Free We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology by Lavie Tidhar, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sofia Samatar, Sandra McDonald, Ernest Hogan, Sunny Moraine Page B

2011.”
    “What makes you think so?” asked Patel.
    “Nothing special,” said Raitek. “Science fiction stories. And wormhole theories.”
    “I thought you were pretty sure about the manifold.”
    “Well, quem tem dois, tem um. Quem tem um, não tem nenhum .”
    “Come again?”
    “It’s an old Brazilian saying. If you have two, actually you have only one. If you have one, you have none. Bottom line: you better be prepared and have a spare—a spare tire, a spare sonic screwdriver, a spare condom, a spare of anything you can possibly think of, because you will most probably need it.”
    “A spare theory as well?”
    “Yep. That too.”
----
    In the second controlled experiment, the elevator fell four decades in three seconds.
    Naturally, it wasn’t the elevator that was really falling, as it was mounted on a spring-based shock absorber structure. But the principle seemed to remain, as Jonathan reported being taken to a different decade each time. They weren’t able to calibrate the instruments well enough to account for years.
    Another precaution they took this time was securing Jonathan to the carriage by rappelling equipment, harness, static rope attached to the guardrail. It wasn’t necessary in the end, but they did it all the same. All that Jonathan did was to get out whenever he happened to be, take a couple of steps, recording every sight and sound for no more than five minutes, then get back to the interior of the carriage, close the doors and pray to return to this own era. Which he did both times.
    The only occasion nothing happened was when they decided to turn the immersion environment off.
    “Okay, one thing we can be quite sure of,” Raitek concluded after the second experiment, “is that the immersion machinery is somehow the key. Now, another question: can we use it outside the elevator with the same result? Or can we use another elevator and different immersion machinery to the same effect?”
    “This last question I can easily answer,” Patel said. “No, we cannot. We had two elevators and half a dozen immersion machineries running in parallel. Only this one presented this result.”
    “Then we could normally say that something is wrong with this particular setting,” Raitek said. “Therefore, it’s an anomaly.”
    “We already knew that.” This time Patel smiled.
    Raitek turned back to him and said, “Hiran, I already know something else: you are a top-notch robotic expert who does not like to have your time wasted and is deeply pissed off by my very presence at what you consider to be your lab, even though you’ve worked for this company for much less time than I have. So I will propose a deal: don’t be smug with me and I will tell you what you don’t already know. How about that?”
    Patel remained unamused. But this time he replied.
    “As long as we can reciprocate.”
    Raitek just nodded. And extended his hand.
----
    What didn’t they know? First off, they couldn’t ascertain if the bubble inside the car was the byproduct of the Calabi-Yau Manifold or a portal to a wormhole, but the former theory held more water than the latter—issues of mass and gravity pertaining to wormholes made it almost impossible to think of them as a viable option.
    The second thing: they never could reproduce the experiment outside the elevator. And the car had to be in motion, if only at a small rate of acceleration.
    Acceleration. Raitek wondered if it played a major role in the events after all.
    At the end of the day, he took the elevator in the central shaft and pushed the button for the top floor.
    Raitek stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse of the 400th floor. It was a sparsely furnished space, all-white, with very few interior walls. He liked the lofty aspect of the place, its half-spartan, half-samurai cleanliness. It reminded him a bit of his summer refuge in Rio; the concrete-and-woodplank house in the middle of Tijuca National Park was very different structurally,