Aperture

It was 3:15pm Greenwich time when the door opened and they came through like acidic confetti. There was no fanfare to be heard, there was no alarm to alert, whistle or bell by which to know. No crier declared their presence in any way a person recognized. There was simply a hum as the plasma field clarified and the anti-neutrino emitters became synced to the coordination grill. Audibly, it was indifferent to the sound it had made hundreds of times before throughout hundreds of prior tests.

The team consisted of the best of the best; particle physicists, eminent theoreticians, engineers from every discipline of matter and energy alike (whatever difference between them there may be). It was the natural emergent result of colliding professions prodding and tearing at the fabric of reality: a grand tumultuous flash-point where it was decided they'd open a large hole instead and get a good look rather than just peaking.

The first and major insight had been in taming the neutrino. Specifically, the discovery that neutrinos and anti-neutrinos could be caught in complex electromagnetically shaped plasma fields. Once trapped, deformation of the fields could "tune" the neutrinos. At the right temperature, pressure, and frequency, the neutrinos would enter quantum super-position. It was just a matter of time before the first real tachyon was detected.

Long a matter of stipulation and theory, the tachyon was thought to be a particle traveling in opposition to the passage of time. Using the vast body of data already garnished, subsequent measurements produced an irrefraggable fact: that tachyons are in fact neutrinos tunneling through our reality. The implications became specific and clear: there must be other worlds, other dimensions. Flows of time and change drifting like glaciers across a great mantle of possibility, expressing whatever facets are appropriate to it's form and vector. Each realm a rainbow cast from a single prism, an adjacent and enmeshed reciprocal to it's neighbors.

With little choice and no complaints the scientists were assembled and put to the task of building a stable bridge, a tunnel through space. Forgotten secret hosts of war and massive resource combines had wet oily dreams of dropping self erecting doorways from orbit into their enemy's back yards so that their machines may spill forth and conquer. Perhaps it could then be used to transport succor to the unified people of the Earth caused to suffer in the endeavor.

It was late and tired throughout the lab. Tenuous results had recently renewed hope amongst the staff when it became consistently possible to transmit sequences of neutrinos through an adjacent substrate, and while not faster than light, it was a clear and flawless data-link providing effectively private and simultaneous communication anywhere on the planet. The mystery then became the spatial properties of the emitters within the substrate. It matched the default spatial properties perfectly, as if passing through another solid world.

An aggressive woman in her 40s stalked her bespectacled way angrily through control boards, casting short glances into the chamber with disdain. She had become gripped with a single thought. "If the emitters have coordinates in another world when they emit, then the closer they are to one another in that realm, the faster the transmission. Can they be moved independently of one another?". Perhaps a scent, a color, or a sound was the spark, but her frayed mind was tinder, and as the flare of inspiration passed she was already writing the program that could distort one half of an emitter and not the other. She had made the Lorentzian fold.

With cause for a day's celebration, the team stood proudly abreast smiling as the President spoke to them from the other side of the world as if he was truly with them there, at a speed their instruments told them was faster than it would take for a photon to curve around the Earth or a neutrino to tunnel through it. The emitters were effectively joined in the substrate, so close that they might overlap in that other world. Our doctor, newly appointed director of the project believed that with the right tuning, they could be "pushed into one another". Where they met, they'd get their hole.

It was thoughts of opening that door that saw our doctor's efforts redoubled. It was her vigor that kept her in the lab upwards of fifteen hours a day, and her vigor that saw her working that late and tired shift, with the hum of her coordination grill dulling her senses. For safety purposes, the work was being performed in two parallel labs on site. In private conversations less optimistic scientists talked vaguely of quantum unraveling in hushed tones, and pressure fell on the project as an emphasis on rigorous testing.

