They were trying to open a portal into an alternate universe, you see. The idea was to use quantum entanglement events as the branch points in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to form an entangled link across parallel universes. It didn’t work as planned, but the surprising thing was that it did in fact work. There were two problems: the first was that they came up with a way to send information across the link, but not matter or energy. The second was that the link only held while the parallel universe was close to our own.

It seemed a shame to throw out the technology just because it didn’t do what they had wanted it to, so they tried plugging a voice transmission system into it. Since the parallel universe on the other end was very close to this one, the scientists there did too, and suddenly the scientists were talking to themselves. Now, of course, they sell the things in those fancy online gadget stores. It turns out, being able to talk to a slightly different version of themselves is a great help to a lot of people in crises or times of indecision. Some people, of course, come very quickly to the realisation that they are prats.