Travelling between world-lines with technology

Five levels of travel

Three ways to force the wave

MM's summary of every technique he knows: "We can accomplish this in different ways."

ΨORM's one-line version: "A portal does not move you through space, it moves you through frozen moments." And a hard limit from the Commander (part 7 of the comm): an inmate suit "is not sustainable outside of the Prison Complex". The Domain has teleportation facilities on Earth and has never moved an inmate outside the walls in their suit.

What it felt like

• Nothing, then details. MM never felt the switch. "The transition point is ALWAYS hidden from the observer." He would notice afterwards: breakfast places serving eggs with potatoes, trousers with buttons instead of zippers, a billboard for a strange surgery, the ending of a public story.
• Dives and slides. A slide was a minor change of reality. A "dive" was a series of slides "that went all over the place", ending somewhere else. Both lasted hours to weeks and came without warning, once in the middle of a presentation to his managers.
• Manual mode. When he ran the core kit #2 probes himself, a heads-up display showed seven soft numbers that "hardened" as he slid; deviation was locked to about two percent. He could not, for example, choose a "cat-friendly world-line" on purpose.
• No twins. He never met a duplicate of himself. "Once you left your world-line and entered a new world-line", the old body is not left behind; the reality changes around one consciousness.
• A price for distance. "If I were to go to a world line of say 30% deviance, and return, my consciousness will be affected." That, and his standing orders, are why he never explored.

Other people's crossings

MM collects public examples and reads them through the model: a woman in a foil-like coat walking out of nothing onto a Russian road (a dash-cam clip; her clothing suggests crude equipment and radiation shielding), vehicles appearing and vanishing at intersections ("roads and intersections provide stable coordinates"), a man who claimed to have been rescued by a stranger with a portal machine and came home with a Beatles tape from a world where the band never split, and "ProfessorPhate", who in 1999 described a different world-line online. His standard: the "unifying commonality" of such accounts is more useful than any single one, and travellers "look plain on purpose".

John Titor

In 2000 and 2001 a poster calling himself John Titor claimed to be a soldier from 2036 sent back for an IBM 5100 computer, and described a "time displacement unit" in a car. MM devotes four articles plus the full transcripts to him, and takes his side: "I happen to believe his story. I do believe that he is leaving certain things out." His reasons are the physical effort behind the hoax (photographs, a cross-section, manual pages, a laser-bending photo hard to fake in 1998) and the fit with his own experience: Titor's "time travel" is world-line travel with the time coordinate changed, and Titor himself said his world diverged from ours. MM uses the story as the reader's on-ramp: "Without it, the reader would have to make a jump directly into my training."

The do-it-yourself portal

Across ten articles MM lays out how he thinks a home-built dimensional portal would work. It is theory with engineering flavour, not a tested build, and he says so ("I recommend that a rent-an-engineer be utilized to design up the system"). The logic follows directly from the model.