The novel “Schild’s Ladder” by Greg Egan was published for the first time in 2002.

Cass made a long journey to the Mimosa star system, where there’s a station where she can verify the accuracy of the Quantum Graph Theory millennia after Sarumpaet developed it. However, when the experiments lead to the creation of the novo-vacuum, a bubble outside the universe that’s not the ordinary ordinary vacuum, it turns out to be much more stable than expected and starts expanding.

Six hundred years after Cass’s experiments, humanity is fleeing the expansion of the novo-vacuum, that is swallowing planet after planet. At the same time, many scientists are trying to understand the causes of this phenomenon but over time among humans have created two factions: the Preservationists who want to eliminate the novo-vacuum at all costs and the Yielders who want to find a way to interact with that separate reality.