Threadwork has three parts to it: The universe itself which doesn't play by standard glowfic rules, the magic system, and The Starlight Institute for Advancing Studies which has decato control of Threadwork's Earth
The universe of threadwork is more insistent than most glowfic universes on things inside the universe following pesky rules like conservation of energy and momentum, as well as the speed of light. In reality, you can cheat small amounts of free energy out of the universe but it's generally not significant. The speed of light though is inviolate. Nothing within threadwork can send a message faster than light. This leads to the denizens of threadwork spending more time visiting nearby worlds which also follow threadwork rules than visiting distant planets in the same world. Eventually though if you go far enough away from threadwork the rules do relax and at these boundaries Threadwork can encounter the rest of the glowfic metaverse.
Universe and Physics
The naming concept of the world are a series of threads, paths through and between worlds where anything that enters them moves at the speed of light. No time passes for objects within the thread so you can't choose your exit point. That said using magic or technology someone can set up a receiver that pulls things below a certain mass and volume out of the thread as they pass. Each receiver can set its own mass and volume limits but retrieving bigger things is harder. The universe itself randomly sets up receivers that pull things weighing micrograms or less out of the threads, with advanced nanotech you can bootstrap this into coming out of the thread at slightly less than random locations.
The next big deviation from standard physics in Threadwork is Bobbles, a delightful technology which allows you to freeze regions of space in time for specific periods as measured by the outside world. The easiest regions to freeze are spheres but more advanced bobblers can freeze more complex regions of space. It is impossible to break a bobble before it's expiration date and bobbles cannot contain other bobbles. You can also generate anti-bobbling interference that prevents bobbling in an area, though sufficiently powerful bobble generators can compensate for the interference of less sophisticated versions.
The third piece of physics in Threadwork are sublayers, these are not-quite universes that are adjacent to threadwork and other adjacent worlds. Gravity propagates between layers but other forces do not. Sublayers start off as infinite vacuum but you can move matter and energy between sublayers. Operating in sublayers near gravity wells is somewhat complex because there's nothing to stop you from being attracted to the center.
Threadwork's magic is a literal case of Clark's Law, what threadwork refers to as magic is a supercomputer that spans across thousands of cubic lightyears of space that uses Threadwork's physics massive generators, and lots of computation to provide effects that appear as magic. The system was created by an alien species who live on Neutron Stars to bring them information about the world since it is inconvenient for them to travel personally. (They literally explode). One small group of the Neutron Star Aliens used the magic system to create a place that translates to Wanderdeep in english. Further they terraformed many dead worlds to support life compatible with that of Earth
Wanderdeep
Wanderdeep was crafted to catch humans who were exploring through the threads if they ever started to. It was also crafted to ensure that there was always at least one user of magecraft alive at all times. If the last known user of magecraft is killed or otherwise out of contact for too long Wanderdeep selects a human who meets it's standards and forks them into a guest room. Mages can create magical artifacts that take in magical energy from around them and use it to accomplish things based on the instructions inscribes into them. These instructions allow artifacts to apply forces, generate bobbles, move items into sublayers, push things into threads or pull them out, detect things about the world, and make small changes to human minds. It also allows users set up what amount to machine learning models that try to refine their implementation of a concept and assign complex commands to macros that can be used by subsequent mages in crafting new artifacts.
SIAS
The Starlight Institute for Advancing Studies began as a relatively ordinary if ambitious university. They did their best to be involved in cutting edge research and their board of directors tried to stay ahead of the oncoming technical and social trends. This insight served them well, as they installed high-quality biofilters in their facilities not long before bio-engineered plagues became reasonably easy to create. Due to heroic efforts by the biology, medical and chemical engineering departments SIAS has an important role in advancing the state-of-the-art in treating engineered plagues and protecting it's own students and faculty. For better or worse the search for solutions to the engineered plagues pushed nanotechnology research over the brink into exciting new capabilities as well, suddenly nanotech was widely available, but as with the improved biotechnology this too was used as a weapon in terrorism and war and once more SIAS's research departments and facilities staff managed to help standardize tools for protecting against this new threat and keep it's own students and faculty safe. One of the side-benefits of this increase in nanotechnology knowledge was that the problem of human uploading was finally cracked. This opened up a third front in this new technological battlefield and once more SIAS stepped up to help protect uploaded minds from computer viruses and other types of corruption. This series of events is collectively known as the Singularity Trials. By their conclusion the Institute was cemented as a major world power, a status which was made more firm when decades later the Institute discovered bobbles and the threadwork.
First question, yes you can stop yourself from being put into one big bobble, but bobbles have no rules about respecting the contiguity of objects. So that might prevent someone from taking you out non-lethally while allowing them to turn you into a mess of inch-sized chunks of your former self.
Theoretically yes you could get around the rules about c that way if you were lucky, but whether because of weird quantum rules or more honestly metacausality there aren't loops like that. You can however go to another universe and run computations faster than would be possible in threadwork and come back.
Yeah, it's one of the coolest simple to explain technologies I've seen in sci-fi. I've made the technology a little more flexible but otherwise I've kept all the mechanics as close to the same as I can. The fight scene in Marooned in Realtime was one of the coolest ones I've ever read, and that's with mostly human reaction times.
I, too, have done a universe that likes to stick to pesky rules like conservation of energy and momentum, as well as the speed of light. It just hasn't yet come up in-thread much so this mostly manifests, if at all, as slightly awkward behind-the-scenes discussion.
“Having conservation laws”, even familiar ones, is not the same as “everything is the physics we know”!
