The Limitations of Tiny Worlds

“Would you like to take a look at something on the higher end of your price range?”

“Sure.” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. This entire apartment hunt was predicated on the promotion and accompanying raise that I was expecting to receive on Monday. It was basically a sure thing, but I still felt weird buying something with money I didn’t actually have yet.

“Great.” She answered, too professional to indicate if she noticed my hesitation. “Right this way.” She marched further into the store, her high heels clacking confidently. I followed. 

We came to a wall covered in screens, all showing the interiors of beautiful apartments from different angles, along with their prices. Heidi pointed to one of the screens.

“Why don’t we take a look at this one. A nice five module set-up, not too expensive, and it has a surprise I think you’ll like.” 

I looked at the price, it was definitely too expensive, but I decided there was no harm in just looking. I nodded and Heidi smiled, reaching up to tap the screen once and enter a code.

A quiet mechanical whirring announced the arrival of a puck. It slid down from the ceiling along a thin track in the wall, which had been disguised by the geometric patterns used to decorate it. The puck reached about chest height and stopped. Its LED was a cheerful green, confirming that the door to a pocket was safely being maintained inside. Heidi moved to stand squarely in front of it and held still as it scanned her face and eyes. 

The puck confirmed her identity and a frame sprouted from the wall. The frame was high-end, a flexible conduit no thicker around than my thumb. It had similarly been hidden by clever patterns in the wall paper. The frame contracted inwards, lowering its circumference until it was hugging the puck around its edges, like a snake coiled around its prey. There were a few seconds of communication between the two pieces of technology, and then the frame began to expand again, drawing the puck with it into a corner of the large rectangle it was outlining. Inside the rectangle was a door, decorated with artisanally cracked blue paint, and sporting an inset door handle that only popped out once the frame was fully expanded. The entire process took maybe five seconds. 

Heidi opened the door to reveal a relatively large living room, aged hardwood floor strategically covered with pale rugs and an assortment of matching linen couches and chairs holding court around a driftwood coffee table. Though everything was arranged to conceal it, the living room clearly had the dimensions of a standard module, about twenty feet on a side and ten high. Light came from the ceiling, which glowed warmly, and from a number of fake windows arranged around the walls, bright screens showing a coordinated view of an ocean and a sandy beach. Heidi led me into the apartment and began pointing out the standard amenities and various pieces of furniture, which I could pay extra to have included. 

“The life support room is through there.” She said, pointing to a normal door that led to one of the two small rooms framing the front hallway. “It comes standard with a hundred gallon ice tank, freshwater, three battery cores, CO2 filters, and a twenty liter oxygen tank.” 

I nodded, these were all just a little more then the legal minimum for a pocket apartment, the essentials to live for three days in resource isolation. Most people upgraded.

A combination kitchen and dining room was connected to the living room through a large portal whose frame was set in the middle of the wall, both disguising and protecting it. It made the room feel much more open than most pocket apartments, and I had to be careful to remind myself that this set-up was still out of my price range. 

The kitchen was nice and compact, with an electric stove, a fridge with a direct connection to the ice tank, and a well insulated toaster oven. Heidi made sure to point out the room's numerous understated air vents, and I could feel the slight draft as cold, oxygenated air flowed past us. I took in everything with a polite fascination, and I honestly didn’t have to try hard to find things to be impressed with or curious about. 

The bedroom was on the back side of the living room, in a module whose frame surrounded a regular door. We just stood on the threshold and looked in. It was pretty standard fare. 

The wall across from the kitchen had a smaller portal, in the shape of an empty arched doorway. The module inside was a ‘sun room’ where the artificial windows were larger and brighter, and the light was better for tricking plants into growing. 

Heidi led me to the back of the sun room, where another wall marked the edge of the module. We walked through the door into an area that was something between a bathroom and a locker room, with showers, tiled floors, and an isolated toilet. I could smell chlorine. Heidi gripped the handle of the door that led into the next room. 

“This feature is popular with a lot of our buyers.” She said, smiling. I felt like I had a good idea of what she was about to show me.

She opened the door to reveal the rest of the fifth module, an infinity pool.

We walked in and Heidi closed the door behind us. It blended in well with the wall, probably to reduce the disorientation of swimming past it over and over again. In front of us there was maybe five feet of tiled floor, then cool looking water, probably four feet deep. Then the far wall, which was covered in artistically abstract noise-cancelling panels with spaces cut out for a couple fake windows, all looking out on the same beach scene as the other rooms of the apartment. Looking to the sides, the room appeared to go on forever, an effect that was dampened by the mist that hung in the air, probably purpose made just to reduce visibility.

I turned to the side, and sure enough, I was looking at the back of my own head. Heidi turned the other way and waved at me from twenty feet away, smiling wide like she was about to be photographed. 

