#391 Hattendorf's Universal Adapter

Age: 150 Years

Hidden or Lost?: Hidden

History: Amelia Hattendorf was a brilliant inventor of marvelous contraptions, but she could never quite connect with other people. Ironically, it would be one of her own inventions that allowed her to connect with her true love, and so much more.

In her time, Hattendorf was a seemingly bottomless well of innovation, developing no less than three new sources of energy, publishing volumes of engineering theory that upended centuries of inventive practice, and developing items that have become fixtures of everyday life like the everlamp, the forest-rider, and the automatic canal. But for all of her professional success, she longed for companionship, or even a close friend. Hattendorf’s powerful intellect and endless devotion to her work made it difficult to find someone who could even understand her when she could find the time to socialize.

When Hattendorf finally achieved her professional dream and pierced the wall between universes, it only became harder. The world-changing discovery dominated her life. Her every waking hour was spent studying the odd readings and extrauniversal energies that emerged from the breach she had created in reality. Unfortunately, Hattendorf discovered the impossible data she was receiving from outside the universe wasn't compatible with the matter in her own. But as usual she had a solution.

Hattendorf dug up an old flight of fancy that she called a ‘potentiality transformer,’ powered by unresolved Schrodinger Particles. From this old idea, Hattendorf created her Universal Adapter, a strange box that could connect any two systems of information in existence.

Her bizarre contraption worked and she was able to bridge the gap between the extra universal language and native matter. Iterating on the connected technologies, Hattendorf was able to advance the world in exponential leaps.

Still Hattendorf felt like she couldn't break through with other humans. And once again she turned to her adapter. Hattendorf had her research assistant Hawkins, with whom she had harbored a doomed infatuation, stay late one evening at the lab. As an experiment, they each placed their hands in the Universal Translator and a remarkable thing happened. Their minds were instantaneously transported through infinite universes, finally resting on an alternate Hattendorf and Hawkins who understood each others’ feelings, secrets, and intentions. When they pulled away, Hattendorf and her assistant had a newfound connection, stolen from that perfect universe. Running deeper than any connection either had experienced previously, the pair spent the remainder of their lives together.

However both Hattendorf and Hawkins agreed that the Universal Adapter’s power to alter minds and possibly more, was too powerful to remain loose in the world. So they hid the odd box, the whereabouts of which are still unknown today. Fittingly, the only clue to its whereabouts was supposedly hidden within their final love letter.