Modes of Transport
First, some words on modes of transport. The portal I took to get here is by no means the only method for traveling in time, but certainly the most convenient. Portals are layered wormholes, born of research in both China and Australia and successfully commercialized at the University of South Australia. Again, an indication of South Australia’s significance in the development of time travel technology; though one thing begats the other. And another reason why Adelaide copped the brunt when things went sour.
I worked on one of the portal projects, one of the early ones that used solar-soaks to separate the ends of wormholes from each other. One end would be buried on earth, the other run into orbit between Venus and Mercury. Even the subsecond differences we were getting made a difference.
It was the only job you could get high to work on. And brain cell destroying, as you threaded wormholes worth millions of dollars (that’s Australian dollars!) into each other. I did this in my last year of uni and then the first year out, while I looked around for something to do. Most of us were like that, uni or ex-uni with a particular affinity for Venusian Mufta. And a steady hand.
I had a good yield, and yields was what it was all about. We lost over a third of the solar pods. A few shut down and died because of problems on arrival. Either their panels didn’t unfurl, or their operating systems refused to boot up, or any of a number of hardware or software related issues. Most of of the pods we lost were on the way back and crapped out in space or bounced off or into Earth’s fickle atmosphere. Some are still out there, deep in the Sun’s gravitational lake; soaking up time until someone brings them home.
Even at 60% the yields from the pods was good. Much much cheaper than using high-energy dilation techniques that never produced good quality wormholes anyway. We could still satisfy our contractual obligations to the research groups and have a commercially viable yield of long-term stable wormholes for building into portals for business, private and other uses.
Having worked on these I’d say that any portals that came out of Adelaide in the 20s or 30s are safe and reliable. As with anything, always get a chance to pop the hood. Things to look out for are rust and the quality of the welds, but you should get an eye for how good the portal is just by looking at its insides. I’m always dubious of portals with lots of energy signatures with branding from component manufacturers. It’s information-level radiation, but it’s noise and you don’t need it when you are poking around.
Buy yourself a portal scanner. You won’t be able to use it at commercial ports obviously, but you can always use them to scan friends’ portals or ones you don’t know a history off. Get one that can cancel out the branding data signals and do virus scans on PLCs. They are not super expensive and will save you time and money in the long run. And, as cliched as it sounds, it may just save your life.