Dr. Susan Marcum, an astrophysicist, sat for lunch at a picnic table with her long time friend, Dr. Robert Flemming, a quantum physicist.

"I know what I'm about to say will sound strange, Bob. I've been studying the cosmic background radiation. If I take my scientist hat off, my intuition tells me there's an original signal. But it's so warped and full of static it doesn't appear to us as artificially produced."

"Could entropy be involved?" Bob stared at the sky.

"What do you mean?" Susan raised an eyebrow.

"Entropy of the signal. If it got so scattered, we might deduce it to what we call the cosmic background radiation. I know from our quantum experiments, it often comes down to comprehension or not."

Susan munched a carrot. "Like entropic ignorance? We can't figure it out because of too much information distortion?"

"Highly debatable.” Bob nodded. “I'm sure some of my colleagues suspect there's an origin. And a few of them would argue an intention. I won't make a teleological statement on the matter. Just that, I, too, often feel like an intelligence similar to our own created what we observe as scientific phenomena. Otherwise, we'd never understand some of it. As if our ignorance is the by-product of a source, perpetually one step ahead of our grasp. But that's a metaphysical, if not spiritual, topic."

"Interesting … Oh. check this out." Susan took out her phone and showed Bob a recent CMBR image. "We compiled this two weeks ago …"

"Two weeks? What day exactly? At what hour and minute if you can tell me."

"The timestamp says Feb 6, 2062, 8:20 a.m."

Bob pulled out his phone, too, and tapped it.

"What are you doing?" Susan asked.

"Just a second." He flipped through a series of photos. "I'm checking something. It could be nothing, or it could be a fantastic coincidence."

Susan watched patiently and ate her sandwich.

"Unbelievable ... It's true, Sue. We ran an undisclosed prototype accelerator at the same time. We've made a recent breakthrough … Can you keep a secret? And I mean really keep it. I'll lose everything if word gets out. I could get fired and sent to prison. I wasn't even supposed to take these photos."

"Yes. I promise, go on ..." Susan placed her half-eaten sandwich on a plate.

"Alright. I'm serious. You can't repeat this to anyone else. We've stabilized particles and created a micro-black hole—which we believe evolved to a temporal universe. Check this out… We kept it stable for nearly a second."

Bob showed a photo of a screen. The pattern looked similar to Susan's CMBR image.

"What could it mean, Bob? Is there a connection?"

"Susan ... I want you to try something extraordinary. I want you to compile all the cosmic radiation data you've ever collected, encrypt it, and send it to my home email address."

"Alright, what are you trying to figure out? "

"Trust me.” Bob shook his finger. “Just do it. Keep this entirely to yourself. We'll talk about it later."

————

Susan did as Bob asked and sent him the historic CMBR data.

Bob remotely hacked his work system, disabled logging, and inputted Susan's data through a cluster of privately networked supercomputers. He ran the data through a simulation, applying spacetime equations from the early universe's start to the first molecules.

He called Susan over his secure personal VPN.

"Susan, I've got some good news and bad news."

"Go on ... "

"Well, Sue, my suspicion may be correct, a single point—like the Big Bang caused CMBR."

"Bob, scientists have known this all along.” Susan laughed. “That's nothing new. What's your bad news?"

"I believe it's a reflection from our own universe's particle acceleration."

"Excuse me.” Susan coughed. “Do you mean its expansion... ?"

"Not quite. Unfortunately, and logically, there's only one conclusion to draw so far.

"Somewhere, out there, in a higher dimension, we are the product of someone's particle acceleration experiment, which created a stable temporal universe. You see, they too probably discovered a CBMR similarity. So they created a more stable version —meaning us—to confirm their hypothesis."

"That sounds fantastic, Bob, and a little too metaphysical. How can you possibly prove it?"

"Exactly, that's the bad news. I'll have no choice but to attempt to create a more stable universe to prove my hypothesis. It's a self-fulfilling causality loop. It means each universe iteration exists under a stack of others, forever caught in an infinity mirror—for those who observe us, others observe them as well, and so forth."

"Bob, say you're right, and we're stuck in this infinity mirror; how did it all begin?"

"No idea, Sue. I'll leave that problem for theologians to figure out."