A
stasis bubble is a
miracle of future
science -- meaning, it has not yet been invented, and like the
antigravity car, it's speculative as to whether it ever will be -- which may be neatly summed up as an imposed
sphere of
space inside of which time has stopped. The development of this
technology began with the discovery that a superaccelerator supplied with the right power pattern and mix of elements (I am precluded from disclosing any particulars here by order of the
time police) could generate antitachyons -- time suppressors -- and that these could be contained in an
electromagnetic field. Next came the development of the tachyser, like a
laser but capable of firing tachyons (or anti-tachyons) with great precision.
Supercomputer development, already proceeding apace, made it possible to generate the necessary tachyser pattern to counter the tachyon activity in an
N-dimensional enclosed, set space -- that is, to stop time. The first stasis box ever built had a stasis chamber barely large enough to hold a
ping pong ball; it was built directly adjacent to the largest existing particle accelerator, which was at the time the 220 mile long "ChIndia Loop" on the border between China and India, and an entire
antimatter reactor dedicated to powering it. Within a few years, streamlining of technology enabled the chamber to be upgraded to the size of a
toaster oven -- at which point the operating scientists delighted in demonstrations in which they would put a bowl of ice cream next to a hot cup of coffee next to a bouncing rubber ball, close the door, and hit the switch to stop time. Visitors would then get a full tour of the facility, have lunch and then a question and answer session, and at the end of the day's events be brought back to the stasis box to be shown that the coffee was still piping hot, the ice cream was still ice cold, and the ball immediately resumed its bounce.
I won't belabor you with the blow by blow of
progress and
setbacks after that -- the refinement of means to put living things in stasis without causing strange and terrible after effects; the efforts to develop small enough power supplies and particle accelerators to make the technology portable; the Kinyasa tragedy and the hundreds of lives lost in that terrible explosion; the triumphant combination of advances which made it possible for a stasis field to be projected as an external bubble rather than a confined box. Problems remain, naturally, with stasis still demanding unwieldy amounts of power and dangers remaining to those who stand in the way of a forming stasis bubble. But new solutions are ever on the horizon, with at least one mathematician now proposing that a particulate
Dyson Sphere could generate enough power to perpetually place an entire
planet inside a stasis bubble, fairly indefinitely, possibly ultimately giving us the key to end the greatest of longterm problems, the
entropy of our
Universe itself!!