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“This? This is Putopia,” says Dr. A, the tall guy with the curly hair who was trying to catch the grape in his mouth. He’s wearing a T-shirt under his lab coat that reads MY BANG THEORY IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.
“Putopia?” I repeat.
“Yes. Putopia. It stands for Parallel Universe Travel Office … pia.”
Dr. O breaks in. “We haven’t figured out the whole acronym yet, but we wanted to secure the domain name before anyone else did.”
“We believe our universe may be a small part of something vast—we’re one house in a cosmic subdivision of houses all right next to each other. If only we could just pop in to see the neighbors, easy as opening the front door,” Dr. T explains.
“You’re kidding, right?” Gonzo raises an eyebrow.
“Not at all,” Dr. T continues. “Why should our world be the only one? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“And, frankly, a little narcissistic?” Dr. M adds.
“Surely, there must be many worlds, many possibilities. Rather like these bubbles.” Dr. T dips a wand into a soapy bottle, gives it a puff, and about a gazillion bubbles float out and away on the breeze. “See? Some bubbles burst immediately or don’t make it far—the least-probable possibilities. But some bubbles go the distance. They float on.”
“Nothing disappears. All of time is unfolding all of the time,” Dr. M continues. He picks up the macaroni-shaped toy and shifts one of the tubes. Lights flash on the toy, and now I can see another set of little shapes underneath the ones on top. “Eleven different dimensions. Most of them too small for us to see.”
“Or dimensions much larger than our world, like a big time ship on which our universe is only a stowaway mouse,” Dr. O argues.
“Whoa,” Gonzo says, and really, he’s got that right.
“We’re trying to reach into those endless worlds now. And this little baby …,” Dr. A says, gesturing to the strange daisy tunnel, “is our crowbar into other realities.”
“What is it?” Gonzo takes a step back. He’s got one hand resting on the exit.
“Seventeen miles of magnetized tunnels with one purpose: to open a window into that house next door and the house next door to that one and so on,” Dr. M tells us. He smiles broadly. “I can almost smell the coffee!”
“So it’s a supercollider,” I say.
“StephenfreakingHawking!” Dr. M huffs. “Super is what you call a sale. Super is the size of a hero sandwich when you upgrade for a buck. This …” He gestures to the weirdly shaped door. “This is an Infinity Collider.”
“That’s trademarked, by the way,” Dr. A warns.
“Your particles colliding with the infinite in an infinite number of ways so that none of the regular quantum laws apply—backward, forward, up, down, sideways, inside out, and outside in.”
Balder’s eyebrows shoot up. “Time travel?”
“Parallel-world travel,” Dr. T says with glee.
Gonzo leaves his post by the exit and sits next to Dr. T. “Dude! So, like, you’ve been to other worlds? What’s it like? Are there, like, Teddy Vamps laying waste to droids and shit? Wait—you’ve been, right?”
The scientists shift uncomfortably. “Not as such,” Dr. A says.
“Still a few kinks to work out,” Dr. T says, his smile tight.
“Kinks, like the hinges on the door need oiling or more like bad stuff I really don’t want to know about?” Gonzo asks.
“We’ve never put a person through,” Dr. A tells us.
“Except for once,” Ed pipes up from his blackboard scribblings.
“Yes. Well. Best forget that one, Ed,” Dr. M cautions.
“Come on. We’ll show you our work. It’s snack time anyway,” Dr. O says. She leads us upstairs to a nice comfy game room complete with big-ass TV and sectional sofa.
“What we’re about to show you is a record of all our work here at Putopia,” Dr. T explains. “The Infinity Collider, String Theory, Superstring Theory, M-Theory …”
