Spock leaned forward. “If I may interpose, Mister Shastri… I presume you both considered the fact that wormholes’ points of exit can be quite distant from their points of origin. Thus, a single source could transmit wormholes to any number of widely distributed coordinates.”

“Naturally, Captain Spock. That was the first thing we looked at. But the wormhole signatures didn’t fit. The spatial gradients, the EPR tensors, the transkinetic vectors… at least, the ones they’d have to have to match what we were reading… they didn’t converge in any number of dimensions. If anything, the signatures suggested that each individual quantum wormhole spanned hardly any distance in space.”

Spock’s brow lifted. “You stress ‘in space.’ ”

Shastri nodded heavily. “As opposed to time. Yes. Eventually Nyota and I realized there was only one explanation for how signals from all over space could have a common origin: because the whole universe had a common origin.”

Uhura’s eyes widened. “The Big Bang.”

“Or just after it. When all the matter and energy of our universe—even the very space of our universe—was still compressed into a single impossibly dense, hot mass. Under such intense energy conditions, quantum wormholes would’ve been spontaneously forming all the time—and with such intense energies driving them, the wormholes’ other ends could come out anywhere in space and time. Including our time.”

“But that’s… that’s incredible. How could anything alive or sentient have existed in those conditions? Or for such a brief time?”

Shastri chuckled. “You asked that exact question back at the Academy. Fortunately, there are a lot of professors at an academy. We posed it as a hypothetical question to our astrophysics instructor. You remember Doctor Sitko, right? Lanky guy with a beard and—” He broke off. “Oh… sorry.”

“I understand.”

He cleared his throat. “Anyway, Doctor Sitko explained that, due to the far greater density and energy of particles at the time, there had been more particle interactions—more events—in the first few minutes of the universe’s existence than in the thirteen-plus billion years since. See, because all the particles were so much closer together, moving with so much energy, they interacted far faster, and far more often. Like how ten people in a turbolift will touch each other far more often than ten people wandering the Sahara Desert, and any one of them will need far less time to pass a rumor to the other nine. So it was like time was accelerated compared to now.

“Most people don’t realize it, but most of the history of the universe, most of the interactions and transformations and upheavals it’s ever gone through, happened in less than the first second of its existence—the four fundamental forces splitting apart, the inflationary epoch, quarks combining into protons and neutrons, matter and antimatter annihilating each other until the small excess of matter remained to make up the universe we know.”