Solar system, 2179
Dr. Alicia Marcus was checking out the station with both her friends, Paul and Angela, the station was sponsored by multiple countries and private companies. Her friend Angela was piloting the shuttle that was taking them to the station, she somehow was good at piloting space shuttles as well as being a good data analyst.
The station represented the biggest enterprise ever built by earth bar none, and she was the leader, it was a big responsibility, not even the attempted colonization of mars rivals it some people are speculating that the knowledge gained from this enterprise might one day allow the human race to move beyond the solar system.
The station is basically three particle accelerators and colliders, the biggest ever created, the idea is to measure what happens to the space around the collider when its activated with the purpose to prove a 90 years old theory that could be a big step in unifying special relativity and quantum mechanics. There have been some interesting results, but nothing conclusive yet. it would be hard to read these results if not the fact that the station was parked in a location with low enough gravity in space, the LaGrange points were the obvious choices.
The station looked like three giant donuts staying one behind the other and attached by some sticks on the outside that connect them, the center was barren since that is the place where the disturbances were supposed to happen, over the last two years they have gotten enough data to keep scientists busy for decades to come.
The shuttle is staying in the center of the rings, because some unexpected disturbances were reported in the center of the rings when it was activated. which didn't make sense, these disturbances couldn't be accounted for by their calculations. They were taking a few instruments to see what they could read and then come up with a better way to measure them later. A few of the idiotic young scientists (supposed to be an oxymoron but somehow some of them proved it to be true) went there once while the rings were active and reported feeling the disturbances. So it became a game, of course it didn't happen for every configuration, but even the lack of disturbance is new data to be analyzed, there are literally thousands of servers here and on earth dedicated to analyzing the data to spot patterns.
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Unnamed star system same time
Alex was in his shuttle configuring another one of his probes, he had sent dozens already, but his project was worth it, if it worked he would go down in history as the first person to be able to create and direct a traversable wormhole. There have been some previous attempts by other group of people but even though they managed to create wormholes, sending anything through it and it coming out the other side has proven hard to accomplish. Some people attempted to create ship that warp space around it in a way that would allow it to pass through, but the spectacular failures of all these attempts made people wary of it, its expensive to build the ships, because of how much warping they want to do they can't use something as small and low powered as a probe.
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His way is completely different, based on an idea he had when he was 15, now 13 years later he had built his portal, in secret but yes it worked, and it was cheaper that the other attempts, still expensive as hell, but cheaper by comparison.
He thought the problem would be creating the wormhole, but no, the problem is guiding it, for some reason he can't control where the other side is anchored. What he achieved is already enough to make history and maybe later someone else will find out a way to solve this problem. But still, he wanted to be known as the guy who did it all, and even more, all by himself. he used a considerable amount of his fortune to build this by himself, if it wasn't the fact that he had an army of builder bots, a few fabricators, and a quantum server cluster he would never be able to accomplish it this quickly that and the fact that somehow his design is somehow cheaper than the other ones.
When he graduated at the age of 17 with multiple degrees people called him one of the smartest people alive, his accomplishments were one is a billion, something that only happens once every few generations, but somehow, his generation got 5 other people who have similar accomplishments. So, instead of being called the smartest person alive he is called the third smartest alive, Alex wants to believe that his actions after he heard the rankings had nothing to do with it, but he would be lying to himself. He was born in a society that worships creativity and intelligence more than actors or musicians like the earthlings do. After all his was a society built by scientists, even after thousands of years the name of the people who created the first warp engines were still remembered.
The probe was a 3 meter cube, it contained a lot of sensors, since he changed the probe configuration in every launch. He could do it remotely using an android in avatar mode, but there was something to being here himself. The probe was floating in the center of the hangar bay of his shuttle by repulsor forces being emitted from both bellow and above it, since he was in space the forces didn't need to be that strong, his main ship a few light seconds away hidden behind a big asteroid, this site was completely secret, not because he was breaking any laws, since he worked alone and in an empty solar system away from any person a lot of the laws didn't apply to him, but he still was not ready to share his project with the rest of humanity, or have the governments trying to take over before he was ready.
He launched the probe to be near the portal structure that was responsible of creating the wormhole, this would be his 33th test but he still was not any closer to finding a solution. With any luck something would click this time, if not, then back to the number crunching which in his opinion was the most fun part of the project.
Now all he needed was to activate, this time he would increase the power to see what happened, a wormhole consumed a lot of power in the first moments but after a while the power consumed was stable, there was always gravimetric disturbances when it started but nothing his shuttle couldn't handle, at least that is what usually happened, this time something went very wrong.