Official History of The Absurd

Some history for those interested in the worlds of The Last Disruptor.

Chapter 1

EARTH A

We will start at the beginning with the accident in the Lab in New Haven, Earth A, which generated the positive pole for the connections between worlds. It should be noted, even today, so many decades later, there is no clear genesis for the negative pole that theory holds would be necessary to make that connection.

The Lab on the New Haven campus was in the basement and experiments in arc-fusing quantum jumps were being conducted by the head of the Quantum Research, Dr. Bryan Danson. On the night of morning of March 12, at approximately 9:32 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, an implosive event of a magnitude never before seen occurred in the lab. Danson and his entire team were believed to have been killed in the accident, though no bodies were ever found.

EARTH R

On March 30, at approximately 12:32 p.m. Pacific Coast Time, a tanker vessel in the Pacific Ocean journeying between Washington State and Japan, spotted an uncharted island. The vessel radioed in the information and a U.N. Destroyer was sent to investigate. The captain and crew confirmed the existence of a new island but reported access would be difficult due to its unique geological features which offered cliff faces on all sides of the island.

It is at this point that Dr. Martin Kennedy, a geologist was dispatched to the island with a six-man team to explore it and determine how it formed. 

Kennedy found the island profoundly strange. One had to anchor off the coast of the leeward side of the island and climb up a craggy cliff face, but once you reached the top of the cliff, one found a nearly circular and level plain which was host to a variety of vegetation, flora, fauna and trees common to a Pacific island but there were also bushes and types of foliage that were unique and not typical of the patterns of evolution on Earth R.

Kennedy and his team played a game of poker to decide who would name the island and Wesley Yurda, a Boston native and the team’s botanist, chose to name it Moeberg Island, after the renowned spymaster who had been a professional baseball player for the Boston Red Sox.

While the geology and plant life was puzzling on Moeberg, the strangest thing about the island was the dent. The Dent was located just slightly off center and it claimed the lives of two men in Kennedy’s exploratory team. It didn’t look like anything really. Just a depression in what appeared to be a type of sandstone. But if a human tried to walk on it, after a few steps he or she plunged into nothingness and there was no way to recover them. However, if you threw an inanimate object into the Dent, it rested on the surface.

Dr. Jill Hollister

Kennedy recognized the dent was beyond his scientific expertise so he called in an old school friend of his, Jill Hollister, a theoretical physicist. It was Hollister who formulated the theories that eventually, and dramatically, were proven true about the island and eventually served as the basis for the founding of The Absurd.

When Hollister arrived at Moeberg, it was populated by five men all engaged in a various botanical, and geological studies. She quickly set up camp outside the Dent carrying out a variety of experiments. Kennedy himself feared for her safety, but he could not persuade her to set up camp farther away from the Dent.

Hollister herself had been doubtful about coming to the island, after all what would a geologist like Martin know about quantum phsyics, but for fun, and to mollify an old friend, she came anyway.  Once she saw the Dent and observed some readings and initial findings from a variety of experiments, she quickly took over the scientific investigation of the island and brought in two more physicists. 

This is actually how The Absurd got its name. Hollister and her colleagues were all women and they built a cabin near the Dent that they jokingly called The Absurd Abbey. The name stuck and while the actual research center that now stands on the island is officially named the Hollister Cottington Center, the entire operation is still referred to as the Absurd.

Despite her reputation, Hollister’s initial findings were dismissed by the government as purely theoretical. She and her colleagues posited that the Dent was a connection to another universe. That it was one end of a quantum tunnel.

However, the government could not dismiss those findings when Dick Cottington appeared in the dent six months and a day after Hollister arrived.

Dr. Dick Cottington

Richard “Dick” Cottington was an Earth A physicist who trained at Cambridge University. He was called in to investigate the experiment in the New Haven Lab and after almost a year of work, had discovered, as Hollister did on Earth R, that the Lab had opened up a tunnel between universes.

Cottington’s findings and his trip through the tunnel would not have been possible without the help fo Peter Singh, Cottington’s research assistant. Singh had not only helped confirm Cottington’s suspicions about the tunnel, but had also devised equipment that their team used to detect the tunnel was stable and led to what appeared to be another Earth or their own Earth, just in a different time.

Cottington, after much debate, decided to walk through the tunnel and see what was on the other side and so confirmed his theory. Singh would come five years later. He would have come sooner, but they found the tunnel only allowed travel only from Earth A to Earth R, so once you went through, you were never going to come back.

This puzzled Hollister who, near the end of her life, raised questions about the veracity of this claim, which she noted were never verified other than through Cottington’s and Earth A official statements and not via significant experimentation.

Cottington said and officials from Earth A confirmed that none of the men in Kennedy’s original research party had come through to their side of the tunnel when they disappeared.

The First Director of the Absurd

Jill Hollister was the first official director of the Absurd, though there are some that claim that Cottington and she were co-directors. That claim, however, has been repudiated. Cottington, due to his citizenship on Earth A, was not allowed to take the helm of The Absurd at that time.

However, Hollister’s premature death at the age of 67, left a vacuum of leadership and the government of Earth R, acceded to opening The Absurd Directorship to Earth A scientists. This set a new direction for The Absurd as the research facility would be headed almost exclusively by Earth A scientists or those with a parent from Earth A for the next sixty years until Gerald Wurd took up the position.