Through The Looking Glass

  They followed Valentina down another sterile corridor followed by a tight spiral stairwell that burrowed its way down to the lower floors. Guards stood at every landing – unblinking, and unbothered by the troupe of students. The air was cooler on the floors above. Here it was dry and warm and the air carried a faint ion tang that tasted like pennies and static.

  Somewhere out of sight, armies of machines breathed and whirred. You could feel them through the floor and walls around you as you walked: a low, patient thrum that crawled up through your shoes and nested in your bones.

  A set of blast doors peeled apart ahead of them with a hydraulic huff. Colder air washed out and over them. Beyond the doors there was a wide chamber full of computers and monitors and displays of LED lights. A reinforced glass wall separated the room from the larger chamber beyond.

  Valentina swept an arm. “The safe room,” she said, her voice bouncing off metal and concrete surrounded by glass walls. “Otherwise known as the control room.”

  On the other side of the thick glass wall, the portal room spread out in tiers of metal grating and gantries. It was the opposite of fantasy – no velvet banners or glowing crystals. No runes, no wood and no cloth of any kind – just modern, brutalist industry: cable looms in neat bundles, coolant lines covered with frost, monitors stacked in tidy ranks like soldiers awaiting orders.

  Three rings commanded the space. On a raised gantry platform, with a walkway that led straight to the control room, stood a man-height portal; a perfect circle of brushed alloy nested with concentric lines of circuitry and covered in status LEDs. Not magical wards, Alex told himself, though from here the micro-etchings and circuitry, too small and complex to follow, could have passed for them.

  To the right, at ground level, a second, longer portal frame rose high enough to admit a truck, its spine flanked by vertical pylons that pulsed faint LEDs like a heartbeat. Road lines were painted in yellow on the concrete floor running away from the portal and leading to an opening in the wall that Alex couldn’t quite see from the control room.

  To the left of the main portal, set on a dais the way you might display a crown, a small hoop, no more than a foot in diameter, quivered with a faint halo of blue that winked in and out, persistent as a pulse. A thick bundle of cables, tightly wrapped in black tape, ran down the wall from the ceiling above and disappeared into the miniature portal. It seemed to be the only one that was activated.

  Alex traced the bundle of cables up until they disappeared into the ceiling and noticed hanging tracks for overhead cranes, hook blocks motionless but ready for action.

  In the safe room, several technicians in lab coats and slate jumpsuits moved between consoles, pressing buttons and looking busy. The air itself buzzed – not just in Alex’s ears but against his skin. He could feel the weight of the room pressing in. He rubbed his thumb over the smooth black stones in his pocket until their familiar weight steadied him.

  “This,” Dr. Kessler said, stepping up beside Valentina, “is the portal array, or Multiversal Transversal Cluster.” He didn’t raise his voice, but it carried around the austere room.

  “What you are about to experience will be incredible, and unbelievable, and possibly even a little scary for some of you. Rest assured, it will be routine for my staff, so you have nothing to fear.”

  A second scientist, taller than Dr. Kessler and clearly the room lead, stood at a master console and checked off items on a digital board in front of him. He didn’t exactly look bored, but he did look like he would rather be anywhere but here at this particular moment.

  “Boot cycle at sixty percent,” he called to no one and everyone. “Stability field warming. Field injectors A through K are green.”

  Valentina gestured to the floor at the front of the safe room. A set of yellow lines had been taped and stencilled on both sides of the glass, running all the way to the portal. “When we go out, you’ll keep to these. Think of it as airport security meets sacred geometry. Stay within the geometry.”

  Mel pressed her face to the glass. “This is the coolest field trip ever.”

  Alex looked around at the others. Ravenna had her hood down now, eyes flicking everywhere. He had no idea what she was thinking. Jay, on the other hand, stood, feet planted shoulder width apart, rolling his shoulders like a man about to take the stage and grinning like an ass. Danny clutched the strap of his bag as if a stiff wind might pry him loose and blow him into the machines.

  Alex didn’t know what to think yet. Or maybe he had lost the capacity to think. He was incredibly excited and only slightly terrified of the idea of stepping through into another universe. He had worried a lot about this show and in hindsight he maybe had been right to worry. But he had worried about all the wrong things. He was going to a fantasy world!