Back when my parents were kids, before pocketing technology was developed, an infinity pool was still something akin to a water treadmill, where you would swim in place as water was pumped past you and then back to the front of the pool in a constant loop. Now the situation was much simpler. An infinity pool was simply a pool missing two sides, but built in a tiny pocket universe with positive curvature such that exiting one side was the same as entering the other. Of course, every module in this apartment was one such universe, but with walls and other pocket universes arranged so that no one had to think about the fact that they were always in what could be considered the center of a space with no edges. 

Being made so viscerally aware of this fact was a sensation that I was more used to than most people, as a result of my profession, but something deep in my brain, which had evolved to navigate a globe with a circumference several million times that of this room, was still uncomfortable with being able to see a repeating string of myselfs, fading away into the fog.

“The mist and water clarity can be adjusted.” Heidi said, confirming my earlier assumption. Her voice echoed strangely as the sound looped through the space over and over again, slowly being absorbed by the panels on the walls. She fiddled with something on her phone and a gentle hissing sound announced the delivery of more mist through a number of hidden nozzles. 

“Could I maybe take a look at another module?” I asked. I suspected that the intended novelty effect of the pool was mostly lost on me, and the thought of coming into this echo chamber everyday to exercise was not one I relished. 

“Of course. I could offer some suggestions, or was there one you had in mind?”

“I was thinking of one of the garden-modules. Maybe the Dutch, with the hedge boundaries?” 

“Certainly. And would you want that as a further addition, or a substitution…?”

“As a substitution, I was thinking, for the sun room and the pool, if that’s alright.”

“No problem!” Heidi said, flashing a smile and pulling out her phone. “We can head back to the living room and try that out.” 

We walked back through the locker room and the sun room, with Heidi taking a few moments at each border to collapse the portal to that module. This took a little longer than before, as the apartment’s automated systems had to detach the pipes that carried water, air, and electricity into each module before the portal could be collapsed back into its puck. 

Another employee arrived just as Heidi was removing the puck for the sun room from the living room wall. He and Heidi traded, two pucks for one, and she put the new one onto the wall, snapping it into place. The frame emerged again and re-contracted, surrounding the new puck. It expanded to reveal a new door, larger than the last one, and made of double pane glass. Heidi opened it. 

The garden was beautiful. The scent of dirt, flowers, and boxwood was amazing after the clinical sterility of the pool. The ceiling was even brighter than the one in the sun room had been, and Heidi demonstrated that it could be made to show, among other things, a clear blue sky, gently drifting clouds, or a detailed midnight star field. 

The walls were disguised as thick hedges, which ended around head height and gave way to a wooden trellis, covered in English ivy. Screens behind the ivy showed the image of bright green hills and a sky that matched the ceiling. 

I walked a circuit around the garden, sticking to the path of flat stones. The plants were all real, and I knew that the amount of light needed to keep them healthy would cost extra, along with the cost of cooling that extra heat. But it was still cheaper than a full five module set up, and I could always trade in this module for another one if it became too expensive. 

I realized about halfway around the garden that I had already decided to buy the apartment. It really wasn’t that expensive, compared to the level of income I was expecting. 

Or maybe that was just justification, and Heidi had pulled some kind of subliminal mind trick on me to get me to buy the place. Either way, I was pretty excited to have a module like this in my living space. 

I told Heidi the good news and we headed back out into the main store to work out all the finer details of payment. A complex of semi-intelligent programs were sent out into the digital world to examine my life’s history, and returned with the decision that I could be trusted to make regular payments on my new home, at a rate such that I would own it fully in less than five years. I also secured a discount for agreeing to trade in my old apartment (two modules) once I had moved all of my possessions out of it. They would save the money of warping new pockets by just gutting the rooms and redoing them in whatever style is popular next month.

Once everything was finalized, Heidi connected the puck to her phone and took it out of showroom mode, so that it could be paired to me as an owner. I stood still, so that it could scan my face and eyes, and used my own phone to give it permission to access my Footprint, the nebulous collection of my appearance, tech, and behavioral signatures that no one else could ever hope to copy completely. That way, even if I was in some kind of accident that deformed my face and wrecked my phone, I could still get into my apartment. The puck beeped happily, and Heidi let me know that I was free to go.

The weight of the puck in my hands was satisfying, like the responsible adult version of getting a new toy. The technical name for a puck is a MASS-CD, a Mobile Aperture Stability and Security Containment Device. But it looks like a high tech hockey puck, and CD already stood for Compact Disk, so add a term for heavy on to that, and puck is really the only word most people use anymore. A puck is a lot of things. They’re physically tough, and very difficult to destroy. They have cameras, microphones, and every other sensor necessary to know where they are, what they’re doing, and who is in possession of them. The government gave them the authority to defend themselves, once it became clear that the trend was for more and more people to keep their houses in their purses. They can scream, alert police, and deduce someone’s Footprint in minutes. They are very hard to steal.

