Constants and Variables

This features lewds between the same person but, like, alternate dimension versions of the same person. I dunno if that's a kink that people are squicked out by but I think it's hot. This also features some medical play, some trans feels, and, as always, some far too revelatory self-insert nonsense. Reader discretion is advised but I think it turned out okay!

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"Whelp, there goes another 50,000 dollars."

Jonas Boltzman watched with bleary eyes as the enormous tunnel behind the safety glass spun to a halt. His dark brown hair was long enough to need a ponytail, and a week's worth of patchy stubble pocked his soft features. Utilitarian glasses sat perched on the bridge of his nose, and the white lab coat of his profession clung to his sagging shoulders. Another disaster. Another chance blown.

Around him, a dozen other scientists ranging from professors to Ph.D. candidates went through a painfully familiar checklist to shut down the experiment safely. Their only product this time was a few neon blue wisps of the Vostok Effect: a little-understood reaction that oxygen-heavy environments had to dimensional warping. He didn't waste time watching the ethereal harbingers of his failure vanish; he'd seen them enough in his dreams.

"Anyone have any theories this time?" he asked, collapsing into his ops chair.

Dr. Kolsko spoke up. Her short cut hair was silver, despite her relative youth. It sat uneven on her head, jutting up in places where she'd clutched at it in frustration. "We need to run the data first. It's impossible to know right now."

Another familiar refrain. Unspoken words hung heavy over the room's occupants. Another costly failure with no more data to show for it. One of the basic tenets of the scientific method was that failure was an acceptable result. That information is gained from discovering what is not possible in the same way as discovering what is. But they all lived in the real world, and even the grad students knew that the university wouldn't keep paying the bill for this. More importantly: the corporate sponsors in the arms industry wouldn't either.

Jonas felt like he'd aged a decade in the 8 months of Project REVERB. They had hailed him as a prodigy of sorts, discovering the fundamental principles of practical Einstein-Rosen Bridges when he was just 21. But now at 35, he could feel the time slipping away from him. His life's work was on full display past the glass pane in front of him, and the damn thing simply refused to work.

He spun in the chair to face his team. Acutely aware of the hour, he was already burning through what little overtime his project had left. A dozen pairs of eyes watched him, waiting for instruction.

"Alright," he said, "Y'all go home. Take Monday off too. You won't be docked for it. The condenser will need that amount of time to spool up after I clean it out."

Relief blossomed on their faces, though the mood dampened again when they saw Jonas' dower expression. They hustled out of the control room, collecting tablets, thermoses, and dogeared textbooks. After a minute, only Kolsko and Boltzman remained.

"You should take some time off too," she said.

Jonas pinched the bridge of his nose. "Would if I could. We're this close to getting shut down. I had some project director at DynaCorp jumping down my throat for not building him the fleet of teleporting tanks he's assuming we're going to give him at the end of this."

Kolsko scoffed. "He believed something that ridiculous?"

"Maybe not. But I had to tell them something. You know better than I do how hard it is to get pure physics research funded. Especially something that saps half the Eastern Seaboard's power grid when operational." He got up, pushed his way through another set of chairs, and made it to the makeshift coffee bar on the back side wall. The pot was cold, but he poured a cup of it anyway. "It doesn't matter. None of this matters. If I can't get REVERB to work by the end of the month, it's over."

"Over?" she asked.

He made a throat-slitting gesture with his finger and an appropriately jarring noise. "Done. Finished. The machine gets dismantled, the team goes their separate ways, and I'll never get funding for a major project again."

His friend put a hand on his shoulder. "It won't be that bad. This is how the process works, y'know? Sometimes stuff doesn't pan out. Look at cold fusion, or the ekranoplan. Hell, look at social media. Some things are just dead ends."

Jonas nodded, but the hurt lingered like a toothache. Poking at it made it worse, but he couldn't stop himself. "I'll think about taking Sunday off. Maybe see my folks or something. Meantime, I gotta run the numbers."

"The numbers won't change after you get some sleep," she retorted, then held up her hands. She knew the look he was giving her. "Alright, alright, I know I won't change your mind. But try to get some rest at some point. The cot's all made up in my office. Don't hesitate to use it."

