Vanessa Liao knew more about the Corporation than most of the people who worked there. She published the sharpest takes on the Corporation’s latest moves, since she’d known the news sometimes weeks in advance. Allie called her the Apple of reporters—not the first, but always the one with the most elegant response. “Apple when Steve was in his prime,” Allie qualified. Other journalists re-shared her blog posts, and major newspapers began picking up her pieces. Tech outlets courted her, but she remained stubbornly independent. Rumor had it that she was in talks with editors in New York about writing a book on the Corporation.

In her newsletter, Liao confirmed that the Corporation had hidden the Portals technology in the DateDate codebase before the acquisition as a way to fast-track its launch and circumvent government regulations. Most importantly, Liao explained that while the technology found in the DateDate codebase was the foundation for Portals, its potential was far greater. “What if,” she mused, “they didn’t think about shareholder value for one day? To judge by what I’ve learned about the technology, the Corporation could, theoretically, invent a way to travel to entirely new places. Not to new planets or to deep pockets of the Pacific, not to the past or to the future, but to places parallel to this world, that exist alongside us. Portals to alternate worlds.”