[ WP ] Arthur C. Clarke said that `` Two possibilities exist : either we are alone in the universe or we are not . Both are equally terrifying . '' What he did n't know is that there is a third possibility ...

I was nervously laughing, a couple were crying, and everyone else was dead silent. I've always been one to laugh when everything is utterly fucked. We'd run countless trials and at this point our initially absurd hypothesis was looking nearly certain. 
 
 Just half a year ago our research group had received an excitingly large grant from DARPA. For over a decade the group had investigating various forms of unbreakable untraceable communications based on quantum level affects. Tantalizingly one approach appeared to enable instantaneous communication. We did n't have the equipment or the funds to build the equipment to study the phenomenon further. Jeff, Dr. Lopatic to be formal and professional, rustled up a lot of interest in DARPA and a big hefty grant. He runs the research group and while we definitely have our disagreements, I am eternally grateful that ultimately he's responsible for begging for grant money and not me. Well, I used to be. Now I sincerely, utterly, deeply, desperately wish we never had had the funds to continue this research. 
 
 Jeff was utterly silent. I was still laughing although tears were also starting to well up in my eyes. Jeff opened his mouth slightly, looked around, and just closed it again. The seven of us were staring at our `` probe''. 
 
 It turns out that if you excite an electron just so, you can change its location in space time. For all intents and purposes, you can make it teleport. If done with absolute precision this makes instantaneous secure communication possible, in admittedly such a bizarre way that we of course discovered this completely by accident. Initially we could make an electron jump one of two exact distances over and over again. With DARPA's funding we pinpointed these distances at 4.24 * 10^-30 meters and 2.71 * 10^-28 meters. Priya had the almost inexplicable observation that as far our precision went these values were 262,144 and 16,777,216 planck lengths, which is bizarrely peculiar because in base 4 these values are 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000. I think we all forgot her observation for a while, but later on it was impossible to ignore. 
 
 Priya was n't crying anymore, but only because she had run out of tears. I was silent now, my manic laughter had only kept me sane or at least distracted for slightly longer than everyone else. Priya was staring in sorrow at our `` probe''. 
 
 We analyzed exactly how the electrons were being excited and how far they jumped. Through trial and error were able to teleport the electrons different distances. After teleporting four different distances we all started to get suspicious. The oscillation of the energy used to excite the electrons was a perfect pattern and the pattern was n't that the the more energy we put in the farther the electron teleported. It corresponded perfectly to Priya's ridiculous observation that the distances were base 4 planck lengths. We worked out the formula and transported electrons hundreds of different precise distances exactly as predicted. 
 
 Everyone was dead silent, all eyes on our `` probe''. I used to consider it a probe, no quotes. But it was a `` probe'' now. If was being intellectually honest with myself at the time, which I was in no state to be, then I should have considered myself to be an `` I'' by then. 
 
 Jeff wanted to try teleporting a proton. A proton is so big compared to an electron it's like comparing a penny to the moon. The amount of energy that should be involved to move a proton is tremendously more than an electron, but we were teleporting the electrons not actually moving them. On the first try we teleported a proton the exact same distance an electron would have been teleported. A few more tries confirmed Jeff's idea. Shortly thereafter we did a neutron. By the end of the day we had teleported an entire helium atom. That was three months ago. 
 
 Priya and I locked eyes. The `` probe'' was our idea. Everyone had worked almost non-stop for the past three months to make it a reality, but we poured every last drop of ourselves into it. In a moment of waning sorrow I thought about the eight billion other people not in this room who were unburdened by our knowledge, but inevitably they would know soon enough. 
 
 Teleporting molecules turned out to be a bit trickier, but the same principle applied. Within a week we had teleported thousands of molecules at once. Over lunch Priya and I had convinced ourselves we could scale this up to teleport a microscopic transmitter to see how far we could teleport it. A few sleepless nights and we could teleport the transmitter within our lab. With just one small tweak we managed to teleport it anywhere within a few kilometers and beyond that distance we were n't able to receive the transmissions. 
 
 Jeff opened his mouth, paused, and was the first person to speak in over half an hour, `` We'll now we know for sure. ” Everyone nodded, but no one else spoke. 
 
 Very little energy was actually needed to teleport the transmitter, but the equipment involved was extremely custom, painstakingly assembled, and bulky. Priya and I realized that if we made a much smaller version we could teleport a teleporter. So we did. We switched from teleporting a transmitter to a sensor. On the first try we teleport a sensor to low Earth orbit and back, the second time we sent one to the moon. Two days later after some very careful calculations we sent a sensor to Proxima Centauri. 
 
 I looked over at the lab bench where we proudly had a half dozen sensors in protective plexiglass containers. From the moment they came back successfully we were convinced they'd rightfully belong in a museum. Priya's gaze followed mine and she looked contemplatively at what we had done. We could have stopped at the sensors. 
 
 The sensors were microscopic and returned barely enough data to confirm they had been sent to where we expected they would go. Over Jeff's initial half-hearted objections, Priya and I convinced everyone to build a sensor-laden probe so that we could collect much more detailed data. For our own innate curiosity the probe included a sensor that took more-or-less normal photos intended for human eye. We sent the probe to the moon and then to Proxima Centauri to test it out. Then we attempted to send the probe so far the calculations said it would be teleported half way across the galaxy. 
 
 Moving my attention from the lab bench back to the `` probe'', part of me desperately wanted to kick and smash it to pieces. It'd have been deeply unprofessional of course, but what actually stopped me is that it was probably still dangerously cold from having spent a good while in the near absolute zero environment of deep space. 
 
 The probe did not teleport itself to half way across the galaxy. Every part of the probe gave off light and in a moment of extreme stupidity I touched the probe. It was noticeably warmer than it should have been, but luckily nowhere near hot enough to hurt me. The glowing stopped and the probe cooled off. Repeating this several more times and then tweaking the excitement pattern showed that we were directly adding energy to every single particle in the probe. Through more trial and error we found the boundary between teleporting and adding energy. 
 
 The `` probe'' sitting on the ground in front of us had just traveled thousands of light years and back, the very furthest we could send it based on the boundary we had discovered. It should have been a great accomplishment, but we all knew we had simply cheated. There was no rationale universe in which particles could be excited such that they ’ d teleport or gain energy for free and the only different was the input pattern. But there was certainly an explanation. One that we had all been nervously hypothesizing about for days. One that was now the only reasonable explanation. I think all of us were seriously wondering whether we were going to have to tell anyone or whether it would all just end. 
 
 The excitement patterns we had been using had always looked far more like the input to a computer program than a physics equation. None of us in the research group had a computer science background, but most of us had a working knowledge. After the probe glowing incident I had an odd feeling I had seen something like this before. A late night scavenging the internet and a conversation with a friend who had gone on to become a professional software developer left me with what I was looking for - a buffer overflow. It ’ s an exploit of a program where due to a bug, data can be input past the expected end and if done in a very exact manner a part of the program will run using that data in way that was never intended. 
 
 The “ probe ” disappeared. I started laughing again. Jeff and I looked over at our initial teleporting equipment, or more accurately where it had been until a moment ago. “ Well that ’ s convenient, thanks! ” I said to … our creators? I had never been religious, questions like the Fermi Paradox had always held far more interest than whether there were gods. It ’ s funny how not until the end do you realize that there never really was anything or anyone in the universe at all because it was all just a simulation and that the “ gods ” were the ones who were real. By the time I finished that thought the seven of us were in a completely white space with no obvious entrances or exits.
