Welcome to the debut of my first novel, remap. Hoping you’ll find it interesting, enjoyable, and share worthy, I’ll welcome your constructive criticism and comments. For those also interested in kinetic sculpture work, please visit BradLitwin.com. I’ll post a new chapter every week. So without further ado -
remap
Bradley N. Litwin
–1
Free thinkers might squirm on hearing that, on day one, you sign one of those comprehensive, non-disclosure, employee exploitation agreements. It kind of feels like signing up for indentured servitude. Of course, they would never suggest you could bring counsel along, in case some terms might be negotiable. Doubtless, a non-starter. But at UCERN, the Unified Coalition for Extra-dimensional Research and Neotericism, they really are trying to keep everybody happy and not likely to consider wandering off into the wilderness. Is it more like they’re trying to encourage everyone to see themselves as basically unsuitable for work anywhere else? No. That’s not fair, of course. And in their defense, we probably have the largest faculty anywhere on the planet, so dedicated to the notion that if you look long and hard enough, you’ll eventually see the back of your own head. And honestly, I’m unconvinced that a few of my colleagues aren’t expecting to achieve that very thing. I mean, where else would they let you work on something like that?
During my tenure, I had an unrelenting compulsion for sticking my nose in where it almost certainly never belonged. I was easily seduced by a myriad of disturbing questions, at that time being furiously debated around campus. It lenod to my being poached from one department to another six or seven times, before finding a permanent home in the comfort of the Kinesthetics lab– last stop before delusion. What a great bunch of nut jobs we were. We’d yak it up deep into the night, deconstructing the most arcane nonsense you’d never imagine – then come back after just a few hours’ sleep to resume chopping away at another cord of perplexing, woody phenomena.
Just to look at us, you wouldn’t expect that a group drawn from such diverse backgrounds would form such an effective research team. But we certainly did. Each of us filled a critical niche that expanded the realm of exploration and the development of a wide range of disparate phenomena. That included the twisted chain of unlikely events resulting in my presence in this very peculiar seat—about which I will attempt a comprehensive description, by and by. I think each of us had a certain flair for pushing the envelope in our respective specialties, while sharing a passion for synthesis, drawn from a remarkable spectrum of perceptions—those fermented in the shadows of our unique psychological kit bags
At UCERN, it can earnestly be said that we are in the business of investigating the very nature of existence. Advancing a fierce commitment to that, we’ve built the world’s largest Bernauzzi Fusillade Accelerator, with a seventy-five mile loop. On the business end of this bad boy, a Higgs boson could get totally lost in the sea of crap we’ve smacked into oblivion. Some folks are pretty sure they could convince a particule to go Dark in there! Ironically, even if one were to achieve such an unlikely result—one that left no visible trace of its occurrence—such obstacles would tend not to deter the more determined and devoted among us. Yep. It’s definitely a crock pot full of crackpots and head-scratchers, here. You can see, no doubt, dedication being a thinly veiled euphemism for obsessive, they’re my kind of people.
Among the many extraordinary phenomena I’ve alluded to, one stands uncontested in its impact: the unpremeditated discovery of an organism that satisfies the most rigorous criteria for exogenous life. Perhaps you noticed that I avoided the word "alien" — feeling it somewhat of a pejorative, as easily applied to plants and animals as to beings from beyond Earth’s bounds. That aside, this discovery sparked a monumental project that now dominates the waking hours of all involved, driven by the primal desire to touch the face of the unknown. As you can imagine, in the course of this venture, countless existential questions have risen from the haze of our work, not unlike the stars, as they emerge from the evening horizon; so bright, yet so blind, we truly are.
The endeavor, grown into an utterly immense project, our mission was intent on fostering the ambitious goal of establishing meaningful relations with a phantom-like entity, or entities, as the case may be. At times, our progress seemed to advance in great strides, while just as often was frustrated by stretches of interminable inactivity and torpor. Recently, among the more challenging developments, a somewhat disturbing realization emerged: our newfound extra-terrestrial acquaintances, who have come to be known as the “Aist Vidragol,” apparently do not inhabit reality entirely in the same sense as any known form of terrestrial life. In fact, they appear to occupy a vast plurality of realms—I can barely make myself say—other dimensions, completely beyond anyone’s ordinary native habits.
Despite so many seemingly insurmountable challenges impeding our exchange of any meaningful sort of anything with them, the AV none the less appeared to be encouraging of a notion – that there is an unprecedented, perhaps unlimited opportunity to be exploited. That is, if one was unusually courageous, and willing to risk their very purchase upon earthly existence, they could experience a much greater, perhaps infinitely expanded understanding of what it means to be alive. I say “encouraging” only as a shorthand expression, here. To the best of anyone’s ability to make a reasoned analysis, this or these beings have not exhibited any kind of recognized emotional capabilities. Ultimately, it must be said, whatever motivates the AV simply cannot be known by us – this also presumes that motivation even defines a place in their lexicon of behaviors.
