Normal Portal

One of the Normal Portal chambers. You can see a seeker on the far wall.

Normal Portal is a transportation device which is used to lock a dimensional funnel in order to send or receive matter. Normal Portal refers both to the type of device and an actual piece of hardware, stationed at The Ring.

It was built by a group of scientists led by Patrice Eastaughffe, with the initial purpose to create an invisibility device.

Normal Portal was developed in late 19th century at a facility called Experimental Physics Institute, which was generally dedicated to the study of the psychic phenomena. While the paranormal studies have failed to produce any interesting results, a portion of studies was dedicated to genuine scientific endeavors. Focusing on the esoteric themes, such as parallel universes, time travel and other sci-fi inspired subjects, it was safe haven for those researchers who would otherwise never receive funding.

A group under the leadership of Patrice Eastaughffe had been working on a special type of invisibility which would hide a person or object by bombarding them with anti-photons. Although the intended effect was not invisibility, their experiments quickly uncovered emanations that did not seem to originate from the particle stream. At first this was attributed to the loss of anti-photons in the particle stream, since collision of anti-photons produces an electron-positron pair. But once this was accounted for, there was still a release of energy that could not be explained by anti-photon interactions.

Red and green bars indicate the unaccounted electron-positron pairs.

In order to study this, Eastaughffe and team developed a device called “seeker”, which would produce an anti-photon particle stream, probe an area around the stream, note which electron-positron pairs are produced from anti-photons hitting each other, and then identify the unaccounted pairs, as well as track their paths. This work has taken them 2 years, and by the time they were finished and published first results in 1901, the fate of the Experimental Physics Institute was in question.

Eastaughffe and her colleague Fred Rogers then relocated to the Urban Labs headquarters in New York, which offered them a grant to continue their work on the anti-photon particle stream, since they believed it might result in something akin to a free energy device.

In 1903, the second paper published by the group for the first time demonstrated that particles that have seemingly neutralized each other can actually be tracked by seeker, and their paths can be measured long after they seem to no longer exist in our Universe. Additionally, seeker was able to backtrack emerging particles by noting their signature and analyzing certain areas of the frequency spectrum. Since there was no Internet at the time, and journalism worked differently, this did not make the news, but became a breakthrough study among physicists. Several laboratories have joined Eastaughffe's project, and the work was financed by several major Institutes in the country.

By 1905 Eastaughffe and Rogers had produced results with such lasting implications for physics that they were able to open their own lab, which they named The Ring due to the shape of the facility, which was built in a form of a donut, with a huge circular corridor. The architecture looked very impressive at the time, but The Ring was criticized for wasting too much space on the corridor. A lot of the equipment, however, is hosted underground, and the main labs B and C are underground as well.

It is at The Ring that Eastaughffe and Rogers have completed the seeker design which allowed to lock the connection between our Universe and the realm from which the incoming particles are emanating, thus securing an interdimensional link (a funnel). The Normal Portal was born. It took 15 more years to be able to develop a saving system, that would reliably re-connect with a given dimension.

Since that time, Normal Portal has not changed and continues to use its original design to this very day.

Interestingly enough, Exotic Portal was conceived before the Normal Portal, but the lack of scientific knowledge prevented the team from moving forward with it, and the project was scrapped. They instead decided to go with a “normal straightforward approach of tracking the particles as far as we could, instead of something exotic that would use quantum mechanics”, according to Rogers' autobiography. Thus, the new project was jokingly called “Normal Portal”. The name quickly stuck, although Rogers mused that Eastaughffe always hated this name and wanted to name the portal “Porty McPortface” instead, so much so that eventually half of the staff started to refer to the Portal as “Porty”. The name “Porty” is still used by some old timers who started their careers with some of the original Ring staff.

Normal Portal consists of four chambers, each of which has a seeker and 30 travel slots. A seeker is capable of creating up to 30 locks at a given base frequency. Thus, Normal Portal is able to service 120 individual connections.

