Intent

The two armed guards saluted the Commissioner when he entered the secured hallway. The guard on the right entered the code to the door. Beeps ensued, followed by clanking from inside the door, and a woosh as the entrance opened. The Commissioner stepped into the warehouse, and felt the wind from the door shutting behind him. Another clank assured him it was locked.

Each of his footsteps resounded through the vast space. Their echoes made him seem even more important and powerful than he was.

The display case, guarded on all four sides, shone from this distance with fluorescent consistency. In front of it, the rows of computers, observed by the small team of scientists hand selected by the High Commission. As he approached, more guards, stationed every few feet along the walkway, saluted him.

The scientists stood up as he approached, but did not salute him. The Commissioner walked past them and stood as close to the thick, bullet and fire proof glass of the display case as he could without touching it. He could have touched it, probably. It was unlikely the guards would have stopped him. They, however, did not salute him. They were the only ones not required by protocol to do so, such was the level of vigilance required from this final line of defense of the artifact.

He would not test their alertness. Instead he examined the object with which he was already quite familiar. It sat now in the middle of the reflection of his own face, as though it were attached to the end of his nose. On top of a small pedestal draped in white fabric and under glaring lights rested a black and white billiard ball. Chipped and smeared with use and age, the ball’s numeral was nonetheless quite legible. A prominent “4” inside a white circle.

Less than two feet from his face now sat the only known object to ever cross from an alternate universe into his own.

Nearly a year ago it had rolled through the inter-dimensional portal that Commission physicists had opened for 4.2 seconds before losing it, never to recover it again. That 4.2 seconds had drained all of the power in five nearby cities which in turn caused endless questions in the press. Questions the Commission had to dodge artfully.

Mainly, though, the occurrence had brought scientists something to study which could reveal clues to the nature of existence.

Not a life form. Not information, and not images. The only thing to cross in those 4.2 seconds was a billiard ball.

And it was in fact a billiard ball. Early and exhaustive tests on the ball’s components and behaviors matched those of a standard billiard ball in his own universe. Tests also indicated that the artifact was free of all known disease, explosives, and other dangers. For months such studies continued 24/7 under the tightest of security measures, as anything gleaned from it could provide the wrong people with enough information to perhaps open a doorway to the universe of its origin.

It was the unseen, subatomic experimentation that offered possible real answers. Those experiments had recently concluded.. It was this information the Commissioner came for now.

 “What do we know today, gentleman?” the Commissioner asked without turning around.

“Quantum variant testing is continuing,” said the oldest of the scientists, who walked with a cane and had no hair remaining on his head, “but from the data we’ve gathered from it so far, and combined with current theories of interdimensional physics, we estimate that the universe of origin for the artifact is quite removed from our own. Not at all an immediately parallel dimension, or even a nearby one, as previously assumed.”

The Commissioner turned around, pulling his gaze from the artifact. “Why would it not have been from the most local alternate universe? How could it not be?”