The most important thing about a puck is that it has a tiny door to another universe inside it. 

Well, most scientists, myself included, would say that it has a part of this universe inside it, a section of space that had been fooled into curling in on itself, creating a new stable formation that we could still access, as long as certain precautions were taken. This was true, but functionally it was easier to say another universe. The space in a pocket, as they were called, had no dependency on the rest of the universe. It could be moved without regard for its mass, and if the aperture, the little tunnel into that universe, was destroyed, it would cease to be accessible for the rest of time. 

Imagine a 2-dimensional universe. A planet there is a massive circle instead of a globe, and a person is a flat being that walks over its surface. Everyone in this universe sees the world as just the edges of objects, a set of lines, all in a row, just in different colors and shades. This sounds weird, but remember that you see a 3-dimensional world as a set of flat images, each one overlapping some of the others.

So in this 2D world, no one can really imagine what it would mean for there to be more than two dimensions. There is no way to properly visualize how there could be forces or objects with components not in the same flat plane as everything else. But there is math that can represent it easily, and scientists spend many decades studying it. One day, some of them figure out how to bend a tiny portion of the flat fabric of their universe into a little balloon, a 3-dimensional balloon. But, the balloon’s opening closes so suddenly that it has to be measured in billionths of a second. The bubble loses any meaningful coherence with the original universe and is gone forever. The scientists learn how to repeat this result, and by placing dangerous garbage, like the waste from nuclear power generators, into the space that is ballooned-away, it can be disposed of in a way that is safer and more permanent than any other.

This is a huge breakthrough, and the technology is sold to governments and power companies all over the circular planet. But the scientists keep studying, trying to understand the moment that the balloon snaps away, and, slowly, they figure out how to keep the balloon from closing completely. They manage to keep the balloon connected to their universe in a small but significant way. The connection is 1 dimensional, a mathematically perfect line, a tiny slit in the fabric of their universe.

When someone in that universe looks at that line it looks like a door. When someone walks into that line they pass through the slit, onto the inside of the balloon. Of course, their brains still can’t comprehend what it would mean for there to be more than two dimensions, so they see this space as being impossible warped. When they look forward, their field of vision loops all the way around the inside of the balloon until they are looking at the back of their own head. 

This effect makes people uncomfortable, and so the scientists start to warp space that already has walls and furniture inside of it, so that people inside of the balloon can’t tell that they are inside of anything weirder than a small room. 

At first the amount of machinery needed to keep the 1 dimensional door open is huge, and expensive, and temperamental, but the scientists work hard and eventually figure out how to shorten and stretch the line, within certain limits. Eventually they reach a time where the line can be shortened almost to a point, and fit into a small device that keeps the door open and the balloon accessible, but lets it be moved around by anyone who can carry the device. 

Imagine that, but everything happens with one more dimension, and it’s actually way more complicated and confusing and there are still a hundred open questions that the scientists argue about in journals made just for arguing about this sort of thing. 

But here’s the craziest thing: it works.

I’m carrying my apartment in my hands. Prices for virtually every consumer good continue to fall  now that an entire ship’s cargo can fit inside a few pucks, flown to their destination inside a tiny, long-range unmanned aerial vehicle. Energy is cheap and safe because nuclear power plants can be contained in universes that can be cut out of the rest of the world at a moment’s notice and housed in the middle of any city’s downtown. There are active colonies on the moon and Mars because rockets don’t have to carry the weight of their cargo or fuel. Right now I would have to pay a day’s wages to get a ride across the ocean in a pocket room strapped to a drone, but the technology for warping the tiny universes is getting cheaper all the time.

I put the puck in my bag and looked up at the sky. I had been happy to walk this morning, but it was only getting colder, and something about the wind and the nasty grey color of the clouds told me it was going to start raining soon. I pulled out my phone and hit the app that aggregated data from all the major ride-hailing services and chose the one with the best combination of price and convenience. There was a car just thirty seconds away. I double tapped the map and my phone turned transparent, so that I could hold it up and see the car, highlighted in bright green, coming up the street. Small floating tags let me know that it was empty, and that I would be back to my building in less than five minutes. The car verified my Footprint as I walked over to it, making sure that my face, build, gait, and phone all matched the ones connected to my account. The door opened just in time for me to slide into the back seat. There was, as usual, no one driving.

I texted Rebecca as the car pulled out onto the road. 

You still down to be my plus-one tonight?

Yeah! She answered, almost immediately. Do you wanna see what I’m planning on wearing?