Ultimately, it cannot be known if they have manipulated our behavior, and if so, whether or not by intention. Such is the fuel for this utterly colossal, some might say “foolhardy” project, now come to fruition —one by which humankind attempts to fully interact with the Aist Vidragol, near to unthinkably, on their “home turf.” I was in 4B, the window seat.
PART I
0
Like most any long hauler, the upholstery was plush, and the hospitality perhaps a bit better than the usual transcontinental. Traveling in the near buff was certainly novel. I’d never been to Aist Vidragol –that is, in the sense that one could actually go there. No one had, what with the communications barrier being among the multitude of formidable obstacles yet to be overcome. From the very outset, I’d closely followed the progress of various deciphering efforts undertaken around the Institute, the challenge defined as both a practical and philosophically convoluted one; attacked on numerous fronts, in almost every lab. Naturally, I developed my own method, an adaptive cross-matrix envelope. It’s an elementary method for initiating a non-sensory-specific exchange – but with whom, and of what: ideas, appreciations, appetites? I still didn’t know, and I’m not so sure any of it was actually relevant. But there I was, on my way, right into it. Did that make any sense? Maybe, I’m still not convinced any anything makes sense.
My unfocused gaze drifted out beyond the window into the abyss, as I contemplated the mind of the infinite. Whereby human cognition could not, by any practical definition, penetrate nor comprehend such a thing, I persisted in the hope of stumbling onto the nexus of a dreamscape, whereby something greater than nothing would be revealed by the journey. Perhaps selfishly, I also considered my personal quest for universal context an appropriate motivation for making this expedition. Considering the stakes, I was certainly entitled.
Unable to reconcile the rare privilege of having been selected by an unknown process, my thoughts wandered off into how this project became virtually drowned in a pool of unlimited resources. Ordinarily, I knew better than to get involved in such severely micromanaged ventures. Still, I sensed there was more than base curiosity at the root of this madness; something not at all trivial to be gained. But for whom, or what, I sure couldn’t say. “Above my pay grade,” some were fond of bragging. Brilliant, right? I just hoped not to have my tail feathers singed if the thing blew up behind me, metaphorically or literally.
What qualified me for this funny business, in the first place? It’s a valid question, for which I must first apologize, the answer being rather involved. In my own field of kinetic synthesis, everyone has been tremendously interested in the definition of yet another basic animal sense, dubbed “Rendence Perception.” It’s a sort of hybrid dimensional sense, the investigation of which has revealed that the logical array order of the ninety-five million light-sensitive receptors at the back of each of one’s eyes can be shuffled—re-arranged or re-mapped, so to speak—to induce an alternative form of consciousness. It’s a superb demonstration of the brain’s neuroplasticity that relies on one’s innate ability to reinterpret visual information.
Try this little example: As a mental exercis3, thi5 5en73nce ev0kes th0s3 huΣorous w02d mem3z th4t 90 420und – wh323 7he Le77er5 42e 9r4du4lly reþL4©3d 6y o7#3r 5¥Σ60L5 – Σ023 0ƒ 7#3Σ 45 0n3 234d5 4L0Z9, µZ7iL, 6¥ 7#3 3Z[), 411 0ƒ 7#3 73><7 15 ©022µþ7.
To fans of code-breaking, at a glance, that might look like a garden variety substitution code – and one could solve it that way. But actually, it’s a simple pictogram, based on an early hacker practice, called "LEET" or "1337." To read the example, your unconscious mind had to transcend the neural processes you customarily rely on, invoking a state of consciousness where letters are seen only as shapes—as they surely are, and still remain—before you learned to read. A dormant neural process was awakened – one with the power to interpret all kinds of complex visual information that we aren’t ordinarily confronted with. The ability to access that latent ability is a crucial factor in developing one’s own Rendence.
My best pal and I practiced a variation of this, taking the concept a step further. But instead of symbols, ours was based on phonetics. We messaged our lunch plans and such, using non-sequiturs and word fragments that produced the intended sounds of actual language – but had to be imagined or pronounced aloud, often in a lampooned accent. Thinking about that, I wondered if my prolonged indulgence of this sort of amusement had any influence on perceptual malleability. More on that later.
