One:Buryatia-Patagonia Transverse
At some time between the Tertiary (Batavia) Excession and the Tunguska Ejection (also known as the Second Tunguska Event), it was discovered that a geometrically-perfect cylindrical section of the planet Earth approximately 2.55 m in diameter, passing through the center of the planet, had been removed. The resulting antipodean bore connects the area between Buryatia, near the city of Ulan Ude, and Patagonia/Tierra Del Fuego, near the city of Puerto Natales (in what used to be Chile). This became known as the Buryatia-Patagonia Transverse, the Buryatia-Patagonia Transverse Bore (or Bypass or Byway), or simply the B.P.T.B.
Initially, the bore could only be used to transport physical objects and goods in heat-shielded, pressurized vessels. Eventually, under the efforts of the Distributed Commonwealth of Autonomous Machines (D.C.A.M.), either end of the bore were sealed via airlock system and then eventually evacuated. The resulting transverse byway allows for transglobal transit in approximately three quarters of an hour[1][2]. It is primarily used as transportation for data stored on solid-state memory devices, providing a higher effective bandwidth connection than the remainder of the existing satellite network. It is also used by robots and certain classes of machine intelligence objects as a form of rapid transit, though for safety reasons (due to the exposure to hard vacuum), it is required they be shut down ("sleep" or similar modes are insufficient) for the duration, to be reactivated upon arrival. Contentious debates rage in robophilosophical and robontological circles as to whether this termination of the instance constitutes an equivalent to the human concept of "death." Some machines, understandably, are reluctant to undergo this process.
Human and other organic intelligences may use the transverse for shipping, as per the First Treaty of New Google (which formally ended the American War of Robotic Independence), subject to tariffs based upon current conversion rates predicated by AIDEX (formerly NASDAQ).
It is unknown what became of the approximately 1.45×1012 kg of Earth that were removed as a result of the bore (though it is postulated they joined the matter that returned to space as part of the aforementioned Tunguska Ejection).
Citations
- American War of Robotic Independence
- Batavia Excession
- Distributed Commonwealth of Autonomous Machines
- Tunguska Ejection
