Basically, for my second fanfiction in the series, I have a killing game taking place on a no-ship moving faster than light. Now you may have some questions, including (a) what a no-ship is, (b) how it can go faster than light, and © what a Markov Drive is and what it has to do with all this.

First, a disclaimer: although they share a name with the no-ships in dune, they are not alike. And please don’t try to build one in real life, because it probably won’t work. No, it definitely won’t work.

The invention of the no-field preceded the no-ship. Shortly after the Imperium of Despair collapsed, Microsoft experiments on pocket dimensions was discovered and repurposed by Soviet scientists, who eventually created the no-field: a method to achieve absolute privacy, by creating a small pocket universe and hiding objects inside. The pocket would be projected as a one-dimensional point in realspace, and since it was a closed system if you looked around you would just see reflections of yourself and other objects in the no-room covering up the entire place. Needless to say, this was quite disorienting, so later no-rooms contained a shell that would block off the view of those inside.

Eventually, it was realized that the ability of a no-field to reduce an object to a mass-less point was useful for high-speed travel, as the object would no longer be limited by its mass. By simply expelling exhaust from a channel to realspace, the ship could reach astonishing speeds on little fuel. This contraption, which could not surpass the speed of light and only approached it, was known as a no-ship.

Early no-ships had no way of surpassing the speed of light. However, this was overcome by yet another new technology, the discovery of Markov waves. These were discovered by soviet scientist Andrei Markov, and they had the ability to create powerful gravity waves, which would compress space around it, leading to the phenomenon known as “foldspace”. Soon, a way was invented to mount Markov Drives on a no-ship, thereby allowing the point to travel a distance within foldspace that would correlate to a much larger distance in realspace. It’s similar to compressing a spring and walking along it. When the spring is decompressed, you will find that you have traveled far despite not having to walk that much.

Markov drives had a short range, so most of realspace was not affected outside of a small region around the no-ship. Despite this, Markov waves still leaked from the area, causing large waste of energy despite a theoretical potential for zero waste. During the Second Killing Game aboard the no-ship Krasny Fujisaki hosted by the hostile AI Daniel, Miu Iruma devised a way to focus the Markov Waves inward to achieve absolute efficiency, as well as rendering no-ships completely undetectable to the outside world.