... Click Click Pause Pause click

We waited for the second signal.

"Radio signal confirmed, message verified, 0% loss."

The control room erupted in cheer. Champagne filled glasses. The media wanted some sound bits.

Not identical, I said, again, the same. They knew this, but the bizarreness was a selling point. It's the exact same snowflake. One iteration is here, and the other is in Australia. When we interact with one, both are changed, including in its physical orientation. That why it's suspended. Although it seems the orientation can be sort of diffracted by gravity, this test confirms that we can, in fact, transmit information faster than light.

Then the question I was waiting for. But doctor, what does this actually mean for science and for technology, you know, common people? What is actually going on here?

I smiled. I smiled because they couldn't possibly see it, but it was quite beautiful and so it felt like a secret. Also, and perhaps more importantly at this point, it was amusing. I know this sounds ridiculous, I said, and you'll quite rightly dismiss it, but we're all going to totally get superpowers now. Like, we're going to all turn into higher-dimensional beings that can move through time and space on a whim.

He stumbled, the reporter did, in his words and his face too, caught off guard as he was. I know, I said, you want me to be serious, and I am being totally serious right now that pretty much everyone on earth is going to have basically interdimensional magic. I mean, it's not magic, but it's funny to say because, I mean, come on, right?

Excuse me, can I talk to you for a second? I felt a hand pull at my arm to bring me aside and the voice it belonged to was playfully urgent and chiding. I told the owner of that hand that, seriously? This is pretty much already happening and that I was having a hard time making cohesive sense of what was going on and that how cool would it be if when I disappeared to another dimension I didn't become transparent but sort of blobbed way out of control and that I'm pretty sure that's what would happen because that's more or less what I was seeing happen to everything around me and he backed off a bit in awe and everything was kind of bright and then I was confused for like a year, and then... right. The celebration. The test.

I saw the reporter, but I already knew what he was thinking and he knew what I was thinking and it was super awkward because we both were in the habit of talking when we needed to express ourselves, but then we were both feeling like, hey, don't worry, I know how you feel and it's okay, and then we were both feeling like, hey, thanks, I know it's okay, you don't have to worry about it, and then it was kind of like when you're trying to say something in a conversation but you both always start talking at the same time?

And then the reporter telephathed me the thought that it was kind of embarrassing, in retrospect, discovering the nature of space and time only after seeing the multidimensional shape of the snowflake. And I'm like, dude, how did you even see the shape before becoming a multi-dimensional entity yourself? And he's like, I have loooooads of memories still, and then started wandering by himself why I was talking like this and he was talking like that.

So I remembered there were loads of people at the testing site, and now none of them were here and I wasn't at the testing site, so that was probably my bad, but it was okay because I didn't particularly like my cooworkers before and I don't see why I'd like their multi-dimensional consciousnesses either.

I totally fucking knew it, you've always hated us. I cared who it was at first and where it was coming from, but as the milliseconds rolled by my interest sagged considerably and I sort of did a mental shrug and went away.

Most of humanity came to terms with the whole thing in about six minutes. The ones who didn't were quite miserable, which was a bummer, so we left.