Project Gateway

***Heavy spoilers, read with caution.***
Project Gateway, also knwon as Gateway Plan or Project Door, was a humongous initiave composed of 176,425 sentient civilizations from trillions of galaxies which intended to prevent the Big Freeze from happening and with it guaranteeing the preservation of life everywhere. It consisted in using gravity to create an opening through the universe to a region beyond it and thus preventing an early silent equilibrium since energy would be injected into the universe from the opening. Due to its activation, magic interwove itself with the universe causing major changes into it.

## Background

Millions and millions of years previous to the begining of the story, a group of sentient civilizations united and through a matrix of massive artificial objetcs moved more than a trillion galaxies representing 1% of the universes matter to created an artificial gravity fissure. This rift was supposed to be connected to a region beyond the universe and energy would continuously flow through it for extended periods of time, and thus increasing the life expectance of the universe.

This plan's inception was done by a scientist of a very advanced and now extinct civilization which after the plan was executed died along with most of the sentient life of the universe. However, he was also responsible for the creation of an artifical sentient being which would later be known, erroniously, as God. This being calls himself the Custodian and was responsible for supervising Project Gateway and its subsequent steps, such as helping life to visit continue progressing and to help it visit the world on the other side of the rift.

The project succeded in what it attempted to do, creating the rift in space and increasing the entropy of the universe, but it also failed in a major way, destroying most of the sentient lifeforms with the energy released from the opening. Also, the energy derived from the hole was very different from conventional energy: it isn't light, it didn't have temperature, it wasn't made up of particles nor waves and it didn't follow the same laws from the known universe. This energy is known today as magic and has a very unique set of laws, one of which is that it changes via a will and that it changes the mind of possessor of the will in exchange.

## In-depth Science

Entropy **a** property of a thermodynamic system that quantifies the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system (such as its volume, pressure and temperature). Because it is determined by the number of random microstates, entropy is related to the amount of additional information needed to specify the exact physical state of a system, given its macroscopic specification. For this reason, it is often said that **entropy is an expression of the disorder, or randomness of a system**, or of the lack of information about it.

The Second Law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy.

Once entropy reaches its maximum, theoretical physicists believe that heat in the system will be distributed evenly. This means there would be no more room for usable energy, or heat, to exist and the Universe would die from ‘heat death’. Put simply, mechanical motion within the Universe will cease. During this Big Freeze, the Universe would, in theory, become so vast that supplies of gas would be spread so thin that no new stars can form. Under that model, time becomes an endless void in which nothing ever happens as there is little to no energy left in the Universe.

## Summary

In layman's terms it means that useful energy (low entropy energy) keeps decreasing over time in an isolated system such as the universe and, therefore, given enough time it naturally tends to die out. In order to prevent this, energy can be added in periodically from another system. Attempting to solve this problem, Project Gateway attempts to inject energy from another universe into its creators' universe through a rip in space. They succeed but due to the unpredictability of the energy inserted (magic), it destroys most of the sentient life due to their inability to adapt to this new energy that mixed itself in the innerworkings of the universe itself. Then, the AI that supervised the project created an isolated world from the universe, called The Cradle, in order to create beings capable of adapting to the environment outside through the filtering of the energy (magic) and the guidance of evolution. This world is the planet in which the novel takes place, and their alledged god is simply that AI.

## Trivia

* Roland's original universe stems from a universe parallel to the one of the witches, one that continued existing without the success of Project Gateway. The Custodian believes that the immense amounts of energy generated by Project Gateway might have created two parallel universes and sent Roland to his universe.
* The universe of the story is several times older than the one in real life. While our universe is just 13.7 billion years old, the **Release That Witch** universe is at least six quadrillion years old, a million times older.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 1486
2. ↑ Chapter 1413
3. ↑ Chapter 1488
4. ↑ Entropy wikipedia page [1]
5. ↑ Second Law of Thermodynamics wikipedia page [2]
6. ↑ Wired article on Big Freeze, Big Rip and Big Cruch [3]
7. ↑ Chapter 1494
8. ↑ Chapter 1485