built? There were endless justifications: what power could a glimpse of the future afford? But the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it. Poole did it because he could.

Later, it would be difficult to recapture the mood of those times. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the universe. Others even believed the universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of producing and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.

But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the real future, not the dream. And what Jovik Emry had once called ‘the magnificence and the grandiose folly’ of Michael Poole had devastating consequences.

The incident that followed the return of the Cauchy, later to be known as the Emergency, was confused, chaotic, difficult for historians to disentangle. Future Earth – at the other end of Poole’s time bridge, a millennium and a half hence – would be under occupation by an alien species about whom almost nothing was known. Rebel humans from the occupation era were pursued back through time, through Poole’s Interface, by warships under the control of the occupiers. The rebels, with the help of Michael Poole, destroyed the warships, and Poole sealed the Interface wormhole. Poole himself was lost in time.

It had been a war – brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in solar space before or since, but a war nevertheless. The Solar System, stunned, slowly recovered.

And the rebels, stranded in their past, fled the Solar System in a captured GUTdrive ship, evidently intending to use relativistic time dilation effects to erode away the years back to their own era.

All the rebels fled.

So it was thought.