Dark Side of the Moon…side

Something is very wrong with Earthbound’s City of Fourside.

It’s not so much the bar that admits unattended children, or the “accidents” involving two-bit hooligans, or even the crooked businessman who has a vice grip on the police force. If those were the only questionable goings-on, Fourside would be no worse than any other American city. No, what’s going on in Fourside, behind the scenes, is far more terrifying than the typical corrupt politician or neighborhood drug dealer. What’s going on is Moonside, where the sun never rises and everything is out to kill you.

And there’s no real escape – even sleep is just a set amount of unconsciousness, with no morning. Moonside is a sort of a living hell, kind of like Silent Hill.

I know what you’re thinking: Moonside is a fabrication of the evil Mani Mani statue, right?

Let’s look at the way Mani Mani has functioned in the past. It takes something that’s already there and perverts it. Look at Monotoli – he’s a kindly old man, yes, but he’s also built an empire in Fourside. He must have at least some desire to earn lots of cold, hard cash. All Mani Mani had to do was multiply that urge to the point where Monotoli would do anything.

It seems to me that as an evil entity, Mani Mani is pretty lazy. And as we have seen it do in Earthbound, it would be much easier to simply open a gateway to something that already exists. Think about it: The mouse tells you that you’ve been wondering around the warehouse with a vacant look in your eyes, and yet, the items you obtain in Moonside are just as real as anything else in your inventory.

So maybe we’re missing the big picture here. Mani Mani, in addition to its ability to corrupt, might be a device that can open a gate to another dimension. In this case, another Fourside that mirrors the city we all know, with terrifying changes.

Could it be that there’s something sinister lurking right where you stand, only it’s just outside of your “reality?” Consider this: When you lose a pencil or a sock or a memory card, it’s got to go someplace. It’s probably behind your desk, under your bed, or buried in a closet somewhere. But there are some things that disappear for good, and no matter how hard you search for them, you never find them. What if that missing flashlight of yours somehow broke through the fabric of time, space or even sanity, and is now floating around in an alternate universe?

And if there’s an “elsewhere” out there that objects can leak into, I doubt it’s full just of a bunch of lost rulers and combs. What if something bigger could pass between realities; something like a human being? Take a moment to think about all those TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries that recount strange tales of missing persons. Seemingly average people, the unassuming local guys of the world, disappear without so much as note saying goodbye. There’s a logical explanation for most of them, but there will always be a few people who vanish without a trace. What if some of these missing people just happened to take a wrong step and suddenly found themselves lost in a world of endless night, a sunless, seasonless existence, surrounded by horrific alien life forms? Seems like it could happen to anybody. What if that unlucky someone ever turns out to be you?

Welcome to Moonside.

But that’s impossible, right? Maybe not. According to Ted Bunn, an assistant professor in the Physics Department at the University of Richmond in Virginia, a black hole, in a nutshell, is “a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull.” Therefore, get close enough, and you’re like an ant next to a vacuum cleaner – you’re going to get sucked in no matter what. Bunn adds that the theoretical opposite of a black hole, the aptly-named white hole, spits matter out instead of sucking it in. Now, put a black hole and a white hole together and you get a “tube” known as a wormhole.

“A conveniently-located wormhole would therefore provide a convenient and rapid way to travel very large distances, or even to travel to another universe. Maybe the exit to the wormhole would lie in the past, so that you could travel back in time by going through. All in all, they sound pretty cool,” wrote Bunn in his “Black Holes FAQ.”

That’s it. Just hello and… goodbye!

Watch my wormhole show on Discovery. You have to. I'm God AND the president.

Something that, when approached, sucks you in and throws you out someplace else. Now, where have you seen that before? The warpmen, of course. Those Moonsidian strangers who teleport you to different places, like mini rips in the fabric of time and space.

So maybe a real life warpman got a hold of that pencil you lost in second grade and sent it to another dimension. And maybe a real life warpman got a hold of Amelia Earhart’s plane.

Think about the nearest window. If you leave it closed, nothing can get in, and nothing can get out. Now what happens if you open it? If it’s a nice spring day, you might get a refreshing breeze. If it’s a dead winter night, you might have left your home open to all sorts of creatures. For example, in July 2003, Stan Romanek of Denver, Colo. thought he had a problem with a Peeping Tom. After setting up a video camera one night near his window, he discovered the culprit. And he realized that it wasn’t human. (Go ahead, look it up…)

Romanek’s window had been closed. What if it hadn’t been?

Now imagine you can’t close that nearest window of yours. Whatever and whoever wants to get in can… and will.

A wormhole is like an open window, an open invitation for anyone or anything. In the case of Earthbound’s Moonside, the transporter effects of wormholes are represented by getting sucked into Moonside, and Moonside itself is explained away as an “evil” force.

In real life however, wormholes and other realities just might exist. If that’s a little too much to swallow for you, think about this: Have you ever felt uneasy when you’re alone? Like you’re being watched? Like someone is behind you?

It’s probably nothing…