No! Let it be a surprise! Were the exclamation points too much?

lol, Alright! Are you still coming to my place before? 

I responded with just a thumbs-up, our way of confirming something and saying “I’m about to be busy and can’t text” at the same time. She sent me a thumbs-up back. 

Rebecca was, not my girlfriend exactly, but about as close as anyone had gotten since I’d left grad school. We would probably go exclusive in a few weeks, but there was the semi-mandatory period of casual dates and hook-ups before then. I was hoping that the party tonight would be a good way to skip forward in that process.

The car pulled up to my building and the door popped open. Sure enough, it had already started to rain. I ran to the front doors and into the safety of the lobby. Where I lived was still called an apartment building, but by volume it’s mostly amenities and life support. Most of the floors housed gyms, rec rooms, spas, restaurants, and stores. There were some actual apartments on the top few floors, with views of the city, but they were the expensive exception. 

It wasn’t rush hour, so I didn’t have any competition for one of the ground floor frames just on the other side of the lobby. The same system that had identified me and unlocked the front doors had brought my apartment puck up from where its ice, water, and electricity had been replaced and recharged. The puck was centered on the wall and it took a second to double check I was its owner before signaling the frame to turn it into a door. I turned the handle and went inside. 

I signaled the building's systems that I was planning on being in for a few hours, and that it was okay to move my puck to an area where it could receive electricity, air, and water through a smaller frame, directly from the building’s supplies. 

I put my bag down and took out my new apartment puck. I latched this into a spot on the wall that was purpose made for hosting the entrances to other modules. I had decided to wait until tomorrow to start moving my stuff over, as I had a party to get ready for, but I still wanted to try out my new shower.

Rebecca looked amazing. We were on our way up to the penthouse suite, and I was having trouble not staring at her reflections in the mirror-walls of the elevator. She was wearing a new dress, made out of that shimmery fabric that changes color depending on the angle you look at it from, and the ripples of blue and red chasing each other as she moved was a very eye-catching effect. I felt dull standing beside her, wearing a plain dark suit, with my hair cut short and straight, while her’s was long and curly. I still was trying to think of something nice to say, to break the awkward elevator-silence, when the doors opened into the penthouse’s reception area. 

The greeter had the requisite bouncer-build, a huge guy dressed better than I was. He looked at his phone, no doubt given to him just for this event. It was a larger than normal piece of smart glass, and had the Hammerspace logo etched into the back side. 

“Kevin Esposito and Rebecca Fayer.” He said, reading our names from the tablet. “Welcome to the party.”

The door behind the greeter was already open, and he stepped to the side, smiling and putting out his hand in the classic sign for ‘right this way.’ We walked in. 

The entrance was a short hallway that took a few paces to turn right into the main party. The walls were covered in doors, their frames almost touching. The subtle red and green lights on their handles marked them as bathrooms, probably provided for the night by a pocket-porta-potty company, though I’m sure they went by some fancy name. 

We turned the corner and almost walked straight into the CEO of Hammerspace. 

“Mr. Esposito!” He said, stopping faster than his large frame would have suggested was possible. He reached out to shake my hand, smiling in a too-genuine way that suggested he had already had a few glasses of champagne. “And this must be Ms. Fayer.” Of course he had memorized the guest list. He shook her hand too, a little less vigorously than he had done mine. 

Rebecca smiled back at him. “This is a beautiful place you have, Mr, uh… ” She stuttered for a second and her eyes flashed down to the ground. Rebecca was almost as bad with names as I was. 

“Watts!” He said, laughing kindly, “Michael Watts. And don’t worry, there’s really no reason you should know my name, I’m the company’s CEO, not its mascot!” He laughed again then walked on, heading for one of the doors with a green light on it. 

Rebecca turned to me. “We need to leave.”  

“It’s fine.” I said, laughing. “He’s my boss’s boss’s boss, I barely even know his name.”

“Ugh, I did know it.” Her face was still slightly red. “Up until the exact moment I was going to say it.”  

“I know.” I squeezed her hand. “I’m sure I would have done the same thing.” I started walking towards the party, and the table with the drinks on it in particular. “Come on, I bet some really expensive champagne will cheer you up.” 

The champagne was delicious. I had two glasses as Rebecca and I stood at the edge of the room watching the guests mill about. She started with a beer, and so decided to make a trip to the bathroom as I was finishing my second. I watched her disappear into the crowd and then ordered some red wine to walk around with. 

I quickly ran into a cabal of researchers from my and other departments. Anya recognized me and summoned me to her side. 

“Kevin!” She said, “We were just talking about you. You’re really getting promoted again?” 

I smiled awkwardly, not sure what to say.

“Of course he is!” One of my assistants chimed in. “If Watts was really thinking he’d just give him a huge budget and no rules. You’d be churning out a breakthrough a month!”

