Chương 1: Hobbies

Everyone needs a hobby. Mine was punching holes in the fabric of spacetime. The kind of hobby that leaves you stranded on a planet that looks like it was color-graded by a toddler with a fever dream. That's what I said to the wind. Out loud. On a beach that was not on Earth, on a planet that was not in my solar system, approximately, and I want to stress the word approximately, thousands of light-years away from the garage where I'd been standing about fifty-three minutes ago. The wind did not respond.

Which, honestly, is fair. I'd been talking to myself for most of my adult life. At least here I had an excuse. The sand was the first thing wrong. Not the fat, bronze-colored twin moons above the horizon, nor the faintly lavender sky, nor the ocean that was too green and too still. The sand. Too fine, almost powdery, and it didn't crunch under my boots the way sand should. It whispered. Like walking on flour. This planet had opinions about sand, and they were all wrong. Learn. Plan. Act. Perfect. My loop.

The place I went to when things went wrong. Call it a coping mechanism with good branding. Either way, I liked my disasters to be planned and to arrive one at a time. I'd been running it since before I had a name for it. When I was a kid and my aunt forgot to pick me up from school for the third time in a month because my mother was sick and dying, I didn't cry about it. I mapped the bus routes home and memorized the schedule.

When my undergraduate thesis advisor told me my higher-dimensional particle interaction models were "imaginative but fundamentally unsound," I didn't argue. I went home, ran the simulations three dozen more times until the data was so clean he had to grade it on merit, then ate an entire sleeve of Oreos in the parking lot because some victories demand a ritual. So here I was on an alien beach, alone, with no visible way home, and my brain was doing what it always does. Running my loop, making a list.

Inventory of the situation: One: I was alive. Always a good start. Two: I was breathing. The air tasted faintly metallic, like licking a nine-volt battery, but my lungs were accepting it without filing a complaint. Three: The wormhole was gone. The shimmering blue-white aperture that I had walked through, the one I had built with math and stubbornness and a truly unreasonable amount of duct tape, was no longer behind me. Where it had been, there was just more beach. More flour-sand. More wrong sky.

Four: My phone had no signal. But I checked anyway because engineers verify assumptions even when the assumption is "your cell carrier does not have a tower on an exoplanet." Five: I was alone. That one sat heaviest. My hand pressed flat against my thigh, hard, a reflex I didn't choose. The body's version of reaching for someone who should be there, and finding the absence instead. So I walked.

Standing on alien sand waiting for a door to reopen was not a plan, and my loop required forward motion, even when forward didn't mean anything yet. Even circles counted. The sand shifted and whispered under each step. * The memory came uninvited, the way they do when there's nothing else to hold. Lavender sky, two moons that shouldn't exist, and my brain went back to the beginning. Carl Sagan. Obviously. If you've seen Cosmos, the original, there's this moment where Sagan explains higher dimensions using an apple.

A two-dimensional being on a flat plane, and a three-dimensional object passing through its world. You wouldn't see an apple. You'd see a dot that becomes a circle that grows and shrinks and vanishes. The apple was always there, whole and complete. You just couldn't perceive it. Sand shifted under my boots, every step its own little cross-section through the dune. The metaphor was following me. Twelve years old when I saw that episode.

Sitting on the floor of our living room (Dad was asleep on the couch, which was his version of parenting after Mom got sick), and something in my brain clicked. The way a deadbolt clicks. Loud and final and weight-bearing. Because Sagan was explaining what a three-dimensional being does to a two-dimensional world. But I was thinking: What would a four-dimensional being do to us? And more importantly: Could a three-dimensional being learn to do it to themselves? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Kind of.

With caveats and far more duct tape than any responsible engineer would admit to. The beach gave way to low dunes. Something that might have been vegetation beyond them, dark shapes against the dimming sky, too regular to be rocks, too still to be animals. Evenly spaced, which bothered me in a way I couldn't name yet. I kept walking. * Everything you see exists in three spatial dimensions. Matter, energy, this beach.

