Alright it's late, and just writing to write isn't particularly productive, so I'll make my task here to come up with 3 ideas for a short piece, a vignette, so to speak. They all have to fit within my sci-fi universe and relate to the technology of it somehow. But, they don't have to relate to the core portal technology. Actually, one of the three should relate to the portal tech. Let's say that's some intermediate event when a person in the military who should have access to the technology does. Maybe they are making a request, which is acknowledged, and then they try to launch an attack through the opening. Maybe the attack is a dangerous idea and the defense is an equal but opposite idea which then comes to fruition in the good side and helps the bad side much much later, somewhat inadvertantly. So, the short piece could be the initial attack (maybe without naming or even describing the idea).

Two, back on the topic of merge tech. Let's have a retry of the scene I shared with Alex, but without the importantance. I think I described this one before, it would be something akin to the one Black Mirror episode where the mom and girl end up sharing a body, probably because the mom is terminally ill. Maybe to make it different, I should have the daughter be terminally ill instead. She could perhaps even be adolescent somehow, which could be a bit of a brainfuck unto itself.

Three, another piece of scary tech is mass manipulation stuff that is going on. Black mirror will probably do something along the lines of Harari's scary ideas in the next season. They already touched on it with the political meme episode, but I bet they make it more sinester this time around. Again, in the mirrored rainbows and gumdrops world, the rainbow mirror would instead have AI that focused on knowing individuals super well in order to help them grow and take on additional purpose and responsibility and good cheer. In vignette form, this might be started as a tool that makes leaders more egalitarian / less greedy / of the purpose/mind that they need to spread the tools and technologies evenly. Let's say it isn't the goal but the story focuses on a leader's adoption and having this epiphany type of effect along the lines of what I'm talking about. Obviously a leader wouldn't be the first with this tech and a leader wouldn't be the first with this manifestation of the tech and not all leaders nor even a plurality or significant number of people or leaders would need to experience the tech this way. But, it would be important that some tipping point of people did experience it this way, so that that version of the idea spread and won against any adversarial idea, which should maybe be another vignette: the story of a locality where the negative idea wins temporarily but is then sequestered by the positive idea. Perhaps the negative idea is even permitted to thrive in a sandbox for further study somehow, probably with only AI involvement and no actual humans.

General idea: Maybe the good side is farther along on most tech, but the bad side is a threat because bad tech is generally more powerful than good tech. So, good tech needs to be farther along to win.