A bank of monitor panels provided a view of each field's metrics. Halfway to sleep and vision blurring, Doctor Taka removed her glasses at 3:14am to rub her eyes. She put them down and resigned herself resting her head on the table. She stared at the blurry outputs as a searching algorithm crawled through the latest field bandwidth looking for correlations. Two graphs started to synchronize. She put her glasses back on.

As the frequencies started overlapping, Doctor Taka experienced a specific sequence of events: the seconds on the clocks started to slow until it seemed as if time was standing still. She moved her head (as if through molasses) and the sounds began - a dry hollow clicking and a whispery scratch like raspy dead leaves. The sound grew louder and the readout panels seemed to strobe. With the volume came a feeling of pressure, and her vision started to distort, first as tunnel vision, and then with a darkening of contrast. Finally a light appeared above her head, and she looked up. A dome was descending through the ceiling above her, it's surface laced with glistening tessellated eyeballs in a mandala upon it. The eyes all swiveled to observe her, and although she tried, she could not scream. Her mouth would just not open.

Like time lapsed growth played in reverse, the sphere segment retracted, her vision cleared, and the sound ended as time returned to normal. She sat stunned as her mind swam flailing for an explanation. The portals were out of phase again as the seeker moved on. It's arrhythmic pulse jostled her from her daze, and she strode to the printout. Impressive bursts of abnormal data littered the readings across all sensors, centered around 3:15:00:00am and her millisecond of infinity.

Shaken, Doctor Taka retired for the night. She would not awake as the woman she was, and her very status as a human was drawn into question. Her cellular structure began to decay and mutate. Although it seemed impossible, she would not die, even as her body twisted up like a slug on a hot frying pan. She expelled an endless stream of glossolalian sounds as her eyes span wildly, unable to focus on what she saw or make any sense of it. As her bones broke and re-knit, her volume rose to that of a scream, but her "words" did not loose clarity. "OP. FEL. STA. KO..." unending.

The door was there; on the printout, and in the database. The printout also described a massive burst of radiation and x-rays: an unsatisfying but singular explanation for Taka's condition given the shielding around the chambers. Nevertheless, for a brief moment they had their hole, and there were many important people with an interest in having it again. Guided by Taka's innovation, the team set about recreating the experiment. They were ready by 3:10pm, and with the push of a button the field started forming before waiting eyes.

At 3:15pm, Greenwich time, the door opened and they started coming through. At first, from the front, they seemed to have form. They looked like fleshy kidney shaped torsos, the only appendages of which were elongated limbs which simply clipped through into the floor as if it weren't there. Then they moved. They didn't walk through space, they transformed through it, like roiling fractalous swarms of contiguous form, their parts grotesquely sliding over one another as they unfolded mechanically like profane corals. They twisted and shuddered, and where they intersected they separated leaving pitted metallic gems floating in their wake like partially seen pillars. Their silhouettes seemed dithered as their edges crumbled and burned in the air. From each tiny piece traced a visible black "ray" connecting them to and then pulling them back into the portal.

As they moved in three paths away from the opening their bottoms grew and swelled until they too passed into the floor. Their changing forms left discrepancies in their path and it could be seen that whatever matter they passed through was dissolved. Or perhaps eaten away. The scientists stood agape and unmoving, their vision dark and tunneled as a scratchy whirling vortex of sound engulfed their thoughts and the beings self-constructed their way out of the aperture. It is perhaps lucky that such scrutiny was pored over safety protocol, because at the moment, the inner perimeter of the first chamber was breached, and the portals were shut down.

Like writhing glitchy hulks the beings percolated in the chamber, burning and crackling, and finally evaporating completely. Simultaneously the compound around the lab was entering secure lock-down. Containment squads flooded the lab, quickly escorting the scientists to parts unknown for debriefing. It is surmised that their status is much like that of Doctor Taka's. Alone in a subterranean wing of some secret hospital, twisted up like wrung out laundry, speaking in tongues.

The second attempt may not have been successful, but it had garnished one important piece of data. The frequency of the stable gate; the address to another world.

The End