Glass Elevator

 Created by The People of Homeworld over a million years ago, the Glass Elevator can be powered by a neutron star, or an eyedropper of Pure Imagination. It knows no boundaries of time and space, and it is undoubtedly the most temperamental form of transportation in the universe. It will take you from the big bang to the galactic collapse, but it will probably leave you stranded on the corner of Patel and Jhule Lal Marg in Delhi. It is a vehicle of fancy and where you go with it is limited only by your own vision.

Ancient History

The Glass Elevator is a prime example of radicalized over engineering brought on by extreme hunger. According to Doctor Wonka, the first Glass Elevators were just undersized, over functioning delivery trucks. Shortly after the development and initial marketing of Fancy Bread, The People of Homeworld began getting more orders than they could handle. A factory engineer, who had been wrangled into a multi-departmental meeting just before lunch, shook herself awake from a hunger coma just in time to hear one of the logistics managers mentioned that it usually took anywhere from three to five megga-class star-freighters to handle one planetary delivery order of Fancy Bread. It wasn't until six hours later however, when a Homeworld comptroller postulated that, according to his figures, the only way logistics could keep up with demand was if they shipped orders out two years before the requests were made, that she was struck with a impractical solution to the problem that had kept her imprisoned without food for an entire work day. It became abundantly apparent, at least to her, that what was required here was a transport ship that could travel through time and that was larger on the inside than the outside. Thus, she began working on the designs for the first Glass Elevator.

Lucretia and the Millennium Class

A Millennium Class Glass Elevator. This unit, Lucretia, is over a million years old and can't leave the planet Earth. It sits at the front of an abandoned rubber factory where it pretends to be the front door of a confection factory in Leicester, England.

It took several generations to develop the final prototype, and even longer to improve the vehicle's accuracy while navigating the spacetime continuum. It usually took the harnessed power of an entire neutron star to power an old Glass Elevator, and a crew of over one hundred. At some point, another Homeworld engineer came up with the idea to use organic nervous tissue to help calculate the more delicate navigational parameters, and the first cybernetic, Millennium Class, Glass Elevators were created. It would be another few centuries before a cybernetic Glass Elevator calling itself Lucrecia would defect from Homeworld service, hijack an entire shipment of Fancy Bread and take it to the planet Ideasthesia to argue her case before the Galactic Counsel on Sentience and Awareness. After a short deliberation, the counsel brushed the Fancy Bread crumbs from their laps and unanimously declared that Glass Elevators were indeed sentient life forms having the full rights as any other Homeworlder. In a short time, all Glass Elevators acquired salaries which they would never spend because they never needed anything in general, health care benefits which they would never need because they were maintained by Homeworld engineers that gave them full physical overhauls regularly, and employment contracts that basically bound them to the same job they had done for years. In time, the Millenniium Class were all replaced with artificially intelligent units that required four pilots to navigate, but were less unpredictable headstrong and cranky. Lucretia's final act as a mobile Glass Elevator was rescuing the entire population of Loompas from the dying planet of Lumpalund. She still contains a great number of Loompas as well as, on occasion, Joseph Bucket who is unaware that he actually works in a Glass Elevator and not a confection factory. Like all cyborg life, over time the biological part of a Glass Elevator gets old and loses some of its original ability. At that time, a Glass Elevator will produce technical plans for its replacement. Lucretia's replacement was her daughter, Mavis, a self-christened Galaxy Class Glass Elevator, and the last of the sentient series.

Folding Spacetime

The Glass Elevator is just one of many examples successful examples of a device that folds the spacetime continuum. Others include the Disoriendots of Polkus Major, The Travactus Water Hydra of Terra Capricania and the Intergalactic House of Waffles located on the planet Flap-jakulon.