The cabin lighting slowly came up as we entered the inversion layer. At least that’s what I presumed we were experiencing, at this point. Outside, plasmic ions formed a brilliant gradient, from deep orange, through an explosive boundary of blue, lightning-like dendrites—their branching electric fingers fanning out into the blackness of an endless void. The transport seemed to be accelerating, as I detected a faint change in my body mass; suddenly a few grams more effort was needed to lift the wrist or scratch an itch. The environmental design of this ship seemed exquisitely balanced to maintain crew comfort. Though, in theory, the mass of each passenger might have exceeded a thousand times normal, none felt much more than a slight twitch.
I reclined my seat, letting the mind wander, while looking around at the various amenities. I hadn’t previously noticed the hydrate respule which was gurgling a suggestive invitation –maybe saying, “Are ya thirsty, hon?” I never could resist the vocal charms of southern marms. I reached over and took a little drift, flashing nostalgically on my old Mom. She would patiently listen to my detailed explanations and plans, smiling and attentive, rarely interjecting the slightest hint of actual comprehension.
I looked up to see the transport attendant padding along, checking in with each of us. A purser’s well retracted next to my seat, a narrow stair emerging, down which she descended for a little chat. “Good afternoon, Doctor. I can see you have designated seed number 50716.” She - or it really - held a small noteral and a rather elaborate visiocet dangling from the forearm. “Um, oh..” I grunted, fishing around for the tracer stub which had fallen down and was stuck to the underside of my thigh. After looking over the otherwise unintelligible symbols, I handed it over without comment.
“Okay. That is fine. Now, I am required by the FDNC to read you the following placard for your benefit and personal equanimity.” She produced a small cue card to read aloud. The quaint notion that this simulation of a live attendant needed to optically read something from tangible, visible source material was laughable, almost endearing. As a child recites in front of a classroom, it said,” Welcome to Aist Vidrigol. As statistically you are aware, it is not possible for these to interact with purses from otherwheres, Thadeus without bent if id, orc indoor natural lysed shack canary. Mini Unice art bing pro bided two mac yore vista suck session oft play-scent mammaries.”
I took all that in stride, of course, having been quite thoroughly exposed over the years—nay, I should say steeped—in all manner of supercilious corporate mumbo-jumbo. “And a Caveat Emperor to you, too!” I chided, eliciting no reaction. The stub was subsequently scanned by the tablet, then docked with the visiocet. After a faint init beep, they were uncoupled, and the device unceremoniously fixed to my cranium – momentarily leaving me in total blackness.
A second later, I was back to seeing just as before—save for one distinctive peculiarity. Dead center in my vision was an odd square, roughly a centimeter wide. I presumed the square was the same in both eyes since it didn’t change when I blinked them alternately, and it tracked perfectly as I turned my head or shifted my eyes. The square did seem to be part of the view from dead ahead, except it showed what should have been in some other part of my field of vision, like a misplaced puzzle piece. I realized this just as I noticed that in my lower right-hand view was another similarly odd square, likely containing the view displaced from the center square, a simple exchange.
My first inclination was that there must be some kind of glitch in my visiocet. But just as I considered summoning the attendant, another pair of squares became likewise transposed, this time from the upper left to the bottom center of my view. The two squares performed a sort of do-si-do on the way to their new positions. And, in the next five minutes, my entire field of vision was transformed this way, leaving me awash in a scrambled checkerboard sea of incomprehensible visual information that I could no longer process into a workable reality. It was so disturbing that I just wanted the visiocet off my head, right then and there.
As I tried to raise my arms, a deep heaviness descended, as though a dentist’s lead apron had been laid on me—not so much to confine, but as stress relief. As I began to calm down, a long, low tone began to build slowly from the silence, the entire visual field then fading to a uniform, soft blue haze. I’m not sure if this new view of total nothingness was preferable to the kaleidoscopic mosaic that preceded it. However, I began to realize that despite the sensory confusion, I was probably about as safe as one could hope for. That is, given the situation. So, I tried to relax and enjoy as much as possible, regardless of what weirdness I had willingly signed up for.
The sound modulated into a low warbling oscillation between two or three tones, punctuated by a barely audible ticking noise, giving the impression of a mechanical wristwatch being taken for a stroll around the room. Slowly, smaller squares, perhaps one fourth the size of the first ones, started to emerge from the edges of my vision, coming to rest at various new positions in front of me. Initially, they resembled tiny meteorites with fading trails. They multiplied rapidly, producing a miniature fireworks display. As the speed of their arrivals built to a visual crescendo, my entire view was entirely filled with what was surely a high-definition reinterpretation of the previously scrambled checkerboard scene from moments before.
