Alternates:GC-Handwavium

This particular version of handwavium isn't the magic material from the mainline: there's no 'apply wave, get stuff' mechanics to it. Still working out the hows and the wherefores, but it's more of a black-box nanotech of sorts (again, very preliminary). However it's presented the stuff basically works as a tool to build the tools to build super-empowering technology.

The Nature of Handwavium

There's four main gradients of the technology handwavium can produce: lightsci, graysci, darksci and madsci. This isn't a moral division, it's a how-much-do-we-understand-it division.

Lightsci tech are things that obey the laws of physics in general but we just can't reproduce, like for example carbon nanotubes of arbitrary length.

Greysci tends to bend the laws of physics a little bit more, or go into things that we know work but still don't understand: artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces and things of that nature would be good examples of greysci.

Darksci is where we get into the openly 'yeah, we must have something wrong in the models' stuff like artificial gravity, inertial control, reactionless drives, FTL and so forth.

Madsci... madsci is probably closest to mainline wavetech in how it works; it's all bespoke, generally can only be reproduced by the person who made it and tends to treat the laws of reality as vague guidelines. It's the rarest and most worried-about part of the whole thing. (It's also the stuff that Sora copied from Kohran's notes before she left Stella Via, which is why Fnord's group is so fascinated by it.)

Handwavium Throughout History

It's by no means a majority opinion yet, but the Emerging Historical Consensus(tm) is that Columbia represents the last premature flowering of wavetech, one of a long line of such things that dates back at least to the Qin Dynasty and has popped up all over the world. The hypothesis is that wavetech has shown up multiple times in human history only to die out due to outside factors (poor resources, the users being too isolated or closing themselves off from the world, the users being destroyed by their own creations, etc.) before it can spread to the rest of the world.

Columbia

Zachary Comstock is known to history as the cult leader who (re)invented/discovered a handwavium analogue in the 1880s, used it to build the floating city of Columbia and eventually (probably) met a very bad end somewhere in the skies just before World War I.

(It should also be noted here that even in 2039, nobody knows exactly what happened to Columbia. The city vanished from all observers somewhere between the death of King Edward VII and the beginning of the First World War, and very little in terms of artifacts have ever been recovered. "Today" most people have forgotten it, much like most people've forgotten the 1890s in general. Only historians and cranks know anything about the city period.)

Columbia's disappearance seems to bear out the Emerging Historical Consensus given above; the people who built it were geniuses, but also isolationist, paranoid and most likely killed themselves.