Breaking Reality

Joe stood on the edge of his kitchen counter, his head pressed sideways against the ceiling. It was the one place he knew, or so he hoped, that Mary would not go. And, he waited.

"Jesus Christ!" he heard Mary exclaim, from somewhere in the bedroom.

"I'm out here!" Joe called, kneeling down, sitting, and then sliding off the counter onto the floor. "Mary! I'm in the kitchen."

"What the fuck is going on Joe!" Mary said, her voice edged with hysteria.

"Time travel," Joe said, hurrying to the bedroom to find Mary bent over, looking down at the folded papers on the floor.

"How the fuck does a piece of paper time travel!?"

"I'm not sure," Joe said, bending down beside her.

"Where did you get that from?"

"Uh, well... funny story," Joe said.

"Tell me so I can tell the FBI after they kill you for this," Mary said in an all too serious tone of voice.

"No! I didn't steal it," Joe said, and then he hurriedly explained his chance meeting with the man named Jack, the way the envelope interferes with electronics, and how he came to possess such an item. "They want me to... investigate it. I don't know what they expect, I mean... Jack didn't explain much."

"So... how does it work?" Mary asked, finally sounding calm enough to listen to reason.

"I don't know," Joe said honestly. "All I know so far is that... I read the letter yesterday after you left-"

"Three months ago," Mary corrected.

"Three months ago, yesterday," Joe said, and then he looked down, as if just now noticing the fact that Mary was pregnant. "Oh shit. Back up," Joe said then, standing up and pulling Mary away from the letter.

"What's wrong? What happened?" Mary asked, confused.

"You're pregnant. How do we know this isn't affecting the baby?"

Mary stepped further away from the letter, looking fearful.

"What are we going to do?" Mary asked after another moment.

"We need to... investigate this. That's what they want."

"Who?" Mary asked.

"Jack... and whoever Jack works for. I'm sure they're going to come looking for the letter, if they haven't already."

"How did Jack give you the letter?" Mary asked then.

"What do you mean? He handed it to me."

"How did he hand it to you, if it makes you time travel?" Mary asked, clarifying her question.

"The envelope!" Joe said, as if the answer had been staring him in the face all along. "The letter came in an envelope. A really nice envelope too. A shield." Joe looked back at the envelope, and then turned for the kitchen.

"Where are you going?" Mary yelled after him.

"I gotta get tools," Joe said, and a moment later he came into the bedroom with his arms loaded with all manner of missmatched items. He unceremoniously dumped them on the bed, and then jammed a pair of safety goggles into Mary's hands. "Here, put those on."

"Goggles?" Mary asked, looking at them as if they were bargain basement brand. "Why do I need-"

"Safety first," Joe said, slapping a pair of goggles on, and then donning oven mitts as protection. He grabbed a pair of salad tongs and then gingerly held them out, coming closer and closer to the letter, without touching it. He held his breath as he came within a hair's width from touching the letter, watching, observing...

"It's not going to explode," Mary said, startling Joe.

"I know!" Joe replied, and then, "well, I don't know. I don't know anything about this." He turned to look at Mary and then remembered the way he'd been thrown against the wall earlier. "Okay, hold on. We need to set some conditions. Fail safes."

"What are you talking about?"

"Conditions!" Joe exclaimed. "Okay, if I disappear, then I'm going forward in time. You can't... no. I can't go, where you're going to be. So, from this moment on, if I disappear, I'm going to go to the kitchen counter. Don't put anything on the counter. I don't wanna end up with a toaster attached to my foot."

"You think that will happen?" Mary asked.

"I have no idea!"

"What about me?"

Joe glanced at the bathroom connected to his bedroom, but then reconsidered. "Under the bed," he said suddenly. "I don't keep anything under the bed, and I doubt anything is going to just show up there. So, if either of us disappear, no. That's not needed. If I disappear, I'll go stand on the counter. If you disappear, you get under the bed."

"Can't I just sit on the bed?" Mary asked. "Or do you plan on having a lot of people in your bed if I disappear?"

Joe shook his head, indicating that he had no plans for anyone to sit on his bed. "Well, yeah. I think... that should be fine. Sit on the bed."

"I was joking!" Mary said, giving him a smile. "Geez. You don't have much of a sense of humor, do you?"

"Not really," Joe said flatly. "Alright. I'm going to pick the letter up with the tongs. If I disappear, I'll call out from the kitchen when I'm on the counter."

"Okay," Mary said, and Joe used the tongs to reach down and pick up the letter.