I was marveling and trying to acclimate to this new and stunning sight when every cell of this mad display began to further subdivide, each cell momentarily flashing brilliantly as its four quadrants relocated. Perhaps a minute later, the final result was the seamless view of an entirely new realm, a remarkably and utterly jarring vision, perhaps as disturbing to the eyes, as was one’s ears first exposure to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” None the less, a completely believable sense of coherence remained in this altered setting—a continuum within which one might conceivably eventually find composure. I thought, here was a possible demonstration of perceptual transformation, accomplished without necessarily sacrificing sanity. Maybe. I was as a fetus in its early moments of visual development, taking in an unfiltered stream of stimulation through a naïve, central nervous system. I didn’t fully appreciate that I was about to learn—if subconsciously—how to exploit one’s innate neuroplasticity, otherwise to become a blind castaway in another dimension. Thereby awakening Rendence.
Intellectually, I knew I remained seated, assured that everything must still be in its proper place: the dark gray upholstery, the window port above my right shoulder, a display screen directly in front of me… Nothing was recognizable in any way I’d previously known. Some kind of light, which I guessed must be emanating from the portal, seemed to be coming from inside my own face. Just beyond what I presumed must be the sides of my nose, the air melted into a kind of sideways shimmering waterfall. My display screen must have become active, the likely source of various jagged blips that alternated from green to yellow, flashing at repeating intervals, arrayed at almost geometric spacings, and leaving chevron after-images that slowly faded, when I blinked.
As heavily as I’d been pressed into my seat, I was suddenly compelled to move about. I raised my arms to examine my hands, much like an exploring infant. What reached my visual cortex still bore no direct spatial correspondence with my sense of touch. Waves of amorphous, tetradic crystals, dotted with iridescent rays, seemed to penetrate my face from every direction. When I touched my fingertips together, some of the tetrads receded, while spreading my fingers brought them back. Both eyes still seemed to be tracking together, but my depth perception was otherwise positively confounded, and I could feel a pretty good headache coming on.
I recalled the experiments of Stratton and Erismann, who devised various mirror and prism goggles that inverted or reversed the wearer’s vision. Subjects would wear these full time, being blindfolded at night. Remarkably, after a week or so, they had become adjusted near completely; some even able to ride a bicycle. In part, this demonstrated the integration of vision as a component member of the kinesthetic system, while more of a supplementary piece of one’s motor control schema, rather than an absolute reference.
I tried to imagine my current situation as an extreme version of those mirrored goggles, but it wasn’t working. The familiar logic of up and down or side-to-side had become irrelevant. Moving my hand vertically, for instance, didn’t cause the view of any distinctly recognizable object to shift in a constant or uniform direction. I may have noticed a bright/dark shift in some radiant color formations. Some forms altered shape perhaps, though it would be hard to say exactly how that change was manifest. I brought both hands up to cover my eyes and beheld a marvelous display of residual swirling lights and shapes retreating into my face when they contacted my closed eyelids. One by one, I moved each finger away, revealing that “Cuckoo-land” was still out there, waiting and always available. Assuring myself that it must be possible, I was nearly desperate to figure out how to refocus my attention. My visual sense was indeed being re-trained by the visiocet – the device wasn’t simply an optical interpreter. But I also worried that my vision could be permanently altered, useless when I eventually took this thing off. Everything leading to my decision to make this trip began to rise like seedlings from the field of my insecurities.
It was Ron, my prescient lab boss at UCERN, who first suggested the Aist Vidragol occupied extra-dimensional space—an idea presuming human animal perception was perhaps fundamentally and historically disabled by genetics, our being aware of barely a pinch of dimensionality; merely four axes among who knows how many more there really were. Maybe we were the result of a hide-bound evolutionary model, particular to the Earth, following a limited path of uniquely biological least resistance. By contrast, appreciating that Dark matter makes up most of existence, leaves a lot of room for some legitimately wild speculation. That’s not to mention some daring, certainly dangerous explorations—this one hardly being exceptional, by that measure.
As a young experimenter and avid consumer of arcane science journalism, my own adventures and exploits inspired some fairly risky endeavors, not the least of which involved setting plastic kit models on fire, just before chucking them from a third story bedroom window. I was indeed very fortunate to have a father who understood my adolescent fascination with incendiaries, while calmly insisting that I really ought not burn down our home. Now, here was Ron, voicing the same sort of caution; me still ignoring it.
Some pretty cool stuff was developed in our intrepid little group. That included Anji Hasenveldt, a highly talented, early–middle-aged, stochastic extragrapher from Czestolatakia, with certs in several niche bio techniques, and whose only professional home has been right here, at the Institute. On the tall side, she has long, near-white-blonde hair, an infectious laugh, and an uncommon dexterity with endo hardware.
Anji put together a cyclopod[5] which could be agitated hypersonically, without at all disturbing the inner contents. On one particular test run, the agitator was left running as the thing was pushed through a 100,000 volt potential and let loose into the main accelerator loop. I still don’t know why, but she’d packed the core with a couple of hundred antbugs. Upon their return, they were not only seemingly unharmed but also possessed the astonishing ability to pass through certain types of matter—most notably, each other!
