TimeDancer, LLC
CONFIDENTIAL
***This communication is the confidential work product of Timedance LLC, and is not intended for distribution to the general public. It is an internal communications document only. Every person who has access to this document has signed a comprehensive non-disclosure agreement, and faces large financial penalties for any disclosure. In addition, because of the governmental clearances involved with this work, distribution of this document is a felony under US Code Title 61.7.31.***
Date: 1/7/43
Attn: TimeDancer Executive Committee - ℅ Chairwoman Lynda Greene
Preparer: Dr. Woodley Finebaum, Senior Researcher, TimeDancer Development Program
Title: Report on the Navigation Problem with TimeDancer Multiverse Access Device
Dear Chairwoman Greene and other members of the committee,
Below please find the executive summary of my team’s recently completed report on the Multiverse Access Problem. The full report will follow in a few days, but we wanted to give you this preview first. This report is the culmination of almost eight months of study, and collaboration between teams of competing researchers in both the public and private sectors. It represents our collective best effort at assessing the current state of play.
In what follows, we have included only that of which we feel we can be certain. There exists much innuendo and speculation regarding these issues among the hobbyist and semiprofessional scientific community, to say nothing of the conspiracy narrative about “multiverse-denial” and “own-universe enslavement” circulating widely on the social media/metaverse/Chinese web/dark web nexus.
We have rigorously ignored these sources, focusing instead on what can be proven, in an effort to give the executive committee the best possible information on which to base their forward guidance, rather than the most possible information. Any omissions that members of the executive committee may have questions or concerns about are almost certainly missing because they come from such unreliable sources.
We wish you the best of luck and the highest wisdom in the decisions you will take in the coming days. It is no exaggeration (indeed it is understatement) to say that the fate of trillions of trillions of people may rest on those choices. We do not envy you the responsibility, but it is yours, and the multiverse puts its trust in you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Woodley Finebaum, PhD, DCs
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Prehistory of the Problem
On November 21, 2039, inside a supercooled clean room at the Jobs Research Center (JRC) in Palo Alto, California, humanity made contact with another universe for the first time. The JRC team sent a golf ball through a wormhole into what came to be known as Universe 2 (Our own universe being Universe 1), and then brought it back intact to their lab. Further experiments with inanimate objects confirmed the wormholes to be a stable, repeatable phenomena, and resulted in the visitation of Universe 3 through Universe 5412 (though at the time it was not clear they were all different universes, the numbering system came later), at which point the U.S. Government intervened.
JRC’s discovery was immediately classified Top Secret/SCI by the Department of Defense (DoD), and the program was relocated from JRC to a secure facility in San Diego, under direct DoD authority. Pursuant to classified national security statutes (which this report is unable to identify specifically), Apple Computer (owner of JRC) was denied their right to commercial exploitation of the technology. Apple sued, but eventually settled under threat of outright nationalization. The terms of their deal were that they would receive patent rights with an extended term (rumored to be 100 years) if and when the DoD determined that the wormhole technology was safe and stable enough for commercialization.
Neither side expected this to happen, ever. However, at that time, in anticipation of possibly receiving the patent rights, Apple and JRC set up a subsidiary called TimeDancer, and formed the new company’s executive committee to whom this report is addressed.
Over the ensuing months, the JRC research team—now living in government-mandated isolation on base in San Diego—extended and expanded their experiments with the wormhole device. On June 22, 2040, they sent cameras through the device, which recorded an arrival in the exact same clean room scientific facility as the San Diego lab, complete with identical copies of the scientists on the JRC team, who were very surprised by the camera’s arrival.
Later that same day, stunned after reviewing their camera’s footage and debating their next move, the JRC scientists were shocked by the arrival of a recorded message inside their inactive device. The message was from themselves in another universe (at this point they did not know if it was the same universe their camera had gone to or a different one). The message expressed the hope that the two teams could work together in exploring the possibilities of the multiverse, a proposal to which the Universe 1 JRC team readily agreed.
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics holds that the divergence of two Universes occurs whenever there is some possible difference between them. Each action that a human takes creates a set of new universes based on all possible modes of the action, but also each raindrop creates universes based on its possible paths to the ground. Any phenomenon with an observer (or, it turns out, a possible observer) creates divergent universes for each of its possible outcomes.
