At Sea: Transmission X459 from within Base 6, Somewhere in Z-Space

Begin Transmission...[all words approximations translated by the {untranslatable word}]1. Immigrants still cross over in one-to-one ratio with bioneered neuro-controllers. Walking ghosts. Zombies. Blinded by the flow of silver. Processed at a blinding pace, but still they come from door after door, drawn by signals we cannot really hear. Do they know what awaits them?2. Maybe it was microscopic. Maybe it was right in front of them. Millions of these sensors monitoring the golden strands have been strewn across a thousand galaxies. Each filament attuned to the vibrations of a different kind of mind. Immersed in establishing the correct connections. When their work is done, they become brittle and wash up on a trillion beaches across worlds, across realities.3. But some sensors need antennae that can roam free. The more unwieldy these antennae look the less they will be suspected. One millimeter of exoskeleton can receive ten trillion retained impulses and transmit them to another million sensors that then analyze the data.4. It appears that the immigrants (some might call them refugees) thus persuaded are stored for a time with any manner of machine free-swimming through the corridors of the laboratory known as Base 6. There they breathe water as if born to it, and, of course, some were. Is there a choice still left for them at this point?5. Within the Base 6 laboratory, ancillary devices known as sunspoilers and sunspotters sift through real-time information brought by the immigrants. We do not know what they are looking for, nor how much time they have been given for the task. All we know is that they are close.6. Once a certain amount of analysis has occurred, the immigrants' brains are temporarily transposed with the gelatinous solution surrounding them in the chambers of the laboratory. This requires a sudden standing stasis on the part of the subject and transmogrifying the brain in question into a more ethereal form. Here, the act in progress, as the brain gracefully exits to the left from the body in the center.7. A close-up of a dislodged brain in ethereal form drifting through spinal fluid and amniotic fluid, several hours before re-engagement. The energy discharged from the tendrils will be vital to transposing the cross-dimensional diver (CDD), as will become clear soon.8. The CDD prepares for the jump by building up momentum with the kinetic energy of its tail feeding directly into its enhanced brain.9. Simultaneous with this action, the mental energy harvested from the immigrants is channeled through thousands of connective synapse worms, their nether ends tethered in far distant potential galaxies crucial to the CDD's journey.10. As the CDD approaches the critical speed to enter the parallel universe selected, it releases ballast in the form of discharge accumulated during prior jumps.11. The Guardian, always alert during these moments, translates data into information relevant to space and time, parts of its nano-flesh shaking into and out of tides and wormholes that open as a result of its inquiries.12. The CDD crosses into the parallel universe, where it will begin its harvest. A CDD can only survive a dozen such trips before it goes insane.13. As soon as the CDD has crossed over, the Guardian stabilizes in our reality, creating a wall against any intruder that might think to take advantage of the small opening created by the CDD's wake.14. In further support of these efforts, the Guardian generates silver-slips of deadly localized fragments of black holes to patrol the outer-most perimeter, and to escort the CDD upon its return.15. Attuned to other states of being, the mogwah, meanwhile, shores up the cosmic radiance of our own reality against a different kind of intruder entirely.16. Working in a simulator environment within the laboratory, many researchers study the effect of the CDD's jump on our own existence. The more interference, the more the picture blurs and the colors become dull. Sometimes the effects can be cataclysmic, no matter the safeguards. And yet the price is small given the potential reward of continued life.17. Finally, exhausted, driving data, possibility, and samples before and within it, the CDD returns, almost dead from the effort.18. Sometimes the dissonance, the strain, is too much, and the cross-dimensional diver cannot keep its form, and then it will revert to a corporealness similar to a damaged version of the client brains provided by the immigrants.19. If this happens, then too the sunspotters and sunspoilers, even the synapse worms, are riven apart by the stress, and the laboratory is rendered temporarily blind until they can repair the damage.20. Usually, however, the CDD retains its form and content jets out from it in a profusion of data that must be caught by the sunspotters21. However, the most valuable of the materials brought back by the CDD are the off-loaded membranes that enhance the ability to peer into other worlds and realities without traveling there. Each unique and thus individual in their capacity and their reach, these membranes hold out the best hope for repairing the damage that will one day, perhaps soon, result in the death of our reality. This is the main reason for the CDD's dangerous missions.22. It is for this purpose, too, that the immigrants, either consciously or subconsciously, are willing to go through the strangeness and agony of brain dissolution and recovery. For they will never be the same afterwards.23. The mogwah and his minions will reassign the immigrants to somewhere new after they have been used.24. This new life may be familiar and yet thrilling.25. It may be unfamiliar and yet simple.26. But the Guardian will never let them remember what came before. They will have only the new memories in keeping with their new reality. They will not remember the shining gates or the breaching of the cross-dimensional diver or the push of universes against each other like crashing waves. Only a hint of it. Only a passing image here, there, then gone.27. Perhaps this fragment of the past will even take the form of a glimpse of the laboratory's supreme director, to whom CDD and Guardian and mogwah all ultimately report...and who sits there even now, pondering new solutions to the possible dissolution of our reality....End TransmissionAquarium photos by Tessa Kum