The Three Laws of Wormhole Safety
Chief Engineer Patricia Wong stood before the fresh batch of CERN-7 interns, watching their eager faces with the weary expression of someone who’d seen too many brilliant minds nearly erase themselves from existence.
“Before we begin,” she said, gesturing to the massive wormhole generator behind reinforced quantum glass, “let’s review the Three Laws of Wormhole Safety.”
A keen young woman raised her hand. “Is this about preventing paradoxes?”
“No. Paradoxes are actually quite difficult to create. The universe has robust error-correction. This is about preventing you from doing something stupid with a hole in spacetime.”
She pulled up the incident report from last Tuesday. “The First Law: A wormhole must not be used for any purpose that would embarrass you if your mother found out.”
The interns laughed. Patricia didn’t.
“Last week, Dr. Peterson created a wormhole from his office to his apartment so he wouldn’t have to commute. Seemed logical. Except he forgot wormholes are bidirectional. His cat wandered through. Then his neighbor’s cat. Then his neighbor, looking for her cat. Then building security, looking for the neighbor. By the time we shut it down, half his apartment building was wandering around CERN’s restricted areas.”
She clicked to the next slide. “The Second Law: A wormhole’s exit point must be verified before, during, and after creation.”
“Isn’t that redundant?” asked an intern with the kind of confidence that preceded most catastrophes.
“Dr. Martinez thought so too. Created a ‘quick transit’ wormhole to Beijing for a conference. Didn’t verify the exit coordinates were in three-dimensional space. The conference attendees were very surprised when he materialized in the middle of their lunch buffet. From above. At terminal velocity.”
The interns had stopped smiling.
“The Third Law,” Patricia continued, “is the most important: Just because you can create a wormhole doesn’t mean you should.”
She pulled up a compilation of the month’s “incidents”:
- Wormhole to steal snacks from the past (created a recursive loop where the snacks never existed)
- Wormhole for “faster” data transfer (data arrived before it was sent, causing IT nightmares)
- Wormhole for waste disposal (connected to another universe that sent their waste back, with interest)
- Wormhole for “privacy” (accidentally linked to a parallel universe’s bathroom)
“But these are all minor uses,” protested an intern. “We’re trained for major spacetime engineering!”
Patricia smiled grimly. “That’s what everyone thinks. Until 3 AM when you’re tired, the coffee machine is broken, and you remember there’s fresh coffee in the breakroom... of yesterday.”
She led them to the observation deck overlooking the main wormhole chamber. Inside, a stable transit wormhole shimmered between Earth and Luna, handling thousands of commuters per hour. Beautiful. Elegant. Monitored by seventeen AI systems and forty-three human technicians.
“This is what we do when we’re careful,” Patricia said. “When we respect the technology. But I’ve seen what happens when we don’t. Wormholes used for pranks that accidentally deleted people from timelines. ‘Shortcut’ wormholes that connected to the inside of stars. One grad student tried to use a micro-wormhole to cheat on an exam by looking at the answers in the future. Created a causality loop where the exam never existed, the course never existed, and we’re still not sure if his degree exists.”
“So how do we use them safely?” asked the keen young woman from earlier.
Patricia appreciated the question. “You remember that you’re punching a hole in reality. That the universe tolerates this, but has limits. That every wormhole is a negotiation with physics itself.”
She showed them to their workstations. “Your first assignment: calculate the energy requirements for a wormhole between here and the cafeteria. Then explain why walking is better. If you can’t answer that, you’re not ready to bend spacetime.”
As the interns began their calculations, Patricia noticed one—Kim something—pull out a sandwich.
“Where did you get that?” Patricia asked suspiciously.
“The cafeteria?”
“The cafeteria is closed for renovation.”
Kim’s face went pale. “But I just... I mean, I walked there...”
Patricia sighed and pulled up the temporal scanners. Sure enough, a tiny unauthorized wormhole signature, leading to next week when the cafeteria would reopen.
“Congratulations,” she told Kim. “You’ve violated all three laws in your first hour. That’s a new record.”
“What happens now?”
“Now? Now you write a 10,000-word essay on why stealing sandwiches from the future is problematic. And you’ll present it. To your past self. Before you stole the sandwich. Creating a paradox where you never stole it but still have to write the essay.”
“That seems unnecessarily complicated.”
Patricia smiled. “Welcome to wormhole engineering. Where the simplest solution is usually walking, but nobody ever learns that until they’ve accidentally created a grandfather paradox over a sandwich.”
She returned to her office, past seventeen different warning signs about wormhole misuse. Her coffee was cold. The coffee machine was still broken. Tomorrow’s coffee would be fresh and hot, just a small spacetime puncture away...
She walked to the kitchen and microwaved her cold coffee like a normal person.
The Fourth Law of Wormhole Safety, she reflected, was the hardest: Leading by example when you have the power to bend reality to your convenience.
But that’s what separated engineers from chaos.
Most days, anyway.