He smiled weakly. "Thank you. I'll talk to you later."

She gathered her things and left. The clock above the door out of the control room said it was 1 AM. Plenty of time to get some work done. He'd burned the midnight oil his whole life working on this project or that, one more wouldn't kill him. Dimly, he was aware of the twitchy strain of his muscles that let him know the caffeine wouldn't help much. There was an upper limit, and after that, all a stimulant would do was make your heart beat faster. He drained the black coffee anyways, almost out of spite. If all he had was willpower, that would just have to do.

The operations room, which held the ERB machine itself, was kept under strict cleanroom protocols. The attached changing room had the white full body suits that kept all the gross hair and skin bits that apparently fall off the human body at all time from contaminating the sterile tiles and sensitive detection equipment. He dropped his labcoat, shirt, and khakis to the bench. Reaching into his locker, he found his duffel of fresh clothes. Underneath the pair of shirts was something special. He only wore them when nobody was around, and even then it felt almost scandalous to do so. Jonas retrieved the silken pink panties and cozy striped kneesocks from their hiding place.

He balled them up in his hands. It wasn't something he could talk about, or felt he could at least. When he felt stressed, or miserable, or under tremendous pressure, he put on some feminine garments and the worries felt...distant. Like they were muffled. He felt silly every time he put them on, and they broached some uncomfortable questions as to why he felt so at home in soft, frilly underthings. But those were a matter for another day. They always were a matter for another day.

Pulling up the panties and socks, he threw on a tank top and shorts, then the clean suit. Using basic decon procedures to remove any potential contaminants from the outside of his suit, he opened the airlock door. Once closed, the room's vents hissed as the pressure raised to match the state the room was in. He yawned after his ears popped; he always hated that part. Once the airlock cycled, he pulled the huge latch on the interior door and stepped into the clean room.

"Hi!" a bubbly voice called out.

Jonas spun in shock. His legs caught one of the large insulated power cables that ran along the ground, and he fell flat on his ass. His assailant loomed over him. Though he had no preconceived notion as to who could have infiltrated a secure room that he had seen was empty ten minutes ago, the person above him was surely not what he expected.

She wore a skin tight jùmpsuit, one that clung to her ample assets. Geometric streaks of glowing blue and white lines pulsed in symmetrical patterns along its surface, connecting to roundels that resembled computer ports. She bent over to look down at him, her platinum blonde hair pouring down her shoulders.

"Oh I'm sorry," she said, "Are you alright? Do you have brain damage?"

Jonas quickly brushed himself off, recovering his pride. Once back on his feet, he realized they were roughly the same height. He cleared his throat.

"This is a secured area," he said in his best menacing cop voice, "You're not supposed to be in here. Just being without a cleansuit could damage the equipment!"

The strange woman rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, that's totally why you can't make a stable Einstein-Rosen Bridge. It's all the cat hair in the vortex manipulator."

His brow raised. This clearly wasn't some lost cosplayer then. "If you know what my project is, then you should also know how sensitive the instrumentation needs to be to detect the subtle changes in subatomic torsion."

The strange woman tittered, which only served to aggravate Jonas further. "Oh my goddess, you're still talking about torsion? I solved that years ago! Well, given your circumstance I can imagine it's been difficult for you. Here, let me help." She wheeled around to the far side of the tunnel and tried prying one of the control panels off.

"Hey! Stop that! That's very sensitive-" His voice caught.

Her sleeves were moving.

They unthreaded themselves like writhing annelids, then reached out along her hands to the panel. Once attached, she yanked it once more with enough strength to break the lock holding it in place.

"Who are you?" he asked, half horrified and half astounded.

She flipped a trio of switches, touched one of the breakers, then slapped the panel shut. Without any command from the control room, power surged into the machine. But instead of sputtering out, the whirring continued. He dashed over to the front of the aperture, momentarily forgetting every safety rule in the book. The spinning cylinder reached its max speed, and a thin line opened in space. Wisps of Vostok effect reached out, only growing longer and thicker rather than turning to puffs of air. They pried open the line until it opened into a window. A tiny, thin parallelogram of impossible energy, a microfracture in reality, and on the other side he saw an incredible vista. Purple trees the size of buildings, grass as black as night swaying in a multidirectional breeze.

