Vector Interdimensional
- JG Stone
- 2 days ago
- 20 min read
There are ages in which security becomes polished so thoroughly and completely that truth can no longer keep a grip on reality. In such an age, men may decide to serve as revolutionaries, and in doing so, decide to serve an accidental civic purpose greater than themselves.
Alek Halloway was not a proper man. Alek was not a polished speaker. Alek was not right about everything. He was simply a man still willing to say the wrong thing out loud, to make people think, if it meant anything true or real existed somewhere underneath the noise.
Dana Vale served as the corrective force just off camera, the woman trying to keep the room attached to law, timing, and observable fact while the age itself turned stranger than either of them could afford to say cleanly. I used to watch this guy often, and so, I saved the broadcasts.
The studio itself, as a brief overview, looked like a failing republic's last refuge for news: a scarred desk under hot lights, bargain royalty-free and artificially machine generated graphics flaring behind it, paper stacked in leaning hills, all while Dana somewhere off camera behind glass and legal notes, microwave on the shelf beside her.
These recordings are where the record begins.With Alek Halloway, conspiracy theorist extra-ordinaire, clearing his throat and greeting the country like a man about to burst.
Episode 1
First Public Suspicion
Alek opens the episode with the old host trick of sounding half amused by the thing that was actually chewing at him. His voice enters the microphone velvety and smooth, bass tones leading to an easy listening experience.
"Good evening, good listener, welcome again to the Alek Halloway Hour. I'll be the voice of your paranoia this evening."
The ads accomplish half his work. Numerous companies were now selling a created prototype that promised instant travel - faster than heating up Ramen from travel hubs worldwide. The public had noticed the metaphor before the press releases did, and comedians quickly latched on to the note of boiling the human anatomy just to save a few hours travel time. The device, at this time, felt too much like a microwave for comfort, with a form facture that was enclosed and caused claustrophobia.
Dana pulled the first map on the production list. Alek leaned forward over the desk and started narrating like a man pointing at a cloud pattern no one else wanted to admit was shaped like something specific.
"Today, folks, we're going to go back to these portals that are beginning to pop up all over the place, what is it, twelve, fifteen, depending on whose brochure you trust? DANA, can we pull that map up? Here we go. For the viewer at home, we're looking at a map of planet Earth, flat of course, and there are four dots over in North America, another four in Asia, Taiwan, Japan, two in Europe, and another two in Africa."
Now, he pushes at labor, distance, and the possibility that convenience had arrived carrying a more ancient appetite underneath the scales. Alek, distrusting of institutions as ever, has a point.
"Now you may be asking, why the islands, why portals in places like Africa? Well, as much as we want to believe that teleportative technology is just used as leisure, I believe the Chinese found they could very quickly transport manual laborers and transport them back with enclosed pockets full of shiny rocks. Time-traveling slaves, as it were. Haha. Communism is hilarious. Anyway."
Dana's pen taps once against the desk glass off camera, the sound of a woman deciding not to spend ten minutes correcting every bad instinct in the room. Then Alek lands the first real warning with travel-time disgust and appliance language.
"I FLEW to Africa, three weeks ago. Took fourteen hours. I mean sure, that's a long flight. But before you even consider saving whatever time overseas it would take, let's talk about the possible repercussions of what is essentially an alien technology more similar to a microwave than anything."
That was the first night I noticed the comparison stop behaving like a joke and start behaving like a warning label no one wanted to read. At that stage the public could still dismiss Alek as a man with a hobby for grievance and a kitchen-appliance fetish. Democracies prefer their warnings dressed cheaply enough to ignore, like the homeless.
Episode 2
Normalization and the 240 Ban
The next turn was always coming. First, the inconvenience became national. Then it became earth-wide. Then, the technology was forced upon us as a solution. With gas prices out of control because of "numerous climate based natural disasters," shipping costs lurched upward, the Strait of Hormuz dried up like the dead sea, and shortages required government-uniting solutions. Then, the state stepped in and numbered everyone, and allowed free portal travel anywhere in the world, as well as 'universal income' that came with observance of universal ID laws.
Alek at this point had moved to local-station out of his home, because he no longer trusted the interconnected system, and most places began to ban his programming.
"You know, I really do love my electric vehicle, it's too bad they made the 240v plugs illegal. Where's that official quote..."