Speculation, at the time, was that the ultra-high-speed compression innately taught their atomic structures some way around the strong nuclear force. What’s more, after a Carbon 14 count, it appeared that at least some parts of our wily insects were immensely old. We theorized that some particles had passed through the bounds of potentially interfering particles by virtue of their not yet existing, or not still persisting in the same space/time as others. Thus, was born the notion of Deep Compression – High-Speed Dimensional Transit[6] and an informal quest beyond dimensionality.
It was Tajeen McAlister, yet another wunderkind in the ‘K’ lab, who became convinced that for a living organism to survive the rigors of a D-Trans (space/time nuclear transit), it had to have gained some way of knowing where/when/how it was going, outside of time. I wouldn’t attempt to explain what thought process lead him to such a conclusion. But it suggested that the antbugs experienced the future through a regression in time. As crazy as that sounded, there was no denying that after their first trips “around the yard,” our test subjects demonstrated the ability to locate a food reward, hours before it was hidden in a randomly selected time and location. That is, before it was even decided where to hide it. He also believed that some kind of extra-sensory capability – an ability to see through multiple dimensions – could have been gained by our test subjects. Otherwise, he reasoned, they could have lost critically important body parts in the transit process. I couldn’t speak to the plausibility of any of that stuff – not yet.
That particular hypothesis never gained much traction, primarily due to a lack of observable tangible evidence. The closest Taj ever came to a meaningful dissection of this thesis was with one particular antbug escapee, which seemed to have grand designs on building some wild, free-range space/time antbug empire. The incident occurred after the creature found a tiny void crack perfectly aligned with an idle xenon flash detector unit, which was left out on a lab bench. We couldn’t quite figure out why, but every time it transited between the future and past, the flash went off. Pop! It created an eerie retinal afterimage of the little critter, frozen in the infinity of a moment, for anyone who happened to be watching. It was far too quick and unpredictable to interact with. Altogether unpremeditated and a one-in-a-skajilliazillion occurrence, it was a miniature maximum freakout. There was no point in trying to capture the little creature, as we had no way of predicting when it would transit the currency of our own continuum. There was no credible argument against the notion that we had glimpsed him in the nearest possible sense of the absolute “Now,” even if we couldn’t tell how far back or forward his temporal expeditions were taking him.
More startling still, I was in Taj’s lab, opening up a cyclopod, when I noticed all throughout the writhing mass of little critters, there were bunches of fine, red tendrils, reminiscent of the tassel on a Shriners’ hat. I asked him what they were. After seeing the unexpected material, he accosted me, ranting on about how I was tampering with his painstaking hard work. “Okay! Okay!” I shouted, hands raised in mock surrender. Evidently, he had not put those in there, prior to the experiment.
After putting the recriminations to rest, we thoroughly scoured the specimen with magnifiers, hypothesizing at length on what possibly could have produced these near micro-fine filaments, and how they could possibly have entered a sealed glass vessel. You can’t really fault us for never considering that the antbugs somehow manufactured the tendrils. I was pretty free with my ideas about alien life forms in those days, half-jokingly positing a notion that we were perhaps the recipients of some kind of extra-terrestrial calling card. After the laughing died down, even more frivolous ideas flowed like so much wine at a dinner party.
“Okay,” Taj still in a creative playful mood, “Suppose the threads are some kind of message from, uh... what? ...like from somebody?” Throwing down the gauntlet, he was frivolously inviting all speculations, “How do you propose that we respond?”
“What response?” I snorted, only slightly bemused that we’d stumbled into a discussion about how one might go about talking with aliens. After all, even if we accepted this as a valid indicator of another life form, a thorough examination of the thread-like tendrils had not revealed even the slightest hint they fit any sort of communications model – not one that we would recognize, anyway.
“Alright then,” I offered half-heartedly. “Maybe the first sensible thing is to show them that we know they exist… or whatever it is they have – I mean, assuming the aliens can actually possess anything, much less something that corresponds to our perceptions or concepts of ownership.” After saying that, I realized how ridiculous this all sounded, and on so many levels. It was like suggesting we try to communicate with a tree, without even knowing it was a tree, or even what a tree actually was. Even if you knew a tree was somehow capable of communication, what meaningful thing could you possibly say to it, and how? How would you begin to approach figuring something like that out?
We agreed that a logical first step would be to devise a way to acknowledge the other entity in so simple a way as to be somehow universally unmistakable. Recognition being a more profound relational concept, that would come later, that being an entirely different level of communication. That line of thought presumed that a tree, from the previous analogy, wasn’t itself merely a medium for communication, or the body of a message, or even the byproduct of a third party’s expression. For the sake of Taj and the antbugs, I withheld these abstractions, realizing in the final analysis, that all of what we know about our own existence is possibly—probably—all of the above.
