One of those captions that seemed like a fun idea when I started writing it, but just ended up very silly. Ah well 🤣

The problem with Planck portals was that the energy required to create them scaled exponentially with their diameter. With little more than a nine-volt battery, a semi-stable, one-inch-wide perforation could be torn open to any point in the Universe. Double that to two inches and you require the output of an entire power station.

But to create a portal wide enough to allow a human to pass through? That would demand more than the total energy output of the sun in its lifetime.

It was one of those cruel cosmic jokes, like the speed of light or the shackles of gravity, that seemed to mock human ambition. The entire Universe lay so achingly close, and yet so far, worlds without number tantalisingly out of reach. Humanity was fated only to look through a letterbox at worlds it would never stand upon.

With physics at an impasse, biology took up the baton of squeezing a human through the eye of a needle, asking such questions as 'how do we turn a man into a liquid' or 'do babies really need arms?'. Plans for artificial wombs capable of operating on alien worlds were drawn up.

A genius of genetic design, Professor Bryant, offered his own solution - disassembling and reassembling a human on the other side.

In the first trial, his thumb was amputated, and modified genetically into its own organism, possessing just enough nerve tissue to operate autonomously, while emitting a bio-electric field that allowed it to exchange neural impulses across small areas of open space. He could sense what it sensed, as it stood on his hand for the cameras of the press, and puppeteer it. On a small scale, the Professor had become the first hive-minded human.

He named it a Severant.