It’s the time of nuclear fusion…
With the enormous power that explodes forth from the fusion of ultradense deuterium, timeships become possible and the multiverse will never be the same, indeed in one beautiful big bangerang, intelligent life seizes the opportunity to shape the vast expanse of the cosmos and itself, from the crest of redshifting wave beyond the cosmic microwave background that is expanding into the past at the edge of the known universe and deep into the Infinite Is.
The crew of the mining ship Diplogen were partying in torpor, a sort of lucid dream construct program that they ran to keep their minds sharp and entertained for the duration of deep space flight. They had just struck it rich, and were celebrating because everything they could imagine was within reach for them now, anything they desired could be bought for what this bounty was worth.
In the program just for fun, they had their very own synthesizer band called Heavy Water and were happily moving butts around the virtual dance floors in a warehouse rave at area 51 of Rydberg station on outpost Charon when it happened. They couldn’t hear the ships warnings, partly because they were slowed down relative to their life in torper, and partly because the rave was so loud. Perhaps they were just having so much fun that they just ignored it?
The first fissure in the multiverse pierced through the very fabric of spacetime when their massive heavy freighter laser fusion impulse drive, the largest ever built, damaged by an emergency landing and modified by an alien stowaway saboteur melted down and exploded, fusing what was then the largest haul of deuterium ever recorded in the history of that universe. The ship and all of it’s miners were presumed dead or lost in space forever. The massive ship disappeared in a brilliant wave of sapphire blue Cherenkov radiation within visual range of what was then the furthest outpost that those primitive humans had managed to build, outpost Charon, which should never have survived such a massive explosion. It was almost as if the whole white hot mess were instantly swallowed up in a small black hole or something, somehow sparing the venerable frontier outpost.
An allegedly empty lifeboat which was said to have been jettisoned right before the event then itself disappeared under mysterious circumstances when it was being hauled out of an emergency net by a tug owned by man named Ham and his trusty Enbot Frank, who, suspiciously, also then went missing.