Object-Translational Travel
Typically, an object’s potential actions, motions, properties, etc. are bound by the physics of that objects’ environment. When impossible transformations of an object are required, the environment around and/or within the object must be changed. If the destination environment is radically different than the origin, the object itself must be translated in order to have equivalent properties within its new environment. Any civilization or entity than can accomplish this must have incredibly precise nanotechnology and the ability to modify spacetime itself.
Examples
Below are four cases of Object-Translational Travel (OTT), ordered from most to least invasive to the translated object.
Interuniversal Travel
Also referred to as ’’gating’’, travel between distinct universes is not really travel at all. For a physics-dependent object to be instantiated in another physics, it must be translated at the most fundamental level. The resulting object might self-identify, and might be indistinguishable from its instance in the origin physics, but it must have been modified.
The amount of computation needed for this is monstrous, and there are extremely few entities that can do it. Additionally, it isn’t possible for a computation inside Physics A to translate an object from A to Physics B unless B is a subset of A. This presents a problem to even the most advanced civilizations, which must rely on some kind of interuniversal being such as Dramatica to open the gate.
Transubstration
A less dramatic but analogous process to interuniversal travel. The object must be translated to or from one kind of underlayment, here called a Substrate, to another. The Substrate of an object is the simplest environment capable of supporting that object’s existence. In software, an application’s substrate might be the runtime interface or physical computing architecture needed for the application to run. For an organism, the substrate might be the entire physics of the universe to which the organism was born.
The difficulty of translating an object from one substrate to another varies wildly, particularly in the case of auto-evolved organisms who, by the nature of evolution, incorporate much of their environments’ physical chemistry. This chemistry, in turn, relies on the particulars of the containing universes’ nanoscale physics.
One implementation of Transubstration is the final phase of Simulated Evolution, when organisms within Simspace must be reconstructed atom-by-atom outside of it.
Enveneration
In Enveneration, some object in Physics A is subdivided into ’’engrams’’that are implemented in a higher-level abstraction above Physics A. These engrams can be reassembled into a snapshot of the object at the time of recording, but most implementations of engrammation enable engrams to be mixed-and-matched into new objects as well. Translation is both straightforward (the origin and destination substrates are the same) and unique (some information is inevitably lost), even if all engrams were recorded from the same object at nearly the same time. However, principles of biology and physics can be leaned on to guide translation, making enveneration much more accessible than transubstration or interuniversal travel.
Perhaps the most widely-practiced form of Enveneration is the lifecycle of Veilenes, who are born from and (usually) return to a specially-maintained engram pool.
Superluminal Motion
Faster-Than-Light travel is an even simpler method of OTT between light cones in the same universe. FTL leaves objects unmodified, instead altering spacetime at the edge of a region containing the object(s) to be moved. In Vimana, this translation involves taking the neck of a spacetime bottle produced by the engines and stitching it to increasingly-further regions of spacetime.
When FTL involves fixed endpoints the object travels between, rather than a moving, internally-powered starship, it is colloquially referred to as Teleportation.
Information Gain and Loss
Depending on the relative complexity of origin and destination, information may either be lost or need to be added to an object to complete translation. When information needs to be added, the resulting object is not arbitrary: it bears the mark of the translator’s decisions about what information to add. When information is lost, some consider the fundamental identity of the object to have been lost as well. Different lifeways will draw very different distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable amounts of change an object can undergo while still being considered the same object.