Dana throws the card up on screen.
"Following the North American Grid Stabilization Emergency, the Federal Energy Reliability Board issued Order 47-C, temporarily prohibiting nonessential residential 240-volt service due to generation shortfall, transformer loss, and peak-load instability."
Alek waited a beat, then lifted his brows in theatrical misery.
"And if that wasn't wordy enough, it continues."
Dana, dutiful even in disgust, rolls the next paragraph.
"Under Emergency Reliability Authority, residential use of nonessential 240-volt circuits is suspended until further notice. Exemptions apply only to licensed medical necessity, approved food preservation, and designated critical trades."
Alek spreads his hands.
"So, yeah, I guess we'll all just chug along in the dark a bit longer. Well, while we still have daytime, now, at least, you can travel the world with these portals. I still haven't used one, due to not being able to leave the house after losing my court case with my ex-wife involving all that Desert Scythe lawsuit...anyway..."
Then Dana pulls the updated map, and the scale lurches. What had been a novelty became a network.
"Let's show that map again, DANA, check this out. What was it last time, four on this continent, right? Now look at this. There's one in every major city worldwide. You'll remember that there were a few companies that came on the scene for teleportation tech, 'Ba'als Archways,' 'Molech Express,' but ultimately, Helix Incorporated acquired a young startup called Vector Interdimensional who has led the way thus far. Their newest project is known as 'Cairo's Gate.' Cairo, the observant watcher will remember, is where the first portal was dug up in that excavation."
He lets that sit, just long enough for the sentence to realize what it had admitted.
"That's right, folks. We found this thing and reverse-engineered it. Well, let me say, the government has been using it for probably fifty years, and it's just now being talked about in civilian life."
The pictures depict a floating device photographed well. The machine in person appeared more clinical: a walk-in half-sphere, like a bathysphere cut open and taught to face its mate.
Alek, naturally, interrupted civilization with leftovers.
"So now these travel companies who were planning teleportation have consolidated since the discovery of this portal, right, like we didn't see that coming. It's always overexpansion and then fire sale with invisible money. And now look at the map again, two hundred thirty locations with Cairo's Gate, and you can go wherever you want. Drive five minutes down the road, boom, you're in Bangkok, date night, boom, you're home, five back, like nothing ever happened."
Dana slid the tray into frame. On it sat a repeatedly reheated frozen dinner that looked like it had lost its legal right to call itself food. Alek brightened the way all influencers do around props.
"Yeah, sure, that's a compelling story, folks. But what on earth happens when you microwave something multiple times? DANA, can we pull out that microwave dinner? Okay folks, for the viewer at home, this is a Hungry Man dinner. It has been microwaved seven times, once per day. So for the metaphor, haha, the meat loaf's wife wanted a lot of date nights. And now, look. It may not have even been food before, but now? Best word I can find for material equivalence is rubber. I wouldn't feed this to my dog even if he begged."
Episode 3
Portal Terror
Alek begins this episode coming in hot because the headlines at the time had everyone in a state of fear.
"PORTAL TERROR! Wow, guys, so look, I've been saying this forever, but there's no security on these portals. Not near enough, at least. All this universalism and our handing off security to the machines so that we could all be 'safer' seems to not be working. DANA, can we pull this video clip that's all over the news today? This is insane, just you wait, give Dana a second to find it. DANA, come on, the viewer is waiting here and we don't have time for an ad brea-"
Dana got the clip up.
The footage proved panic faster than it proved truth. A man in an ordinary jacket drifted through the checkpoint holding a cooler that would not have looked suspicious at a church potluck. People glanced at him and then past him. Machines blessed the passage with green lights. The next frame split the world in two. One screen showed the sending gate. The other showed the paired gate halfway across the network.
Alek narrated at speed because speed was the only honest shape for the moment.
"You can see there he has a turban on, but he's not, eh....Dana, what can I call him, you said I can't say brown? What? Oh, we'll mute it in post later, it will be fine. Ok look, his lineage is not typical for someone wearing a turban is what I'm trying to say. This guy sticks out. Ok, so watch this, he conceals this bomb, part is in his shoe and then part hidden elsewhere, he goes to the bathroom, combines the two things, and then he activates his portal when it's his turn. Steps out last minute, throws the bomb. Ok, now watch this, guys. This stuff is crazy. DANA, do the split screen thing."
