Loops

It was the last that most concerned Ezra. Instantaneous transport meant the highest cargo volume any system had ever seen. Keeping track of all of it was almost a detective story in the process of unfolding, yielding its secrets only the most skilled and persistent investigator. Ezra had always wanted to be a private investigator. He had served a short time as a salaried police officer right out of college, while saving for graduate school. He always had envied the freedom that P.I.s had, their attitude, the fiercely independent streak he wished he possessed. This train of thought was a familiar one, which ran through Ezra’s head after his third cup of coffee, every day for the past 15 years. He had not had even a single arguably original thought in the past 12, though he didn’t know it. In his own, twisted way, he was happy.

A sound interrupted his reverie. It was similar to the whining sound a freshly opened wormhole made, which he liked to think of as space creaking under the pressure. He had a rather poetic streak, and no one had ever had the heart to tell him it was simply an artifact of the machinery. His consciousness veered off his routine, and a new thought pushed its way into his rather denuded mind, "There were no visitors today." He whirled around, looking for the source of the sound. But there was none visible. Yet it sounded so close, almost right next to his ear. Ezra slumped to his desk, all his troubles with bulk transit finished forever.

"How fast does it go? With all due respect, Mr. President, I think you may have misunderstood. It does not accelerate the object to any speed at all. The actual distance traveled during wormhole transit is immeasurably small. Not zero, we believe, but probably no longer than the Planck length, the smallest measurable distance. It’s an iffy point; we’ll have to do more research. The object simply ceases to be there and now exists here. Think of the universe as a sheet of paper, with us standing on one side. You can go to the edge, and over and then some to get to a point on the other side of the paper. Or you can take a shortcut THROUGH the paper, a distance immeasurable in terms of the two dimensional paper surface. It’s a crude analogy, to be sure, but it gets the point across."

On the other side of the Solar System, in a dark office littered with files, cans of soda, and half-eaten carryout, a phone rang. A lump atop the desk stirred to life, and a tired, weary voice said, "Who’s calling?" An AI’s dull monotones answered "LazaCorp, Saturn Office. It’s flagged as urgent."

"Fine, make a hookup."

Inside the innocuous-looking phone on the desk, a switch flipped. A tiny wormhole appeared in the depths of the base, and a contact reached through, extended, and touched an appropriately shaped receptor inside the phone. The wormhole had revolutionized human existence, even reaching to such things as the humble telephone. Instantaneous communication had become a reality. Special Relativity was no longer a problem, as signals didn’t have to speed across the vacuum riding radio waves. A tiny ‘hole could simply physically connect the two. A device powerful enough to cross interstellar space could be nestled in the palm of your hand, or even, for the truly "on the go", as a cortical implant.

Daniel Rieger was a traditionalist, well suiting the last private eye in the Sol system.