Searching Far and Wide

[intricate_engineer]

Glen was creating a prototype for a new gate design. It was meant to be affordable and provide quick transport between individual homes. She tests several objects and a rat and everything seems to be working.

She steps through. Instead of finding herself in the room next door, she finds herself standing on a sidewalk in an empty city. The buildings are tall and perfect, colorless with doorways far too tall for any human. The roads have no straight lines and twist in on themselves. There is no life or sound.
Glen tries to stay calm. She begins to walk along the road, randomly opening doors and exploring buildings that are as silent as the rest of the world.

She opens a door that she hopes will lead onto a roof and is instead met with warmth, and soft noise, and color.

Comments

[the_very_best]

"I know, but - you don't even have immortality. So you probably want to be a little risk-averse, making sure that there's not, like, a war or even a riot, over the stuff."

[intricate_engineer]

"Yea. You're right. I wish I could call Alex."

[the_very_best]

"Why, what would he say?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Oh, nothing in particular. He's one of the people who handles this stuff. He does initial contact anyway, and he's sort of immortal so he can take more risks."

[the_very_best]

"Sort of immortal?"

[intricate_engineer]

"A while ago he had a run in with one of the powerful beings I mentioned before. He isn't quite sure if it's meant to be a gift, or a curse, or if it was even intentional. He doesn't age. He gets hurt normally until the point where he would die, and then his body resets. He doesn't go completely back to normal. There's a kind of panful residue we figured out is damage to his spark. That doesn't heal. We don't know if that means he can only reset a finite number of times, or if his spark will keep getting damaged until he can no longer function."

[the_very_best]

"What does it mean for a spark to be damaged?"

[intricate_engineer]

"He says it hurts, but where it hurts isn't part of his body. He can block it out, but if he gets distracted it comes back and he sort of loses hold of his body. The rest of the time, he feels fragile. Everything is farther away and he doesn't feel like he's the one who is moving his hands or walking."

[the_very_best]

"That sounds really unpleasant. ...Immortality's still pretty great though, how old is he?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Time passes differently in different universes so it's hard to get an exact number. Maybe two hundred years? But he has problems with his memory. When he dies he loses some stuff and for a while after memories don't form properly."

[the_very_best]

"Oof. Time passes differently like how? I just meant subjective time."

[intricate_engineer]

"Yea, roughly 200 years in subjective time. It's a problem with distant universes. Time will pass at a different rate. So for example, two years pass at home but only a minute passes in the other universe, or fifty years pass in the other universe. It always isn't consistent. So, one minute can be a day, but the next minute will be a year. This stops once there is a connection between the universes."

[the_very_best]

"Sounds like a headache to keep track of. Does that mean time's not synced between here and where you're from, since our connection's to Milliways?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Maybe."

[the_very_best]

"Any way to predict which way it won't match if it doesn't?"

[intricate_engineer]

"No. Not with the equipment I have. There are humans here, so I'm hoping we're close enough that it won't be too much time."

[the_very_best]

"Having humans around affects the passage of time?"

[intricate_engineer]

"No, not at all. Sorry, I'm not explaining very well. Humans implies this universe might be close to the one I'm from, which makes it less likely that a bunch of time is passing back home."

[the_very_best]

"Oh, nearby universes are more similar, gotcha."

[intricate_engineer]

"Yea. There's a definite pattern. Maybe there are random human worlds out there, but we haven't found them yet. Not that that means much."

[the_very_best]

"It doesn't?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Yea. Since our search methods aren't random, we can't say that the worlds we've found are a representative sample."

[the_very_best]

"Ah, fair enough, you're just rummaging around in a sort of clustered area and there could be other clusters."

[intricate_engineer]

"Exactly."

[the_very_best]

"What's the most interestingly off-pattern world you've found?"