“Or else,” continued Todd. “The remote is going to start leaking.”
“Leaking?” said Carrie. “What do you mean? It’s going to piss on the carpet?”
Todd sighed, which is amazingly cute coming from a hamster. “I mean that remote is basically a mini singularity. You see that machine behind you. There’s a white hole in there.”
“A white hole?”
“Yes.”
Carrie leaned back. She could tell this would be a long lecture, and she wanted to get comfortable. “Which is…?”
Another cute sigh. “Do you know what a black hole is?”
“Kinda, not really,” she admitted.
“A black hole is a very dense, very heavy object that sucks in everything, including light. It’s one of the most powerful and least understood phenomena in the universe”
“Okay.”
“A white hole is the opposite. It can produce any type of energy or matter from seemingly nowhere.”
“Neat,” she said only slightly impressed.
“Most scientists believed that it was impossible to make one, a white hole, that is. I figured out how to make one, though. I even figured out how to make a second smaller white hole and quantum entangle it with the main reactor here. Then I figured out how to, sort of, poke the hole to get it to produce what I wanted. Basically, the big hole is the source of the energy, and the little hole is where the energy is released.”
“Okay,” she said. “And the little one is going to leak?”
“Yes, right now it is contained by an electrical field in the remote, but if the battery runs out on the field, then the little hole is going to start leaking energy.”
“And, that’s bad,” she ventured.
“Yes, that’s bad. If the remote starts to leak, the energy might just start warping reality out of control.”
“I see.”
“You do?”
“Yep,” she said. “You’re crazy.”
“Crazy?”
She leaned forward. “Yep, you made this incredibly complex and powerful device and then, in your incredible wisdom, took it to a library to get off on messing with some random girl. Nice job.”
That cute hamster sigh again.
“And, now you’re stuck as a hamster, and the remote is going to start melting reality somewhere.”
“I don’t know what it will do when the containment fails. It might do nothing. It might just sit there. Or…”
“Or…” she prompted him.
“…or, it could tear a hole in reality and destroy the planet.”
“Hmm.”
“Probably, something in between those two possibilities.”
“Well,” she said, nonplussed. “How do we get it back?”