The Rosenbaum Frequency

The Rosenbaum Frequency is my basis for my sci-fi genre setting.

My sci-fi genre universe is a little unconventional.  FTL drives haven't been invented, and vast regions of space lay unexplored.  People have managed to populate other systems however, because of a concept called the Rosenbaum Frequency.

Every object has a dicrete and measurable Rosenbaum Frequency ('Rofe' value) which defines its position in space-time.  And simply by physically moving an object, its Rofe will change.  Researchers then developed a device which emitted a field which in turn could influence the Rofe of whatever was placed inside the field.

The net result of doing this was to instantly transport the affected object to the location dictated by this new frequency.  I.e. teleportation / displacement could be achieved without the need for any molecular disassembly or matter transference.  Because the rules of the Rosenbaum Frequency dictate than an object with a Rofe value of X must be in position X.  The trouble is, there seems to be no relationship between locations close in space-time and their corresponding frequencies.  I.e. two people standing next to each other, occupying very close-by space will very likely exhibit vastly different Rosenbaum Frequencies.  And only slightly modifying the frequency can potentially displace an object to the other side of the galaxy / universe / wherever.  And that might well be inside a sun / asteroid / whatever.  So its a hazardous and wholly random process.

So the diaspora of Terrans to the stars in my universe didn't happen by the typical means, but by labs altering the Rofe's of probes at random, and sending them off to places at random, and recording what happened.  In many cases of course they simply recorded dead space, or distant stars, but in some cases they found systems with inhabitable worlds.  And of course in some instances the probe was lost, presumed instantly destroyed.  On rare occassions, alien life was witnessed.

The probes were fitted with pre-programmed Rofe field generators, so they could be recalled.  And communication with the probes was via what I call a Paired Quark Dictor (PQD) sometimes referred to as a Tangle Comm.  Because any force applied to one of a pair of entangled quarks affects the other quark as if it had been directly applied to it.  In physics terms the concept of quantum entanglement.

The concept of quantum entanglement nicely validates the notion of instantaneous communication over any distance.  One quark from an entangled pair is embedded in the PQD housed within the probe.  Any data the probe records is translated into binary and communicated by inducing a simple up and down oscillation of the quark it contains.  Back in the lab, the matched quark oscillates simultaneously in precisely the same manner as its entangled buddy, and thus produces a real-time binary data stream which is re-encoded back into audio/video and whatever mulit-spectrum data the probe is programmed to record.

So in this way tiny (mostly unrelated) fragments of the universe were mapped.  Many probes were lost of course, but by pure chance some systems were discovered which could support human life.  So earth's overcrowding and environmental issues were circumnavigated by colonists who were 'freq'd' or 'freaked' off to distant worlds discovered by the probes.

In some cases wealthy individuals paid vast sums of money to have private worlds located for them, and the race was on for different labs, funded by different corporations to find the most fabulous worlds imaginable.

But sometimes, they found other things....