Ilene reeled off a list of measurements from theinstrument probes that were monitoring their environment, out to aradius of more than a light-hour. There was nothing on its way thatcould wreck the experiment — or at least, nothing traveling slower thanninety-five percent of lightspeed. Zulkifli followed with a statusreport from the machinery deep inside the Quietener. Systems that hadbeen preparing themselves for the last twelve hours were now minutesaway from readiness.

The single graph on the wall was just a useful shorthandfor the state they were hoping to create; the novo-vacuum itself wasthe sum of equal parts of forty-eight variations of the target graph,all generated by simple symmetry transformations of the original. Allthe individual variations favored one direction over another, but thesum combined every possible bias, canceling them all out and givingrise to a perfectly isotropic state. Since none of the graphs could befound in nature, this elegant description was useless as a recipe, butit wasn’t hard to show that the same state vector could also bedescribed by a different sum: forty-eight regions of ordinary vacuum,each slightly curved, oriented in forty-eight different directions.

Inside the Quietener, an asteroid’s-mass worth of heliumhad been cooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate, and manipulated into astate where it was equally likely to be found in any of forty-eightdifferent places. These alternative locations were distributed acrossthe surface of a sphere six kilometers wide. Ordinary matter — or anykind of matter interacting with the outside world — would have behavedasif each distinct position had already become the sole reality; if aswarm of dust particles wandering by had made themselves part of the