The following day, while helping prepare a special pod with Taj, re-inserting the mysterious thread bundle, my thoughts returned to the very complex issues in modeling communications. I recalled the Inca people of ancient South America had some sort of communication and accounting system that used knotted lengths of rope, called quipu. That little factoid represented the sum total of my knowledge on the subject. But it gave rise to an idea. With Taj’s assent, I tied a dozen minute knots along the length of the crimson threads. It was admittedly a whimsical thing to do. But for lack of a better idea, I thought, “why not? It’s a simple acknowledgment, right?”
Having done that, it later occurred to me that if the tendrils were an attempt at communication, was it more likely that they were actually directed at the creatures inside the pods? Why wouldn’t these other beings assume the antbugs were not themselves autonomous explorers? Globally outnumbering humans 2.8 million to 1, after all, ants might have engineered us to launch them into the next dimension. If the ants knew, they weren’t talking.
And what did the antbugs do with all of it? As far as I could tell, they weren’t interacting with the tendrils in any way. Then again, we were no better at communicating with antbugs than with inanimate piles of dirt. So, chalk one up for ignorance. All day, I pondered the problems stemming from my deeply ingrained anthropocentric way of thinking. If we really could communicate with beings from another world, what was reasonable to assume about how that might be accomplished?
It seemed to me that entities engaged in a “communicative relationship” need to share certain baseline attributes. Such attributes need not be limited to morphological similarities or even complementary features; instead, they should be of a nature that enables each to perceive changes in the other over time – a base level comprehension. At its core, the first and most fundamental attribute is simply an awareness of the other’s existence within a shared space and time.
This necessity of a shared space/time led me to curse the notion that from an unfathomable infinitesimal singularity, there once poured forth the damnable underpinnings of human thought. After all, existence was a monolith we clung to quite dearly, an albatross proclaiming the guilt of reality. To discard that was literally to deny everything. But what if transcending space-time into another dimension was a real possibility?
But right there, this reality was getting more fascinating by the minute. The vial of near-frantic antbugs returned intact—its accompanying tendrils un-knotted. Escalating matters from peculiar to panic-stricken, the returning cyclopod also contained several dozen cubic, metallic nodules, all the same size, a bit smaller than gaming dice, shimmering like holograms.
Stunned and incredulous, we rushed the little cubes down to the microscopy lab. Viewed head on, the faces of the cubes seemed at once both reflective and refractive, maybe somehow representational of an entrance to, or from within the interior of some larger environment – a room of sorts, suggesting these could be miniscule viewports, or even entry ports – that is if one was really teeny tiny.
Entry to what, of course we had no idea. Further examination revealed the edges of each cube included microscopic symbols that resembled and matched similar marks on all the other cubes. At painstaking length, a digital catalog of each of the cubes’ faces was made, their edge markings then algorithmically paired with each other. From this, two-dimensional maps were generated and projected as rectangular arrays, each scaled to four-centimeter squares. Not only had our diminutive subjects learned to D-Trans, but this new development seemed a clear sign that something from another dimension had taken notice of us. But for the sake of restraint, we tabled that notion for the moment.
It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that none of us had thought to weigh the glass specimen vials before accelerating the cyclopods. Electron microscopy would reveal the cubes were mostly silicon, which we figured must somehow have been extracted from the vials themselves. We really had no explanation where the material could have come from, especially considering the accelerator loop transit. Adding fuel to our mystery, the tendrils had shown to be composed of simple organics, mimicking cellulose. All the antbugs were accounted for; none sacrificed for their carbon content. And the notion that our minute subjects themselves could have somehow produced these objects was beyond consideration, despite their tricky, newfound trans-dimensional acumen.
Back in the lab, the three of us poked and prodded the little cubes, arranging them in various configurations as they sat out on the central table. The processed mapping data clearly suggested various pattern matches. And, when arranged into rectangular arrays, we saw that the cubes could be stacked and combined in three dimensions, forming the sides of larger cubes. Putting that to practice, each piece seemed to register itself, gently reorienting itself and snapping into position. And, once a final die was placed in the array, thereby completing a large cube, the resulting assembly underwent an unseen transformation, becoming impossible to take apart.
Each of us broke fingernails trying to pry the little dice back off, like taking turns trying to extract Excalibur from the stone. Dumbfounded, I laid the cube down in the middle of the table, whereupon it adroitly flipped itself over 90°, then righted itself, balancing on one corner. There, it remained perfectly stable, suspended like a gyroscope toy. “Woah!” we all gasped in unison. We looked at one another, eyes wide, shaking our heads; this gift kept giving.
