Márk Gál
…and I entered the room with Mr Jan Erik Johansen. 12m², that’s the area of a casual office. Its area is evenly distributed on a rectangle, furnished with a shady brown pine desk, a black swivel chair and an armchair composed of the same color. The paint of the wall is a cappuccino brown painted by a not-outstanding painter who made some mistakes, but as many as a very not-outstanding painter does. The LED lamps and a white rectangle framed window provided just enough light to read, but the room was neither gloomy nor vibrant. The documents on the desks were organized, but I didn’t have the feeling that Johansen was a man diagnosed with OCD and that he couldn’t stand it if there was one match that wasn’t lying along with the others. I felt that the place felt way too sinisterly mediocre, considering that it had one HP laptop, which is a very common brand. You might hope that its room number would be something unique, but I have to disappoint you: it is just 26 (not even a prime or a quadratic number).
I was thinking, why had Equinor promised me 20 million NOK plus a 200 thousand NOK wage for the job? -What did they mean under “setting up and organizing crude oil production under extraordinary circumstances”? – I was asking the college.
– Well… I think you should extract it from PET bottles.
– Ha ha… very “funny”!
He opened his laptop, dragged out a program that was hidden in the Recycle Bin, and started to run it, than put the documents away from the desk’s shelf, which turned out to be secretly a sensor that activated something only when this protocol was performed the exact same way. The computer popped up the site where I could register using a code that was on the paper they gave me.
– But be serious, can you tell me what my job to do here is and not just doing something like I didn’t exist? – Asking him very nicely like a true gentlemen who is very patient.
– I’m on it. You know by making that something I can answer your question. Now could hold your lower jaw and tongue in the same position till I finish? Thank you!
It was a very heavy task to do, but somehow I managed. He registered me and then something weird happened with the part of the wall where the not-outstanding painter made not outstandingly many, but a few mistakes. I was just lifted up, and a gloomy hallway appeared. It also included a steel stairway leading down way so deep I could hardly see its end. I failed to continue the mission which Johansen had entrusted me with. The gravity pulled my jaw a minimum of 20 cm if not more.
– I told you something! – he yelled at me with cynicism. – Now you may have some questions for instance… why those lamps, those useless pieces of scrap, do not work when I ordered them recently?! Well I want to know that too! Even their blasted warranty has not expired, because than I would understand why those damn Chinese made it like this! – Yelling madly like a father who had entered the shop and realized at the cash register that he forgot to bring his coupons and just left the shop.
That was the first question which came to my mind! – I answered calmly and brutally honestly. – Look, there is the switch, I assume you forgot to turn on!
You are a nervy savior, Mr. Olsen! It seems you know what is what here more than I do!
While we were walking down the stairs he told me that at the end there would be a tremendously large underground that transports both personnel and crude oil. It made sense to me, since there were headquarters in Bergen where the black gold was also extracted, but the enormous gates sealed a more meaningful secret, or so I thought.
Well behind these steel gates there is your future, our future, Norway’s future, maybe the world’s future… – the colleague said.
After 15 minutes of waiting and chatting, a smaller crew of our scientists arrived, and we opened the seal. Behind it there was huge whatchamacallit, having a hole in its middle and tons of coils and wires around it. When a scientist turned on it I saw a reflection of a meadow with a lake. It turned out that I was looking at Minnesota and this monstrosity was a portal, but not just any kind of portal. With this we could jump into a new dimension of our world where the reserves of oil were much more. But there are twists. The portal can change to new dimensions or new places in that dimension and it wasn’t completely stable, so if someone entered at a wrong moment they might get through with just half of themself, but the most important fact is that the in the dimensions there are quirky physics and many times reversed ones. We can filter some of these traits, but we can’t remove all of them, so this is what “extraordinary circumstances” means.
Just to mention some of them from my first expedition: the crude oil in D1 wasn’t a fossil fuel that needed eternities for extraction and refinement; instead it is generated in less than a year. However, in the USA, where guns are allowed, here were the fewest crimes committed particularly by guns, but in the homeland gunshots occur more times than you here a birds sing a day, where firearms are prohibited even for most cops. But this was just a slight one. In Iraq, there is stability and women keep harems of men, and top models that barely weight 50 kg often kidnap masculine men and rape them… What I found outrageous was that those who lived no more than 20 years spent more time in the sunlight than prisoners and also hated to scroll on kotkiT. How dare they! And they also prefer to eat vegetables over anything. Or that the USA is actually a communist state which very oddly not collapsed and was led by a man named Trotsky from Mexico. (Yes the leaders of the countries mainly lead the country from the outside of their own.) Apart from these silly social changes there are biological, physical and chemical ones, too. Gravitation mostly works, but sometimes it just vanishes. Chemical reactions happen much faster; probably this is the main reason why there are so many of those mixtures of carbon and hydrogen. And probably the oddest one of all is that many animals (humans included) are old when born; as time passes they become younger and younger, and people usually die young. (This is why I said “lived no more than 20 years” and not young people instead)
After we arrived back some of the particles we brought with us from the New World started to glitch the atmosphere. Luckily we sent them all back to their original place, but unluckily we still need to find a solution to this issue of bringing oil to our world.