Thus the Universe 1 JRC team and the Universe 8221 JRC team—although this designation later became inaccurate, once it was established that each recording, both those sent by the Universe 1 team and those received by the Universe 1 team, went to or came from a different universe, albeit one where the non-Universe 1 JRC team had had the exact same set of experiences and received the same messages and thus communicated exactly as the previous Universe’s team had done—set out to discover what was different between their two Universes, and thus to establish with more certainty that their device was, in fact, opening wormholes in the multiverse.
The first and most obvious possible difference between the two Universes was that the camera had first arrived in the non-Universe 1 Universe, and the first recorded message had arrived in Universe 1. However, if this were the case, then their device would not be a multiverse travel device but a universe-creating device, since it could only travel to universes in which the travel itself was the key difference. This seemed less than ideal from a both a commercial and a national security perspective, and so the decision was taken to look for other (and hopefully more consequential) differences between the universes.
This, however, proved to be difficult. The different-universe JRC teams exchanged terabytes of data, downloaded it from the portable drives before the drives disappeared back to their universe of origin (energy required to sustain the wormhole scales exponentially with time, placing a hard limit on inter-universe trips of about ninety minutes) and used A.I. to scan the data for differences. Wikipedia, Twitter, Reddit, and eventually (with DoD cooperation) text messages and emails, and in every universe the JRC team contacted or were contacted by, the data was the exact same.
Reluctantly, the Universe 1 JRC team came around to the hypothesis that what they had actually designed was a universe-creating device. That is, the only differences they would find in any universe they visited were the ones they made by visiting.
But then, on December 1, 2040 the JRC team received a zip drive from Universe 10899.
Anomaly of Universe 10899
According to Wikipedia in Universe 10899, Candidate Swift had in fact lost her bid for the Presidency in 2036, getting narrowly beat by Khaleef Majors as the first Republican nominee of color in the party’s history. Downstream of this election swing, many smaller things were different between Universe 10899 and Universe 1. Different laws were passed, foreign policy was conducted differently, and news programs and other TV shows were produced differently, to name just a few examples.
Much rejoicing was done back in Universe 1 when the report on this data came back from the A.I. It now seemed clear that the alternate universes existed independently of our contacting them, and thus the possibility existed of “steering” towards the sort of universe that the user of the device wanted—a capacity viewed as crucial for ongoing commercial applications.
The Universe 1 JRC team recorded a message and sent it back, both expressing their excitement and providing their version of the contradictory data to the alternate-universe JRC team. What they received in turn, however, was a confused message from the JRC team in Universe 10901, who had recently sent data to what they thought was Universe 1 (although they didn’t call Universe 1 by that name since each JRC team thought of itself at “the Universe 1 JRC team”). But the data that the Universe 10901 JRC team had sent matched the incoming Universe 1 data perfectly, so that team was confused by the Universe 1 team’s message noting the supposed contradiction.
That is when the Universe 1 JRC team realized that each message they sent or received was going to or coming from a different universe. They had not previously realized this, because in every universe they had contacted before Universe 10899, that universe’s JRC team’s history was identical (so far as they could tell) to each other and to Universe 1’s own. This gave the illusion of universe continuity; Universe 10899 shattered that illusion.
Still, in Universe 1, the incident of Universe 10899 was enough to refocus stakeholder interest in the research and secure a new round of funding from DoD and TimeDancer (who were already pressing for the device to be declared safe after over 10000 wormholes opened without a single damaging incident).
Over the next six months, over 8000 more wormholes were opened under a staggering variety of experimental conditions. The total list of experiments is too extensive to fit in this summary, but will be included as an appendix to the full report. All manner of scientific instrumentation took readings in other universes, looking for further anomalies. The same objects were sent through wormholes hundreds of times. They experimented with length of trips and times of day. They refined the technology to make it portable and sent objects through from other places than the clean room lab—the objects always appeared in the new universe exactly where and when it left Universe 1, and always found its arrival place in exactly the same condition as when it departed.
On June 29, 2041, John Eastlake became the first human subject to go through the machine. He spent sixty minutes walking around the empty fields outside the San Diego JRC lab in Universe 21213, spoke with the JRC team from that universe briefly, and then returned unharmed to the same fields outside the Universe 1 JRC lab.
On that same day, the first catalogued rumors of the wormhole technology appeared on a Dark Web hacker forum. Within days, the story had reached cable news. DoD traced the rumors back to a series of mysterious messages that had appeared outside the homes of key hackers and journalists. Speculation suggests the messages came from another universe, although their exact origin remains unknown.