As soon as the image appeared, it vanished. The machine spun down, and Jonas was left dumbfounded.

"My name," she began, "Is Victoria. And you already know who I am."

The name danced across a raw nerve in the back of his mind. The spot where he didn't dare to tread. "I've...I've never met anyone named Victoria."

She nodded slowly. "Suuuure you haven't. C'mon, this'll take less time if I just show you."

Victoria aimed her left hand with her right, then pressed down on a button on her glove. A giant glob of energy shot out and splashed the side of the room. It formed into a swirling vortex, both similar and completely different from the tiny window that had formed in his experiment's aperture. Where his had flickered, her hole in space looked stable. Or stable enough. He couldn't see through this one, however. Like a whirlpool, the eddies around and inside made visibility impossible.

"Is that...is it really a..." He tried to gather his words, but they just wouldn't come.

"Yes, yes, it's a stable ERB. And yes, mine's smaller. Rest assured, though, that it's safe. C'mon, I got some stuff you're gonna want to see."

***

Jonas fell out of the other end of the portal and sucked in a huge, greedy breath. His glasses clattered to the ground as he dropped onto all fours. Time had no meaning in whatever limbo he'd just existed in between worlds, but one thing was for sure: you couldn't breathe there.

"Oh, right, sorry." Victoria said, knocking herself softly against the forehead, "Forgot to tell you to take a deep breath first. That's rule one of dimension hopping."

"Dim...dimension hopping?" he asked, retrieving his glasses from the floor. They had come to rest on cold tile. But not the sterile ones from his lab. These were marble, the telltale pattern of dark veins on white giving it away immediately. As he looked up, he saw more signs of conspicuous opulence. The room he was in was enormous, with a colossal vaulted ceiling that'd put some cathedrals to shame. Immense columns in the shape of outstretched claws held up a raised balcony that surrounded the room. Underneath the balcony, dozens of machines of bizarre purpose and function confounded his every glance. Tanks bubbled with mysteriously coloured fluids, huge reel-to-reel computers chattered and whirred, even a Jacob's Ladder the size of a human being buzzed away, doing whatever Jacob's Ladders were supposed to do.

Whatever dimension he was in, it wasn't anywhere with taste.

"Yes! You're the first, as far as I know, person from your planet to hop to another world! Isn't it exciting? This is my humble abode. Used to be the home of the Union of American Justice who, unsurprisingly, were reluctant to give it up. After I sank it into the sea, however, they were more than willing to negotiate a transfer of ownership."

"We're underwater too?!" he gasped, suddenly aware of the complete lack of windows.

Victoria rolled her wrist. "Yes, yes, let's get all the sources of stupefied awe out of the way right now. But it's perfectly safe. The ionic bulwarks have been holding for years, and I doubt the Mantamen will attack anytime soon. But that's beside the point! We're here to get you up to speed. Come!" She motioned for him to follow, which he did, reluctantly. This was all going far too quickly for him, and there were things he's said that were sticking out in his mind. Not so much the mention of Mantamen. More the idea that they had met before. And that her name was Victoria.

That name...

Leaving the bizarre superscience hall behind, they entered a much more intimate room. This one looked like a study, with warm incandescent lighting and wooden panelling to the walls. Large, comfy looking chairs and tables filled with books sat in between long bookcases crammed to the rafters with volumes. A cursory glance offered titles on everything from quantum mechanics to gold smithing to keeping exotic pets healthy. There were a few books he recognised, and another couple that he was sure didn't exist. J Robert Oppenheimer's musings on the Roswell crash, for example, and one on the Soviet discovery of something called 'E-99'.

"This is my favourite room," Victoria mused, running her fingers down the spines of some of the books. "So much assembled knowledge here. I'll have to get some volumes from your world, of course. For posterity."

"You were going to explain something to me?" Jonas reminded her.

"Right! Sorry, ehm, where was it...right! So," She grabbed a huge stack of papers from the table and sat down, offering a seat to Jonas at her side. He took it, hesitating for a moment, not knowing where this was going, "Just some formalities to take care of. Your name is Jonas Boltzman, correct?"

