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Excerpt from an article written by Danielle Thompson about her experience in the new universe

Writer's picture: NJ HoldenNJ Holden

In recent decades, the flat-Earth theories spread like wildfire among Earth’s population. It takes just a moment here, on an actually flat world to realize their ridiculousness.


A look up is the first clue: the sky has a solid quality that is frankly disconcerting. The sky shouldn't be this solid. And nothing this solid should be this big. This world is slightly smaller than the Earth and the light reflects of the curves of the sky-dome like it's some kind of giant snowball. Sometimes it darkens: it means the heavier matter is coming through. It takes a few minutes for the rain to reach the ground; shorter if it's rocks or gravel. The sky is too far to see, but I can imagine billions of tiny holes. I can’t help thinking what would happen if the matter started seeping the other way. The sky deflating like a punctured balloon and falling to crush the world beneath it.


I asked my Dahlsli friends how they do live with it, but they just shrugged it off. No wonder–these are the only types of skies they've ever lived with. To them, it’s more unnerving to look up and witness the universe, with nothing but a layer of air between you and the cold vacuum.


The sun itself is a cat’s eye: lodged firmly in the center of the firmament, fluctuating from a mere slit at dawn to a near circle at midday. The day lasts around twenty hours and the period of darkness–illuminated by the second, smaller cat eye of the moon–another twelve. No one has been here long enough to say if there are any seasons.


But even staying on the ground can feel different. Not usually, as you're surrounded by buildings, trees, mountains, and such. But climb any elevated spot and a vista opens before you greater than anything you could witness on Earth. There is no planet curvature to block the view, if not for the mountains you’d be able to see all the way to the world’s edge. I was once on a beach; when I looked across the ocean, I could see a dark line - the next shore. With a specialized telescope, I could even count individual peaks.


Dahlsi have wonderful devices called modelers. By analyzing the pattern of ae they can create models; approximations of how any world looks like. I saw some of the first models, created less than fifty years ago; they look like something an aspiring fantasy writer would doodle with a pencil. The newest models are so detailed, you could probably count the trees–though you’d probably need a magnifying glass.


Both agree that the distance between the beach I was on, and the shore I observed is slightly bigger than the distance between New York and the British Isles.


Strangely, the gravitational disturbances predicted by flat-world theories do not apply here. Probably because the laws of physics, while similar enough to allow us a pretty comfortable transition, are not exactly the same as in our universe. Some scientists theorize that it’s because the downward pull is not generated by gravity-analog, but by centrifugal force created by the spin of the Great Sphere.

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