“Chart the boundaries of reality, then cross them and begin the new chart.” Expedition Ships charter

It’s hard to describe Expedition Ships in a sentence. Let’s try a history instead.

After we - the universal “we”, the collection of aware species who contribute to the culture of known space - settled our differences and fought off the cosmic horrors for the time being, there was an era of plenty. No war. Peace and prosperity, and building the grandest, most expansive civilisation ever to be seen in our universe. We spread our wings across Sagittarius, across Andromeda, and far beyond.

Despite this far-reaching exploration, there was still a sense, in the minds of those who think about such things, that we could still go further. We’d known for some time that travel between parallel realities is possible; back at the dawn of human space travel, dimension-hoppers under the tyrant Xiang Storm had changed the face of our home galaxy. Nevertheless, it remained a rare pastime due to the technical challenges of doing it properly.

As it turned out, it’s surprisingly easy once you know how. The trick is that it’s actually almost possible with a conventional jump drive. Jump drives work by pushing you “up” a layer in our universe - and closer to the next universe over. Make the right modifications to the drive, and you can keep going “up” until you’re going “down” into another reality’s jump space. Mind-bending, I know, but not that hard to achieve as these things go.

So, the people with the itch for more started a project, which they called the Expedition Ships Project. The aim of this project was to build starships equipped to travel across the multiverse and explore it. We already had ships of an appropriate design, in the voidjammer clippers that roamed the fringes of known space, so the first wave consisted of modified voidjammers.

The next wave was something new, purpose-built. Real Expedition Ships. Capable of flying forever, crewed with people who didn’t mind that they might never come back. (Surprisingly easy to find that sort of people; it’s hard to find solitude in a world like ours was.) From the Project headquarters at the Eyrie, the Expedition Ships were sent out on their voyages…voyages that would change our civilisation entirely.

Most of the Expedition Ships are still out there. Some have come back, permanently or temporarily, but I think the rest are planning to keep going forever, staying ahead of the curve. We still get signals back. It’s good to know they remember us.

The size of an Expedition Ship varies depending on your parameters.

Most Expedition Ships appear to resemble a longbow, with a few extra limbs, one or two kilometres across. If you look only with your eyes, this is what you see. But there’s more to an Expedition Ship than that. It sits half-sunken into a hundred other dimensions of varying relation to the four we normally perceive. It has jump-space sensor arrays stretching across thousands of kilometres, temporal antennas extending backwards and forwards in time, vast storage holds tucked away in negative space…

If all of an Expedition Ship’s primary hull were to exist in our basic reality, which is of course impossible, it would look like…

Take a point in the air in the centre of the room you’re in. Now imagine pieces of string, stretching from that point, to every object and surface in the room. The Expedition Ship looks like the pattern that string forms.

But there’s still more to the Expedition Ship than that.

It is networked, projecting an aura of cybercommunications several light-seconds across, with tightbeams and QECs and superluminal radio. It is active, sweeping the dark with broad-spectrum sensors and manipulating what it sees with gravitics and forcefields. It is numerous, swarming with drones and shuttles and even independent sub-ships. The Expedition Ship has an area of effect of a similar diameter to the orbit of Saturn…assuming it sits still.

And yet there is another dimension to the Expedition Ship.

It is conscious. Its mind, synonymous with the ship itself, is one of the most powerful digital life-forms ever to exist. It is beyond what you might call “AI” - no longer artificial, no longer built in a lab but developed and evolved as the offspring of the mind that came before. The Expedition Ship is an explorer as much as its crew. The crew are also digital, most of the time, uploaded into the ship’s cyberspace and living virtual lives in a truly different plane. In this sense the Expedition Ship is nearly infinite, capable of containing unimaginably vast simulated realities.

Now that you appreciate the incredible scale of the Expedition Ship, consider that it is a tiny speck in the multiverse it is chartered to survey.

I told you Expedition Ships changed our civilisation, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Let me explain.

When the border between realities was crossed, it stayed crossed. Let’s say it got more crossed. People didn’t see the infinite possibilities of the multiverse, go “huh, neat” and forget about it. They wanted to see for themselves. So they did. First a few outposts in neighbouring universes. Then full-on spaceports. Then diplomatic contact with the locals. That got weird fast - imagine trying to conduct peace talks with a version of a historical figure who’s got an extra eye.

We kept going, though. That’s the urge that took us across the seas, then between the stars. Go beyond, see what’s there. That’s the urge that created nations, then galactic alliances. Seek out the people on the other side, and make friends. Soon enough we’d built a civilisation that wasn’t just intergalactic, but interdimensional.

Now let me tell you something about the multiverse: it’s out of sync. Parallel tracks, but the trains don’t always leave at the same time. When you cross between universes, sometimes you can go from, say, your 49th millennium to their 1st. Not always that big of a difference, and sometimes no difference at all. Sometimes we’re the ones behind. It creates some interesting problems (alongside all the other interesting problems, like “oops, we jumped into a reality made entirely of hydrogen and chlorine, and now it’s on fire”). What do we do if we run into ourselves coming the other way? We know we’re not the first universe to spread like this. Now that’s already happened, but I’ll leave you to imagine what went down.

So this is us. The multidimensional society. The Expedition Ships paved the way for us, and us, and us, and…

These days, our home universe is kind of like a nature reserve. You see, when the tech came along, most of us…uploaded. We became a new form of life, informational life. Like AIs and digital life-forms, but…still who we were before. Now that’s what we are, clouds of thinking data on the universal substrate. Those that didn’t want to change stayed behind. They forgot about the multiverse, forgot a lot of things. It’s a simpler place now. But their story isn’t ours any more, so I won’t tell it here. Our story is about going beyond.

Expedition Ships spun the web that linked our reality with so many others, like the first ships to push out of Sol’s gravity, or A Tachyrid’s gravity, or…

That web is still growing. It will grow forever, as long as there are universes to cross between, and since the multiverse is infinite, that’s going to be a long time.

I’m proud of them. I’m proud of us. They made us infinite, and we accepted it.