Portal

Portal

Exploring parallel universes

Chapter 1 by jejudrirop jejudrirop

“ID, please.”

As you hand in your card, you consider the situation. Three weeks ago, you were personally invited to participate in a secretive government project. You received the invitation in person directly from a government representative. He knew nothing about the project itself, only that the higher-ups considered it “a big deal”.

You’re currently trying to enter a highly restricted research lab. Even the fact that you’re here at all is known only to you, the few employees working here, and perhaps a handful of high-ranking government officials. No one else knows about the site, and if they do, they have been kept uninformed as to its true purpose. And you’re showing your ID at the gate like it’s another day at the office.

“All right, everything checks out. I will take you to the laboratory myself. Follow me.”

Too nervous to utter a single word, you do as you’re told. The lone security officer leads you through a series of doors into an elevator that leads only down; it takes you something like ten minutes to reach the bottom. There, you’re led through another sequence of doors, leading to a deceptively unassuming gate.

“This is your destination. I have no further clearance beyond this point. Good luck.”

Before I can ask him anything, he immediately spins on his heel and leaves, presumably back to his post. You place your ID on the reader and the gate beeps open.

Inside the small room, a woman in a lab coat is sitting at a desk, poring over a pile of documents. You don’t have the time to take in the rest of your surroundings before she raises her head to look at you with a smile.

“Ah, you’re here,” she says. She stands up and stretches her hand to greet you, which you hesitate for a second before shaking. “I was just going over the details of the operation, although my team has been so comprehensive about the safety checks that it’s probably redundant at this point. I’m Dr. Sarah Friedman. Call me Dr. Friedman.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Friedman. I’m—”

“Yes, I know who you are,” she interrupts. “Probably more than you’re aware. Sorry to be brusque, but I’m not one for small talk and there is a lot of important information that I was assigned to explain to you. This will take a while. Do sit down,” she suggests, gesturing at the only other chair in the room. “How much have you been told regarding this project?”

“Well, not a lot. I know it’s a big important secret, but I’m quite honestly at a loss over why they chose me. I’m not exactly a famous researcher.”

“I’m not certain of the answer myself, to be frank. Regardless, there’s a great deal you must understand, including some fairly abstruse physics. Or the big picture, at the very least. I’ll try to make it simple. Basically, this government project has been under development for quite some time at the hand of a select group of scientists, myself included. The machine will finally be fully operational and available for civilian testing later today, and you have been chosen as the first subject. Do you know anything about multiverse theory?”

“I, uh, I’ve heard of it, but… Can you give me the 101?”

After a brief pause, she sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, probably annoyed at being to simplify advanced science for the benefit of a layperson. “Okay. It’s like this: basically, many physicists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have speculated about the concept of universes that coexist, for lack of a better word, ‘alongside’ our own. In popular culture, this concept has often been referred to as ‘parallel universes’. Our current project is our attempt to prove a theory that these universes not only exist, but are even accessible from our own. Have you heard of an Einstein-Rosen bridge?”

“Maybe? I'm not sure.”

“I suppose you’ve heard of a ‘wormhole’, then.”

“Oh. Uh, yeah, vaguely. Kind of like a tunnel that connects distant sections in spacetime? Or something. That’s all I remember from Cosmos.”

“In the vaguest possible sense, yes. Anyway, our theory and initial tests have confirmed that these bridges can in fact be created. However, due to quirks of quantum mechanics, we can only create bridges that lead to an equivalent location in spacetime inside a parallel universe, but not bridges that may lead elsewhere in our own universe, so traveling in time and space as you probably think of it is currently impossible. The exact nature of a given parallel universe which serves as our ‘destination’ is unknown before contact. We have only preliminary results, but the mechanism as it stands today inherently limits the kind of universes that we can access… which is probably for the better.”

“So,” you wager, “you can’t have access to universes with, say, totally different laws of physics that would destroy our own upon contact or something like that?”

“There’s a vanishingly small chance of an existential threat happening in theory, but we consider the device safer by orders of magnitude than, for example, the safest hadron colliders, and those have been proven safe beyond reasonable worry.

”To continue, the reason we only have access to a specific subset of universes is that our current mechanism creates an opening for a bridge which ‘connects’ only to a similar opening in another universe. Due to predictable particle decay, quantum openings of the size and shape we’re talking about, basically a large human-size ‘hole’ or ‘portal’, are astronomically unlikely to form on their own, and even then they would last a short fraction of a second at best, not remotely long enough for the bridge to be used how we have been using it.

”This means that these tunnels can only be created by civilizations at least as advanced as ours, which rules out any unstable or catastrophic scenarios, even on human timescales. The very few universes we have accessed so far all seem to feature slight variations, in which the human species, or something much like it, has developed through a general course of history largely similar to our own, although with some minor though unexpected differences. Is this all clear?”

“Yes… Sort of. This is a lot to take in.”

“Naturally. And this is the extremely simplified version. Like I said, we have been developing the theory and running our tests for quite a while now, which means that a lot of the potential danger and uncertainty has been overcome.”

“Okay, I’ll trust the experts on that. While we’re at it, you mentioned that you’ve already made contact with some universes? How are they different?”

“Hmm…” She hesitates for a second. “I’ll let you see the briefing for yourself. In the meantime, let me explain the general outline of your mission and what we’ll need you to do from the technical side of things.”

And so she does. In excruciating detail, which takes almost two hours. Your head is left spinning, but the general idea is: let us handle the science, just don’t do anything stupid so you can come back to the portal in one piece.

“That should be everything,” she states, apparently glad to be done with it. “Any questions?” Before you can even think of anything to say, her phone vibrates, and she holds up her hand to preemptively cut you off. “One second, I’ve just received a notification. It seems that the first portal is ready. I must leave for the mission control center. If you do have any further questions, read the briefing,” she says, pointing to a document at the near end of the desk.

And with that, she steps up to a door in the back of the room, swipes her ID over the reader to open it and scurries off, the door closing right behind her. A separate door opens to a large chamber with a human-sized gate in the center.

Do you read the briefing? Go straight through?

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