Faster Than Light Travel

War has a way of accelerating science. The desperate hunt for a battlefield advantage over the enemy drives invention, and the Gene War was no exception. In the course of saving humanity from mind-controlled slavery, scientists discovered that a collapsing microsingularity would produce a wormhole.

People at the time knew quite well what a wormhole was, of course. Known in more precise scientific terminology as “Einstein-Rosen Bridges,” they were essentially holes in the fabric of space time. One could go into a wormhole at one place in space and emerge in a completely different place, possibly light years distant, with no time having passed.

For as long as the theory of wormholes existed, everyone saw the possibilities for space travel. Missing was how to create a wormhole and how to keep it from immediately collapsing and disappearing.

The physicist Kip Thorne popularized the idea that there might be some kind of previously never-observed matter that could keep them from collapsing. It would, Thorne theorized, have to somehow have a negative mass. He called this hypothetical material exotic matter.

(Note: The above paragraph is factual, not fiction. Thorne really did publicize the idea of exotic matter and using it to stabilize an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It has obviously never been done, but the theory is his.)

During the Gene War, scientists came to understand that by controlling the spin and mass of a microsingularity, you could control the output of a wormhole. Once they figured out how to create exotic matter, Faster Than Light travel finally became a reality.