But particles also have higher-dimensional components, extensions into dimensions we can't directly perceive. What I figured out, after four years and roughly 4, 842 obsessively logged hours, because yes, I tracked them, because I am the woman who brings receipts, was that we could manipulate those components. Nudge the right particles into the right higher-dimensional patterns, and space folds. Push them into a more specific pattern, and the fold becomes a tear. Push enough of them, and the tear holds open.

A wormhole. Two points billions of miles apart, touching, like a folded tablecloth with a hole ripped through the layers by a steak knife. The first time I did this, the aperture was about the size of a marble. It opened for one-third of a second, pointed into deep space, and the resulting micro-tornado scattered every paper in the garage, knocked over V's coffee, and made a sound like God cracking His knuckles. V stared at the mess. I stared at the mess. Then I said, "So the good news is the math works."

And V smiled, looked at her destroyed latte and said, "Morgan, if you vaporize my coffee one more time, I'm cutting the funding." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. She was kidding. Mostly. Our second attempt cracked the garage window. Our third earned us a visit from the landlord, who I'm pretty sure thought we were cooking meth. Walking past the dunes now.

Corkscrew bushes, waist-high, with thick segmented stems that spiraled up out of the sand in lazy helices, pale gray-green. They smelled faintly of hot plastic and static, like a 3D printer mid-job. Something about the regularity, the spacing, tugged at a thought I wasn't ready to have yet. Victoria Ashford, though if you called her that to her face, she'd look at you like you'd insulted her mother, had been bankrolling our operation since graduation.

"Operation" is a generous term for two engineers in a garage, a whiteboard, and a liberated higher-dimensional particle array. V wasn't my kind of smart. She looked at a marble-sized wormhole and didn't see a scientific breakthrough. She saw a patent. A market. A headline. She could translate my whiteboard ravings into something a venture capitalist might hear as visionary instead of prosecutable, which was a skill I absolutely did not possess. But more than that, she was my best friend.

She'd been my best friend since we were kids, when she dropped beside me in the schoolyard, glanced at my notebooks, and said, "Either you're a genius, or something is seriously wrong with you. Either way, I want in." She'd been in ever since. She also had a way of reminding you what she'd contributed without ever quite saying it outright, a gift for keeping score dressed up as generosity. I'd noticed. I'd decided a lot of things didn't matter back when I still thought I knew who to trust.

* The vacuum problem almost killed the project. Literally. When you fold space through higher-dimensional particles, you don't get to pick your destination like typing an address into GPS. The terminus goes where the math takes it, and in the early days, the math kept taking it into hard vacuum. We scaled up too fast. A basketball-sized aperture, open for nearly two seconds. Direct vacuum exposure in an enclosed garage.

The pressure differential nearly pulled V into the workbench, blew out both windows, and the noise: imagine a freight train being swallowed by a whale. The neighbors called the cops. V told them we'd had a gas leak. The cop looked at our equipment and said, "What is all this?" And V, without missing a beat, said, "Art installation."

"We need an airlock," I said.

"We need therapy," Victoria said. V handled every room we were ever in. That was the division of labor, unwritten and load-bearing: I made the thing work, and V made the world want it. She had a whole pitch about us that she'd been polishing since undergrad, and I'd heard it evolve the way software evolves, release by release, each version tighter: two women in a garage are about to do to distance what the Wright brothers did to altitude.

She could deliver a sentence like that with a straight face and make a venture partner reach for a pen. I told her once that the two-women thing was irrelevant to the physics. She looked at me the way I look at people who say tolerances are irrelevant to machining.

"Morgan. The physics is the product. We're the packaging. Nobody funds a product they haven't been sold the packaging for." I added it to the list of things V understood so that I didn't have to. It was a long list. I went back to the interferometer. I built the airlock. Therapy would have to wait. The ground got rougher underfoot, darker grains mixing with the pale powder. Ahead, the terrain turned black and glassy. A lava field stretching to the horizon.

The sound of boots on volcanic glass under twin moons was a conversation my soles didn't want to have. I stopped. Looked back toward the beach. Sighed. What was I doing? The tide had crept up. Not gently. The sand where I'd first arrived was already darker, wetter; the too-green ocean swallowing the beach in steady bites. If V reopened the connection to my original coordinates, the aperture would open right there. Standing here, half a kilometer inland, I'd never see it. I needed to get back.