The twinge again. "Correct," he said, ignoring it.

"And you come from...Earth-4039-A-Omicron?"

He made a face. "I have no idea of determining that."

"I'll mark that as a yes! I'll have to admit, you're the first Jonas I know who got as far as getting a Bridge working. Or close to working, at least. Usually it's just the Victorias."

"I don't understand," he said, shaking his head, "What do we have to do with one another?"

She clicked her pen in her hand. "Oh...oh dear. I suppose you couldn't be THAT clever. You are still a Jonas, after all. Tell me, do you remember the tree house you had when you were a child? The one you called your castle and the one you hid a bunch of toys you weren't supposed to have in a shoebox?"

Memories, ones long suppressed or dormant, bubbled up to the surface like boiling lava. He physically winced from the pang of nostalgic pain. "How the fuck do you know about that?"

But she continued. "There was a doll there, remember? The one in the pretty dress you got from your babysitter who saw how much you liked to play with hers? Do you remember what you named that doll? The one you wanted to look like? One hint: it began with a V."

He got up out of the chair. "There's no way you can know about that. You're...who the fuck are you?!"

She stood up, closing the distance between them. In that moment, he realized that they weren't just similar heights. They were the same height. The exact. Same. Height.

"I told you. My name is Victoria. And I'm you. Well, another you. But we're the same person, just...different."

The floor fell out from under him. Jonas grabbed the nearest bookcase to keep from toppling over as a wave of competing, confusing emotions washed over him.

"That's not possible," he said, not believing his own words, "You're...you have tits. Huge breasts. And you're pretty!"

"HRT is one hell of a drug, my friend. And, hey, you can be pretty too! It's amazing what a little skincare can do, y'know. You might have to get rid of the ol' face fuzz. I've never met a version of me who could grow a good beard. Hmm...maybe that's another multiversal constant. I'll have to make a note of it."

A part of him wanted to be furious. How dare this...person just come into his life and upend it so casually? "What do you want from me? Do you enjoy seeing me suffer?"

"Oh no! That's not it at all!" she rushed over to take his hands into hers. He jerked them back, turning his back to her. "I'm trying to find all the Victorias I can. The multiverse has a few, but some of them are still Jonases. They're all brilliant. It's just that the ones who remain Jonas are held back. The clash of who they appear to be and who they are shackles their true potential. If I'm going to create a dimension-spanning council of Victorias, I'm going to need us all up at the same speed. And that means cracking a few eggs, so to speak."

"And what gives you the right?" he spat.

"I...I don't know. Maybe I don't have the right? But I know that, when I was Jonas, I would have wanted a Victoria to show me it was okay to be me."

Jonas didn't speak. Victoria tried to start a few explanations, but they died in her throat. "I'm sorry. I guess I was just too excited to find a Jonas who had got so far with his proverbial hand tied behind his back. You persevered. I just...imagine what we could accomplish once you're..." she trailed off. With a nod, she pressed the wrist button on her suit again. The giant glob shot out against the far wall, and a new portal opened. "This will take you back to your world. I wasn't thinking of how you might feel with all this dumped out on you all of a sudden. I won't bother you again, if you don't want me to."

He stepped toward the portal. This was all some fever dream. Maybe that's what it was. He had fallen asleep at a keyboard, and he was dreaming this all up. Some random neuron impulses making him imagine it. Step through that doorway in space and he can go back to his life. To his mundane worries about funding and incremental deadlines.

But.

That nagging in his mind hadn't gone away. She'd said nothing that would indicate she was lying, or even off the mark.

"If I stay," he began, choosing his words carefully, "What exactly did you have planned for me?"

Victoria immediately brightened. "Oh, so so much! I've been gathering us all together, a chorus of Victorias, so we could be friends and share notes and be brilliant together. I can also give you a head start on your own empire. I can give you weapons, technology, raw resources...you can be queen of your own world! And, importantly, I can also give you peace of mind."

She brought him to a room that looked like a small clinic. Beds with intimidating amounts of restraints sat in a row along the far wall, while the sides held all kinds of medical machinery, metres and pumps and diodes and the like. Cabinets on the wall closest to him featured a cornucopia of pills and serums, none of which he recognised.