The Museum of Mankind
A mega structure existing in the far future, long after the Earth and even the Bubble itself have been consigned to ancient history.
Situated in second harmonic space, the Museum was constructed using human generative starships. Only in second harmonic space, could a megastructure of the ambitious size and scale desired, be built without hitting engineering limits imposed by gravity and material science.
Multicoloured coruscations vibrate ecstatically round the mathematical bubble where the Museum intrudes into a hostile dimension. Its illegal wavefunction is held in collapsed co-reference to the wavefunction of the rest of first harmonic space by a spider web of photon chains which anchor it to a hundred black holes scattered throughout the local galactic group. Each one pipes it with the ‘pseudo energy’ of the first harmonic gradient of entropy which the Big Bang set in motion.
Access to the museum from first harmonic space, can sometimes be dangerous. If the pilots of generative starships make critical restructuring errors using superimplicit drives too near to the Museum, they may not only destroy their craft utterly, but seriously pollute the galactic dimensional environment. This has happened on more than one occasion, making the fabric of space writhe in agony, the photon chains stretch under the strain and proto intelligent systems eject emergency anchors at the command of the Lords of the Museum to catch the new curvature and renormalise the whole structure.
Purpose / Function
The Museum of Mankind was built some time after the three hundredth millenium to be a super repository of all the many curios and objects of interest encountered by humanity in its long, slow expansion into the galaxy.
Alterations
The Museum has never exactly been finished, and new halls, floors and wings are added on a regular basis.
Architecture
The Museum is divided into a series of linear "wings", coded with letters of the alphabet. Each wing has a two dimensional breakdown consisting of a vertical set of floors, (known to consist of a minimum of at least a thousand on the "J" wing) and a set of numbered halls running within each floor and also known to run to at least several hundred on the J wing.
Thus, a specific exhibition space within the museum can be uniquely identified by the combination of the wing letter and the floor and hall number.
Spiral staircases connect the floors at five hall intervals with wider sweeping ramps and mezzanine balconies after every twenty halls. In order to accommodate larger exhibits, the floors and ceilings of some halls have been removed to make great internal caverns.
History
The Lords of the Museum are an aristocratic oligarchy which manage the structure, its staff and its exhibits. There have been three dynasties at the time of the story of the Museum.
Tourism
The Museum serves as both a repository for academic material used by human and non-human scholars throughout human space and more rarely as a site for very wealthy tourists. It is only accessable to a narrow strata of society and at the time of the story of the Museum it was receiving very few visitors of any kind having become unfashionable.
Founding Date
some time after 300000 CE
Type
Megastructure, Stellar scale
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