Though the cube assembly surely must have remained hollow, it emitted a warm, scintillating radiance that seemed to come from a source within. The newly combined faces served as view portals, unified and enticing. Peering into them was a transcendental experience. As the cube was slowly turned, the internal view shifted in an unexpected way, giving the impression of looking outward from within, as if one was turning around in the center of a cavernous room. But it was not exactly a conventional kind of room. Concentrating the gaze as much as possible—without a perceptual frame of reference of walls or other boundaries—the room expanded rather impossibly, extending through an array of dancing light beams, some intensely bright, others cycling through varied hues. Some beams swept about, while others flickered stroboscopically. Where the beams intersected, a near-blinding flash often resulted, or a rainbow of new beams would bounce off, scattering in different directions. Looking into the cube for just a few seconds, one lost all sense of time, space, and the outside world, perhaps irresistibly compelled to a perfect stillness.
1
Nested deep in the seat of my journey to Aist Vidragol, the memory of what I’d seen in the cubes resonated with immersion in the visiocet. Radiant beams washed over me, intersecting upon trains of electrified, crystalline tetradynes, evidently closing a sort of “chain of comprehension,” coaxing the emergence of an innate familiarity, but with what I could barely describe. With no remaining connection to even my theoretical understanding of the world, I began to realize that there was really nothing to surrender in the first place —so no anxiety materialized over losing what was, in essence, well... nothing. It was perhaps an instinctual response to serenity, as with swimming in a mountain lake in summer. I ceased to wonder why my fingers weren’t represented as they were in “ordinary” dimensional space, and extended my hand straight forward. My fingertips unexpectedly encountered the forgotten screen display, which became active, and responded by transforming into variously slanted, disjointed segments of shimmering ellipsoids, resplendent with broken links of circulating, multi-colored bands. One of the bands seemed to call to my attention, compelling me to reach into it. Though I can’t say I saw my fingers touch anything, I felt the band respond by unwrapping itself onto my wrist - which I interpreted as an ordinary sort of tactile or haptic cue. Startled by it, I pulled back, the band easily releasing.
The boundless nature of this new environment thrust my exploratory instincts into high gear. Those constellations of interactive specters suggested an entirely new realm—perhaps many realms—into which my whole being was suddenly released; not constrained by length, width, or depth, nor perhaps even time. My perception was confounded, not still sure if everything was visually sensed, turning inside out without effort, without forethought, without concern for the absurdity. I tried to speak but couldn’t find my tongue for a moment. My mouth was on top of my head, my kinesthetic awareness long since having leapt off into the laughing chaos with a clutch of feral playmates, and spinning off a carousel of fleeing memories. Uh oh.
I don’t know what caused me to wonder at the passage of time. If I was so profoundly transformed by new circumstances, why remain held within the confines of the present? Or was I? As surely as back and front no longer held sway, did time’s direction still have an unrelenting grasp on reality? Was I when I was supposed to be, yet? My eye winked me and fell into a fast-moving spray of some inversion of time, a squadron of moments retracing a recursion into oblivion. Uh uh oh.
While briefly confused by the temporal deviations, I was rudely startled by a jagged pattern extending into my side, illuminated with a horizontal gradient that descended into my extremities.
“Hello again, Doctor,” the attendant crooned warmly. “I know it’s a bit early in your assimilation phase, but one of your journey-mates suggested you might like some company on the way in – a Mister Feran d’Ello?”
“What?! Grisdoff?!” I sputtered incredulously, as a flock of yellow tetrads diverged into the fluff. How could it be that my oldest friend from elementary school days had materialized in a seat next to mine,.. here, on this pre-dimensional inflexion, headed for I really knew not what? It was an absolute bolt from the blue, an electric shock of impossible equation. In an instant, my mind recalled his bizarre, animated collages, accompanied by the crooning likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, backed by Nelson Riddle’s Orchestral All-Stars. He was an artist who trampled on boundaries, was perhaps seasoned with a side order of clueless indifference, and whom I hadn’t thought of in thirty years.
As a kid, I really admired Griz’s off-kilter wit, which in retrospect was a well cultivated legacy, inherited from somewhat bohemian parents, both also artists. And though we shared so many common interests, he’d been a sort of fair-weather friend, not usually the one to suggest we get together outside the school yard. I never became part of his neighborhood cadre of slightly older, mischievous ruffians, who seemed always involved in some clandestine pyrotechnic shenanigans. Still, despite whatever dormant relationship baggage I might have kept, I just had to know what the hell he was doing there.
“He’s just over here,” the attendant was guiding me up and over what appeared, for all intents and purposes, as the illuminated viscera of a flying moose. Don’t ask me if I walked or flew upside down as we made our way down the aisle.