  It was hard to believe, surrounded as he was by concrete and sweating coolant loops, with anti-slip grating underfoot and fans stuttering around him behind slatted vents.

  Somewhere, a relay thunked. The smaller ring hiccupped blue again. Someone’s radio crackled and a voice said, “Vector lock at twelve by oh-three. Do not deviate.”

  Dr. Kessler lifted a hand to the glass. “A transversal is a small fold between pages,” he said. “Not a random tear. More like a small funnel. Same coordinates, different sheet. Our array maintains the crease, holds the pages close, then applies a catalyst.”

  Valentina’s tone shifted to something brighter, stage-polished. “You’re about to see what very few people ever have. On the other side of that gate is Alpha Base, or, as many of you know from the Dungeon Inc. show: First Home.” She let the words ring, then softened. “Breathe. If anyone needs to sit, do so. Because once the portal opens we will need to move quickly.”

  Alex turned towards her. “Quickly?” he asked.

  Clearly there was something worried in his voice because she laughed and said, “Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t mean it like that. It's just that it takes a lot of energy to keep these gates open. And not your usual types of energy. So we want to open it, get through and close it again as fast as possible.”

  Alex pointed to the small portal on the pedestal. “Is that one not on now? There are cables running through the middle of it and they look like they disappear.” All of the students shifted their gaze to the smaller pedestal. Someone gasped.

  “Yes, very observant,” Dr. Kessler said. That one is maintained at all times. The truth is that all three portals are technically on at all times. We feed a small amount of energy into them to maintain the connection. But to open the way enough for people to pass requires more energy, and the larger the portal?” He made a shrugging motion as he spoke. “Well, it requires exponentially more energy.”

  Jay pointed down at the truck sized portal. “That one must take a ton of juice then.”

  “Yes it does, and when we use it, we have to have the trucks lined up and ready to go because a portal of that size pushes the limits of what we can currently handle.”

  “Then why is the small one kept open?” Alex asked.

  “Ah, well, you see the bundle of cables there? That is electricity and an internet trunk that passes to Alpha Base and creates a direct connection. There is a lot of interference in the cables as they pass through the space between, but we have created a heavy duty shielding to protect them the best we can.”

  As Dr. Kessler talked, the lights around the outside of the central portal flickered to a uniform green and then began to chase each other around the circumference of the ring: twelve pulses, pause, reset; twelve pulses, pause, reset. Exact. Predictable. Safe. Alex counted unconsciously. Habit.

  Tick… tick… tick…

  The head technician adjusted his glasses and turned back to his console. “Brane proximity at threshold. Initiate surfactant.”

  A new sound layered in: a high, almost subliminal whine that Alex could feel as well as hear. The space inside the ring became uncertain, the way hot asphalt blurs in summer. It slumped, first inwards, and then out towards the safe room.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Stability injectors go,” said the scientist. Light crawled along braided conduits. The portal hummed.

  “Excuse me,” Danny said, still clutching his strap. “Is there a… like, a safety… rate?” He winced at his own wording. “I mean, how safe is this?”

  “Safer than a motorcycle,” the console scientist said without looking up. “Less safe than your couch.” Alex stared at him a moment; the guy likely didn’t have many friends.

  Kessler added, “Ninety-seven-point-eight percent for a standard human passage. Slightly lower for vehicle mass. We disclosed all of this in your contracts.”

  Ninety-seven-point-eight. Alex did the math anyway. Two-point-two percent of something. Of what? Catastrophic failure? A stutter that left your atoms arguing about which neighbourhood they lived in? He couldn’t find the placard with the days-since-last-incident report and that meant they either had a perfect safety ratio or an aversion to bad luck.

  The whine intensified and then fractured into a harmonic ladder that felt and sounded like ice sliding across steel. Actually, Alex couldn’t even be sure if it was something he heard or felt.

  The space inside the ring deepened. Not darker, exactly, but deeper. A glossy black that drank light one moment and returned it the next in fractured gleams like crystalized oil. The surface trembled, ripples chasing ripples. Invisible wind stirring a pond that wasn’t really there. He could have sworn he saw colours ghost through it: pale pink from nowhere, a shard of green, then a cold blue that pooled and held.

