The Lattice in the Milky Way

Earth & The Lattice

The Lattice World closest to Earth is World S-11/W-55, at 112 lightyears distant; S-11/W-55 serves as the main hub for travel between Earth and the Lattice, though her neighbor Lattice Worlds are practically equally near to Earth and compete for the traffic. Astronomically, World S-11/W-55 stands near Gamma Persei in the Earth sky. World-0, not the closest to Earth but the first Lattice World found by humanity, lies far behind the Lattice Plane, having fallen into a stellar orbit.

The Intersection

The Milky Way, our galaxy, occupies a disk-shaped volume of the Universe roughly 71,000 light years in diameter, insignificantly small compared to the totality. The Lattice occupies an area of two-dimensional space, without any discovered limit in those dimensions. On a cosmological scale, it is amazing The Milky Way and the Lattice intersect.

Numerically, Earth lies 28,000 light years from the Galactic Core; the Lattice lies at an angle of 27° to the Galactic Plane, and a current distance from the Galactic Core of 24,100 light years.

The intersectional area of the Lattice with the Milky Way is 30,320 light years wide, and nearly 400 light years high at the center, tapering to extreme thinness at the edges. Within this area of approximately six million square light years, there are an estimated one quarter million Lattice Worlds. Of course, humanity's presence in the Lattice, based at and spreading concentrically from World-0, finds no limitation at the galactic boundaries.

Theoretically, the most distant Lattice World that can have been visited by a human would lie 3.5 billion light years* from World-0 -- if our traveller turned around at the half-way point, he could claim to his fellow humans back at World-0 that he had travelled nearly two billion light years away ... but, of course, he would be 9,000 years old.

* Assuming he began his trip in 6380 A.D., when the Teegs were discovered, and was able to move to adjacent worlds at a maximum rate as dictated by the Seven Minute Limit: 15601 A.D. - 6380 A.D. = 9,221 years * 365.25 days/year = 3,367,970 days * 1,440 minutes/day = 4,849,877,160 minutes * 1 Teeg travelled/7 minutes = 692,839,594 Teegs travelled * 5.1 light years distance/Teeg = 3,533,481,931 light years

Relative Motion

If the Lattice is regarded as immobile in the Universe (a difficult assumption to make, there being no absolute reference), then the Milky Way is moving at a speed of nine light years per millennium, at an angle of 63° off-axis to the plane of the Lattice -- in effect striking the Lattice sideways, or "skimming across its surface." The Galactic Core moves closer to the plane of the Lattice by 4 light years per millennium, and moves along the plane of the Lattice by 8 light years per millennium. Since the human discovery of the Lattice, the Milky Way has moved 36 light years closer to the plane of the Lattice, and 72 light years along the plane of the Lattice. The rate is constant: the Mily Way's core will reach the plane of the Lattice in just over eight million years, at which time an estimated three hundred Lattice worlds will add their mass to the black hole at the Galactic Core.

Dematrixed Lattice Worlds

The Lattice Worlds are by no means immune to the effects of encounters with objects in the Milky Way. Over a hundred Lattice Worlds are "missing" and believed destroyed by collisions with other planets, stars, or black holes. Others have been pulled gravitationally out of their places within the Lattice's grid -- some to fly off randomly, but others, such as World-0, dematrixed by Urun-10037, to fall into stable orbits around various stars or other celestial bodies. (Whether a Lattice World has suffered dematrixing, however, does not affect the interconnections of the Teegs.)