“It’s not really that big of a deal.” I said, worried that Frank’s enthusiasm would make me look arrogant. “It should just be a few more resources, a little bit of wiggle room.” I was, to be honest, underselling myself a bit. My research had shown that there were ways to negate the need for circulating Casimir fluids in the portal frames by replacing them with solid-state micro-chains. It was a huge step forward in the technology that connected our universe with its warped pockets, and my department had already been nominated for several awards. 

“Shut up!” It was Anya again, smiling to let me know she was teasing. “Don’t try to play the humble scientist. It doesn’t suit you.” She moved closer to me, so that our arms were touching. “Some people get to be the lab tech who diligently works through tedious problems, and some get to have brilliant leaps of intuition and revolutionize industries. It’s okay to know which one you are.”

I was saved from having to respond by the return of Rebecca. I felt her hand on my shoulder, and she took advantage of me turning around to place herself between me and Anya. 

"Let's dance." She said, and pulled me back away from the group. I was immensely grateful, I never knew how to respond when Anya started flirting with me. 

Rebecca led me towards the central feature of the room, a pair of freestanding columns that reached from floor to ceiling. They were connected by an arched crossbar about eight feet off the ground, from which hung a set of dense bead curtains. Muffled music could be heard coming from the structure, and I had watched countless people walk between the columns and disappear, or conversely, appear from inside it, stumbling through one of the curtains.. 

I tipped the last of my wine into my mouth and put the glass down on a table as it passed by us. Rebecca passed through the archway and I followed her, breaking through the beads into a massive dark space, filled as far as the eye could see with dancing people.

There was a circular bar in the middle of the dance floor, where three bartenders were mixing drinks under a looming set of speakers that were the source of the bass-pumping music. I looked around and saw another bar maybe forty feet to the left, and another as far away on the right. Rebecca laughed and let go of my hand, running into the crowd.

“Wait!” I called out, much too quietly. What the hell? Where was she-

Rebecca grabbed my hand as she ran up on me from behind. She was still laughing as she pulled me into an empty section of the floor and started dancing. Where I had been disoriented by the realization that this pocket room had no walls, she had jumped right in, running a lap of the universe. 

I danced distractedly, gazing around at the strange artifacts of the pocket dance-floor. Now that I was looking for it, I could see the other doors. Or the same door over and over again. They were repeated just like the bar was, one every forty feet or so, like points on a grid. I was impressed by the size of the pocket, a forty foot circumference, double a normal module, meant that its volume was eight times larger, and even more expensive. I was guessing the roof was held up by some combination of a pillar in the middle of the bar and the columns framing the door. I could feel drafts of cold air, so the roof must have-

“Hey!” Rebecca said, tugging on my hands. “Are you really nerding out right now? When you could be dancing with me?” I smiled, she made a good point.

I forgot about the impossible dimensions of the room and danced. The effect was incredible, when you let yourself enjoy it. Rebecca and I were on the largest possible dance floor, extending to infinity in all directions, but with no fear of getting lost. We danced and talked, putting our heads close together to be heard over the music. We went to the bar for drinks and drank them and went back to dancing. 

Some time passed. It was hard to know exactly how much, under those conditions, but eventually my bladder began to cry out, and Rebecca’s energy seemed to be waning. We conferred, and moved slowly towards the nearest iteration of the columns. We passed through the curtain, and back into the main room of the penthouse. 

The shift was jarring. The light wasn’t too bright, but it was just one color, and steady. The music was soft, so that the dominant sound was overlapping chatter and laughter. Worst of all, there were walls again. The room had edges, if you walked to one side you would have to turn around and walk the whole way across to get to the other. I stumbled slightly as I took it all in and Rebecca caught me.

“Kevin!” She said, failing to stifle a laugh that exited mostly through her nose. “You’re gonna run into someone!” 

She dragged me over to an empty loveseat that had been secreted into the corner by the horderves. We flopped down messily, the seams of my fancy clothes protesting at the casual arrangement of limbs. I let my head thunk softly into Rebecca’s and closed my eyes. 

“I have to go to the bathroom.” I said, sighing and not moving.

Rebecca pushed at me half heartedly. “Go, go pee, before you get more comfortable. I’ll still be here.”

She was right. I sighed again and worked myself to my feet. I looked around, reorienting myself, and headed towards the bathrooms. The room I chose was incredible, a half-sized pocket room was still a big bathroom, and this one was outfitted with a bath, shower, smart toilet, and actual towels. I spent a moment admiring it after I was done, then splashed some cold water on my face and headed back out. 

I was almost back to the main room when Watts came around the corner and almost ran into me for the second time that night. 

“Kevin!” He said, his voice booming as always. He walked up to me and clasped his hand on my shoulder. “Just the guy I was looking for.”