Nothing happened.

"Well, that seems to answer that question," Joe said, and he lifted the letter up and placed it on the top of the bed. As he stood, he noticed a slight discoloration on the carpeting. "What is that?" he asked, bending down to get a better look.

"Dirt?" Mary guessed.

"I don't think so," Joe said. He used the tongs to swipe back and forth across the carpet and something that did resemble dust, puffed into the air. Was the letter disintegrating the carpet? He brushed his hand across it, but it felt the same as always. He turned to the bed, stood up, used the tongs to push the letter across the bed spread. As the letter moved, the fabric beneath looked discolored and dirty, but as the letter moved further away, the coloration came back. "That is so weird!"

"How's it doing that?" Mary asked.

"I... I don't know," Joe said, and then he saw something he couldn't quite believe. The type on the letter, the words themselves, were moving. "Are you seeing this?" Joe asked, and he used the tongs to unfold the letter, and tried his best to make it lay flat.

"No! No way," Mary said, and she turned around and left the room.

"Where are you going?" Joe called after her.

"I'm just going into the front room, in case that thing becomes possessed."

Joe turned back to the letter, reading the wording that wasn't moving.

Late 2024, an entire city went dark. Belafonte. Most of Argentina. It's something called a super-city. You can't imagine it right now. I mean, not then. Not for a long while. We call it that now. "Going dark". No, I need to clarify otherwise you're not going to understand. It disappeared. Not crumbled, not destroyed, not consumed by a sink-hole. Certainly not shot into outer space. It disappeared. Think of an anti-matter chain-reaction, without an explosion. Wrap your head around that. Everything, everyone, all of it. Gone.

"This is bad," Joe said, and then, in that moment, the rest of the page, all the text, snapped into place. "Whoa!"

25 and 26 were pretty quiet as far as the weird stuff. Things still happened, but people just kind of dismissed them. They had no idea it was caused by the breaking. A building fell into a sink hole. 600 stories, just built. Gone. Well, not gone, but the foundation and the earth beneath it was, so it fell into the hole. Everyone chalked it up as an earthquake. Only thing, there was no earthquake. No tremors. No fault line. The sink hole was not a normal sink hole either.

Then in 27, we got a fourth moon. Out of the blue, out of nothing, a 367 mile wide ball of molten metal and rock appeared in space and got snagged by earth's gravity well. It was on a different orbit so there was no chance of it falling to earth and killing everyone, but man did it make headlines. Almost immediately, those in power wanted to send excavators to harvest the metal, bring it back to earth to help rebuild. That lasted about a month before they, and I mean we, before we discovered wormholes.

"We," Joe asked himself. Does this person mean him? Was he included in this? No. There was no way he was part of this. The author must have been speaking metaphorically. "We", was the human race.

Deuterium drive engines are massive things, comprised of over four thousand high energy lasers, and have an extremely high energy consumption. Since they produce more energy than they consume, they are almost entirely self sufficient. All you need to do is feed the engine raw deuterium, or they can run on tritium as well.

Remember the... no. Never mind. You wouldn't. I apologize. A scientist by the name of Baxter Stockman was working on quantum entanglement, and quite by chance, stumbled upon a unique characteristic of deuterium drive engines. You see, the DDEs create a massive "field" around them. It is not an electromagnetic field, as many thought in the beginning. It's something else. Not dark energy either. We still don't know what it is, but I think of it as a "quantum entanglement" field. Let me explain.

Stockman's experiments proved that any two DDE's started within a few feet of each, will "sync" with each other. He later proved that this "sync" was actual hard quantum entanglement of precursor bits, and that, once synced, both DDE's would act as one. Even more disturbing, or impossible I should say, is that, the DDE's will stay synced, and linked, no matter how far you separate them, no matter what exists in between them. We still don't fully know how it works, but it works. Something about the precursor bits having a tendency to attract and entangle, but not combine. The drives remember. Oh! Everything remembers. Remember that.

Joe made a mental note to remember that bit of advice, even though he had almost no clue what the author was going on about now. How in the hell could they make a wormhole?

Wormholes are created when you separate a pair of entangled DDE's, and then reverse the polarity on one of the drives. You got it. Instantaneous Protonic Reversal, and Instantaneous Protonic Generation. Both drives have to be running, and synced. "Paired" is another word for it. I don;t know why I'm going through the process of explaining all this. I know you won't understand it. You can't. But... i'm going to have any chance of convincing you that this is real, then this is the only way. That's it.

