I wanted to arrive naked, slick and trembling in the moody car park near your flat, but I was talked out of it by Consensus. The handful of your movies I'd seen convinced me that a newcomer to your slice of spacetime should materialise as some sort of overgrown foetus in a phosphorescent womb of raw energy. Only when it was suggested I'd traded my cerebellum for a melon did I concede that it made no sense to pander to the undereducated fictions of a world into which I hoped to slip unnoticed.

I was nevertheless tempted by the offer of a single-use plasma shunt by some prankster. I couldn't decide whether it was a moral spot-test or weasel words from a gamehead keen enough to sneak past Vigilance. A microsecond dose of the fourth and prettiest state of matter would have made my arrival as spectacular as the second coming of whatever you worship, but it would also have turned a city block to molten glass and prevented me from blending in. Not that I'd have found room for it in my suit pockets with all my other tiny essentials. Even if I had, Ethics & Mores would have confiscated it at Portal and Consensus would have slapped me around the lobes.

Such abstract morality: in our pure, rational technocracy, we can't shake off the notion that what goes around comes around, even if it goes around in a different sliver of the multiverse. Not that I would advocate irradiating thousands of strangers on a whim just because they pitch their tents in a different existential campsite. I should grow some manners and explain. I'm from here, but it's a here you're never likely to see. I'm not going to blather on about the prodigious achievements of our civilisation, but it's fair to say we've done much better than you in almost identical conditions.

You have some very quaint cars, boats and aeroplanes, and all of that fossil-burning and getting pummelled by the laws of physics without the benefit of inertial or gravitic damping has a certain old world charm. We have instantaneous travel between dimensions. We occupy the same wedge of spacetime and the same raw matter, but we use a different strand of it; we resonate to different notes.

Or something along those lines. I'm not a specialist and I certainly wouldn't trust me to do Portal's job. But I can just about hold my own in a multiple choice exam on the General Theory of Everything, provided there are lots of pictures in exciting colours. More importantly, I'm sufficiently lacking in fear, imagination and humility to make an ideal test subject.

The Right Stuff, Cojones, True Grit, Affiçion, Derring Do: attach the culturally fitting label of your choice, but this is what the first test subjects had bursting from their flinty eyes. Back then, Portal was 93.7% sure it could deliver them into another dimension with at least 95% physical integrity, but could only guestimate which dimension that was whilst offering a 0% accurate picture of what they could expect to find there.

Assuming they arrived with a full complement of body parts, and not in a lava flow or an episode of ethnic cleansing, they were still guaranteed a one way trip until a way of finding them and bringing them back was pioneered.

TBC (maybe)