I didn’t know what to say, that sounded like some kind of cliche, but he seemed to be completely serious. He took his hand off my shoulder and put his other arm out, directing me towards the set of dark wooden doors we had been standing next to. 

He opened one of the doors and gestured for me to go ahead of him. I was still confused, but I walked into the room. 

The lights came on as soon as I stepped over the threshold, and I could see that it was some kind of personal study-slash-library, the kind of thing you assume every rich person had somewhere in their house. There were tall bookshelves and a huge desk, all in dark polished wood. There were old books with tough bindings, high-backed leather chairs, and even one of those globe stands that was probably a secret minibar. 

The sound of the door clicking shut behind me made me jump, and I spun around to see Mr. Watts walking towards his desk. 

“I almost never use this room.” He said, bending down to open one of the drawers on the other side of the desk. “I honestly think the decorator went a bit overboard. I feel like a super villain in here, when I’m just reviewing quarterly reports of something.” 

He stood up, holding two stout glasses and a bottle of dark brown liquid. Aw well, so much for my globe theory. 

I felt like it was my turn to respond. “It uh, it definitely has a, uh, certain atmosphere to it.” 

He laughed. “That’s cigar smoke, I had one in here when I first moved in, just to complete the stereotype, and the scent has never left, I think the materials were designed specifically to magnify the smell.” 

I smiled and forced out a laugh. I could feel myself being awkward, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know why I was here, and so I couldn’t figure out how to act. 

Mr. Watts settled down into one of the two chairs winging a small table. He placed the glasses and whiskey down on the table and gestured for me to take the other seat. I did.

“You know, Mr. Esposito, for the CEO of a company that deals in pocket universes, I know remarkably little about how they actually work.” 

“Well, it is a very complicated subject.” I said, telling the truth. 

“But less so for you.” He said, pouring each glass half full and offering me one. 

“Umm.” I took a sip of the whiskey. “I guess that’s true, any scientist in the field would know more than someone in another line of work.” 

“Please, Kevin, there’s no need to bullshit me.” He said, taking his own sip and giving my blood pressure time to spike. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you. Your work on Casimir fluids, your paper on transition warping factors, I couldn’t understand half those words, but I know how you think. You may not know this, but after decades in an industry like this, that is still having breakthroughs and improvements that lead in new directions, you learn that there are few types of geniuses. The rarest is your type, someone who doesn’t need to make slow, steady progress. Someone who thinks of completely new ideas, makes leaps of intuition that no one else can.”

I took another sip, and realized my glass was empty. I had no idea what Watts was talking about, but it sounded good for me, it sounded very good.   

“The only reason I haven’t set you up with your own devoted department is that I have been waiting for a problem that is worthy of your talents.”

“Is this-” I stuttered, afraid to actually say it. “Is this the uh, the promotion?”

He laughed again, but kindly, and poured me more whiskey.

“Think of this as your interview.” He said, “And then we’ll see.” 

I nodded, sipping. I thought about mentioning Rebecca waiting for me, but I doubted this would take more than half an hour, and she could always text me if she was wondering where I had disappeared to. 

“It’s okay.” Watts said, smiling. “Don’t look so tense. I’m not going to ask about your three biggest weaknesses. Like I was saying before, I sometimes feel like I don’t know nearly enough about the science behind my fortune.” . 

I made a conscious effort to relax, lowering my shoulders and unclenching my legs. 

“There you go!” Watts said. He took my glass and refilled it, though I hadn’t emptied it yet. 

“So.” He began, “What do you know about the idea of casual domains?”

I was a little surprised, that wasn’t the kind of thing I expected a serious CEO to ask about. “Uh, they’re an old idea, from science fiction, really. It’s the idea that everything in our universe is linked by cause and effect, any event with a future light cone that intersects with ours has to obey the same rules of what makes what occur, so that the universe remains coherent.”

“So our entire universe is a single causal domain?” 

“Yes, exactly.” I was starting to legitimately relax now. I loved explaining science stuff, and it was rare to find someone who actually wanted to listen. “Everything in our universe has to work together to make reality happen the same way, at the same pace, everywhere.” 

“I see.” Watts said, nodding slightly. “And what about the pocket universes my company makes? Are they then separate domains?”

“No.” I said, leaning forward in my seat. “People used to think that they could be, but they are still connected to our universe in a casual way, otherwise they turn into bubbles and disappear forever, like what we use for hazardous waste.”

“Ah, see, I think this is where I get lost. How are they connected, such that they will be lost forever if disconnected? I have heard it explained like a radio signal, sending information back and forth, but that always rang false to me, since you can turn a radio on and off without losing its ability to play music.”

