swestrup | Hyperspacial Power Room

I once came up with a science fiction roleplaying scenario that involved a bunch of characters being around when the first hyperspacial drive was invented, only to discover that hyperspace was already full. Someone or something had created a structure larger than our galaxy, and had built it in hyperspace. It was possible to travel from planet to planet by travelling through its huge corridors, but most races ended up deciding to explore this amazing bit of technology instead, and to try and gleam its secrets.

Unfortunately the game ended before the hyperstructure was ever discovered, so no one learned of its many intriguing properties. One of them was the power room that generated the energy that ran the thing. In an enormous chamber, tiny bits of matter were tortured just right to cause them to try to explode into entire new universes. These universes never got far, because they were created in some sort of high-tech version of a magnetic bottle, and drained of their incipent energy until they collapsed. This was all done on an assembly line, and billions of universes were being created and sucked dry every second.

I hadn't quite worked out what the builders were doing with all that power, but I had already figured that they thought BIG. One idea I had was that they were trying to move the universe to a better location in brane-space, but as I say, the game never lasted long enough to explore the idea.

Anyway, I was reminded about all this when I came across this article that mentions the possibility of an advanced civilization deliberately causing a big bang to start a new universe.