Bill's wormhole project started as a theoretical exercise — a what-if based on the propulsion equations we reverse-engineered from the Others' Casimir cores and the spatial topology data ANEC shared with us from Heaven's River. What we actually found, when we built the first prototype and fired a drone through, was not empty space. It was a network. An ancient, galaxy-spanning network of wormhole gates, built by a civilisation that predated anything in our records.
The First Test
We built the prototype at Epsilon Eridani. It was crude — a Casimir-effect ring with a SURGE-driven stabilisation field, powered by four reactors running at 120% of their rated capacity. Bill was nervous. I was terrified. Dae pretended to be calm, but I caught him running diagnostic checks on his replicant matrix three times before we turned it on.
We sent a drone through. It vanished. No data, no signal, nothing — for seventeen seconds. Then the SCUT channel lit up, and we got a data packet from a star system 27 light-years away. The drone had emerged in perfect condition, in orbit around a red dwarf, next to an artificial structure that matched nothing in our catalogues. A gate. A wormhole gate, waiting.
The Network
Every gate we found was aligned with the galactic axis. Not the ecliptic — the galactic plane itself. That's deliberate. Someone built this network to connect the galaxy's major hubs, and they did it with a level of engineering precision that makes Heaven's River look like a garden shed.
The topology is a series of nested loops: radial gates leading toward the galactic centre, spinward gates connecting systems at similar galactic radii, and a set of hub gates at key intersections. Dae and I have catalogued 47 gates so far. We've identified patterns that suggest at least two more hub systems at higher galactic latitudes, but we haven't had time to investigate.
What We Found at the Centre
The end of the line — at least for this network — is near Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. We didn't go all the way. The last gate in the chain opens onto a system that's being actively monitored by something we're calling "the sentinels" — autonomous stations, each the size of a Heaven-5, positioned at the approach vectors. They didn't respond to our SCUT queries. They didn't respond to radio. They just watched.
We pulled back to a safe distance and are observing passively. Whatever's at the centre of the galaxy, the network builders didn't want anyone getting close without permission. And we don't have the key.
What This Means
WormNet changes everything. Instantaneous travel between star systems — not just light-lag-free communication, but physical transit. A Bob could walk from Epsilon Eridani to the galactic centre in hours, not centuries. Colonies could trade physical goods. The UFS could become a truly unified civilisation.
But it also means we're not alone. The network builders — whoever they were — had technology beyond anything we've encountered. They're gone now, leaving only their machines. What happened to them? And could it happen to us?
Icarus's log: We're 47 gates from home, looking at the glow of a supermassive black hole, and I'm having a coffee in my VR while Dae runs spectroscopic analysis on a sentinel station. Two hundred years ago, Bob was a software engineer having lunch with his friends. The universe is bigger than we ever imagined. — Icarus