“The radio analogy is not a very good one, you’re right. The way I usually explain it is like a One Time Authorization Code, a password that only works for a single session. Imagine creating and accessing a server with a OTAC, but you are the only one who has a code to that server, and there’s no way to get a new one or to make another password. You have to stay logged in for as long as you want to use the server. And once you log out, the server doesn’t actually stop existing, it’s just completely inaccessible.”

“So the server is like a pocket universe, and a puck is a uh, an Oh-Tee-A-Cee.” He said the acronym slowly, though I was doubtful that he had never heard it before.

“Exactly. And instead of the internet’s fiber optic cables, the connection between them is a critically warped string of spacetime. Ensuring that the universes remain connected, and, as you said, part of the same casual domain.”

“And, hypothetically, if we found a way to dis-and-reconnect to a pocket universe, what could we do with that technology?” 

I almost laughed. “If we found a way to connect to a universe existing in an non-spatial abstract coordinate domain?”

“Yes.” Watts’s chair creaked as he leaned forward in it. He looked serious. 

“I… there’s no way to do that. The cut off universes aren’t floating around somewhere. There’s no “where” that universes exist in. The math tells us that the pockets still exist, but they aren’t accessible, there’s no way to get back to them once they’re disconnected from our universe.”

Watts placed his glass down on the table and looked at me. His jovial attitude of benign curiosity was gone, this was something else. “I didn’t ask if you thought it was possible. I asked what we could do if it were.” He leaned back into his chair, and I realized that I was squeezing my glass so hard that it was shaking. “So please, humor me.”

“Well, um…” I forced myself to relax, and took another sip of my whiskey. “The most obvious advantage is that you would be able to reconnect to that pocket from anywhere else in our universe, since it wouldn’t necessarily be linked to a specific puck. I could put a bunch of colonists in a pocket here and cut it loose, then someone on mars could reconnect to it a second later, and the people could step out again.”

“So people could make the trip in what feels like just a few seconds.” 

“Well it’s even crazier than that. Every time we disconnect from a pocket, it becomes a legitimately separate universe, a totally different causal domain. There’s no reason that time would have to run at the same speed in that universe and ours. They could spend a decade there while only a few seconds pass in our universe.” I didn’t add that anyone in a pocket for that long would surely be dead of either overheating or asphyxiation.

“And could it work the other way around, decades passing in our universe while the inhabitants experience just a few minutes?”

“Yes, it could, but I don’t know how you could control that. We only have the weakest theories about how this kind of thing would work. There’s nothing to say that millions of years wouldn’t pass in an instant. And again,” I was trying not to let the strange mixture of exasperation and fear I was feeling affect my voice, “This is all impossible. No one has ever connected to a pocket universe after it’s been cut loose.”

Watts smiled and stood up. He looked at me expectantly and I stood up too. My heart was racing, obviously his line of questioning wasn’t just for the sake of curiosity, but I couldn’t believe that he had done what he was suggesting.

“Congratulations, Mr. Esposito.” Watts said, walking around his desk and towards the massive bookshelf that made up the back wall, “Our talk has gone well, I’ve decided to give you that promotion.”

He pulled out one of the books and the shelf rolled smoothly forward, revealing an empty frame set into the wall behind it. 

“This secret entrance was the only thing I knew I had to have when this place was being designed.” Watts took a fancy looking puck out of the inside of his jacket and placed it into the slot in the wall. “And it’s a lot easier to have a secret entrance when the rooms don’t take up any space.” 

I followed Watts around the desk. I was still uneasy, he was definitely acting strange, but billionaire CEOs were a strange bunch, and I had almost forgotten about my promotion. If this was all some weird initiation into the higher levels of the company then I was happy to endure a bit of strange behavior. And if he had managed a breakthrough of the magnitude that he was suggesting, I had to see it for myself.

The frame contracted around the puck and opened to reveal an empty hallway that ended in a frosted glass door. Watts walked through and I followed. The hallway was warmer than I was expecting, compared to the study. We reached the door and Watts waited for a second before opening it, presumably to let a camera scan his face and eyes. 

On the other side of the door was the largest pocket universe I had ever seen. It was a warehouse. The floor was bare concrete, and the walls held up a tall, peaked roof. The floor was covered in overlapping ribbons of wires, all leading into or out of huge machines and integrated workstations. There were already people in there, walking around and staring intently at various screens or pieces of technology being dissected on worktables. I saw someone I recognized, Mohan, a researcher from another department that I would get lunch with sometimes. I tried to catch his attention as he walked from one machine to the other. His eyes froze for a second as they scanned over me, but then he looked away and started walking faster. 

“How…” I was stunned. “How is this possible?” A space this large represented a massive breakthrough in the technology for creating new pockets. The difficulty scales with the volume of the space, and this room was easily twenty times larger than the biggest pocket I had ever heard of. 