Joe sucked in a deep breath, and then let it out slow.

The quantum field generated around the drives suck everything in around it, but only on one side. And you can't pick the side either. And it changes! Oh shit. I have to warn you. Don't try to put a pair of entangled deuterium drives into any kind of brackets, cage, or housing. If the field flips, it'll just tear the structure apart. Like it's made of paper. Don't do that. Anyway, whatever get's sucked in one side, exits the opposite side, but the key is, it exits the other drive. The other side...

It exits the opposite polarity of the other entangled drive! Joe thought.

It exits the opposite polarity of the other entangled drive.

Joe shook his head, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu.

We still don't know how it works, or even if it should work. The breaking did it... maybe. But... we were able to control them, direct them, utilize them. Of course we had no idea what we were doing. Not a f... fudging clue. Like most "great discoveries" it was accidental. Oh sure Stockman said it was what he was trying to do all along, but really, he just got lucky. More than that, it was impossible. Absolutely impossible. And then, it was being done.

Remember the fourth moon? Yeah. Well, after we created wormholes, we started sending them all over the place. We used them to carve up the fourth moon, and then the Kupier asteroid belt. We used them to instantly teleport things from one place to another. I'm talking, BIG things. Trains, boats, planes, and all other forms of travel, other than hover-cars and short distance local modes of travel, became obsolete.

I remember in the beginning, if you wanted to go somewhere, all you had to do was drive to the exchange, pick your destination, and drive through the corresponding wormhole. Mega Francisco to Hidenselberg in the blink of an eye. And Earth was no longer the limit. We sent a WHG into space to mine the gasses of Saturn, Neptune, and Venus. All the raw materials were sent directly into the refineries here on earth. Another big mistake. The foundry down in Mon-Calipso ran day and night. The raw materials, metal and other substances, helped us rebuild everything we'd lost, but it wasn't enough. And, like everything else, more was never enough.

"Jesus," Joe breathed, continuing to read.

"What does it say?" Mary asked.

"Something about deuterium drive engines and wormhole generators."

"Wormholes?"

Joe turned back to the papers, reading on.

After we created wormholes, we really started going crazy. We, I mean, corporations... and humanity as a whole, not me personally... We started doing stupid things. Stupid everything.

DDE's were designed to become smaller and smaller, more compact, more "economical". We already had limitless free energy, but now we wanted limitless free teleportation, personal teleporters, and more. Someone tried to entangle five DDEs at the same time. What they ended up with was an atomic recycler, and ended up recycling themselves in the process... or so we think. After a long investigation we realized that anything coming within the intake of two of the DDEs resulted in an export of raw protonic plasma from the exit jets of the other three DDEs. We shut that down, but things were bound to keep happening.

Remember, Wormholes are made by quantum entangling two DDEs. DDE's run off of deuterium. With a limited supply of 2H, we started sending collector dishes out to orbit the sun. We fed the 2H directly into a giant wormhole that fed the 2H into a hopper, and then into a splitter, that fed a hundred-thousand first-stage mini-wormholes, which fed directly into the DDE fuel chambers. By the end of the chains, we had billions. Billions of deuterium drives. Billions of wormholes. Billions.

When you have a billion of anything, completely unregulated, you're bound to have an accident. And there were, accidents. Most of the time, you didn't know there was an accident, until it became obvious. Really obvious. People started disappearing. Oops. Greg never made it into work today. No worries. Someone else will fill his spot. Harry's house disappeared. Who's Harry? Huh? What was I talking about? Remember when I said, everything remembers? Well, it works in reverse too. If you reverse existence of a thing, it takes its history with it, and everyone's memory as well. Everything. All of it.

The thing about memory is, you really can't reverse time. Memory, existence, time, and influence, can never really be erased completely. A group of scientists got together and sat down to brain storm, and eventually, they realized that things were missing, and they shouldn't be missing. Eventually, they were able to recover information, and then... this is going to throw you for a loop... we used extra-solar telescopes to view the events, the moments that things "went dark" to prove that they existed in the first place.

"This is crazy," Joe said, turning to Mary. "There's no way any of this is possible."

It isn't possible. But it is. All you have to do is; break reality... Again, you need to remember that. Remember it all. Everything is possible now. Everything. Anything. Even this letter.

"Mary!" Joe shouted, falling back from the paper to land on his ass. "Come read this so I know I'm not crazy!"

"What is it?" Mary asked, hurrying over. "What does it say?"

"It's... talking to me."