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This is about the monolith in the cave, the portal to the Iaunti galactic sector. You are probably thinking that I know something about it that nobody knows. After all, why would the government keep the details of my accident under top secret clearance? If so, you are expecting too much from my parting monologue. Prepare to be disappointed that it reiterates commonly known events from history.
Neither me nor anyone else has figured out what happens when you approach the Iaunti monolith and touch it. Nobody even knows why it is so easy to find it in the pitch-black darkness of the cave. Why do your feet carry you to it on their own? Why, in the next few seconds after contact, the world turns inside-out and you find yourself marching confidently out of the cave?
My best advice for you, should you want to go into the cave yourself, is a very boring one. After your visit, keep recording the dreams you'll have. Write down any visions of space arcologies, space cities or space belts that you see in your dreams. Especially if they are too far to be detected by telescopes. Enter them into the government database, like all the monolith visitors do. We've been doing it for a hundred of years and the images of distant arcologies that have reached us recently were ones that the first monolith visitors saw in their sleep. That was back when the light from those structures was still lightyears away.
But don't try to test whether the monolith really, physically takes you to the Iaunti galactic sector. People thought they could experiment with it, and the entire planet reaped the consequences.
First.
You might say, what about tying a rope to the entrance and the other end to your waist, and then touching the monolith? You could see if the rope gets broken. Then you know you have traveled physically. Right? You are not the first with this idea. I will tell you not to bother. You won't even find the monolith. You'll roam the room and eventually give up.
But you will need to report this to the government, and they will expend billions of taxpayer money on a super-extra thorough inspection of every fiber of the space elevator cables. Because you don't want it to snap and to pull the space habitat out of orbit and have it crash into the planet. Because that's what happened the last time someone tried the rope trick. The Iaunti do not waste an opportunity to teach us about the futility of our cleverness. And they make their point in a poetic way.
Second.
Whatever you do, don't try to shine a light into the cave in hopes that you can actually see what happens to the person who touches the monolith. The one and only time someone did it, a new supernova lit up just some hundred lightyears away. The next time it may be closer. The next time it may be close enough for the gamma rays to wipe out life on our planet.
You might say, it took a hundred years for the light of that supernova to reach our solar system. How could the Iaunti blow up a star at just the right time? Well, I'm asking you, how did the first monolith travellers get dreams of space arcologies built by the Iaunti that we are discovering just now, hundreds of years later? If there is another lesson that the Iaunti try to teach us is that we don't understand time.
Third.
Whatever you do, do not try to enter the cave as two people, one of you holding the other's hand while the other touches the monolith. You might think you would feel it if your friend's hand disappears from yours. Listen: there is a reason why I have written this letter to be revealed only after my departure to the Outermost Belt. Two of us went in: Sloan held Yera's hand, Yera made contact with the monolith. Only one came out. I still don't know which one I am.
My face did not look like Yera or Sloan, and nobody recognized me when I returned. I had to get a new ID card. In the photo, I saw Yera's eyes looking at me, and nearly threw up. Since then I have avoided all the situations where I would need to show my card. This is why I am leaving for the Outermost Belt: I need to be where nobody knows me and her.
I think I was Sloan. But then why do I sometimes dream of Yera's little stuffed hippopotamus Isama, her childhood friend that she never told me about? Her mom confirmed she had one. And why do I sometimes dream of space cities powered by the heat of incandescent gas swirling into the black hole?
Some top scientists have thanked me for this experiment. They say that unlike my first two useless lessons, this one is actually constructive. My and Yera's identity merge shows that the Iaunti, indeed, make copies of us and merge them back to the originals. Sometimes the merge is not 1:1.
But I think they got the wrong lesson from it. I think the Iaunti, in an unusually gentle way, hinted at how much we would have to give up if we were to really understand them. An identity hash like Sloan's and Yera's was just a drop in the bucket. An identity loss of the whole human race might be required. I am asking you to think very long and hard before paying that price.