Boom Tube Travel

Have you ever wished you could open a door in the air and step from one place straight to another, no matter how far?

In the Justice League, there is a way to do that. It is called a Boom Tube. And the only person who can open one is Cyborg.

Tucked deep inside Victor Stone's chest, glowing softly between his circuits, lives something called a Mother Box. The Mother Box is a piece of ancient living technology from a faraway world. It hums. It thinks. It is almost like a small, secret friend. And when Victor closes his eyes and asks it very carefully, the Mother Box reaches out to the great cosmic power that runs through every star — a power called the Source — and it tears a temporary door in the fabric of reality.

This is not a quiet trick.

Opening a Boom Tube goes exactly like its name says. BOOOOOOOOM.

The sound is enormous. Like a hundred thunderstorms all clapping at once. Light explodes outward — a great spinning ring of pure white that pulses and roars and pulls at everything around it. Wind whips through the room. Papers fly. The air itself shudders. Victor's mechanical joints sing with strain.

It is loud enough to vibrate the cells of his organic heart.

It never stops being a little bit scary, even for him.

To open one, Victor has to do something very delicate. He has to sync his own internal frequencies to the music of the Mother Box. He has to align his breathing, his thoughts, his pulse, to a song that does not exist in human ears. It feels — Victor has said quietly to his friends — like his soul is being gently stretched across the cosmos. Just for a moment. Just long enough.

And then — BOOM — the door opens.

Inside a Boom Tube is a place no ordinary eye can really see. It is a swirling river of colors that have no names, sounds that taste like memories, dimensions folded together like soft cloth. For most heroes, it is dizzying. Wonder Woman has admitted she has to close her eyes. The Flash, who is the fastest man alive, says it feels like running through a dream.

But for Victor, it is different. He can feel the pulse of distant galaxies. He can hear the whispers of the New Gods. He is the navigator of the impossible. He guides his friends through the storm, his glowing red eye scanning the swirling chaos, his voice steady.

"Stay close. Follow my light. Three more seconds. Two. One."

POP. The far door opens. They step out into a battle on the other side of the universe.

Boom Tubes are wonderful. They let the Justice League respond to galactic emergencies in mere seconds. But they are also dangerous.

There was one time the team had to travel through a Boom Tube while a strange gravity well was pulling at the cosmos nearby. Halfway through, the tube began to COLLAPSE — like a tunnel filling with sand. If it closed all the way, the team would be trapped in something called the Fourth Dimension, where time and space do not behave themselves.

Victor planted his metal feet wide. He stretched out both arms. His circuits glowed so bright his teammates had to look away. He used his own body as a brace, holding the tube open through sheer iron will, every wire singing, every plate trembling.

"GO!" he roared. "GO, GO, GO!"

His friends shot through the closing portal. The last one was Wonder Woman, who paused and turned back. "Cyborg —"

"GO!"

She went. He held the tube one heartbeat longer, then leapt through himself just as it slammed shut behind him like a vault.

He could not move for three days after that. But every one of his friends was home.

There is one more thing Boom Tubes carry, though, that Victor never forgets.

Boom Tube technology comes from Apokolips, the dark and terrible world of Darkseid. The Mother Box was forged there. Every time Victor opens a tube, he is using a tool that once belonged to a tyrant — and he has to be careful, very careful, that he is the one telling the Mother Box what to do, and not the other way around.

He calls it the great irony of his life. To use a weapon of darkness to defend the light.

But Victor has decided he can do it. Because the door swings both ways, after all. And in the right hands, a door is just a door.

After every mission, he closes the portal carefully. WHOOSH. The roar fades. The white light folds itself away. The Watchtower returns to its quiet hum.

Victor checks his Mother Box. He whispers, "Rest now." And it does.

The stars are still out there. There will always be another emergency, another BOOM, another door waiting to open.

And Cyborg will be ready.