Normal Portal seeker in action

A seeker bombards a metalloid target with a combination of elementary particles, usually starting with photons in order to open a connection, and proceeding with quarks and antiquarks in order to keep it open. It then traces the particle stream until a dimension is located, which is denoted by the particle tracks cutting out. The seeker then collects this data and the Portal mapping computer begins comparing the data to the reality source and building out a map of the located dimensions. Once at least one dimension is defined, it is presented to the travelers which sit in travel slots. They can either chose the dimension or continue waiting for new ones to appear and browse through those.

If a traveler chooses a dimension, the seeker will then proceed to lock the connection which is done by amplifying the particle stream and force opening a funnel between dimensions.

A travel slot is a small airtight cubicle which has an entrance on one side and an exit on the other. The exit is opened after the lock has commenced, exposing the traveler to environment of another dimension. As soon as the traveler exits and the cubicle is empty, the funnel is closed, but the connection is kept open. Recently, with increased reliability of the mapping, the connection may be closed and re-opened later, but many travelers still chose to keep the connection open. In the past this required an additional fee due to the energy required to hold up the particle stream, but today the efficiency of seeker emitters keeping a connection open is cheap and no longer requires additional money. However, the fee for keeping the connection open actually went up due to increased demand of interdimensional travel: keeping a connection open makes the travel slot unavailable to others.

Seeker never stops scanning for dimensions and the longer it is on, the more dimensions it maps. It is customary for a seeker session to last for months and sometimes years. Unfortunately, it is impossible to store maps for later use, since seekers cannot control the angle at which particles exit our dimension. Because of that, there is no way to use previous mappings, and the map must be extremely accurate in order to open a funnel safely. However, remapping allows to identify already known dimensions and re-open connections with them, if necessary. The only setback might be that the dimension which is needed might take an arbitrary amount of time to be located, especially if the angle of exit is steep. One of the methods to avoid long waiting times is to restart the Portal and try again.

There is on-going research to measure the angle of exit, however Normal Portal is basically not much more than a particle emitter and particle receiver, which limits its capabilities. Exotic Portal is capable of measuring the angle of exit, but the range of error is far too wide for practical use.

Previewing is a way to study other dimensions without sending human beings and is the main use case for the Normal Portal even to this day. Although Normal Portal sends dozens to hundreds of travelers every day, the vast majority of funnels are created for previewing probes. These are usually small devices on a very long cable which allow researchers to peek into the dimension and conduct measurements. Additionally, starting 1985 it is a mandatory procedure to preview all the dimensions that have been scheduled for the day, to ensure that the exit points are still safe (see section “Points of entry” below).

Dimension mapping

Partially due to the practice of previewing, there have been no accidents directly linked to Normal Portal. The Ring contains many backup systems and its own underground power station lovingly called Beast in cases of loss of electricity. However, no major outages have happened, and Normal Portal's history has been largely devoid of any significant incidents.

Points of entry usually depend on the dimension in question. Some dimensions have a single point of entry, which means that travelers will end up emerging at same coordinates again and again. Some dimensions have a set of points of entry, which are determined randomly. In order to acquire a necessary entry point, previewing probes are used.

The higher the type, the more likely points of entry be randomized. Type 3 dimensions almost always will have many points of entry and almost always they are going to be completely randomized. Type 1 dimensions almost always will have a single, directly viewable point of entry.

There have been rare cases of intergalactic frame points of entry, when points of entry seems to be tied to large or very far away astronomical objects, which makes points of entry quickly unusable. In on famous case described in a 1956 paper, a probe exited in what seemed to be the upper atmosphere of a planet, only to see the planet move away at an enormous speed. The probe was left floating in space. The hypothesis is that such points of entry are immovable in relation to something beyond the planet, and thus the planet moves away. Several more such cases have been documented, including at least two cases when the point of entry was well within the atmosphere, and the atmosphere of the moving away planet hit the probe with such force that it was be dissipated into atoms immediately, possibly causing an atmospheric vortex on the planet.

However, due to the fact that such points of entry start within planets, which should be an infinitesimal probability if those entry points are set in frames independent of planet frames, it stands to reason that they are actually within planets' frames, but switch frames when accessed from beyond the dimension. The mechanism that might explain such frame switching is yet unclear.