"Ok so over here on the left, here's the scene you just saw, he throws the bomb, it's about to explode. And then over here on the right is the camera from the other end of the portal. Ok now watch what happens when the crystal on the left, when that bomb goes off, watch what happens when it explodes. BOOM, other one goes up in smoke. This actually caused a huge chain of events that blew 25 portals (crystals next to the device blowing the crystals on the other end) and killed an as of yet uncounted, due to how many countries impacted by one event and the communications being shaky around the scene."
"DANA, do the split-screen thing. Good. Over here on the left, here's the scene you just saw. Over here on the right is the camera from the other end of the portal. Now watch what happens when the crystal on the left, when that blast goes off, watch what happens when it explodes. BOOM. Other one goes up in smoke. This actually caused a huge chain of events that blew twenty-five portals and killed an as-of-yet uncounted number, due to how many countries were impacted by one event and communications being shaky around the scene."
For the first time Alek stops mugging long enough to sound tired.
"Guys, listen. If you didn't fear the microwaving thing enough, if you live near one of these, you need to move immediately. It's just a matter of time before this whole thing melts down."
That was the point at which convenience collapsed into blast-radius thinking. It was also the first night I stopped recording as content and started archiving as evidence. A private citizen with a stupid shelf microwave should not have been carrying more public warning value than half the national press, but that was the age.
Episode 4.
Pope Tony and the Soul Problem
The next program moves from physical danger to continuity panic.
Alek grinned at the camera with the aggressive hospitality of a man about to bring nonsense into the room and see whether it behaved.
"Today on the program, we have a special guest with us. Pope Tony, from darkweb fame. Now, of course Pope Tony isn't actually Pope, but he's definitely an authority on...Tony, what is it you're an authority of?
Tony folded his hands and answered with unsettling calm.
"I am the Pope of the unseen hand. Have you ever seen the movie the Matrix?"
Alek took half a second to enjoy that and then, because he could not help himself, wrecked the solemnity.
"The one with the brothers? What's that, DANA? Sisters? What on earth are you talking about, the end of the movie says brothers."
Tony blinked. Reality, he would soon claim, ran on number, law, repetition, and hidden order. The portals exploited that order without respecting the body that had to pass through it.
"In the Matrix, we are shown that people who have figured out the secret to the world can transcend what other citizens, or users, can. It's very similar to what these portals are doing, in a way, but just like in that movie, our world runs on numbers, similar to a machine. Physics, gravity, time, everything runs on schedule like a machine, and then we later replicated the natural world and created our own versions of computers. That means my data, my DNA, is unique, but relocatable. I'm convinced, Alek, that these machines do not in fact teleport the user, but instead, clone the user."
Alek replies with the obvious question because he's still a broadcaster before philosopher and the next answer would shock and amaze.
"If they clone the user, Tony, what happens to the original?"
Tony answered in the register the episode needed: certain enough to wound, uncertain enough to remain arguable.
"At this point, and from where we are dimensionally, it's impossible to say. But from the original point, the original is annihilated, and now the clone can freely travel through the portals unimpeded."
Then the hard religious objection landed clean.
"Interdimensional travel is not natural, and the process by which a portal transports man is not through physical means, but by death in the machine and digital recreation by cloning on a receiving end. I must insist that those who have used the portals have been stripped of their soul."
Episode 5
Zeke and Portal Sickness
The next week Alek opens with the kind of domestic lie people tell on television because television makes them stupid.
"Hahah, so folks do we have some news today. Dana and I got married, folks. I got tired of paying her salary and I also got tired of spending money at the gentleman's clubs, so this was a win-win. Way more money in my pocket until the divorce, right Dana? Haha. Yeah, she's not laughing, folks. Let's pull that article."
Dana always heroically refuses the bait. She puts the Zurich package on screen.
"So this is a picture of, honestly, I still can't pronounce his name, so we're calling him Zeke. Zeke is a scientist in Zurich. For twenty years he has been running rats through a private portal rig and collecting results ugly enough to ruin everyone's week. I'm letting him explain the rest, because at this point the physics starts wearing an occult mask."
The scientist looks like the sort of man who had traded every ordinary adult hobby for spending time with rodents.
