Notes from the Mad Science Lab: Vacation

So, my wife and our son are heading off to Pennsylvania to visit her parents next week. While they're gone, I thought I'd take a bit of a vacation myself.

Vacations aren't just about getting away from your life; at least, not according to the brochures at the travel agency down the street. No, vacations are all about getting away from the rest of the world.

So that's what I'm going to do.

I considered interstellar travel as an option, but neither I nor any of my colleagues have a working Faster-Than-Light drive. Even if we did, the distances involved border on the ridiculous; even if I built something to provide instantaneous travel across any distance, I could spend years searching for a suitable planet to relax on. And anyway, why take the long way around?

No, I'll be taking advantage of some of the Mad Science community's recent breakthroughs in the field of Dimensional Fatigue Resonance (DFR) instead. Rather than crossing space, DFR allows you to punch through into nearby dimensions, using the Earth's gravity well as an anchor to orient your arrival point on a (broadly) similar planet. By adjusting the resonance, you can tune for different sorts of similarity. My own contribution to the field, the Dimensional Resonance Imager, allows me to preview these worlds before I attempt to set foot on them.

So I've selected a particularly attractive beach on a tranquil world which numbers, among its other virtues, a gravity equivalent to approximately .95 Earth Median Gravity. The atmosphere is as close to identical as random chance can provide, having only a minor difference in trace elements, and the local flora and fauna... well, the plants seem to favor a fern-like spray of leaves; perfect for a tropical vacation. The animals are a bit less symmetrical than we're used to, tending to have one strong side and one agile side, but are otherwise similar enough.

I haven't seen any indication of intelligent life or major predators, but I'll be prepared just in case: my travel bag includes flip-flops, Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, two death rays, an electrified shield enclosure, and a case of scotch. In addition, I've designed a belt buckle which will remotely activate my DFR transport tube, allowing me to escape immediately to the Q&D (quarantine and decontamination) area of the crypto-zoo.

So those are my vacation plans: extra-dimensional sand castles and scotch. As long as my transport tube doesn't create a fractal array of dimensional weaknesses that provide unexpected holes between the two worlds, it should be fine.