It was 8:22PM the night the project was due, and Olivia was… not done with the assignment. She had gotten most of the report written, and a great deal of data collected, but she hadn’t actually traveled to her planet yet. What a find, though! Wu’s gonna flip! Olivia had stumbled upon a fairly typical temperate planet orbiting a fairly common star, but the inhabitants of the planet were interesting. They looked a lot like Olivia! At least, her species. Automatic drones survey different spots of each universe and one drone caught a picture of the inhabitants of this planet from years ago. There were organisms identical in appearance to her species, and there was some kind of subspecies, too. They looked similar as well, but they were taller and had some kind of extra appendage between their legs. Kinda gross looking, actually. Maybe they’re livestock for the apex species or something. She could see grainy footage from the dimensional viewers, these showing live footage, of pale bipeds using tools and living in primitive structures that resemble tiny buildings. So cool. I’ve never seen a lesser species look so similar to us! Figuring that they must be ecosystem engineers like the sponges in that example presentation, Olivia pre-wrote her report before actually seeing the planet with her eyes. Using the fair bit of data she already had from the scanners, she constructed a half-confirmed story about a species that mastered its planet, integrating the rest of the biosphere into their own habitats. It looked like they had totally engineered their environment! She could see fields of grey that covered the entire planet. Spaceships and massive stations enveloped the sphere in a cloud of metal dots. Maybe it’s one big city! So big that they needed to go into orbit to keep expanding. So cool!
She fantasized about getting out there, excited for this class for the first time ever, but administrative constraints jeopardized this part of the assignment. To travel across dimensions safely, one needs to use the proper equipment. Said equipment is called a “Muonic Resonance Defoliator” and is used to gently displace a person from this dimension, the highest one in existence that they know of, to any other. The process is safe, as all one must do to ‘reverse’ the process that displaces them from this universe is think about going home. Willpower for Olivia’s species was strong enough that one could influence reality, especially in the lower dimensions. A simple thought would return her to her home dimension. Getting out of it was what needed some pushing.
The problem was that MRD machines are the size of a house and draw the power of a city, and so access to them, even for legitimate reasons like research or school, was tightly controlled, expensive, and always had a backlog. Olivia reserved a spot online two weeks ago, but spent the time waiting for her turn, seeing her place constantly moved back in favor of last-minute travelers paying extra to jump the line, researchers using grants or preferred contracts with the machine’s operator, even other students doing the same assignment who somehow just got placed in front of her. Now, she was running out of time.
But there was another way… a dangerous way. Dangerous for the universes we go into, not for us. “Tunneling” it was called. A similar principle to the MRD, that is displacing a person into a new dimension, but it worked less gently. In essence, it uses focused energy to rip a hole in spacetime and shove a person into the new dimension. The amount of displacement and the force of entry can have consequences for the destination. Reality itself is often changed, though the inhabitants of the destination have no clue it happened. Still, it can tarnish a universe and permanently ruin the contents within. There’s literally infinite universes, though. Like, why care about any of them except ours? Olivia tried to justify to herself that tunneling was not only needed, but it was actually not a big deal. This effort convinced her to commit, and yesterday she texted her roommate, a physics grad student, to arrange a deal for a tunneler device. Tonight, after being paid a bottle of vodka, her roommate brought in a black box roughly the size of a laptop.
“It’s so… small. This is the real thing?” Oliva was skeptical her roommate hadn’t just scammed her.
“Yeah, that’s it,” her roommate replied. “It’s small, but trust me, it works. You don’t need all that extra equipment for this stuff. MRDs are big because jumping safely is so hard.”
Olivia nodded, content with the answer, “Alright. Well, I have no time left, so I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Wait, you’re going dressed in that? Girl, are you gonna take a nap there?”
Olivia did forget to dress appropriately. She liked simple, comfortable clothes and wore them whenever she had the chance. Right now, she was wearing a pair of black leggings and a slightly tattered blue t-shirt with her university’s logo on it. She wasn’t even wearing shoes, all she had were some white ankle socks. Olivia shrugged at her roommate, “Well, the lesser species won’t care, right? And besides, if someone catches me, I’ll just say I was sleeping when I got displaced suddenly. That’s happened before!”
