GB: Wormholes
Wormholes
They are a common side effect of the Improbability Drive. Unlike what many of you think, the Drive’s objective isn’t just speed traveling, the improbability factor, or pissing you off at the end of every month; it exists to create wormholes, and which without, Thor wouldn’t be able to reach for the refugees they are meant to save.
Wormholes are gates from a place to another, ignoring space-time logic; they are not controlled - you can't find wormholes, they find you. You can't escape a wormhole, however, you can jump into one if there is one nearby that wasn’t meant for you.
They have been studied by the Research and Development department for over 50 years now, and while unpredictable, they are “a necessary evil”. Without them, none of you would have been saved from your world’s destruction. They are what allow our captains to save the refugees and go on with their mission.
Wormholes are unpredictable. Just like they have saved you, they can send you back to your dying world. Keeping in mind a wormhole can ignore time and space, it doesn’t mean it’ll take you from your world during the exact moment of its destruction. It means that you were indeed saved, but you may return back to your planet, live there for 5 years, and only then the world will be destroyed.
Does that mean your planet is still alive? No. The best explanation for those who don’t understand quantum physics well enough, is: it means you were just taken from the past. Currently your world doesn’t exist anymore; you exist because a wormhole went to the past and picked you there.
For those who have a better imagination, this is what the captains explained once: Earth (or whatever you want to call your planet) was destroyed at any point in time; present, past and future. Who has seen or is from the future knows Earth as it is in the future and is now being told Earth exploded; however, someone from the past knows it as it is in the past, but they are also being told it exploded exact the same way. You don’t know when it actually happened. It just happened and affected the whole timeline, and picked people from many different moments. You can meet people who are from the future, the past or the present time.
Trying not to deviate from the original point, you can be sent back to your world. If you are lucky, your world will only be destroyed in 100 years, so only your children get to feel that despair. If you are not lucky, you may feel it in two months. It greatly depends when you were picked relatively to the lifespan left on your planet.
Don’t panic, though. Those people who disappeared do have a chance of returning back to the Thor later on, or perhaps even sooner than you’d think. This is where I will introduce you the theory “Two types of wormholes”.
Vogons work methodically and quite efficiently when it comes to Refugee’s list. They know when someone arrives and when someone leaves, and for them to update the list accordingly, they need proof that such happened, and they need forms that will validate said proof, and more forms to validate the first ones. This means, the Refugee List is never wrong. If someone is still there, it means they are on board or they will soon be on board, even if they were taken by a wormhole.
One type of wormhole is the permanent type. Refugees are sucked in by a wormhole, go back to their worlds and stay there. Their names are taken off the Refugee List and Vogons erase any record of their existence. These people who left are no longer bound to Thor and it’ll be up to chance and karma and wormholes if they are to be picked up again. These are the people that you can cry for; because there is a chance they will live the end of their world and die.The memories of those who left Thor through a permanent wormhole, if they return, they have no recollection on ever being on the ship. In their point of view they were never on Thor. There is however, records of those who DO remember being on the Thor for the first time even thought they were permanently wormholed; this is still going understudy and a wild guess would be that they were lost in a wormhole for quite a while.
The second type of wormholes is the non-permanent type. People leave Thor, however they are bound to return, even if it takes a month. Vogons do not take their names off the Refugee Lists, and there is no point crying for them because they’ll return soon. Vogons may force them to fill all the paperwork; I suppose it depends on how much they like you.
Those people, who were taken by a temporary wormhole, when return, will keep the memories from the time they were in their world. While they are in their world, they don’t remember the Thor, or see it as a dream. There aren’t many records about this part and not many people have decided to share their experience.
How do the Vogons know what kind of wormhole is it? Maintenance robots.
The maintenance robots that report the disappearances have developed a complex algorithm that has thus far been fairly accurate in determining whether the wormholing of a given person is permanent or temporary. No one's managed to decode it yet, though, even though several top-of-the-line super computers have been employed in the endeavor - and most of them crashed. Considering this, the authorities have decided not to question the maintenance bots, and simply allow them to go about their jobs undisturbed, and make the most of the information they share.
So, when someone leaves and the Refugee list is updated consequently, it means said person did leave for real. If their names are still on the list, they did not leave.