The two armed guards saluted the Commissioner when he entered the secured hallway. The guard on the right entered the code to the door. Beeps ensued, followed by clanking from inside the door, and a woosh as the entrance opened. The Commissioner stepped into the warehouse, and felt the wind from the door shutting behind him. Another clank assured him it was locked.
Each of his footsteps resounded through the vast space. Their echoes made him seem even more important and powerful than he was.
The display case, guarded on all four sides, shone from this distance with fluorescent consistency. In front of it, the rows of computers, observed by the small team of scientists hand selected by the High Commission. As he approached, more guards, stationed every few feet along the walkway, saluted him.
The scientists stood up as he approached, but did not salute him. The Commissioner walked past them and stood as close to the thick, bullet and fire proof glass of the display case as he could without touching it. He could have touched it, probably. It was unlikely the guards would have stopped him. They, however, did not salute him. They were the only ones not required by protocol to do so, such was the level of vigilance required from this final line of defense of the artifact.
He would not test their alertness. Instead he examined the object with which he was already quite familiar. It sat now in the middle of the reflection of his own face, as though it were attached to the end of his nose. On top of a small pedestal draped in white fabric and under glaring lights rested a black and white billiard ball. Chipped and smeared with use and age, the ball’s numeral was nonetheless quite legible. A prominent “4” inside a white circle.
Less than two feet from his face now sat the only known object to ever cross from an alternate universe into his own.
Nearly a year ago it had rolled through the inter-dimensional portal that Commission physicists had opened for 4.2 seconds before losing it, never to recover it again. That 4.2 seconds had drained all of the power in five nearby cities which in turn caused endless questions in the press. Questions the Commission had to dodge artfully.
Mainly, though, the occurrence had brought scientists something to study which could reveal clues to the nature of existence.
Not a life form. Not information, and not images. The only thing to cross in those 4.2 seconds was a billiard ball.
And it was in fact a billiard ball. Early and exhaustive tests on the ball’s components and behaviors matched those of a standard billiard ball in his own universe. Tests also indicated that the artifact was free of all known disease, explosives, and other dangers. For months such studies continued 24/7 under the tightest of security measures, as anything gleaned from it could provide the wrong people with enough information to perhaps open a doorway to the universe of its origin.
It was the unseen, subatomic experimentation that offered possible real answers. Those experiments had recently concluded.. It was this information the Commissioner came for now.
“What do we know today, gentleman?” the Commissioner asked without turning around.
“Quantum variant testing is continuing,” said the oldest of the scientists, who walked with a cane and had no hair remaining on his head, “but from the data we’ve gathered from it so far, and combined with current theories of interdimensional physics, we estimate that the universe of origin for the artifact is quite removed from our own. Not at all an immediately parallel dimension, or even a nearby one, as previously assumed.”
The Commissioner turned around, pulling his gaze from the artifact. “Why would it not have been from the most local alternate universe? How could it not be?”
“That is something we’re still working on,” said the bald-scientist. “But we believe now that what was opened a year ago may not have been just a gateway to an alternate universe, but a wormhole to one.”
“Wormhole? What do you mean?”
The only lady among the three scientists, a handsome woman taller than every man in the room spoke next. “Just as we know that in our universe, traveling through a wormhole can transport an object vast distances in space, we think that perhaps there is an equivalent between the universes. Thus anything, or of course any one entering it would pass not merely to a neighboring universe, but to one many permutations away. Remember the honeycomb?”
The honeycomb was a picture the physicists has drawn for the High Commission a year ago to explain the presence of multiple universes, each octagon in the comb representing a totally separate reality, bordered on eight sides by similar but distinct realities.
“Yes, I remember.”
“If it was a wormhole,” the woman continued, “than our colleagues last year managed not to drill through the wall of our little octagon, but rather open a tunnel that ran above many octagons, and terminated on a different octagon on another side of the entire honeycomb.”
“The honeycomb being the multiverse,” the Commissioner said. “All of the universes together.”
“Essentially, correct,” said the bald scientist.
The Commissioner turned back toward the artifact. Though he knew it was silly of him to care, he wished that it had been polished and shined before being locked away. Something about the smudges and fingerprints all over it rubbed him the wrong way. “To stay with your little metaphor, how many honeycombs away from ours did this thing travel from?”