  “Event horizon forming,” one of the technicians said, voice flattening with focus. “Hold the vector. Do not adjust.”

  “Calibrate the window,” came a radio voice from the floor. “No deviation.”

  Alex’s throat was dry. His hand found the stones in his pocket again, rolling them, feeling every smoothed edge. He pressed his other hand to the glass and leaned in, breath fogging a perfect oval. He could see the tangle of cables, the colour-coded zip-ties, the corporate logo stencilled hazard yellow at every junction. He traced the path of a coolant line with his eyes just so he wouldn’t stare too long into the portal’s surface, because every time he did his stomach dropped.

  Tick… tick… tick…

  “Okay,” Mel whispered, bouncing on her toes, “I need you to know that I am resisting singing a power ballad right now.”

  “The world thanks you,” Ravenna muttered without heat. Her gaze was glued to the ring.

  Jay cracked his knuckles; each pop seemed to punctuate the hum. “It’s a door,” he said, almost reverent. “They built an actual door. Un-Frickin-believable!”

  “Boot cycle complete,” the head technician said. “We are at go.” He pressed a button that was very large and very red in a way Alex found unsubtle but reassuring. Somewhere on the lab floor, a lock disengaged with a mechanical chonk, and a gate in the railing around the outside of the observation room swung open.

  Valentina turned, all teeth and confidence. “Ladies and gentlemen… your adventure awaits.” She didn’t sell it like a line; she delivered it like a promise. Then she keyed the intercom. “Opening safe room door!”

  The glass in front of them split and air equalized between the two rooms with a sigh that cooled Alex’s cheeks. The safe room door slid aside and in an instant they weren’t observers behind thick panes; they were on the lab floor, only metres from the ring. The surface of the portal was right there, shifting like liquid glass, endless and alive.

  “Um, is it going to suck us in when we get close?” Danny asked, clearly eyeing the safety of the safe room behind them.

  Valentina laughed and answered, “No! It’s almost like there is a thin wall between the two spaces. You will have to push through it. But gently, it doesn’t take much force. It’s sort of like a wall of air.”

  She turned back and took point, heels clacking on the diamond steel plating, each step precise on the painted line down the centre of the gantry. She stopped just shy of the threshold, touched the little sword pin at her collar, and glanced back and took them all in with a show woman's brightest smile.

  Then she leaned forward into a reality that wasn’t theirs. The portal accepted her without argument and she was just gone. No smoke. No spark or sparkles. Just a woman passing through an upright lake.

  Jay barked a laugh that was too loud and too bright. “Hell yes!” He shot a two-finger salute at the group, jogged the last four steps, and plunged through with a little too much eager, reckless energy.

  Mel squealed, “Bye!” to no one in particular, nearly tripped on her own enthusiasm, caught herself, and vanished right behind him.

  The portal rippled as if a pebble had dropped into a pond; a second later it was smooth again.

  Ravenna sighed. “Five bucks says she just ran right into the giant’s backside over there.” Without waiting for an answer she jammed her hands in her hoodie pocket and walked through as if crossing a street.

  Danny hung back, but when Alex looked over at him, he took a long breath, squared his shoulders the way people did when they were pretending – to be the version of themselves they wanted others to see Alex thought – and stepped through the almost oily-looking surface.

  And then there was nothing between Alex and the ring.

  He stepped forward, excited but ready to savour this moment. As he got close he could feel the gateways temperature on his skin – except it wasn’t temperature; it was something both cold and warm, an alternating current of sensations out of sequence. The hairs on his forearms lifted.

  He held out a hand.

  The surface took it. No real resistance. No shock. Nothing to push against. One moment his fingers were here, the next they were elsewhere. He pulled his arm back and it came with no more resistance than it went with.

  He laughed and stuck his hand through again. He thought about peeking around the side to see his missing arm from the side but remembered the speech about maintaining the right path when you entered. “I’ll bet there’s a story there,” he muttered.

