GOLD OPENS DOORS
Our name, The Travel Agency, has a tendency to give the wrong impression. We do not book cruises, nor do we arrange honeymoons. We cannot get you two weeks in Niagara Falls for sixty bucks, and if some rascal claiming to be from accounting says otherwise, do NOT give him your Social Security number.
The Travel Agency deals in transportation of a somewhat broader variety. You’ll hear plenty of fancy terminology around Headquarters about K3 surfaces and noncommutative geometry, but don’t let all that highfalutin talk get your socks in a twist. The eggheads use those words because they’re trying to describe the machinery from the outside. You’ve been traveling all throughout, and that’s probably why you’re a little mixed up. But it’s nothing serious! We will have you all sorted out, lickety split.
For field purposes, here’s what you need to understand right now… Space and time are not a rigid stage. Civilians assume you can only travel along the surface. That’s not what we do. We bring two sufficiently distant portions of the map into the appropriate relation and cross between them. Easy as banana cream pie! The mathematics is considerably less easy than pie, though, which is why we have the eggheads. Whatever you do, don’t ask one of them to explain it during lunch. They’re grumpy. Except for Marvin. Marvin is never grumpy.
Do you remember Marvin?
Anywho, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can’t necessarily get somewhere by going there, when it comes down to it. Location is only part of the address after all. Most tenderfoots imagine that if a room exists at 1729 West Something-or-Other, then all they have to do is mosey over to 1729 West Something-or-Other and open the door. Wouldn’t that be swell? Unfortunately, most of our way stations are observer-dependent. This means that you may be standing in front of the shiny glass entry doors of an automatic carwash, but you may not presently be the person to whom the “automatic carwash” is accessible. But don’t worry, if you consult the records you may find yourself in the right shoes soon enough.
The eggheads can describe this phenomenon with crackerjack precision, and the basic theory involves geometric structures that permit configurations which appear disconnected locally to become adjacent under higher-dimensional transformations. But Personnel has a more vanilla explanation:
Sometimes the door doesn’t know you… Yet.
When that happens, don’t blow your top, you’ll only hurt your head. Go onward and upward, traveler! If you stay cool and keep on keeping on, you’ll eventually loop back around with the key.
