Museum

Exhibit 137: The Empty Box

There are lots of empty boxes in the galaxy, but only one is the Empty Box.

This simple, small cube of tarnished silver and lead, recovered from a Precursor site on Omane (First Expanses), is unique because it is exactly that: empty. It contains no mere vacuum.

Within its internal “volume”, for lack of a better word, there is nothing; not only the absence of mass-energy, but also of everything else. There is no space within the cube, nor does time pass there. The most sensitive measuring instruments available detect no activity within, not even that of the quantum foam. Most significantly, radiation passed through the cube appears to travel faster than light, passing into one facet and out of the opposing facet with the delay that would be expected were the inner facets of the cube to be coterminous – which we believe them to be, in fact. A captured glitch in the fabric of space, perhaps, or an experiment in creating the ultimate emptiness?

It is, of course, quite impossible. But then, everything here is.

– exhibit label at the Museum of Manifest Impossibilities,
Landing, Víëlle (Thirteen Colonies)