The Particle Portals

Like the big Star Wars nerd that I was, as a kid I was engrossed in science fiction and the cosmos. Stars fascinated me. Galaxies too. I sponged up book after book, movie after movie, video game after video game, story after story on science fiction, war, and fantasy. 

   I would incorporate the tropes and premises into my own fantasy world that I would go and escape into to detach myself from a world I didn't want to be a part of and felt very little freedom in. 

     In my own universe, I would fight war after war and battle after battle, destroying evil and laying waste to my enemies all the while creating an elaborate escape from the real world and the traumas that came with it. This world never satisfied me, and as a child the fantasies gave me a sense of purpose, adventure, and pleasure that nothing in this reality could ever match or supercede.

    In the universe I developed, there were seven primary races that had colonized most of the galaxies in the known universe and partitioned planets and territories between the seven of them, and they engaged in squabbles and had differences here and there. Often times there was always some sort of evil force that overthrew the established order and a war would commence between the good guys and the bad guys. Very Star Wars style storylines. 

    I tried to be original occasionally in my fantasies, and one of my favorite things I developed in one of my fantasy war stories is what essentially was an "artificial reality." It kind of has a matrix feel to it, but a little different. During one of the space wars against "evil empire" the good guys were getting there butts kicked. They were on the verge of being completely annihilated.

    However, there was a massive secret project that the good side was working on. They were designing an artificial reality where anything conceivable can be made manifest and real and brought into the real world fully functional and operational, just as real as the real. The way you access this reality was through sub-atomic particles that you would detect with a certain device and you can enter into the artificially reality the moment you connect with just one of the particles. 

     These particles were engineered portals to a man-made reality of unlimited resources and unlimited potential. Anything you wanted, anything you could imagine could be accessed in this reality, and it would be just as real as the real world. Of course, this made these particles weapons because you could all of the sudden access whatever weapon you wanted or needed in this artificial reality.

      The good guys detonated a bomb that spread these particle portals across the universe. All the sudden the good guys had all the weapons and warriors they would ever need. It won the war.

     In this new reality any technology, environment, city, and way of existing could exist and could be as real as you want it to be. There were quintillions...uncountable numbers of new worlds and new civilizations. Your house could be as big as you want it to be or as small as you want it to be. You could live anywhere, do anything, and be anything.

     It was a freedom that I as a young boy relished in in my own mind. It was a freedom that I've never had in life, nor will I ever have. This liberty has dissipated as I got older and into adulthood, but I'll never forget how that freedom felt. 

      What I do know is that God's going to give me this liberty and multiply it by an infinite number. Even though I can't have the freedom I want on earth. Eternity's promise is far superior to any faux promise of liberty and opportunity this place could ever give me.

    The freedom here is a tragic joke.