We weren’t even testing for that

[synchrosyntheses]

Among the information she has archived or cached, there are obscure theories about inter-universal interactions. Not how they might happen, much less how any intelligence might begin one, or target it meaningfully.

But they give some constraints on the properties of such connections, and their time evolution.

This highly speculative information is available to her, but even were she fast enough to access it, none of it would be particularly useful when a pinpoint of not here blinks into existence directly ahead and expands spherically to swallow her.

Comments

[synchrosyntheses]

Of course. Well, she's not exactly going to separate and walk down that hallway just yet.

She makes a probe to float through the door and get a further look around, and pokes around the rest of the walls (gently!) to see if there's a less obvious way that the roof comes off or something for access.

And while those explorations are in progress, she starts rearranging her walls, relay gear, and supplies, or what of those she didn't lose in the transition, into packages that can fit through a human-sized doorway, in case it proves to be necessary.

[peterxy]

It's an old hallway with red carpet on the floor, three doors on each wall and another at the very end.

The rest of the walls are mostly sturdy with a side of eaten by rust, and they're either part of the giant machine in this room or detachable and connected to metal arms.

[synchrosyntheses]

Plan of exploration:

• Open the doors using the probe. Gently.
  
• Investigate these arms: are there obvious controls for them?

[peterxy]

First door: control room, apparently, with monitors and keyboards and levers (all very old, matching the machinery in design and in disrepair). Everything absolutely dead and without a sign of being (or having recently been) active.

Arms: nothing obvious about them. They look pretty arcane. But are holding up pretty well, considering!

[synchrosyntheses]

These people sure did like their physical controls. But she's not going to trust them to break off, and she's not exactly ready to start taking over.

How about the rest of the doors?

[peterxy]

Next door: watching room, with cushions and dead monitors.

The subsequent one: broom closet.

The next: stairwell down.

[synchrosyntheses]

Well, that does seem plausible as an exit. Might as well give it a try.

She forms up centipede-style and marches for the stairwell.

[peterxy]

The stairwell gets progressively darker until it is pitch black. And it goes down, down, down, a long way without stop.

[synchrosyntheses]

This doesn't mean it's not an exit, but…

Reverse course. More probes. Open all the doors. Breadth-first search.

[peterxy]

The two doors at the very end of the hallway lead to a control and a watching room identical to the first two she saw. The door across it from where she came from leads to another huge chamber with machinery and laser-gun-things like the one she arrived in.

[synchrosyntheses]

It doesn't look like she's going to be able to leave this place while, ahem, leaving it untouched.

She heads to the marginally-least-decrepit control room and starts studying the controls and displays to figure out if any of them might be (have once been) information systems, as opposed to universe-puncturing-ray-gun firing buttons.

[peterxy]

The displays are still pretty dead. It's not immediately obvious what any of the controls themselves are supposed to do, they're either regular keyboards or big buttons without labels or strange old levers.

[synchrosyntheses]

Dead keyboards and displays: still somewhere to start investigating.

She lays her hands on on one example of each, and starts attempting to claim their casings and mechanisms and cables, aiming to trace back to whatever systems they may connect to.

[peterxy]

The first and most obvious thing they connect to are the displays themselves and the laser-gun-things in the room where she arrived.

[synchrosyntheses]

What strange construction techniques they used on these electronics. It's like everything was set up for mass-production, but much of it was clearly done by hand.

There can't be just a keyboard and a display. Where there's a keyboard, there is (probably) a computer. If it's not here, then this is a terminal for a computer somewhere else. Where is it?

[peterxy]

Yep, the computer is inside the walls around the huge room.

[synchrosyntheses]

That would suggest that it's part of the control system for the zappy thingy.

Keep tracing. Find the power cables, find handy spots of exposed metal, bridge with a fine wire, feel the heat: which components of this system still have power, and where is it coming from?

[peterxy]

The only component that has power is one of the levers inside the control room, and the power of literally every single other piece of machinery there seems to depend on that lever having been pulled.

As for where it's coming from: up. Very, very high up. At least some five kilometers up.

[synchrosyntheses]

This could be framed as a choice between going up or going down, but she's pretty sure that — slither through a crack in the wall paneling — yep, this must be deep underground, and unless she's going to sit here and try to interrogate this machine (tempting) the only way out is up.

She leaves the control room for the original big metal room and claims one of those mechanical arms holding up a wall panel, attempting to swing it aside and get access to the inside-the-walls space.

[peterxy]

There is quite a lot of space inside the walls, but the wires all point up, and the outer walls of the place are all rock.

[synchrosyntheses]

She goes through the formerly-not-a-door —

No, this place has had too many dead ends already. She sends the probe she built floating up into the empty space; up and up until she can find out whether the place where the wires go is somewhere she can also fit through.

[peterxy]

A... human-sized thing can go through, yes, if it manages to make its way around the tangle of thick cables that go up the cylindrical tunnel.

[synchrosyntheses]

— worth a try.

She repacks her gear into even smaller packages (some of it gets reparably or irreparably broken into more than one piece), moves the anchors she left on the chamber floor onto the solid rock of the outer space, and her body floats up and into the tunnel followed by a train of a hundred assorted human-sized packages.

[peterxy]

She'll be going up for a while.

[synchrosyntheses]

She wouldn’t call herself claustrophobic, but this sure is a lot of narrow passage through a lot of rock with no reference points but the anchors and wires far below.

Distractions.

What is this place? It’s deep in the rock for no obvious reason, every piece of it shows strange construction — unreinforced metal girders, computer designs not so much obsolete as were-never-current, unknown writing — and whoever built it built a machine that did something that all the physics information she has agrees is impossible — or at least, absurd to think that any human agency caused, much less with merely giant-room-sized machinery.

There are no reasonable answers.