A Chunk of SciFi – 2.10 – Wild Space [Location]
“Wild Space? Yeah, I’ve been there. Well, been close to it, never across the border. It’s a weird bit of the universe. Like someone took the rules of nature and decided they would be, well not guidelines, but more like suggestions…”
Wild Space is the common name given to sector EGH-37. It goes by other names; Fractal Space, Choas Zone, Satans Eye and much more. Every spacefaring culture has encountered it or decides to try and explore it. Many do not return. Within this zone, the rules of reality hare mere suggestions. Time and space are bent, looped and twisted. A probe passing through the sector in 5 seconds might record several thousand years of data and come out the other side broken and in need of repair. Legends say that once a small ship, being chased by bandits in a Dreadnaught-class vessel was chased into the zone. When it eventually came out the other side, it had somehow grown and changed, to the point that the pursuers thought it was a different ship. If they hadn’t seen it warp and change before their eyes they would have thought the same. The Dreadnaughts wreckage can still be found by the border.
One of the most peculiar things about Wild Space is that its effects never cross a certain point. This is easy to scan for and can be detected by any space going species. There is a suggestion that the beings that once inhabited sector EGH-37 were able to stop the effect from going further. Another is that every 41.6 years, a clear path emerges that leads to the middle of the sector. Many groups were prepared for this and last time sent the fastest probe they could to the middle.
Before the probe was destroyed it manage to get close enough to the one-star system in EGH-37. This is where the confusion increased even more. Several major things were immediately noticed about the system. The first is that the star and other 5 planets all orbited around one planet as if it was the star and the star a planet. The second was that the orbits were not on one plane. They went across each other, sometimes at 90 degrees to each other. Pushing forward to the core planet around which the star orbited, the probe picked up something more peculiar.
The central planet had a massive part missing from it as if a giant scoop had taken a chunk out of the planet. A faint spherical haze could be seen protruding as well. Those that saw the image said it was as if that part of space had been replaced with a perfect sphere of …something… and the planet just happened to get in the way. It was quickly noticed that this sphere, where it was on the planet, was at the exact centre of Wild Space. Before more speculations could be put forth, the temporal and spatial distortions returned and contact with the probe was lost.
To this day, no-one has been able to get as close to the planet in EGH-37. The warping and twisting and changeable nature of both time and space in this sector make it almost impossible. Still, if it follows the same pattern as before, the next window to explore there should be open very soon.