Nature of the Problem
Even as pressure mounted for public revelation of the discovery, momentum for the experiments by JRC began to falter. In short: There are only so many ideas for experiments within the limitations of the device, and there are surprisingly few applications of multiverse access as currently configured.
Dr. Delaney Cross, an astrophysicist and genius mathematician on our team, put the essence of the problem thusly: If the number of universes is truly infinite, which according to the Many Worlds interpretation it is, and if the vast majority of universes are exactly like ours to any reasonable observer, which JRC’s experimentation seems to indicate, then we should never arrive in a universe that is different than ours. The existence of Universe 10899 is, under this theory, very very unlikely. We should be able to go to a trillion trillion universes and never find one observable difference between any of them and ours.
Universe 10899 is so unlikely, under this rubric, that the existence of that single universe is itself strong evidence that something is wrong with the theory. However, after traveling to over 40000 other universes after that one and never finding a difference, the JRC is forced to consider that our arrival in Universe 10899 is simply the occurrence of something highly unlikely, and that it may never be replicated, even with millions or billions of further attempts.
A financial report commissioned by Apple indicates there are two main areas of commercial potential for the multiverse access technology: Resource acquisition and recreational travel.
Resource acquisition is the appropriation of resources from other universes for our use here in Universe 1, or, alternately, the disposal of our civilization’s waste products in an alternate universe. However, because of both the time limitations of the device and the energy requirements for activating it (simply turning it on requires enough power to light Phoenix for an entire day), even further refinement of the technology makes resource acquisition an energy-negative proposition. As a commercial enterprise, without a major breakthrough, it is a dead end.
This leaves recreational travel. If TimeDance were able to offer a wealthy person a safe and temporary trip to an alternate universe of their choice, the commercial potential is obvious. An offer of a universe that is exactly the same as the one they left is only appealing if they want to commit crimes or otherwise do harm for which they will not face consequences, which, while potentially profitable, would be harmful to Apple’s reputation. It will also likely be declared illegal, since the DoD has certainly noticed that whatever we start doing to other universes is likely to start happening to our universe as well, given our counterparts’ similarity to us.
Thus we are left with a technology that is stable, safe, scientifically fascinating, and not obviously going to make anyone rich in the immediate future. As of January 1, 2043, the patent for the multiverse access device belongs wholly to Apple—the DoD has declared it safe and declassified it.
The technology as it currently exists will circle the globe once it is revealed. Foreign governments will experiment with it, and someone will set up an illicit business allowing people to live depraved fantasies in other universes. Its overall applications, however, remain at this stage rather limited.
The Choice Before This Committee
In 1454, Gutenberg had a prototype of the printing press and was printing indulgences for the church by the thousands. Imagine if that hadn’t been profitable, and instead of improving the technology and using it for other things, Gutenberg had put it into a storage closet and moved on to new experiments.
Imagine if the glider that Orville Wright flew in was deemed useless and abandoned before commercial air travel become a glimmer in the human imagination. Imagine if email hadn’t become universal because when it was invented there was hardly anyone connected to the internet to receive emails. Imagine if cavemen had thrown away the wheel because they hadn’t yet invented the axle.
We stand now astride another inflection point in human history. This committee faces a choice between continuing to fund research on these devices, or looking at them as an expendable line item in a budget. At this moment, we here in Universe 1 have visited 98484 other universes. We need to go to ten times that many just to really get started.
The authors of this report, after much careful study and consideration, believe it is the moral and fiduciary duty of the executive committee to fund this research to the maximum possible extent. This is, first of all, good business. If further research is able to reduce the energy costs or find a steering mechanism that allows for specific universe-destination selection, it will be one of the most profitable (and impactful) discoveries in human history.
Beyond that, however, there are the universes full of people whose lives might be changed—and whose lives might even be created—by the full and responsible use of these devices. There are, in fact, a literal infinity of people out there, in an infinity of universes, waiting for us to come and discover them. Do not dry dock our ship before it has a chance to sail. Those other universes need us, and we need them.
Thank you for your time and attention to this urgent matter. You will have our full report within days, and we look forward to hearing back from you at your earliest possible convenience.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Woodley Finebaum
San Diego, CA
1/7/43
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
i think I see a sequel.
unchained meets multiverse XB4IF