  “Just walk through please,” came a voice over the intercom. “Do not wave your arms around inside the event horizon.” Alex looked back over at the safe room and saw the head technician take his hand off the intercom button. He looked like a teacher who’d given this warning more times than he could count.

  “Right,” Alex said and then gave a thumbs up to the guy. “No jazz hands in eternity. Got it.”

  It was time. His whole life… Did everyone wish for a moment like this? A thing that changes everything?

  Tick… tick… tick…

  The LED sequence accelerated around him: twelve green, yellow pause, reset. But still: twelve, pause, reset meant: stable. Predictable. And on the other side of this shimmering, rolling gateway was the famous Inn at Last Home. He was going to get to see it all in person!

  The lead technician's voice came back over the intercom, apparently he was taking too long, because the man’s bored, and now less-patient voice said: “When you enter, just keep your eyes forward and your feet moving. The phase lag is brief. If you feel taller, shorter, sideways – don’t interpret it. Let your body recalibrate. Do not stop moving until you feel ground underneath you.”

  “Ground,” Alex repeated, because it felt like the kind of word you should pocket. “Right.” The guy must have thought he was nervous. Maybe he was a little, but he just wanted this moment to last forever. No, not forever. Just long enough.

  Tick… tick… tick…

  It was time. The rollercoaster had reached the pinnacle of the hill and Alex was looking straight into the descent. He smiled and took a small step forward. Then another. He watched as his nose touched the surface. It felt a little bit like water. He took his last breath of Earth air – even if it was heavily recycled, deep mine, lab air – and stepped forward.

  The surface broke around his face. It clung to him like water, only without the wetness.

  Don’t overthink it. Just go.

  He shoved his shoulders through..

  The world wavered like a heat mirage. For a brief moment he thought he could see through the walls and the miles of rock to the surface above and he looked at the sky he recognized one last time.

  Then he was someplace else. There was an odour that was sharp but unlike anything he had ever experienced before. His eyes were open, but it made no difference: sight collapsed into pure sensation.

  He shuffled forward a little further – or thought he did. It was hard to tell. He could see his body, but not really feel it. He felt stretched and squeezed. He couldn’t tell how long he had been here. He moved again, closing his eyes for a moment to rebalance himself. It didn’t matter though, he could see the nothing around him just as well with his eyes closed. He took another deep breath, but couldn’t tell if he was actually still breathing. Couldn’t feel the rise of his chest.

  He stepped once more and felt a pressure against him. Like a stiff breeze in his face.

  And then he stepped on through to the other side.

  Early portal research failed because it tried to force specific geographic destinations without an understanding of the necessary upper dimensional maths. Conventional transit presumes a shared frame of reference: two points occupying the same universe, separated by distance but governed by identical physical constants. That assumption proved both insufficient and unnecessarily restrictive.

  Contemporary quantum theory had already suggested an alternative and after leaving DARPA and returning to basics we could finally see it. If reality permits a superposition of possible states, then space itself may be treated as an emergent property rather than a fixed substrate. Under this model, distance is not traversed; it is bypassed.

  The multiverse hypothesis was not adopted to explain portal function. It emerged as the least implausible explanation for observed behavior: that portal apertures would not stabilize when anchored to terrestrial coordinates. Observation showed that they only stabilized when treated as probabilistic selections from an adjacent solution space.

  In practical terms, it proved easier to reach elsewhere than somewhere.

  Earth-3 is not a destination in the traditional sense. It is a statistically adjacent reality with compatible physical laws and tolerable variance. Countless others likely exist. Most are unreachable. Some are hostile. A few, by chance, align closely enough to allow sustained interaction. We’ve found 2 so far.

  Excerpt from HEX Research Primer

  Foundational Models: Non-Local Transit

  Thanks for sticking with the story so far!!

  I am a new writer here on RR, so your reviews and ratings and especially follows mean a ton - please consider taking a moment to help if you like my story!

  In fact, I think I'm legally obliged to tell you to SMASH that follow button at the very least and don't forget to comment and let me know what you think!

  ─────────────?─────────────

  Dungeon Inc. // RECRUIT DIV.

  ─────────────?─────────────

  ? ━━━? THE STORY CONTINUES… ?━━━ ?