This was written December 30th, 2025
The Portal
– The Test –
“Start refractor activation countdown.”
“5! 4! 3! 2! 1!”
“Activate refractors!”
“Refractors activated, systems are online.”
“Initiate test battery!”
“Initiating…”
“Testing Matter Leakage…No Matter Leaking.”
“Testing Energy Levels…Range Acceptable.”
“Testing Visibility…Light Within Visible Spectrum.”
“Testing Acoustics…Portal Completely Static, Sound Waves Undetectable.”
“Testing Result: Safe for Human Viewing, Visuals Adequate, Sound Unavailable.”
The five people were assembled in front of the heavily reinforced gate serving to protect them from the portal, in case of a potential danger.
“Here we go team, the first ever viewing of another Verse. What do y’all expect to see?”
“I expect it to be rather boring. Maybe a dead planet? At most I expect to see some
vegetation.”
“Eh, I expect this to be an inhabited world. According to our calculation, drift should
be insufficient to lead to a World that wouldn’t be able to sustain life. If anything,
I think we’ll see other humans, just like us, living their own lives.”
“Puh-lease, do you hear yourselves? An uninhabited world or one filled with humans? Of
course it’ll be inhabited…but why would humans be the dominant species? It’s obviously
going to be an odd one where some reptilians or something rule the world.”
“You mean they already do? Hahaha”
“Well played, Jack, well played.”
“Welp, there’s no other way to know but to see. Everyone ready?”
After everyone else acquiesced, the man in charge pressed the big red button next to the gate, causing it to ever-so-slowly rise up. Before it was all the way up, they started seeing purple light filter through.
“Did anyone have blueshift on their bingo card? Looks like we might be on a truly alien
world here.”
The assembled group kept transfixed as the portal was gradually revealed. Initially, it felt
a bit too bright for all of them, until their eyes adjusted.
“Are those…faeries? They look like small people with wings!”
“They really do, what the…?”
“And we’re sure it’s a one-way portal, right? They can’t see us?”
“Nope, the should be able to anyway.”
“And what if one of them crosses the portal?”
“Why are you even asking…we’ve discussed that many times. In theory, we’d get to see a
cross-section of their insights…but there won’t be any light going through to provide
it for us.”
“Wait…how can they not realize there’s something off? Their light _is_ going through
the portal, isn’t it? So the portal should somehow be black for them, no?”
“No, no, don’t you remember we had to create the magnifier just for that reason? Less
than a tenth of a percent of the light is lost to the portal, the rest just passes through,
and we…”
“Guys, shut up and look!”
“Are they…eating each other? What the fuck is that?”
“And, is what’s happening to that tree-looking thing in the background?”
“Is it…?”
All of a sudden, the image disappeared and the portal became pure white. And then, it started flashing extremely quickly, intersparsed by some distinct images. Then, it went completely black and the portal deactivated.
“Huh…team…what was that?”
“I…I have no clue whatsoever…That sure was in none of our scenarios!”
“What do you think that light was? And why did the portal just…turn off?”
“Run Diagnostics!”
“On it.”
“Considering the lights we saw after…do you think their world just…died?”
“What, and we’d just so happen to randomly witness it? How likely would that be?”
“Well…if we caused it with the portal…very likely?”
“Oh come on, Peter made the calculations, there was supposed to be no risk whatsoever
on that front!”
“His calculations could simply be off. Not like we’re dealing with standard and thoroughly
test science over here.”
“True…but come on…how?”
“Guys, we’ll have plenty of time to debate this later. For now, we need to understand
what’s happened to the portal. Got the results of the diagnostic?”
“Yeah. Seems like it the portal was somehow hijacked. Yet, it didn’t flip to a different
Verse, we had the same frequency all along. Still, eventually there was a resonance cascade,
signals bouncing over and over until the portal got overwhelmed.”
“Fuck…how long would it even take us to remodel a new portal?”
“Well..it’s not like we’d be starting from scratch, and we’ve learned from all our mistakes.
Still…probably another…3 months at least?”
“Ugh, such a waste of tttttttttttttttt.”
“John, you ok?”
“I’m ok, just…feeling weird.”
“You…You’re also having a nosebleed. You should go rest a bit.”
“Yeah, we all should, we’ve been overworking ourselves non-stop for the past year. Everyone,
let’s take a full week to try to relax, and then get back to it.”
– The Aftermath –
The party thus disbanded and only regrouped a full week later. Still, during that time, the different members had discovered disconcerting changes. For some, it had started with voices they thought they’d heard. For Peter, a new obsession. Some new equation he’d never considered before came to him in a dream, and he was possessed to figure out where they’d lead.
Over the next few months, their endeavour was transformed. After about a week of focused work, they realized that the equations could lead to a new creation, something that would allow them to communicate with the other Verse, but not quite like a radio. More like… an inter-verse network. It also seemed like each of them glimpsed a different piece of the puzzle that would lead them to this.
After three months, they finally had their first prototype ready, a means of sending about 12 Bytes of information and receiving about half as much. Their understanding also seemed to include the kind of encoding that would be necessary (after all, such a network would be fairly useless without a common encoding). Accordingly, they opted to test it in a simple matter, sending a simple addition, and confirming that what they received was the expected result. And their first test was a success!
Obviously, there was always the chance that they’d received completely random jumble and mistakenly interpreted it as a success…yet what were the odds? They’d received 4 Bytes of data, which can have 4294967296 distinct combinations…and yet they got the single correct one? Unlikely.
An extra month later, they were finally able to not only transfer data in batches, but also have a continuous stream of data. It was still slow, at roughly 1 kiloByte upstream and 500 Bytes downstream per day, extremely slow. But this also meant they could start getting help, as long as they were judicious about their questions.
Gradually, through this cooperation, they managed to get much better bandwidths and the progress felt exponential. It didn’t take too long before they finally go reasonable transfers of about 1 megaBytes per hour both ways (Nothing revolutionary, but when transferring text, more than ample).
Once they passed the threshold of 8 kiloBytes per second (or 64 kiloBits per second), they were finally given access to what they dubbed the Inter-Verse-Net, or IVN for short. It was similar to the modern internet, but allowed them to pull information from data being hosted in other Verses, and also converse with them. Obviously, the data was rather slow, but it was more than fascinating. The group having introduced them to the IVN had graciously granted them with access to a base index page, accompanied with simple onboarding information. And thus it is that our 5 men found themselves with a treasure cove of unimaginable information. Though…who knows at what cost.