The Curated Guide to Hellsborough and The Dark Peak
Your Guide to navigating Hellsborough and The Dark Peak by Pip Rippon.
The finished version of Dark Peak: Hellsborough Chronicles Book One, is now available in Kindle and paperback formats from Amazon -- or you can download the first 7 chapters for free in ePub or Kindle mobi format from Hellsborough Library
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Introduction » Chapter 1 » Chapter 2 » Chapter 3 » Chapter 4 » Chapter 5 » Chapter 6 »
How is Hellsborough accessed?
That meteor and the massive forces that ruined the Earth and the dinosaurs isn’t what interests us in this chapter.
Right now, we’re more interested in tiny forces, infinitesimal ones. Changes so small they’re not visible to the human eye.
When that meteor hit, it caused a quantum fracture that forged the creation of two parallel worlds.
Apparently. Our universe, it’s a strange place.
There’s this thing: Quantum gravity. If spacetime is time and space wrapped into the same thing, then quantum gravity is just space and time and gravity all wrapped up into the same substance. How can I explain it better?
Think about doing the washing up – when you wash the dishes. Them bubbles of soap. Each soap bubble clings to the other, each a shining rainbow of light. Occasionally, some pop, that’s life; that’s the universe, I guess.
You’ve heard of Albert Einstein, right? Pretty much heralded as the cleverest bloke who ever lived. But this quantum gravity, that’s the bit that the great man couldn’t work out, bless him.
Einstein predicted light speed travel and black holes and all that crazy stuff – which turned out to be spot on – but this is the bit he didn’t get to: Gravity is a quantum element. Just as a photon is the quantum element of the electromagnetic field, so the graviton is the quantum element of the gravitational field.
With quantum gravity, each of them soap bubbles is a universe that exists in its own right. I know, hard to get your head around, but stay with me.
These soap bubbles, they all rub up against each other. They’re all jostling, all the time. Mostly this jostling is harmless, but sometimes – every once in a while, given a sufficient source of energy – like that almighty meteor strike of 66 Ma – them bubbles get severely agitated.
In times like that, they move apart. Maybe only a Plank length (which is an almost incalculably minute amount), but that’s enough.
That meteor strike in 66 was enough. It caused a fracture. A rift. A rupture in quantum gravity spacetime.
That’s when the illimitable cleavage happened. One world became two.
Hellsborough and Hillsborough. The town within the city and the town within the city. The same, but separate. And this was before either town existed; don’t forget that.
At the time though, no-one noticed. Not really. Most inhabitants of the world had died in that instant, when that split occurred.
This ain’t really my thing. I’m more of an anthropologist and folklorist, but if you’ve followed so far, this is my summary of it:
- A meteor struck 66 million years ago. The dinosaurs and 75-90% of life on Earth was wiped out
- Some creatures survived, otherwise life wouldn’t have
- Two parallel worlds were created (possibly more, but there are two that we know about, so let’s stick with two for now)
66 Ma was under a week ago in geological time according to our yearly calendar from the last chapter.
Of those survivors though, Milting were amongst them. Milting knew that parallel worlds existed. They also knew that there was nothing to stop anything crossing between those parallel worlds – everything was the same. There were no sides as such, there wasn’t left and right, it was the same on both sides, and a river ran through it – as rivers do.
A river, the Loxley in this case, runs through these parallel worlds. Like clouds and air drift across the boundaries, like The Murk pays no attention to this border between worlds.
So nothing noticed, and nothing cared. For millions of years, it was the same place. It looked the same, it was the same. But it wasn’t the same. Things were developing differently on each side of that invisible fissure.
Who knew?
Well, Milting knew. Ask Milting today, they remember the illimitable cleavage. I think I know what you’re thinking. How can anyone – how can anything – remember that?
Milting. They might have been travelling to the stars, or they might not. Their history doesn’t go into detail (if it does, I’ve yet to locate and interpret it). But they recorded things, they wrote things down – not in any language that can be readily understood, but written down nonetheless. And remembrance for them is hereditary, passed through their lineage. Their life history is recorded in their DNA.
That evidence of recorded intelligence I mentioned? In my research, I found it. Semagrams, like fossils – hidden, buried, closeted by the time of eons past.
Where they came from, know one really knows; I investigated. I talked to the librarians. I spoke to the Vice Principle. No one knows what they are. I had them spectrographically analysed – they told me that they shouldn’t exist, that they were impossible, that I had somehow fabricated them, that they were fake. They wanted to keep them though, course they did. I said I needed them for my research.
It was around then that my troubles with the university began.
I know what these semagrams are though: They’re most ancient data in the universe.
Until I found them they languished in a deep cellar, far from inquiring eyes. How I came to be in that deep cellar is a whole story in its own right, and not one I’m going to explore further here, but if your interested, read these diary entries: