The Warren

Well, that’s a bit odd. I seem to have accidentally done some creative hyperspatial architecture without even being conscious of it.

Let me rewind a little, as this needs some explaining!

I was getting up the other day after a very pleasant sleep, and as I crossed my entrance hall I detected something strange. It was a very faint sensation, but I thought I recognised it. At first I didn’t quite believe that a spatial fork could have spontaneously manifested itself in my base, so after breakfast I went back out into the hall with some sensor equipment, fully expecting to be proved wrong. But the evidence was right there on the readouts: a multi-way fork in space, accessible with the correct hyperwave resonance generated as a bubble field around my body, if I did it carefully. And of course, by this time I had cottoned on: this must have been a side effect of the anomaly, in which case it could be seen as a kind of farewell gift from Jalaa – although whether it would prove interesting or dangerous (or perhaps both) remained to be seen.

Not being one to ignore an opportunity, I got to work. It took a couple of days to construct the bubble field projector and test it using a pre-programmed probe. The probe vanished at the expected location and returned successfully within thirty seconds, bearing video footage that showed… guess what? Haha, well it showed the entrance hall of the base! OK, so we were dealing with duplicates. I wondered how many there were, but I knew it would take time to calibrate everything and do a survey. For now, I was ready to explore.

I spent another day or so kitting out my tool belt with a larger bubble field projector so I could set a resonant frequency and put myself through the portal. I made a very careful note of the resonance of the original base, of course, so I could return. And then I tried the same frequency I’d used with the probe.

The new place looked identical to the old one, though the kitchen hadn’t been used for days so I knew the copies had been made a while ago, which fit with my hypothesis. It was when I decided to check outside that I discovered just how interesting this situation really was.

Outside was a mountainside. But it was not the same one. GPS indicated that I was in Scotland, but around a hundred miles from my original base. The door in the rock wall was perfect, as though it had been designed deliberately by me – but of course, the location was a different shape, and so this seemed to me to require disbelief to be suspended about as much as a light-year-long pendulum over a supermassive black hole. In short, I just couldn’t accept that it had happened. How could a natural process have resulted in a second copy of my base in a different mountain, with a door camouflaged in the rock just as with the original?

I set the resonance for home and stepped back through the portal, then tried another frequency. Again, I was in an identical copy of the base, and again, it was in another mountain, this time only about ten miles from the original.

Abso. Lutely. Bonkers.

I’m going to continue exploring this labyrinth, as I’m not quite comfortable with it yet. I don’t like unexplained mysteries! However, if it turns out to be harmless then I suppose it might be a rather useful way to travel.