I plunked down next to him, air hissing from the seat as it formed around my contours. Despite the changes in my newly developing perceptions, I could somehow see it was him, almost instantly.
“You know, I’d rather be Grizdoff than pizzed off! What the bloody hell are you doing here, on the way to the bottomless pit of sub-nucleic high jinks?”
D’Ello and I were then middling our fifties, he was a little more rough around the edges, and almost painfully thin.
“I dunno.” It was a typically flippant Griz reply. “I saw an open call for ethno-graphic decoders. And being out of work at the time, I had nothing better to do. I sure knew about graphics. I thought I could, you know, try It out. So, I applied, and here I am.”
Just like that, still as matter of fact as when we were twelve.
With further prodding, I learned that he’d traveled a serpentine career path, that more often than not provided an outlet for at least some of his many skills and interests, while never quite landing on what felt like the solid ground of his true raison d'être. Starting out as a cartoonist for The Post Gazetteer, he experienced his first downsizing as a ten-year veteran, A.I. proving more adept at snarky political humor than anyone would have suspected. A crackerjack engine mechanic, Griz toured the Formula One circuit with the likes of Lee Driveeno and Hay-Jay Foot. When that got old, he found there was an audience, albeit possibly a bit too cultured, for his animated collages. These were giant-size paintings, upwards of five meters high, featuring moving figures, reimagined as snippets from magazine ads, popping in from side to side, disembodied legs dancing, and the like.
The collages were not making him a rich man. The self-evident logic of survival had him casting about for better prospects. As luck would have it, the institute was then struggling to decipher a way into the Aist Vidragol intelligence. If the flashing lights and dancing shapes were a form of communication, there was no reference point from which to comprehend them, much less process such seemingly infinite and random formations. The exceptional beauty of what they produced was, nonetheless, undeniable.
Little progress being made with extracting meaning from the cubes, an absurd notion, likely born of someone’s drunken stupor, gained traction for lack of a better idea. It was the castoff delusion of an unknown figure in the upper echelons—a garden variety paycheck thief—who hypothesized the laughable concept of beauty itself being the possible key to unlocking the meaning of these apparitions. The thought was that artists, whose inclinations weren’t necessarily bound to a fixed interpretation of what they saw, were more likely to make sense of whatever the hell they were looking at. Griz appeared with the right kind of art at the right time.
I told him about how the whole shebang had barged into existence in my own lab, under my very own nose, some time ago...
As with any artifact of an unknown origin, news of an alien object in our lab reached official ears in short order. A typically monstrous institution, UCERN likewise owed much of its existence to the largesse of international, government-funded science agencies, the organs of which digested every scintilla of research, useful and not, exploiting and excreting political agendas along with the attendant political intrigue. After the Higgs Boson incident and the Dark Matter Cascade Interruption, security had really tightened up. So, it was no surprise when Ron Ruvendas, the head of our lab, strolled in one afternoon for a peek at our little gem, a couple of official minders in tow.
“Aww! Who blabbed?” I feigned with friendly indignation, rolling my eyes.
Naturally, Ron was mesmerized just like the rest of us. After a few minutes, he motioned me, Taj and Anji into the conference room, shutting the door behind, leaving the goons at parade rest, near the lab’s main entry.
“This is the real deal, isn’t it!” he exhaled heavily. “I know none of us ever expected to get involved in something like this. Yet here we are. Now, we have to decide if this is the game we signed up for, or hand off to SETI. You know, once they get wind of this, it’s gonna be frisky as hell, until they at least get a seat at the table.”
Of course, we did know this was coming. But as we were all so engrossed and transformed by a unified passion to know what this thing was, none of us was mulling over any long-term scenarios of that sort. The thought of walking away from whatever we had now was nevertheless entirely unthinkable.
“What will they want to do with it?” Anji wondered aloud. “Will they take it off site? Subject it to high energetics? Or worse, give it away?”
Nervous and pensive, Ron worried his lower lip between his incisors.
“Geez, I really don’t know, Anj. You know, I wanna keep it in the family, too.” He paused a moment.
“You know, I’m thinking, there’s a guy over there that came up in my old neighborhood. I haven’t seen or said much to Gaynard Grey in twenty-five years. But, if reaching out to him with an invitation is how we get to stay in the game, he might be our best shot.”
I shrugged and quipped, “In for a dime; in for a dollar.” Despite the glib sentiment, a reluctant but resolved half-smile with raised eyebrows circulated through our little ensemble. Ron’s minders stayed behind, when he left. No doubt, what was in our lab had been classified.
…next chapter posting on 5/12/2025
copyright©2025 Bradley N. Litwin
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