Help Text: Cramedge connects to many different realities, and its laws of nature, flow of time, and even the matter that make up the universe are all affected by those connections. Unfortunately, despite knowing this, there is no known way to send something or someone to any of these realities, despite several instances of people and things coming from them.
While I was off on my adventure in the Two Tomes Kingdom, the world I left behind continued to move forward. There were some rather spectacular consequences to me being brought here. When I was pulled into the hole, the force generated by it was enough to collapse my entire apartment, and damage some of the surrounding area. Thankfully none of my neighbors were injured in the process, but it was still very traumatic for them.
The police started their investigation of the incident, and labeled me the prime suspect after they couldn’t find my body, but my family denied the allegations, and demanded the police find me. They tracked my movements that day, making their way to the shop I attempted to have my phone repaired at, the sandwich shop I ate at, and the grocery store where I picked up the stuff for dinner. They attempted to locate me through my phone’s GPS, but it had been destroyed during the collapse, but the tracking data from the company showed that it was last in my bedroom. Later my college friends came forward and said that they had been playing games with me that night, and the police subpoenaed the records from the company to see where I was connecting from which showed it was my home.
After several days, they started their investigation into the cause of the collapse. They carefully cleared the rubble looking for traces of explosives, or some other kind of destructive device, but they found nothing. They also took my laptop as evidence, pouring through my old emails and checking all of my correspondence, but they didn’t find anything strange. After these repeated investigations into the cause turned up nothing, a group of people volunteered to help my parents find me, and to investigate the cause.
Some of them were scientists and engineers, some were paranormal hunters, but most were just regular people wanting to help. They would eventually start a pool to purchase the area and continue the investigation on their own. Using several simulations, the engineers were the first to discover something strange was going on, as it would take an implosion to damage the building in the way that it had been. Later the scientists would discover that the area around my bedroom was saturated with a new form of radiation. Even the paranormal hunters found strange things occurring around the area, like clear radio signals with what sounded like people speaking in a language they couldn’t understand.
The volunteers would eventually discover this all traced back to a warp in space time, and present their findings to the police, my family, and academia. Scientists and inventors would flock to the area to investigate the warp, but it frequently led to conflicts between them. After many years of this, the government stepped in and claimed the land, and several of the surrounding properties using Imminent Domain, and built a government funded research institute to investigate the phenomenon which was named the American Space Time Research Institute. Initially scientists were baffled by the warp, spending years and billions of dollars, but making no progress. Until a young woman decided to use a new method of catching the particles that made up the strange radiation the warp emitted, and discovered that it was a form of exotic matter. As more and more successful research was carried out, the area around the institute grew, becoming a hub for technological advancement. The "Scar", as the warping had been named, became the source of that exotic matter, and it was discovered that it had negative mass.
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This discovery cracked the door to wormhole technology to be developed, albeit very slowly. Decades of research revealed that by quantum entangling two particles of negative mass matter, they maintained their link through microscopic wormholes. Clustering more of these particles around the entangled ones made the wormholes large enough for electromagnetic signals to pass through. The biggest test was carried out nearly a century after I had disappeared when a team of scientists used a wormhole to connect two phones together over bluetooth on geographically opposite sides of the planet.
This revolutionized communications and data transmission, and allowed for instantaneous communication across any distance. It almost became an arms race between tech companies to acquire and use this new method to enhance networks across the globe. It also became a huge boon for the U.S. government which held the only source of the negative mass matter. Within a decade every internet connection in the country was replaced with this new method. Within fifty years it allowed for power to be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere on the globe. In another century the United Nations was announcing the joint venture to send people into the galaxy to start colonizing planets.
With more reliable communications and power transportation solved, the prospect of colony ships to other worlds became more realistic. The scientists even thought of new methods that could create larger wormholes that allowed travel, if things were done properly. A few decades into the colony ship plan, several attempts at creating larger wormholes had succeeded. Though they were only slightly larger than a door, they allowed for ships to be made with doors back to the home planet, though there were some safety protocols that had to be followed.
Early on in the testing phase it was discovered that if two wormholes intersected they caused a temporary tear in reality that produced a dangerous type of radiation, and consumed the negative mass matter in the process. This discovery came at the cost of two scientists' lives, as they were blasted with this radiation, and died instantly from exposure. In the case of smaller wormholes, this was true as well, but the amount of radiation released was negligible so they decided to place shielding around them as a safety measure.
My family during all of this had grown considerably. Given that the research was initially spearheaded by the people who volunteered to help my family, the entire group amassed quite a bit of money. My family used a large portion of it to found a charity in my name called the Mark Harris Scholarship Fund. For decades they also petitioned the government to have a memorial built on the spot, as they assumed I had died during the incident, and my body had somehow been destroyed in the process. As a compromise, they decided to name the building containing the scar after me, and built a statue outside thanking me for my sacrifice to lead to the discovery.
Over two-thousand years after my disappearance, a group of eight students started their PHD in space time physics, all of which had gotten the Mark Harris Scholarship of Science. They entered the Mark Harris Research Building which had become the source of wormhole technology for the Terrestrial Worlds' Alliance. They were there to work on their joint thesis, to identify what caused the scar, and to eventually find ways of replicating it elsewhere safely.
During a routine attempt to harvest negative mass matter from the Scar for use in the wormhole networks, and to take measurements of the distortion, these students would suddenly find themselves falling through a hole in reality, and the Mark Harris Research Building would collapse around the hole. The damage occurred so quickly, that the cameras in the building were unable to see what happened. After clearing the rubble from the area, and an extensive search the students’ bodies were never found, and several pieces of equipment including eight experimental A.I. cores were never recovered. This left the mystery of what happened to me unsolved, even thousands of years after this.