"People call it teleportation," Zeke said. "That is close enough for public use and wrong enough to be dangerous. The portal does not destroy you and print a copy somewhere else. It folds your coordinates out of normal space, routes them through a higher-dimensional transit layer, and restores them at a new location inside the same universe. In theory, continuity is preserved. In practice, living tissue does not always come back perfectly aligned."
He pauses over his own chart as if he still resented the chart for being true.
"The damage is usually microscopic and delayed. Bone marrow, nervous tissue, and reproductive cells are the weak points. A user walks out feeling normal because the injury is not a burn. It is a latent indexing fault. Years later, one organ begins to fail. The growth does not appear on scans until it is already terminal. That is what we call portal sickness."
Then Zeke explained how he arrived at his conclusions.
"When I began, I assumed the risk scaled by mass. A rat is roughly one two-hundredth the mass of a human, so I expected it would take about two hundred rat transits to imitate one human crossing. That assumption was wrong. The portal does not punish bodies by weight. It punishes them by complexity. A rat is a full living pattern, not a small cargo load. One clean crossing is enough to tell me whether an organism survives translation intact.
"So I sent one hundred rats through once and bred the survivors. Rats let me compress decades into months. In this model, thirteen months of rat time corresponds to roughly thirty years of human latency. After a single crossing, three out of five exposed rats developed terminal portal sickness. In some it formed in bone. In others it struck brain, heart, or liver. We do not yet know why the target organ changes. We only know the disease remains invisible until the last possible stage.
"The hereditary damage is worse. The first generation born to exposed animals is often viable and outwardly normal. The second generation is not. The defect appears to skip a generation, which suggests corrupted repair instructions in the germ line rather than simple tissue damage. By the grandchild generation we saw near-universal developmental abnormalities, especially in the nervous system. By the third generation, viable births fell to roughly seventy percent. Projected forward, the line reaches functional sterility by the fifth."
Portal fear was no longer about the traveler alone. It now ran risk of extinction.
Episode 6
Defector Friday
Alek arrives almost cheerful on this one, which was how he tends to sound when he's attempting to embarrass civilization somehow.
"DEFECTOR FRIDAY, folks. Today we've got Theodore Ruxfelt on the program. Theodore, you mind if I call you Teddy? Big Teddy Roosevelt fan. Before World War Three, me and my friends got into paintball because we figured if the draft came back we'd already have a chain of command. Rough Riders, suburban edition. I broke my foot, though, so history got robbed. Otherwise I'd probably have ended up President. What's that, Dana? Right. Theodore, tell the people why three federal agencies and two contractors suddenly insist you were never born."
Theodore does not smile as he reveals his secrets.
"My name is Theodore Ruxfelt. I worked for twelve years inside the Joint Transit Materials Initiative. Crystal tuning, gate-pair calibration, signal mapping."
Then he steps on the landmine.
"The public has been told portals were a human invention. They were not. We found the first one during an excavation in Egypt. We still do not know who built it."
Alek leans in.
"You're saying Egypt had Wi-Fi for matter?"
Theodore ignors the joke as long as he can.
"The machine works because of a crystal recovered from deep mantle extraction. It is not a battery. It does not generate power. It couples vibration and light into the same stable pattern. That pattern is what we call the travel tone."
"So it sings."
"Our instruments render it as sound. Sound, however, does not travel fast enough to explain the method. The tone is a translation portion of a deeper resonant address. When a gate is driven with the correct low-frequency excitation, the crystal emits a frequency matched between two crystals. Any paired gate tuned to the same frequency locks onto it and aligns for transfer. But the transference itself occurs faster than light, we cannot ascertain the method."
"The transfer itself is not carried by sound through the atmosphere or by radio through space. Matter is translated through a transit layer outside normal local geometry. The light component is what stabilizes reentry. That is why every active portal system requires orbital mirror support. The exit gate has to be hit with phase-matched light at the exact moment the address resolves, or you do not get a clean return."
"So every portal trip on Earth needs satellites."
"Yes. The first portal did nothing, but we learned how to build one. The main issue for earth became the curvature, thus the satellites. To hypothetically reach far space would be much simpler if we could reach other planets."
He moves on quickly.
