13 KiB
The disaster that started it all
(I intended to post this on Reddit but the internet went down just a few moments before I finished this and it didn't went up until we lost the connection with that world due to this nuclear revenge)
TLDR: Crappy management, tried to screw our research, treated us like trash and then asked us to conduct research in one of the most dangerous worlds in an unsafe way, telling us "find a way to get money out of the world if you want to be safe". We pack all staff and equipment of the research site into the capsule before heading out. The capsule arrives into the world safely and then loses contact with its homeworld. We now get to conduct our research according to our terms and the crappy management is left with the task of explaining to their company how their largest research center ended up turning into an empty and desered warehouse.
I was working for a long time (over 20 years) in a research company as an interdimensional explorer. It was not a great job in terms of salary and benefits but everyone at this site got to do what we were so passionate about and even get paid for that, so it looked like a dream job for us.
The business model of our company was to explore other worlds, find a way to mine and transfer materials from them to Arepol and then develop and sell products based on these materials. Initially, we had a few factories but over time we discovered sources of such rare and wonderful materials that we no longer needed the factories to maintain the profit margins. The company sold these factories off and transformed its business into a blueprint and raw materials supplier. Business was booming and before long the company was pretty huge, with the research center I was working on being the largest scientific research site in the entire Arepol. This will be important later.
But despite the insane profit that grew steadily since the company sold off the factories (there were more and more factories entering the market in Arepol so the demand for the materials and blueprints always exceeded supply by a large margin), the salaries of the researchers that ran the show stayed the same. We didn't complain as we all were "research nerds" that had almost no life outside of the lab.
Almost all of us constructed a bunk of sorts to get their sleep on site, so not only the company got more research hours out of us (overtime was unpaid but we didn't care about that and management didn't care about limiting us to "sane working times" as the labor law demanded) but also no expensive appartment was necessary to make a living (again, technically, this was against the law but nobody in the research lab complained to the authorities and the managemet also kept silent about that).
Additionally, we got to explore, design and make wonderful meals out of all the exotic meats, fruits, vegetables and other ... er ... edible stuff ... for us, so nobody felt the need to eat out in the expensive Arepol restaurants around or waste time commuting from areas of Arepol where food was cheap and plentiful. The company didn't care about catering to food business. All those pesky regulations about healthy food and stuff, along with the fact that tastes differ, made it a real pain in the ass to design, develop and market a new meal product, especially when made from exotic sources.
But we didn't care about the rules and regulations (and the related expenses). We simply developed a range of instruments to make sure our "extraarepol" food was safe to eat and had no adverse effects on productivity. The management was happy we didn't demand a 16 times salary increase to match the Arepol's living expenses and we enjoyed the independence this arrangement gave us.
My job is exploration of the new worlds, using avatars driven by a sort of virtual reality equipment. Basically, I go out into the wild, search for interesting stuff and bring it back for analysis. After my colleagues complete their analysis, I go out again to get different interesting stuff for further analysis. Rinse and repeat.
This might sound boring but these worlds have physics that almost always differs from the physics of Arepol, my homeworld, in weird, wonderful and sometimes even utterly crazy ways. This made the job much more interesting as one got to wonder what we are going to discover next. And challenging, because I often got to solve new and interesting puzzles, sometimes in cooperation with my colleauges.
When I started, all the exploration was done remotely. The datalinks between our base and the avatars were riddled with all sorts of problems such as lost and/or laggy connections, excruciating time delays and stuff like that. Many times we simply lost contact with the world after our single avatar died in it before we could understand even the basics of its physics.
But, one day, one of our team members discovered that one of the materials we were mining allowed us to construct what we called "reality bubble". Essentially it was a region of space with Arepol physics inside a world with completely different physics. The material made this bubble stable and its stability didn't depend on physics of the containing world. The material in question was cheap and plentiful and didn't have much use in Arepol.
Soon we had "base hull", a fairly big, yet compact shell with facilities for on-site research and reliable remote communication, that we could send into the destination world. This got rid of most of the problems with remote exploration as we no longer needed to run interdimensional connections between the avatars and our research facility in Arepol. This translated to faster research and no more lost worlds. The management was exstatic and gave us a generous budget to further this line of development.
We added living quarters into the base hull so a team of scientists could be present directly on site (getting rid of the time delay) and hibernation units so if the team ran out of resources, they could simply hibernate themselves and wait for another team to rescue them.
So now I often get to physically travel with a science team directly into the world in question. During each of these many, several months long expeditions, I got to know many of them at the first name basis.
This new development was like on cue because very soon (literally days after the first few base hulls were successfully brought to other worlds and back), we discovered "the father of all challenges". A strange world with complex structure and weird physics. First efforts showed a lot of promise. This world promised a revolution in manufacturing as its unusual physics allowed construction of materials that could not be made anywhere else. To add to the lure, we discovered resources in it that allowed design and development of even more lucrative products and materials. The proverbial cherry on top was that most of these raw resources had to be processed inside this weird and wonderful world.
