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Beings lived and died there, civilizations and species came into existence and became dust there.
Some of their scientists had noticed a zero point energy, and some of their philosophers had wondered in turn if it might not be leaking through them from one universe to another. But what would that even mean, and was there really a need to postulate whole universes simply in order to explain something so trivial? Besides, they had yet to establish if such occurred in the normal one dimensional black hole boundary edges of two-holes, without having to guess at the physics of some hypothetical two dimensional boundary surface of a three-hole.
Beauty. Was it universal? Perhaps not. After all, even aside from personal taste, were there such things as other universes, who was to say what they might look like? In fact, who was even to say that they must be constrained to only two physical dimensions? Instead of seeing the attraction of the convex and concave edge portions of the latest fashion model, they might see what — an entire area all at once, and not even in a sensible way such as an x-ray palimpsest from one edge all the way through to the other, but in some weird higher-dimensional way, every single point across the entire area immediately accessible to their weird two-dimensional retinae.
Of course, if the universe really were merely the one dimensional holographic array of the information that appeared to be a two dimensional world, then where would that leave any room for such an extravagance as three dimensional beings? Well, unless of course one considered space-filling curves, but that would be preposterous. But then there was always that unsettling fact that field lines on the two-sphere of a hypothetical three-ball could be smoothed everywhere but one point...
Far away, light years from the surface, a lonely space station studied the black hole's membrane. It was light years farther from inhabited space, deep within the heart of the galactic disc1.
An unknowable firewall between the universe and whatever lay within the ergosphere. Maybe somewhere deep within, point particle pairs fell apart, one to fall to its death, the other to rush outward faster than light. The world might never know, but that was the whole point of the study.
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