"Each crystal can only be tuned once. One frequency. One pair. That is why the network was built point to point. Publicly they sell it as a web. It is not a web. It is a set of locked pairs."
Wearing a big grin, Alek clearly can't resist saying the thought that pops into his head.
"That's beautiful. Traditional values. Portal only loves one other Portal."
Theodore does not even register than one.
"If three portals are ever tuned to the same address, we do not know what happens. There was modeling. The models disagreed. Some predicted random exit selection. Some predicted matter partitioning. Some predicted recursive lock. None predicted a stable triad."
Then the line the companies had spent fortunes trying not to say.
"The larger issue is that the portal program did not just copy the gate. It copied everything around it. Materials science. Signal compression. Mirror logic. Half the technologies sold to the public as human breakthroughs were derivative. They were not invented by us. They were translated from-"
Alek raised one finger and cut straight into the sponsor read, because cash was running low.
"Theodore, freeze right there. Do not move. Not because of state surveillance. Because today's episode is brought to you by NeuroBurst Neutropics, the only sponsor brave enough to ask: what if your brain had a manager."
Dana buried her face in one hand. Alek finished the read anyway, then swung right back.
"You were saying the backbone of modern civilization is copied from something we dug out of a hole. Quick break. Don't go anywhere."
And at that point, I realized that the portals were something more than civilizational evolution.
By morning, any recorded clips were gone. The network carried a trimmed replay, the sponsor block survived, the Egypt line went missing, and half the outlets covering the segment suddenly discovered more urgent stories. The interview had not been denied. It had been handled, which is more modern and more expensive. My tapes worked just fine.
Episode 7
Open Lines
After all the networks scrub Alek's work, he opens for one last, final live episode with exactly the right recap energy.
"OPEN LINES tonight, folks. That's right. No guests. No priests. No men from Zurich with rat genocide in a spreadsheet. No government defectors explaining that modern civilization was reverse-engineered from a hole in Egypt and then looking offended when I compare it to haunted Wi-Fi.
"Just you. The people. The public. The tax base. God help me."
Dana told him the email responses had been lit up since DEFECTOR FRIDAY. He said of course they had, he was a great personality. Theodore says every portal trip depends on satellites, crystals, mirrored light, secret frequencies, and possibly ancient technology we did not build, and suddenly everyone has questions. Weird how that happens, truth spilling over.
And then the calls began.
Brenda from Phoenix came first. Her husband used portals for work. She did not. He began looking older in a way that did not match her same aging process, although for a while she attributed that to being a woman. Then, what she described as dementia began.
"He says we spent our tenth anniversary in Charleston. I have never been to Charleston in my life. He remembers a blue room, a balcony, and a waiter with a broken thumb. I remember staying home because our youngest had a fever."
Doctor's told her it was anecdotal. Alek said she was not the first person to report differing memories of events. The researchers whose grants got canceled said the most obvious changes showed up in couples where one person used portals and the other did not. Age drift. Memory mismatch. Two people remembering the same life like it happened in adjacent apartments.
Then Alek gave the theory its trashy dignity.
"The theory goes like this, folks: every trip does not move you through ordinary space so much as it nudges you sideways onto a neighboring version of Earth so similar you don't notice at first. Same couch. Same marriage. Same taxes. Tiny differences. Wrong paint color. Wrong anniversary story. Wrong first kiss."
"Because if you are stuck inside your own, differing universe, even in your own mind, how exactly are you gonna compare notes with the one you used to be in?"
Mike from Detroit called next to say the 240 ban gutted his neighborhood and now his company gave portal commute credits instead of mileage reimbursement. Alek called that a scam. "So you think it’s coordinated?" Mike asked.
"I think when every problem in society ends with 'therefore, buy access,' the answer is already in the question."
Sister Colleen from Omaha wanted clarification on matters of the soul:
"Our church has members who believe portal travel does not move a person. It kills the person and produces a replacement. Others believe it strips away a divine essence even if the body survives. Are you saying that’s possible?"
"I’m saying the insane thing is no longer that someone believes it. The insane thing is that the technology is vague enough to make them sound halfway reasonable."
Alek Continues, "We had Pope Tony on a few episodes back, and he made the case that the machine annihilates the original and recreates the user at the far end. Theodore said continuity is preserved. Zeke said living tissue comes back misaligned. Government says the process is safe. Corporate says the process is safer than driving. Meanwhile, spouses are remembering different marriages and rats are dying like cursed lab snacks."