Then things went south. Our company was bought out under suspicious circumstances and the management replaced. For a few months things looked ok. But then the new management decided the company needs to "reduce costs", "increase safety" and "comply with the laws". They turned this unwanted attention to our research center.
First the management argued "you cannot live inside the facility, you must have an appartment and live there". We complied by starting a "research program" with the affected team members living inside the half-constructed base hulls. This turned out to be good for our research because now the teams could find out what equipment they miss and get it installed while still in Arepol, greatly reducing the costs of the expeditions. That drove them off for a while.
Then we started development of a new base hull with a tether connection to Arepol that would allow quick evacuation of the resident team should things go awry. This is when the management jerks decided to mess with our research again by reducing our research budget and telling us how to do our job.
So the tether connection equipment of the hull did not have a lot of robustness to begin with (designing a robust interdimensional portal is not exactly easy, especially when the world at the other side of the portal has weird physics). Additionally, instead of installing a dedicated interdimensional transmitter and receiver into the base hull, we were told to "just run a cable through the tether portal".
We were even denied our request for a small liquid fluoride thorium reactor core because "who has money for that when the power grid can handle the load?". Of course we told them that the portal is way too hungry for the power grid but their response was "don't teach a former power company CEO how a power grid works!" The meeting then ended with "if you want money you can become a tycoon of that strange world but good luck finding anything useful for OUR world there".
So, run this thing on commercial power lines and ignore our concerns about their capacity? And cut the budget to prevent our base from becoming long term self-sustainable, because reasons? Are you really wanting to turn us, a group of veterans with interdimensional exploration as their hobby into yet another dormant cocoon lying in the bowels of the world which was nicknamed "scientist eater" because of its reputation? Not going to happen.
The revenge started small. The rudeness of the management turned everyone on the research site against them and the company, so it took little persuasion to bring them all onboard. All the scientists joined their forces and whatever little money they had stashed away to prepare for the "grand disaster" the management was asking for.
Almost a year later, at the Christmas time, when everyone in the management went to vacation (this was a public secret that the management is not working during these holidays), it was time to go nuclear. In a matter of days, everything on the site was dismantled and hauled them into the new interdimensional base hull. The only equipment left behind will be the equipment of the Arepol side of the tether portal. All the scientists (several hundredths of them) then headed towards the hibernation units, leaving only me and a handful of people in charge of the operation.
They all knew this is an one way trip. They sank their tiny salaries and savings into piles of batteries and tanks of Quirium, stashing them inside the base hull since I enrolled them in my scheme. They put every bit and piece of information about the strange world that is going to be mine and their new home for the foreseeable future into the control computers of the base hull.
And, as we predicted, that happened. After the base landed safely into the world, the tether portal died. A quick look at it was all we needed to do to know the power failure was the culprit. Actually, we were pretty surprised that not only the portal lasted for the entire time of the journey, it seemed to be pretty stable. So stable in fact that I was even hoping for sending a "Screw you!" message to the management once they return from they holiday, before cutting the power and closing the portal for good. Must have been the fact that without all the equipment on the power lines there was much more power available for the base's journey and the tether portal. Likely enough power to run it at a stable configuration.
But only a few days after we landed, the portal suddenly went down. The power company decided to cut the power to our site after a few days of cranking the power load near the maximum of the grid. I was grinning when thinking about the massive electricity bill our greedy management is going to receive for our site.
The few scientists who did not hibernate before the trip assembled and configured an avatar deployment system with three avatars. I better be careful with these because if I get them killed all, I might as well go to deep sleep myself. Yes, an avatar detection equipment was also set up for this occasion, but that means I will get connected to an avatar at a random and potentially hostile place and will be required to find my home base before continuing the quest.
So, now all the scientists are catching their Z's in the hybernation chambers and I am sitting here, slightly disappointed that I won't get to see the face of the management jerks once they find all the equipment and staff gone but nevetheless excited. And feeling a massive weight of responsibility on my shoulders. The fate of my fellow colleagues are now in my hands. Can I bring them out of their sleep and, possibly, bring them home? Of course I can. I am a veteran interdimensional explorer!
It turned out the company had many more research centers. After the discovery of this new world, all of them were thrown into the project, asked to build base hulls and then move themselves inside, doing research. But since these teams lacked experienced interdimensional explorers, once inside the world, they ran out of avatars and resources and were forced to hibernate. Competitors of our company then tried to send rescue missions to rescue our lost teams (and get their hands on their research) only to lose their teams too. Eventually, scientists that were still in Arepol started to quit their companies immediately once tasked with "on-site research of the scientist eating world"