You never want to be conscious when you go over a bridge. Consciousness catches the attention of trolls.

That’s the second thing you learn, at the Interstellar Academy.

Consciousness is a tricky thing to manage though, especially when it comes to crossing Einstein-Rosen Bridges. Things get weird around wormholes. That’s the first thing you learn. Reality stretches. Slips its bounds. Spills over the edges. AI simply can’t handle it, else you could just stay in cryo-sleep and let the computer cross the bridge for you. But it can’t. It starts hallucinating like it’s an early model-2099, so a human navigator needs to be in control, right up the second your ship has entered the wormhole and begins crossing the bridge.

At first, people thought the trolls were hallucinations too. Even when the first successful navigators all reported their existence. Even when ships started vanishing without a trace. In those early days, some clown at the Academy called them trolls - these things we now know are vast, higher-dimensional beings of terrifying power and unknowable purpose. Seems disrespectful, but the name stuck.

We don’t know…can’t know…why the trolls let some ships pass and destroy others. We don’t even know if those ships are destroyed or simply taken and moved into some other dimension. What measure do they take of us? Why do some of us not meet the mark?

Some navigators swear by intent. A voyage with good purpose will stand a better chance of being spared by the trolls, they say. I’m not so sure of that. How could we know what they think is good?

All we know for sure is consciousness attracts their attention, on the bridge.

Tricky thing to manage, consciousness. A medication was developed for navigators. Take it just before the bridge, and it will knock you out exactly 60 seconds later. Gives you plenty of time for those last-second adjustments that are always needed when reality gets weird around the wormhole. There’s a catch, though. Hard to be exact, in that situation. The best navigators get it down to within 0.42 of a second upon bridge-entry to achieve unconsciousness, but that can be too much time.

It can be a lifetime, on the bridge.

I’m living that lifetime, right now.

An eye looks down on me. An eye the size of a universe, holding a billion smaller eyes, each with their own universe inside. Horror and awe fill me, and I know I will pay whatever toll this creature deems fit.

The eye blinks and swamping over my terror I get an overwhelming sense of something strangely…warm. Something that could almost be called amusement. This particular troll thinks my horror is quite charming, it seems. Perhaps that will be enough. A billion universes blink again and the troll is gone, leaving only a silver-white line in the darkness behind. The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is open. This crossing can continue.

Blessed unconsciousness takes me, and there will be no further toll on the bridge today.

...

This story was originally written for the Australian Writers' Centre Furious Fiction competition. Each story (max. 500 words) had to take place on a bridge, a character in the story had to have too much/many of something, and each story had to include the words catch, measure and warm.

I thought an Einstein-Rosen Bridge (the fancy name for a wormhole in space) would be a fun spin on the "bridge" qualification, and from there the ideas of trolls and tolls followed pretty naturally.

While I didn't end up winning the competition, I did make the longlist (top 10% of entries from all over the world) so that's not bad, I think. I have re-edited the story and made some minor cosmetic changes (part of the competition is that there is only 55 hours from open to close to come up with your story and enter it, so it didn't get as much of an edit as I would have liked the first time around).