"So what do you believe?" The Sister inquired.
"I believe nobody would be debating whether a machine steals your soul if the people who built it were honest for even ten consecutive minutes. I do think something is wrong with the continuity. Whether that is spiritual, biological, dimensional, or all three wearing each other’s clothes, I do not know."
"Sister Colleen, if you want my cleanest answer: the body arrives, the paperwork confirms it’s you, and everyone involved gets very irritated if you ask what happened in between."
Alek's answer comes out sharp and pious. "Regardless, the soul is light, and immortal, so, somehow, someway, a part of you survives. You'll have to ask God the specifics when you die. Next caller."
Next caller. Hector, Miami. Portal tech.
"Satellite maintenance technician. Folks, we have a man from orbit’s plumbing. Hector, bless you. Tell me something horrifying."
"Well, I’m under NDA, so not too horrifying. But I wanted to ask why nobody is talking about the mirror arrays. If the public knew how dependent portal traffic is on orbital reflection windows, people would panic every time there was a launch failure or a solar event."
"Hector, without giving me anything that gets you shot off a roof, tell me this. Are there bottlenecks?"
"Yes."
"More than they admit?"
"Yes."
"Single points of failure?"
"Yes."
Then came Evan from Arlington
Don’t you think you’re fearmongering a little? Portal safety data does not show any verified pattern of large-scale harm attributable directly to consumer use.
Alek laughs like a man watching a thief count his take in public view.
"'Attributable directly' - that phrase is doing more heavy lifting than an unpaid intern handling a government social media account. Evan, what do you do?"
"Consulting."
"For whom?"
"Mobility sector."
"Dana, translate that."
"Helix. He works for Vector Interdimensional...probably."
"Thank you. Evan, let me help. When you say 'no verified pattern of harm attributable directly,' what you mean is there has not yet been a publicly admitted, legally survivable, longitudinal dataset that corporations couldn’t delay, suppress, reclassify, or bury under twelve layers of 'further study required.'"
"That is not what I said."
"It’s what your sentence said while wearing a tie."
"If portals were dangerous, regulators would step in."
"You mean the same regulators who made 240 illegal in half the continent and then recommended portal usage to offset the inconvenience? Those regulators? The same state-corporate cuddle puddle that keeps discovering new emergencies right before a subscription model appears?"
"Evan, I appreciate the call. Please tell your bosses I said hello, and that if they would like equal time on the program, they can come on any night they want, provided they answer one question without speaking in laminated English."
Alek's last live turn comes smaller than the earlier ranting, which makes it worse.
"Maybe the machine...the system...does not ruin you all at once...maybe it changes you inch by inch. Maybe it sends back somebody close enough to keep your job, keep your marriage, keep your voter registration, keep your face, keep your passwords. Close enough for the government. Close enough for your employer. Close enough for the scanners. Just not close enough for people who share memories."
Then, I suppose to get one last check for the road, he swings directly into the sponsor read.
"Tonight's program is brought to you by NeuroBurst Neutropics. Feeling distracted? Foggy? Troubled by the possibility that your spouse has been swapped with an adjacent-dimensional near-match carrying all the same debt but slightly different memories? NeuroBurst helps turn ambient dread into clean workplace focus. Use code SAMEWIFE for ten percent off your first order and a stainless steel pill case engraved with the phrase TRUST YOUR RECEIPTS."
Then he delivers the actual sign-off.
"That's the last program, good listener. Lock your doors, write down your memories, and for the love of God, if your spouse suddenly starts insisting the kitchen was blue, check the paint before you check your sanity."
I did not save the broadcasts because Alek was saying anything special. I saved them because the data had already entered my own life and the clean names stopped protecting anybody the moment the wrong memory showed up at home.
Alek at the end of his career had already spent years training an audience to distrust institutions, read pattern into power, and mistake appetite for authenticity. That meant the portal story was not his first encounter with the difference between access and control. He once thought that because a power-seeking man came through his fire and borrowed his language, some piece of that man would remain answerable to the people who taught him how to speak.
What he eventually learned was uglier: by admitting the truth, or some version of conspiracy, he was ultimately and entirely silenced.
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