1. There was never a guarantee that during the crossing you would be safe. For a while, they thought there was a pattern, six through, one no, then three through, two no, and it began again, but then there was an expedition where everyone, one-two-three-four, popped quickly. After that, it was at random.
2. Everyone used the colloquial term popping, because exploded was too dramatic and pop felt matter-of-fact. They used it because even the why of it was still uncertain.
3. It was an easy way to make money and gain information by letting rich people pay for permits to go exploring and to promise that all things discovered on their expeditions were also property of the US government. It was also less of a burden on a military already struggling to recruit people to fight multiple wars. There were so many people needed elsewhere, why keep sending them to what felt like a beautiful, yet boring, national park?
4. The door would disappear again and might not return for hundreds or thousands of years. It was driven, like the most interesting things in the universe, by an unseen force. Even a scrap of information about where and how people were going elsewhere could help humanity leap a thousand years in development.

As an adult, Ayanna would read those rationales about the Michigan doors over and over in different declassified files about all the findings from artifacts gathered by and copied for her church, and theorizing typed up purposefully boring official reports given to Congress. There were three things she would consider the rest of her life. First, the idea these unseen forces were opening doors, giving people access to two static elsewheres, were part of the universe’s weather patterns. That while we thought of weather as heat and liquid and air, forces such as this rippled across galaxies and the void. The second, which would have a profound impact on her life, was there were health impacts for people who had spent an extended amount of time traveling in these other spaces. Some people reported hearing voices, others reported seeing shadows and blobs, and some said that there were times when they fell into trances.

In those states, people sometimes spoke in a language that was still being studied, but every person, regardless of nationality, spoke it when in this state. Sometimes they wrote in a mixture of English letters, scribbles, and symbols that ranged from mathematical to cute little houses and cats. A sample sentence: A ~~~~~%γBD. To an older Ayanna, that sentence read “The silver mountains are where we go to be reborn.” She did not tell people she could read or understand this language. It was too much trouble, and no one powerful seemed to consider the possibility that she truly knew things. They assumed she was too ordinary.