Yellow letters traveled across the screen, marquee style: Maskhål och du. Below it, in subtitles, “WORMHOLES AND YOU.”

The LitenVärld logo appeared at the bottom of the screen as a man and woman walked into the shot. Judging by their hair and fashion, this video had been made before Ava was born. They both wore polo shirts in LitenVärld’s signature sky-blue, with yellow and crimson accents, tucked into unflattering khakis with pleats where no pleats should ever be. Their hair didn’t seem to move, stuck in helmet-like structures to their scalps, which made the rest of their faces look weirdly mobile.

Their voices were overdubbed. Badly.

“What’s up, amigos?” said the pallid white man. His voice was a cross between Wolf of Wall Street and California beach bum. “I’m Mark!”

“And I’m Dana,” warbled the blonde.

“Is Dana drunk?” Ava whispered to one of her coworkers. The coworker rolled his eyes and didn’t say anything. (God, they were all so boring. She’d forgotten how this store sucked the life from people.)

Mark spoke again. “We’re here to tell you what to do if a wormhole opens up on your shift!”

Mark spoke in exclamation points. His voice was far more energetic than the actor, who was wan, bland in that vaguely Scandinavian way, an off-brand Mads Mikkelsen with all the interesting bits filed off.

“First, we should get our disclaimer out of the way,” Dana said, in her wobbly, nasal whine. She had an affected mid-Atlantic accent, like she was auditioning for a minor role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The original actress moved with the confidence and poise of a piece of seaweed washed ashore. “LitenVärld accepts no responsibility or liability for any losses or injuries that wormholes incur, since they fall under the Act of God clauses on our employee insurance. This training video does not replace the longer and more in-depth training for our FINNA division—”

Tricia bent over and skipped ahead on the video, speeding through what looked like several more minutes of banter and/or legalese. “The FINNA divisions were made redundant during the Recession. Each store handles the maskhål in-house now.”

She restarted the video on a close-up of Mark. “—that’s out of the way, it’s time for a short physics lesson. In physics, the term quantum entanglement refers to particles that are linked in strange ways that we don’t entirely understand, but that we can measure.”