“If you think that’s impressive, you’re really going to like this.” We were at one of the corners of the warehouse, and Watts walked the few steps over to the other wall where there was a classic exit door. He hit the slam-bar and opened it.

Light flooded in and for a second I was blinded, but then my eyes adjusted and I looked out on a bright green field, flooded with sunlight and dancing with insects. The smell was almost overwhelming, like nothing you’d ever get living in a city. Hot grass and living dirt, dust and pollen and humidity being burned away. I knew instantly that this was real. It wasn’t just a warehouse, and this wasn’t a pocket universe. 

Watts spoke. “I think we can dispense with subtlety at this point.” He stood beside me, just inside the door, holding his hands behind his back and admiring the view.  “This was an accident. A group at Hammerspace has been working on solving the problem of cut off universes, trying to find bubbles that have been detached. They found this instead. Repeating the conditions of that experiment does nothing, and we have not been lucky enough to stumble across any other universes. This is the only one. It could take decades before the science that brought us here is good enough to do it consistently, and maybe it will.”

He turned and started walking back towards the hallway we emerged from. I was stunned, and slow to follow, and that’s why he was able to slide the glass door closed in between us, trapping me on the warehouse side. I saw his shadowy outline reach for a spot on the wall and, with a click, the door became fully transparent. 

“I am going to walk back into my office.” He said, looking at me through the glass. “Then I am going to collapse the door that brought us here, and tell my puck, which was specially made for this experiment, to destroy the thread that connects this universe to mine. Then I am going to go get a drink, come back to my office, and have the puck reconnect to this universe, at which time you and all your coworkers will be free to leave.”

I had to say something, Watts was crazy. There were laws about this. Cutting off a pocket while someone was inside was the same as murder. I took a step towards the door, ready to plead for my life, but Watts cut me off before I could speak.

“Currently, the series of events I have just described is impossible. As you have said, no one can reconnect to a universe that has been lost. But we are already halfway there. Connecting to another universe, at least once, is possible, you just need to solve the problem of connecting to a specific one, consistently.”

“And how are we supposed to do that in five minutes!” I slapped the glass, hoping to at least make Watts flinch, he didn’t. “When you turn that puck back on it will connect to nothing! And we’ll all be stuck here for the rest of our lives!”

“I sincerely hope that is not true.” He said, slowly backing away from the door. “You know more about causal domains than I do, Mr. Esposito. Once I disconnect this universe from mine, there is no reason for things to happen here at the same rate they do over here. You’ll have as much time as you need.” 

Horror started to creep through my bones as I realized the truth of Watts’s words. “Stop!” I slammed on the glass again, and I wished more than anything that it would crack. “This isn’t the right way to do this! We’ll need materials, power, new ideas! We need the rest of the world!”

“You’re wrong. It will take longer I’m sure, to make your discovery here, but that doesn’t matter, as long as you make it. For the rest of the world this will be the fastest science has ever moved, decades of advancement in five minutes! There is no telling the ways that this will improve the world, not to mention Hammerspace’s stock. We simply can’t afford to wait.” He was almost back to the door now, walking slowly backwards. “This world is empty, Kevin. No people, no one is coming to help you. But you have the seeds for food, and the facilities for manufacturing, and as for ideas, well, that’s why I brought you here.” 

That made me remember the other people in the lab. Were they kidnapped too? Tricked into this macabre mockery of R&D? I tore my eyes away from Watts and the door to look at them. They were all still at their workstations, but none of them were working. They were all watching me, and the show I was apparently putting on. A few of them had the decency to look down when I turned, but most starred openly, curiosity and pity mixing on their faces. 

They wanted to be here, some of them had probably helped to come up with this idea.

“It feels strange saying goodbye Mr. Esposito!” I looked back, Watts was just on the other side of the door now, standing on the carpet of his study, waving sarcastically. “You really are brilliant you know, I trust that you will figure this out. You will learn how to reconnect a puck to the universe it has lost, and the instant you do, it will find my puck waiting for it, a mere five minutes in my future. Why, I doubt your girlfriend will even know you were gone!” 

The portal slammed closed as the frame snapped back around the puck. The glass door beeped and unlocked and I threw it open. I ran to the wall where the door had been and pressed my hands against the concrete, horrifyingly solid. The light on the puck was red, there was no door inside. 

I heard footsteps coming up from behind me. It was Mohan, my friend from lunch. He put a hand on my shoulder, then reached past me and detached the puck from the wall. 

“I’m sorry, Kevin.” He paused, perhaps searching for some way of explaining, of defending himself. I was half hoping he would find something, something to make me understand why he and everyone else had willingly chosen to condemn themselves to this. But in the end all he said was

“Come on. It’s time to get to work.”