"Alright, the two of us can go if that's alright with everyone." She's very lucky this is happening now and not when she was a tiny undergrad too scared to suggest anything to a professor.

What happens with both of them touching the door, Brenda wanting the galaxy room and Shirley wanting the conference room?

They get... galaxy room, apparently.

James is wandering toward the minifridges, but has a suggestion. "Maybe we should get a larger sample size. Like, ten?"

"Ten seems good; should we just go stand in the hallway and bug people? Also we don't know what your default is yet."

"Oh, that would make sense as well. But I was thinking that we only have a single sample per person for not aiming, and they're different. That could be random variation."

"Yeah, definitely. I'll go do a bunch more attempts--though if it keeps being the same I might have a hard time not expecting anything--and then you can try." She suits action to words, opening the door repeatedly with her mind as blank as she can make it and recording the results as a series of characters in the shared doc.

In ten more attempts she gets the talk eight times and the galaxy room twice, shuffled around in no noticeable pattern. (In order, the talk x4, galaxy, talk x2, galaxy, talk x2.)

Shirley also tries and gets the same result; the galaxy room twice and the talk eight times, shuffled.

"So it's probably random unless we're both the same kind of bad at not wanting anything."

What does Brenda get if she tries wanting the conference room but expecting the galaxy and vice versa? It's a bit of a brain contortion but she can do it with a little setup time.

She gets the galaxy. If she tries some more, she'll get the conference room once out of ten tries.

Possibly she's imperfect at putting her brain in specific states and possibly the room is imperfect at reading her mind when she's doing weird things with it.

"Does anyone have a string? I want to see what the range is on the mind-reading."

They search their pockets and bags, but don't turn up anything strong enough to open a door with. Except James's backpack straps. They can't come loose from the backpack and aren't that long, but are more than zero inches long.

"I don't want to mutilate your backpack--oh, I know." She unthreads both of her shoelaces and ties one end to the door handle so that a downward pull will unlatch the door, and tries opening the door while expecting the galaxy room (because that's the one she's least likely to get if it can't read her) a bunch of times from over two meters away. Hopefully she can still finesse it so that if she gets the conference room the door doesn't open far enough to be noticed by the presenter.

She gets the galaxy room reliably, it doesn't seem to have any trouble with a couple meters.

Or with the fact that she's not touching the door. It's a bit unnerving in between being the most exciting thing that has happened in her entire life.

"Okay, seriously, does everyone agree that this really looks like the work of an intelligence? I know humans think things are intelligences all the time when they're not but it reads my mind and it's attached to a doorframe and it's got minifridges in it."

Shirley nods. "It is certainly acting intelligently. And doesn't seem... seem like it works on normal physical laws."

James replied, "In short, it's magic."

Shirley grimaced. "...More or less, yes."

"Whatever it is has to be part of whatever physics reality actually runs on, but if you want to call the set of physical phenomena that can connect the same door to two places and read my intent off my neurons 'magic' I'm not gonna complain."

James says, "I read something once, some old SF with a world-hopping protagonist, that said the difference was that physics cares about what's simple in math and magic cares about what's simple in minds. I think we've established that however this works, it's the latter. At least mostly."

"That or it's doing something complicated with our minds where we can't see the metaphorical gears, but that makes sense. Anything else we want to test just the three of us? . . . I'm kind of tempted to wrap my head in aluminium foil and see if it can still detect my intent but I can't actually get a closed shell so that's mostly a joke idea."

"We should run a couple more trials for the two-opener case. And, time check on the talk, I'm less worried about someone trying to open it from inside while we have it open to the other room, but I'm not not worried.", says Shirley.

James contributes that he hasn't tried ingesting anything in the fridges, but he opened some of the alcohol to sniff it, and everything so far had its smell match the (generic, image-based) labeling. (Some of the labels weren't very informative, but he's left those closed so far.)

"Yeah I am also gonna call not-it on eating the food, we can feed some to a mouse and get it under a spectroscope and whatnot later. I'll set a timer for ten minutes before the talk ends, but that isn't going to help if someone needs to use the restroom." She sets the timer anyway. "I still want to see where the pipe in the sink goes--I bet someone at this conference knows where to get an endoscope in a hurry. What else is there . . . oh, if someone has a heat source we might be able to tell if heat diffuses through the glass over there in a way that suggests vacuum on the other side or not."

"Heat diffusion if there's vacuum... Would there be any, actually? I seem to remember space is a good insulator. From somewhere."

"Should we have someone wait inside the lecture hall? Or, hmm, not sure they could signal us if they did. Also we might need a fourth person, though I could probably bug Steve to come back out."

"Yeah, that's what I meant, if there's vacuum on the other side heat will stay in the glass longer than if there's air on both sides or a wall on the other side. But we don't know how thick the glass is so maybe that's a nonstarter. Maybe one of us should open the conference room door, count heads, then stay in the hallway without opening it again until everyone is out before opening this room again, and the people in here just keep the door shut from their perspective until the person in the hall gives them the all clear."

"Oh, right. I haven't had to work with that part of physics in..." ...Long enough that trying to count makes her feel old, which she doesn't want to admit to. "Well, in years. Also, James, we have cell phones, we can too signal each other."

James facepalms briefly. "Oh. Duh. On the other topic-" the one where he didn't just brainfart "-did the room seem like a different temperature when you first found it? It's being all suspiciously convenient for humans, for all we know the other side of the glass is in atmosphere but it's at STP... You'd think the galaxy would be hard to set up in atmosphere, but setting up two different rooms attached to the same door sounds harder, so we probably shouldn't assume."

"I didn't notice a temperature change when I first came in. Also I have no sense of scale, that galaxy could be tiny and close or huge and far away. Let me check for parallax." If she puts her head as far to the left edge of the window and then as far to the right edge of the window as she can manage, does the galaxy change perspective at all the way a small model would?"

"That points toward it being suspiciously convenient... I don't know where we go from there, though."

No parallax is visible.

"It's suspiciously a lot of things. Also it really looks like the other side of this window is actually a point in deep space, which, wow." She's not saying it was aliens but it totally might have been aliens.