Written by me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
Whatever it was that brought us over into the timeless space apparently left a hole—a hole which was invisible to us for a very long time, not least because that hole was in the sky, hundreds of meters up.
Finding the hole was just one step, though. We didn’t understand the hole at first, nor what it meant, nor how to interact with it. It wasn’t just that we could travel through it, though obviously that was eventually possible given that you are reading this document now. However, there were also other ways we could interact with the phenomenon.
But first we had to access it. And we were very interested in accessing it. Imagine a world unchanging for untold millennia. Completely static, except for yourself and your friends and a certain amount of matter that had come through from your original home. That sort of environment does little to stimulate the senses. And when you have an entire population growing steadily more intelligent, that one mystery became the center of our attentions.
So we took the physical matter—the plants, which we were not eating anyway, as well as the rocks and minerals and more—we took the stuff that had come through with us, and we built a structure to investigate the hole. And eventually as we interacted with that hole, we also built technology to access its secrets, monitor its changes. And we discovered many surprises about this portal that connected to our previous home.
First we discovered we could monitor things through the portal into the world on the other side. We spied on our old home with an increasing level of sophistication. Initially our observations were conducted via simple optical and visual equipment aimed through the portal from our frozen world, and later, when we discovered travel through the portal was possible, we explored your time through devices similar to your drone technology.
And we discovered as well that, by manipulating the portal in particular ways with certain kinds of particulates and specific kinds of radiation, we could travel not just to the physical space of our old home, but to different times, both far into the future and far into the past.
After that discovery, our obsession with the portal only increased, and we likewise increased our investigations with earnest, peeking into the many worlds across time, watching the lands change and shift, the animals migrate and mutate, and eventually the very civilizations rise and fall.
We learned all that we could about the physics of our old world, which was so much more accessible than the physics of the strange world in which we had awoken. And as our curiosity about this world increased, more and more of our drone technology was sent across the void.
More and more drones were of course lost.
And we realized if we were going to continue to investigate our old world, we would need to harvest matter from that world because we were losing our matter, our stores of resources every time we lost a drone. We just didn’t realize what harvesting your matter would mean.