Turning around, I walked back toward where the wormhole had been. My mouth still tasted like the nine-volt battery, my scalp was starting to report an opinion about a sun that wasn't mine, and my left boot had found sand in a place boots are specifically engineered to prevent sand. The universe had thrown me across itself, and the itch in my boot did not care. I needed a better plan. The boot needed emptying.

In the absence of the first, I did the second, hopping on one leg on an alien beach, which is the true posture of exploration nobody puts on the mission patch. * Five months to solve the aiming problem. Nine notebooks. V kept me fed, kept the rent paid, kept the landlord convinced we were "performance artists" doing a "long-term residency." The humiliating part was that the math worked in month one. I derived a terminus equation in eleven days, and the equation was correct.

I want that on the record: the equation was correct. Given the higher-dimensional field state at the moment of aperture, it predicted the exit point to within meters. The problem was the word given. The field state couldn't be measured before the aperture opened, because the only instrument that could read the field was the aperture itself. I had built a rifle with perfect ballistics and no way to know which way the wind was blowing until after the bullet left.

Month one ended with a correct equation and a notebook page that said, in handwriting that got smaller as it went, DEFINE THE FAILURE. The failure was not the aim. The failure was the weather report. Months two and three were probes. If you can't measure the field before you fire, fire something small and instrumented and let it phone home. The first probe returned data for a tenth of a second and then returned slag.

The second probe was hardened, insulated, and returned nothing at all, which was worse, because slag is at least a data point about temperature. V found me at 3 AM cross-referencing melting points and said the sentence that got itself written on the whiteboard for the rest of the project: "Maybe stop asking what's over there and start asking what the hole already knows." Month four, I stopped trying to send anything through and started listening to what came back on its own. Every aperture leaked.

A fraction of a second of return spectrum, higher-dimensional discharge spraying back through the opening like light through a keyhole, and the spray was structured. The error in my termini had never been random. It only looked random the way a dice roll looks random when you can't see the table. The return spectrum was the table.

Sample it fast enough, feed it back into the terminus equation as the missing field state, and the next aperture, opened within seconds while the field held roughly still, would land inside a cone instead of inside a galaxy. The breakthrough, when it came, was not a better dart. It was a flashlight: a return-spectrum sampler, cobbled from a spectrometer V bought at a university surplus auction and a signal chain I am still not proud of. A dim, flickering flashlight. It saw the board. It did not see the bullseye.

The cone was as tight as the sampler was fast, and the sampler was built from surplus, and I logged the residual error in notebook nine with a note that said acceptable for cargo, not for crew, and then, because the note was true and we both knew it, we spent two more weeks tightening the cone before anyone said the word crew out loud. V looked at the data and said, "So we went from accidentally poking holes into random space to intentionally poking holes into slightly less random space."

"Exactly."

"Morgan, that is the most terrifying progress report I've ever heard." But she was grinning. We kept going, obviously. Nobody with a working wormhole quits over a cone error. Sometimes, deep in the work at 2 AM, I'd surface and find V watching me instead of her screen. Appraising me. Like a jeweler with a loupe, calculating cut and clarity. She'd notice me noticing and grin the simple grin, the V grin, and hand me another slice of pizza. I filed it under things I wasn't going to think about.

Then, on a Tuesday, because everything important in my life happens on a Tuesday, I opened a wormhole, and on the other side, there wasn't a vacuum. There was light. Blue-green, filtered, like sunlight through water. And air. We could see it shimmering at the boundary, two atmospheres meeting and doing that heat-mirage dance. Both of us stood there. Not breathing. The clouds shifted. Two moons hung low in the sky, both the color of hammered bronze. One was a thin, hooked crescent.

The other was nearly full and big enough that my brain rejected it as a rendering error in the universe.

"Okay," I said, because my mind had wisely abandoned any attempt to produce a better sentence.

"That is not Earth."

"Morgan." V grabbed my shoulder. Her hands were shaking.

"Your hobby," she said quietly, as if the word might break something, "is insane."