Other Gateways Than These

I've been working my library and office all evening, taking occasional breaks to read Other Worlds Than These, which I've almost finished. Stephen King's latest novel got me thinking about the Dark Tower and Mid-World again, but also about his other works, some of which tie in to the Dark Tower stories. Most don't, of course, and one of those that don't is "The Jaunt," one of King's early short stories--and one of his most terrifying. In "The Jaunt," humans can teleport across interplanetary distances in the blink of an eye--but they can only do safely if they transit while unconscious. If you're awake during transit, you come out the other side either dead, about to die, or utterly insane, because subjectively, the trip lasts anywhere from a hundred years to a billion years in a white void with only your thoughts to keep you company. 

The short story doesn't provide much in the way of visual detail, so I ran a few suggestions through ChatGPT about what a Jaunt facility might look like, and it came up with this. Not bad. But then I got to thinking . . . in the Dark Tower books, and in Other Worlds Than These, the land of Mid-World is littered with the high-tech remains of some very advanced but long-dead civilization. But what if that long-dead civilization has actually yet to be born? What if it's us? (It could also be a civilization from a parallel universe, or multiple parallel universes, but stay with me for a second.) 

Imagine if, a few centuries after the events of "The Jaunt," humans have perfected Jaunt technology to make anesthesia unnecessary. Imagine further that a future corporation, which I've called Carune-Janus (after the inventor in King's story and the mythological Janus), is responsible for the doorways Roland encounters in The Drawing of the Three. Maybe the doors, in the far future, looked and operated something like this . . .

By the time Roland finds the doors--which would be, I suppose, both before and after this technological breakthrough--they've degraded, and of course Roland doesn't have the brain-computer interface that would allow him to use the doors with a greater degree of control. 

A fun little thought experiment, anyway.