The Stillness Engine

It started with a hunch, months ago, when I realized matter wasn’t the solid foundation we’d always assumed. Local space, I figured, was denser than the stuff we could touch—gravity was just pressure from that unseen density pushing down on the less dense bits, like us. Mass? That was trickier. After weeks of scribbling equations on napkins and staring at particle sims, I saw it: trillions of tiny oscillations, particles whipping around barycenters, mostly canceling each other out to give us momentum. It was a chaotic dance, and I wondered—what if I could choreograph it? Or better yet, stop it entirely?
I’d been tinkering in my garage ever since I retired from the aerospace gig. No deadlines, no bureaucracy—just me, a workbench, and a lifetime of engineering know-how. My first breakthrough came when I synced up the particle movements in a chunk of copper. The results were wild: it levitated an inch off the table before melting from the heat. Promising, but messy. Stopping the particles, though—that was the real prize. To do it, I needed a way to block out the universe’s constant chatter, especially those pesky neutrinos that zip through everything.
I’d already cracked impenetrable shields a year back—stacked layers of superconducting material, graphene, and borophene on a spinning disk. Scaled it up to a cube to trap a sample inside, figuring it’d block the neutrinos and let me freeze the particles cold. First attempts were a disaster—feedback loops fried my sensors, and radiation leakage turned my garage into a hazmat zone. Then it hit me: a cube was too simple. I rebuilt it as a tesseract, a four-dimensional shape collapsed into our 3D world. Insanely complex, sure, but when I fired it up, the problems vanished. No leaks, no damage—just perfect stillness inside.
“Frank, you’re gonna want to see this,” I muttered to myself, peering at the test chamber. I’d tossed in a few odds and ends: an ice cube, a steaming mug of coffee, a couple of lab mice from the pet store down the road. When the tesseract spun up, everything froze—not in temperature, but in time. The ice didn’t melt, the coffee stayed hot, and the mice? Locked mid-scamper, like statues. Power it down, and they’d blink back to life, none the wiser.
I grabbed my old buddy Tom on a video call that night, still buzzing from the results. He’d been my lab partner back in the day, the only guy I trusted not to laugh me out of the room.
“Tom, check this out,” I said, holding up the ice cube—still frosty after hours in the open air. “No melting. None. And the mice? They’re fine, just… paused while it’s on.”
His face popped up on my screen, gray beard scruffier than ever. “You’re kidding. That tesseract rig actually worked?”
“Better than worked,” I said, grinning. “I threw in a watch next. Stops ticking when it’s powered up, starts again when it’s off. Electronics, too—dead while it’s running, back online after. It’s like I’m nulling out time inside the field.”
Tom leaned closer, squinting. “Nulling time? Frank, you’re talking about stasis. Real stasis. How’s it holding up?”
“Stable as a rock,” I said. “But here’s the kicker—I dropped my pen next to it while it was on, and the whole damn thing slid over a foot. This beast weighs three tons with all the gear, but inside the field, it’s like it’s nothing. Maybe a hundred pounds.”
He whistled low. “You’re saying it’s cutting mass?”
“Not cutting,” I corrected. “Everything outside the disks still weighs what it should. But inside? Null. Zero effective mass while it’s running.”
Tom rubbed his temples. “Frank, you’ve got a retired engineer’s dream here. You’re one step from rewriting physics. What’s next?”
“Next,” I said, leaning back, “is I stop screwing around in my garage and get some real help. Scientists, funding, the works. I’m too old to fumble through this alone.”
He laughed. “You’re not wrong. Call up that grad student you met at the conference last year—Lila something. She’s sharp, and she owes you a favor after you fixed her spectrometer.”
“Good call,” I said. “Let’s see if she’s game.”
A week later, Lila Patel showed up at my door, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun, a tablet tucked under her arm. She’d brought a suitcase of gear and a skeptical frown.
“So,” she said, stepping into the garage, “you’re telling me you’ve built a time-freezer out of spare parts and delusions?”
“Not delusions,” I shot back, waving her toward the tesseract rig. It loomed in the corner, a tangled mess of spinning disks and coolant lines. “Proof. Watch this.”
I flipped the switch, and the hum filled the room. Inside the test chamber, a fresh ice cube gleamed, defiant against the garage’s heat. Lila’s frown softened as she tapped her tablet, pulling up sensor readings.
“No temperature change,” she murmured. “No molecular drift. This is… insane. How are you powering it?”
“Superconductors do most of the heavy lifting,” I said. “The tesseract shape blocks the neutrinos—or whatever’s keeping the particles buzzing. Stops ‘em dead.”
She circled the rig, muttering to herself. “And the mass thing? You said it moved?”
“Yep,” I said, picking up a wrench and tossing it near the base. The whole setup slid an inch, smooth as butter. “Inside the field, it’s null. Outside, it’s still a multiton pain in the ass.”
Lila stopped, staring at me. “Frank, do you realize what this means? If we scale this up—ships, stations, hell, entire cities—we could rewrite how we move through space. No inertia, no fuel limits. Just… go.”
“Thought crossed my mind,” I admitted. “But I’m out of my depth. I need a team. You in?”
She grinned, sharp and eager. “Oh, I’m in. But we’re not stopping at a team. We’re getting funding. I’ve got contacts at MIT—they’ll flip when they see this.”
“MIT, huh?” I said, scratching my chin. “Guess I’ll need a tie.”
“Nah,” she replied, already typing on her tablet. “Just bring the rig. Results like these? They’ll fund you in your pajamas.”
Two months later, we were in a gleaming lab at MIT, the tesseract rig rebuilt with proper materials and a dozen PhDs buzzing around it. Lila had taken lead on the physics, while I stuck to the engineering—tweaking, testing, cursing at bolts that wouldn’t budge. Our first big demo was today, and the room was packed: scientists, military types, even a couple of suits from some aerospace corp.
“Ready, Frank?” Lila asked, adjusting a sensor array.
“Born ready,” I said, hitting the power switch. The hum kicked in, and a steel block inside the chamber—two tons of dead weight—lifted off the floor like a feather when we nudged it. Gasps rippled through the crowd.
“Gentlemen, ladies,” Lila said, stepping forward, “what you’re seeing is a null-mass field. Inside this tesseract, matter stops oscillating. No inertia, no resistance. We’re calling it the Stillness Engine.”
A grizzled general in the front row leaned forward. “You’re saying you can make a tank weigh nothing?”
“Tank, plane, spaceship—anything,” I said. “Long as it’s inside the field. Switch it off, and gravity’s back in charge.”
The suits whispered furiously among themselves. Lila shot me a look—half thrill, half terror. We’d done it. The garage days were over.
“Guess it’s time to think big,” I said under my breath.
“Bigger than big,” she replied. “We just changed the game.”