In the ancient literature, they called it “hyperspace.” Lacking the conceptual tools for discussing the means for spatial displacement which didn’t require actually crossing the space, they came up with a word which missed the point, but was still popularly used. The technical explanations were not his specialty, but he was aware enough to be able to say the something about the process of cutting across vast physical distances between star systems in modern travel. The mathematics made it seem like grabbing hold of some anchor point and sliding space around until you had brought your destination to you. The process of grabbing that anchor point and moving space took time, and they referred to as stepping into hyperspace.
Without that means of spatial displacement, there would be no particular need for him to travel. That is, there would really be no place for him to go. Humanity had long ago stumbled upon that technology, and immediately sent probes to places they had only dreamed. At first, they had to send them out, then bring them back. Information traveled at the speed of light, and this business of stepping aside from space was immeasurably quicker for unmanned machines. Send enough probes into enough distant places, and when they came back, they would have data which hinted at worlds which, as statistical probabilities had long told them, were almost like Earth. Given the vast number of stars, it was inevitable they found quite a few. It was human nature to want to explore these Terran planets first hand, with hopes of colonizing.
It took some time before anyone realized how to pass humans through that experience. First, the machines had to scale down the process of hooking up to those imaginary anchor points. All the previous speculation couldn’t guess what it did to the mind of humans, and even now they still weren’t exactly sure. The people came back from the initial attempts in all manner of different psychoses. Some were foetal, some permanently unintelligible with irregular noises and gestures which no computer could diagram into consistent patterns, some were afraid of everything, and the worst were those unafraid of anything. The range was limited only by the limited number of failed attempts. Eventually the scientists simply slowed the process until some invisible threshold was crossed, and folks were able to adjust.
Then the search and classification began in earnest, followed quickly by colonization. And again followed quickly by the wars. For all their brilliance, humans could not tame that instinct, could not breed it out, reason it out, technology it out — it was a permanent feature. Oddly, it was the technological advances of war which made colonization easier. They found a way to pass some weapon strikes across the anchoring process without leaving it. With weapons came the ability to transmit data, since what’s the point of striking if you can’t aim the weapon? They discovered it meant adding another variable to the mathematical algorithms, because an anchor point wasn’t actually in any one place. As long as the anchor point was validly constructed, so to speak, something could be released from it anywhere in space. It took some doing to figure out a way to calibrate the multiple points of exit, and correlate them with known places for targeting, then receive the feedback, but it all made colonization all that much easier and efficient, since any anchor point could examine any place.
Eventually someone with power or influence got sick of the fighting and convinced others to feel the same way. Then there were truces and pieces of peace, but was never really any great peace without first an exhausting war across most of human space. This last war was particularly widespread, and many colonies lost contact with each other. Centralizing control would wax and wane with the winds of fashion, but centralized contact seemed always fundamentally essential. So after massive galaxy-wide wars like the last one, the academics who had been waiting for things to calm down would send out their researchers to survey what had changed among the known human systems. When, as was this case, they stumbled across a colony long forgotten, they were all the more eager.
Dr. Plimick was just such an eager researcher. His specialty was currently referred to as Interstellar Anthropology. Only half-way through his expected life span, he was already a member of several academic boards and associations, and on staff with three different governing entities. They had recently gotten in contact with a world which seemed to have missed the last three wars, which meant even Plimick’s grandfather was not alive when this one went out of contact. So it was, Dr. Plimick was watching the few instruments he could understand on the ship’s command console, indicating the predicted cyclical timing of anchoring, swapping space around, then releasing the anchor in hailing distance from the recent find. His education and experience indicated caution was essential in their approach to this “lost world.”
