Morton's Fork

Acrylic on Panel
18 x 23 cm
2023

There is a place in the maze complex where two doorways stand side by side.

There are hundreds of similar doorways, that we’ve found. The doorways dotted across the maze complex are generally the same in terms of size and proportion. They are unadorned; simple doorways leading to tunnels or adjoining rooms. There are no doors. At least not in the physical sense.

This pair of doors are dangerous. They display the unexplained phenomena now found to be common across the maze complex; they have no visible threshold. To the naked eye, they both lead to darkened tunnels. However, when the threshold is crossed in either of these doorways, whatever has crossed the threshold goes somewhere else. Nowhere in the maze complex, and nowhere on planet, as far as we have been able to determine.

We have lost several dozen remote drones attempting to understand where the doorways lead. We lose communication as soon as they cross the threshold, and even those fitted with DSN-Grade antenna beacons disappear on entry; as if these doorways somehow transport them beyond the reach of human scientific capability.

Except for one. One returned.

It managed to wheel itself back out of a doorway, quite unexpectedly. It wasn’t picked up by our comms equipment any longer, and on initial inspection, it looked to have had its comms equipment malfunction and wiped. It was clearly one of ours though.

However, when the tech team did manage to access its internal storage, they found that the comms module hadn’t been wiped at all. Our equipment simply didn't recognise the machine to communicate with it. This was because, in fact, the drone wasn’t one of the many we had sent through the doorways. It was identical in every way, but it simply wasn't one of ours. According to its logs, it had been manufactured over six hundred years ago.