[ WP ] Doctors have found out the use of the appendix , and it is not good .

Humanity's Golden Age started in the year 2020, when researchers at CERN lucked into opening an Einstein-Rosen Bridge the size of a grapefruit. Almost immediately, a sealed manila envelope fell through, labeled **'' WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW'' **. There was a single flash drive in the envelope; no strangers to the idea of ontological paradoxes, the researchers copied the contents of the flash drive to a blank flash drive, sealed that in a new envelope, gave it the same label, and dropped it through the other end of the wormhole. 
 
 The files contained an improved version of their method: suggestions on how to make bigger bridges, precise control of when and where the other end opened, how to build quantum entangled radios for communication synced across spacetime... and how to access parallel universes. 
 
 It was the Age of Exploration all over again; any idiot with a national charter, an inflated ego, and no survival instinct could hop in a bridge and go see what was on the other side. Mapping our universe came first, astrophysicists getting to observe stars in real time, biologists happily completing the fossil record with freshly preserved cadavers, movies shot on-set in the deep past, a Jurassic Park sequel with no CGI followed by the establishment of a real Jurassic Park, moon colonies, Mars colonies - everything you could imagine. 
 
 The explorers from other universes, however, started to bring back disturbing reports. Oftentimes, whole universes would be dead. Not just unborn, but dead - life had formed and then it had died out. Some of our explorers began to die in ways that seemed unlikely - using their radios as a black box, investigations into their deaths always suggested an unlikely chain of circumstances. Freak avalanches, planes breaking down for no reason and landing precisely on world-hoppers, brakes failing without reason. 
 
 We did n't really want to say the multiverse was fighting against us, but it certainly seemed that way. 
 
 Some of the world-hoppers had the odd idea of finding themselves. Some reported success - some reported graves marked with their names. Running the list of people who found their doubles and those who found their doubles dead against the medical records, the only correlation was appendix removal. 
 
 It seemed... unlikely. But we'd apparently given a few conspiracy theorists wormhole passports, and they'd found this too tantalizing to pass up, and started searching through obituaries in every world, trying to prove the correlation. The results were eerie. 
 
 If a plane crashed on every Earth, and a John Doe died in at least one world but survived in others, his appendix would invariably fail within the week. Car crash killed your world-twin? Pop goes the appendix. Jealous lover? Killed in action? Driving on New Year's Eve, and a drunk T-bones you? Pop. 
 
 We did n't really like that theory, that the appendix was designed to synchronize your death across the multiverse. That opened a lot of doors... but no good ones. We kept our findings mostly secret. We had no intention of announcing the multiverse was probably created by something intelligent, that wanted to keep its universes synced up and was killing to kill us to do so. Frankly, no one wanted to tell the Pope God might be real, but if he was, he was a jerk. But we also worried we would reignite every religious war in our world as the existence of a creator suddenly made the question of which god was real relevant once more, and for every death in our world, countless appendices would explode across every other world. No one wanted that much blood on our hands. 
 
 But we were n't recklessly careful. We made our findings clear to select world leaders, who began mandating appendix removals. No longer would we chance the death of any of our own people just because their world-twin died elsewhere. 
 
 I told you we entered a Golden Age. We did. The multiverse wanted us to die when it chose, but as a race, we said fuck that, and we did what humans do: we explored, we adapted, and we conquered the virgin multiverse. We've been more places than anyone can conceive of, seen wonders without count, we'll never again have to worry about space or resources, and every inhabited world has some new solution to offer us. Our lives are now measured in centuries, diseases were eradicated, and we've only explored a fraction of the multiverse - new discoveries from new worlds pour in every day, and the rate of progress only accelerates. 
 
 If you're out there, God, we're coming for you. And we're taking back our multiverse.
