The Airlock

When I got to the latest location, my briefing included the largest concentration of small craft that I had ever heard of. That wasn't even the unusual part. All but one of them were known types and the unknown seemed to be based on the same tech as the others. They were all parked grouped around a cave entrance. Inside the cave was a shipping container number 4, or at least what we nicknamed these alien devices that served the same role. It was about the size of one of our short shipping containers and was sitting in the middle of an artificially enlarged cave.

The combination of both the number of ships and the shipping container is what triggered my part. They like to bring me in when unsure how to proceed or what something might mean. I am far enough off of normal that I have had to expand my thinking enough to understand people and that lets me do the same for animals, aliens, and AI. I come in, make my notes and send in my report and most of the time I get to go home. This time, after I submitted the report that this was an airlock leading somewhere else, they offered to triple my cumulative earnings to date if I could prove this.

Later that day I am loading up the airlock with as many autopacks as we had with all of the supplies I could think of. My suit was the latest and greatest with full recycling of water, air, and waste so I wouldn't starve. My sensors were quantumly attached with our network so even if I ended up on the other side of the universe, they would have full take of whatever happened to me.

A week after that, I pop back through with all of my recordings intact and we are forced to tell Earth that we have broken some rule and for a year, no Quantum Computers or communications will work. We have been sent a list of rules to abide by and which systems we will be allowed to control beyond the ones we already colonized. Since most people are unaware that Quantum Computing exists or that we have off-world colonies, this shouldn't affect humanity. The tech that I got a look at should also help us leap ahead a few orders of magnitude as well.

2025 is going to be a great year after all.