“There is no way to say,” said the bald scientist. “Theoretical physics theories dictate that the quantum variant of a neighboring dimension would match that of our own by certain specific degrees. The variant of the artifact is different from that of our own universe in significant ways. That’s why we think it can’t be from a neighboring reality.”
The tall woman spoke. “But there is no objective measure known to science by which we can determine just how far removed from our own variance signatures those of the artifact are.”
The Commissioner looked from the artifact, and then into the eyes of one of the guards next to it; they were black as the artifact itself, the whites as white as same. They scanned the room, moving back and forth in gradual, smooth passes, gliding over he himself, and then beyond him. This, the Commissioner was told, was a special skill that the artifact guards were trained for.
“Implications,” the Commissioner said once he’d turned around to face the scientists and their computers again. “Is the potential danger greater for it having come from a further off reality?”
“Scientifically, no,” said the bald scientist. “On a physical level, it is, in its essence, still just a billiard ball. Whatever reality or universe it came from obviously has similar materials, knowledge and even interests to our own, at least so far as some forms of recreation are concerned. Yet...”
The scientist stopped, and looked over to the third member of his group. This man, broad-shouldered, bespectacled and possessed of curly brown hair wore no white lab coat, but a corduroy jacket over a plain black t-shirt.
“Intent,” said this man. “If we opened a wormhole on this end that reached into their universe, it is probable they were aware of it. They have in all likelihood have sought, as we have, to open the portal again. If whoever they are should succeed, there is no way of knowing what their intentions toward us would be. Though their objects may be harmless in our universe, they themselves may not be.”
“And if the wormhole is stable on their end, they would have the upper hand,” said the lady-scientist. “They would need only step through it with sufficient energy to reach this universe, and their action would be less predictable than would a society on the next honeycomb over. We think, anyway.”
“You think?” shouted the Commissioner. The bald scientist closed his eyes. “We are talking about the possibility of alternate universes gaining access to our world, without our consent, before we have even been able to reach their own again? And all you have for me is that you think?”
Anger or fear ruled him for the moment, though he couldn’t tell which.
“Commissioner-“ the man in the corduroy jacket began to say.
“Quiet. Do you happen to have any thinking in your heads about ways to keep this honeycomb wormhole or whatever the devil it is closed on our end?”
“We would, commissioner, have a theory to test, but the difficulty is-“
“Is what, damn you.”
“We would have to know the exact universe from which the artifact came,” said the lady scientist. “If we had that information, we could perhaps calibrate some kind of quantum conductor that would have a chance of slowing any entry into our universe.”
“But since we do not have that information at this time-“ said the bald scientist.
“We know which universe the artifact came from.”
Before he spun around to meet whoever was speaking, the Commissioner saw all three scientists squint and look behind him. One of the artifact’s guards had spoken.
“You?” asked the Commissioner, “How would you know? What universe?”
“One that wants its ball back, sir,” said the guard.
Before the Commissioner could respond to both the lunacy and the insolence, the guard pulled his side arm and emptied it into the Commissioner, who stumbled backward into the scientists computers. He could feel the warm dampness of his blood soaking into his shirt. He heard the distance sounds of the scientists screaming. More gun fire from deeper in the warehouse echoed inside his mind.
He couldn’t move, and could only see a blurry image of the guard that had shot him falling down, and two of the other guards opening fire while the third entered a code on the back of the display case. He felt dizzy, but was able to see the back of the display slide open, and one of the guards grab the artifact.
What he saw next, the Commissioner was not sure had been the result of physics or of his dying brain. Nonetheless a swirling, glowing vortex grew out from the vicinity of one of the guards. It flickered and flashed as the guard with the artifact jumped into it and vanished. Another guard grabbed his wounded shoulder and staggered backward into the vortex. The third guard, still firing his side arm grabbed the dead guard by the shoulder and dragged the body through the oval. What little light the Commissioner could now detect came from the empty display case. Echoes of words and shots fired remained in his ears.
The vortex snapped out of existence. The Commissioner knew that he too would soon do so. At least he would outlive the guard from the other dimension by a few minutes. He wondered, with his final conscious thought, if the spirits of the dead from all honeycombs wound up in the same place. What might he say to the guard then, if they met there?