Her roommate chuckled, “What an alibi. Well, have fun. I’ll get help if you aren’t back by midnight. Try to keep in touch, alright?”
Olivia grinned, “Yeah, I will. Thanks!” and with that, she pressed a large green button on the device, punched in the coordinates for the target universe, and waited for the machine to start. Immediately, a white circle erupted from the device, the height of a person. The circle was partly reflective, and Olivia could see her deep brown eyes staring back at her. The circle flashed twice, then a loud zapping came from the circle. The tunnel was forming. This continued for a few minutes until suddenly the circle burst open, the opaque white receding, and Olivia could see blackness peppered with a few dots of light. The lesser universe! Olivia jumped feet first into the portal, ready to get her samples.
The tunnel traversal has the side effect of blinding the traveler temporarily when she gets into the new dimension. Olivia rubbed her eyes to adjust to the light, and when she could see again, she froze in shock. Rather than the normal blackness of space, she was surrounded by… magma? Um… that wasn’t there before. Olivia felt the heat on her skin, though it didn’t burn her. She could stand on the surface of a neutron star and not be hurt by the heat. But the rest of this universe was less resilient. She saw the nearest stars burn out instantly, and realized that the magma was spreading out. Looks like it’s moving at the speed of light here. I wonder where it’s going. With a thought, she gained awareness of all of spacetime near the portal. She could see and feel every atom, every photon, and know the forces that moved them. In this heightened state, she saw all the stars nearby and the magma ball as it was beginning to expand. The stars in her view died out one by one as the magma rolled over them. Olivia noticed that the magma was beginning to accelerate. Uh oh. Looks like there’s so much energy here, the laws of physics here are changing. Oops. This was undoubtedly her fault. The tunnel punched too hard, and the magma ball would probably swallow the entire universe. Shit, my planet! Olivia panicked, thinking her target was already consumed. She took out her phone, which had apps for planet tracking when traveling universes, but saw something confusing: her planet wasn’t here. It wasn’t in this universe. She looked at the universe locator on her phone and slammed her hand into her forehead. Ohhh, shit. I got the wrong universe! She made a typo when entering in the universal coordinates. Reeling from her error, she began thinking of herself back in her apartment, and instantly she was there. The portal destabilized and closed, showing one last view of a universe doomed to total destruction from her careless mistake.
Olivia’s roommate walked back in, hearing the commotion of the student returning, “Hey, that was fast. You get what you need?”
“No. Got the wrong universe. Also think I fucked that one up with the jump.”
Her roommate shrugged, “Eh, it happens. Usually the way you go in affects the entry to the universe. Try to slowly walk into the portal. You went in fast, so all your kinetic energy overwhelmed that dimension.”
Olivia nodded. Would’ve been nice to know that beforehand, but okay. She typed in the correct coordinates, triple checking her entry, then started the machine up. Once the tunnel was made, the portal cleared, and this time, a bright yellow star was dead center in the portal. Olivia recognized it as the planet’s home star. Better already! She walked in the portal, going comically slow. She scrunched her shoulders in anticipation as her vision went white.
When she could see again, she gazed at the little star. No magma. Yay! Pulling out her phone, she snapped a picture of the system and began scanning the place more. Got the local physics recorded. Hmm… no other lifeforms in the system. Some more species a few lightyears away. Looks like no contact with these guys were ever made, though. That was odd, since she remembered the drone showing spaceships that looked capable of interstellar travel. Indeed, she actually could see a few ships near the cloud of dust surrounding the star. But her scans indicated they weren’t from around this part of space. Observers, or invaders? She really didn’t care all that much. Once she had her collection, she would leave this universe and probably never return. Still, she decided she didn’t want any others to watch her work. She brought her left hand up to the ships, filled with hundreds of lifeforms, and pinched her thumb and index finger together. The ships exploded instantly on her skin, their annihilation barely registering as a little tickle on her digits. Olivia sighed; she needed to get close to her target. She sped through the cloud of dust and asteroids and approached the third planet. Her phone’s automated translation recorded radio transmissions coming from there and allowed her to know what they were doing and saying. For Olivia, this didn’t matter. This universe was unusually low in power, so much so that she already could feel each lifeform on the planet. She saw every being’s life, their perceptions, their minds. She learned what the apex species called themselves: “humans”. And she knew what their little planet was called: Earth.