Even more remarkable was another prediction that followed from the Chironian symmetry relationships, which required the creation of an “antiuniverse” along with the universe, populated by antimatter and consisting of an extraordinary realm in which “antitime” ran backward and “antispace” contracted from an initial volume of zero, Universes, like particles, were created in pairs. And it was the duality of universes, each exhibiting a spacetime decomposed into two discrete dimensions, which gave rise to the two-way duality manifested by tweedles and antitweedles: Dums, dees, antidums, and antidees were simply spacelike, timelike, antispacelike, and antitimelike projections of the same fundamental entity existing in the timeless, spaceless domain of tweedlespace.
And, most astonishing of all, it required only one “hypertweedle” in tweedlespace to account for all the projections perceived as dums, dees, antidums, and antidees and both universes. A universe provided, in effect, a screen upon which the same projections were repeated over and over again as a consequence of the separation of the space and time dimensions of the screen itself, which of course was why every dum was the same as every other dum, and every dee the same as every other dee. It was as if a typewriter created paper as it typed on, leaving the planar inhabitants of the flat universe that it had brought into being to ponder why all the characters encountered serially in their own “flat-time” should have exactly the same form.
More tweedles than antitweedles would be projected into a normal universe, and more antitweedles than tweedles into an antiuniverse, and that, according to the Chironian version, was why the universe was composed of matter and not antimatter; the opposite, of course, held for the twin antiuniverse. The way to obtain antimatter, they therefore reasoned, would be to make a small part of the universe look like an antiuniverse so that tweedlespace could be “fooled” into projecting antitweedles instead of tweedles into it. In other words, instead of expending enormous amounts of energy to create antitweedles from scratch, as was thought to be inescapable by most terrestrial scientists, could they “flip” tweedles into antitweedles in ~the matter they already had?
To the astonishment of even themselves, they found that they could. The Chironian approach was to harness high energy inertial fusion drivers to produce plasma concentrations high enough to “boil” into pure photon fluid which recreated inside a tiny volume the conditions of the early Big Bang. Within this region, space and time recoupled and contracted inward with the imploding core to simulate for an instant the bizarre, inverted conditions of an antiuniverse, and in that instant a large portion of the tweedles liberated in the process transformed into antitweedles which, under the prevailing high-energy conditions, combined preferentially into antiquarks and antileptons rather than radiation. Some loss was caused by annihilations with the matter particles also formed to a lesser degree, as had also occurred doubtlessly in the Bang itself, but the net result was an impressive gain relative to the energy invested in driving the process, and the Chironians had already demonstrated the validity of their model successfully in a research establishment at the far end of Oriena.
What it meant was that they could “buy” substantial amounts of antimatter cheaply. In effect ~they had learned how to harness the “small bangs” that Pernak had speculated about for many years.
The theory opened up whole new realms, Pernak was beginning to appreciate as he sat back in his office to give his mind a rest from absorbing the information being presented on the wall screen opposite. What he was starting to glimpse hadn’t just to do with the physics; it was the completely new philosophy of existence that came with the physical interpretation.
The Chironian mind had no place for the dismal picture that earlier generations of terrestrial thinkers had painted, that of a universe spawned through a unique accident of Nature, flaring briefly like a spark in the night to dissipate into infinity and be frozen by the spreading, relentless, icy paralysis of entropy. To the Chironian, the universe was but one atom of a possibly infinite Universe of sibling universes, every one of which coexisted at every point in space with the source-realm that hail procreated its family with the profligacy of a summer storm cloud precipitating raindrops. Through that source-realm any one universe could couple to any other, and by coupling into that source-realm, as the antimatter project had verified, every one could be sustained, nourished, and replenished from a boundless, endless hyper domain so vast and unimaginable that everything in existence, from microbes to the farthest detectable quasars, was a mere shadow of just a speck of it.