remap -3

the sub-dimensional adventure continues...

Welcome back to remap, an unwieldy schematic diagram of cosmic aspirations, institutional farce, and deeply personal confusion that still insists on being called a novel.

In this next installment, the absurdity proliferates. Logic is only barely tolerated. There are declarations made with the confidence of ancient prophets, who’ve tripped on the same cracked floorboards as the rest of us. If you crave language that unbuttons its collar and curls into the grimy folds of a dimensional anomaly—you’ll feel right at home, here.

Ah! Here’s a link to the beginning of the book.
- Start At The Beginning
I’ll post a linked table of contents later.

3A

Still reeling from wartime devastation on a remote fringe of the Ardennes, the tiny Belgian hamlet of Heflerbech had scant little to offer, save what meager sustenance could be scavenged by a couple of young survivors. The lovers had just wed to avoid the prospect of an honor killing, and likely would have otherwise gone their separate directions, by and by. But shortly after the end of hostilities, Simone d’Abernaise Kinvey, a buxom and talkative milkmaid, and Willie Vanderquiche Mahier, a n’er-do-well saddle stitcher from the village, found themselves the culpable parties at the arrival of a squalling diminutive brand new family member.

Ers Kinvey Mahier was a fractious and sullen little boy; in four years, sickly and grown habituated to his mother’s constant pampering. He was practically insufferable as a result, except, oddly, when discussing the wonders of distant planets and the stars. Despite his parents’ indifference, it was a topic that also enthralled his street urchin comrades. Thus, he was let loose to otherwise explore his innate curiosities along with the ragtag posse of budding young criminals, rollicking amongst the highly toxic remains of the war’s still decaying ruins.

After one particular foray into those waste heaps, Ers developed a body rash that quickly blossomed into a blazing fever. In those days, such could be the harbinger of an impending, life-threatening illness, or even death, antibiotics yet being a somewhat rare commodity. In only a couple hours, the boy’s head softened and enflamed to a bright purplish red, expanding to a grotesque bulb, which was feared might even burst. With nothing more to be done, the Mahiers gave consent to a local veterinarian, who offered to bore a small hole into the boy’s skull for the insertion of a tube; this in hopes of draining what was assumed to be a building volume of pustulent fluid. Without any basis for thinking it a curative procedure, the wizened horse doc only hoped to provide some level of comfort for the suffering tyke, in the few hours before his presumed demise.

As if nothing more revolting could possibly result, upon the tube’s penetration of the dura membrane just inside Ers’s skull, a piercing hiss erupted, accompanied by the most gawdawful ghastly stench anyone had ever beheld in the entirety of their mortally forsaken lives. Effluent gases concentrated within the boy’s inflated head quickly spread to every corner of the small bedroom. At the foot of the bed, his loyal dog’s sense of reality became utterly unraveled, and any pestilent creature that had dared encroach upon the scene was thereby instantly rendered feet-up. The corrupt air nearly rendering unconscious every sentient body in attendance, all bolted in horrified desperation, nearly tearing the door from its hinges.

Left alone at last, the boy’s eyes opened to reveal a completely unexpected view. The evening stars and heavens penetrated the roof overhead, replacing the room entire, as well as his own tiny body, now made perfectly still within a warm embrace, the likes of which was surely unknown up to that moment. Cascading waves of shooting stars and clouds of swirling nebulae formed an altogether redefined dimensionless milieu, one by which Ers felt surely this must be his ascension, though he’d not yet really considered the concept of “Heaven.” There was a roar of crystalline silence, from which somewhere came a singular, disembodied call: “Come.” With that, his eyelids eased to a close again, a new assurance conferred upon his tenuous existence.

As the last of the offending gases were expelled from the boy’s head, it regained its previously normal size and shape, the dreadful odor dissipating over the next few hours. By morning, Ers’s disposition was completely normal and in need of some breakfast. Given a slice of baguette with a dab of jam and tea, his parents marveled at their son’s miraculous rapid recovery. Was it his imagination, a figment of delirium; had there been someone else in the room? Had some ‘other world entity’ really invited him to somehow join the vastness of the universe? Thoughts along these lines raced across his imagination that morning, and for decades to come.

The frail boy was constantly victimized by the cruelty of his insensitive contemporaries over his ensuing formative years. Perhaps understandably, Ers Kinvey Mahier’s sullen demeanor was moulded into an attitude of profound cynicism towards humanity. Compounded in the savagery of an antisocial adolescence, he learned to effectively retaliate through subterfuge, perfecting the art of setting up his tormentors, orchestrating stunningly nefarious schemes that would result in their disgrace; some being marked for life; all by the time Ers entered le Lycée.

Never pausing to examine his deeper motives, or the nameless, relentless, visceral pain he endured, a dark and bitter heart seethed and putrefied within, remorse and compassion equated with weakness. Ultimately, the only thing that stayed him from self-destruction was the vivid memory of his early childhood illness and that enigmatic, one-word exhortation, “Come.” Over time, he privately became obsessed with it, utterly convinced of his destiny beyond the cosmos. And when the AV materialized… Voila! Within his very own two hands, obsession was transformed to undeniable fait accompli. He knew it was they who had summoned him.

4

At the single focal point terminating all the beams, the cube still waiting in the reflexer mount was glowing orange, interspersed by hot blue flashes, evanescent branches of electric charges dancing all over it. Perhaps a minute passed before the beams abruptly vanished. The operations tech looked over at Anji for some kind of encouragement, perhaps to initiate the test protocol. To her credit, Anji was an overly cautious sort–saying so being an understatement. It was an attribute I admired in her, having made countless impulsive errors in the course of bungling my own travails. You would think such impulsive behavior entirely out of bounds for a Registered Fixer. Ha! But Anji would be a natural, she was all about precision and procedure. She held up a hand to indicate the tech should stop whatever it was she was contemplating. We agreed to sit on this new development, pending some much-needed rest, and space/time to contemplate.

I had an art gallery opening invitation for that night. The guest artist was of the conceptual bent, his installation consisting of some continuous strands of beef jerky, sewn up to comprise the structural members of an un-dimensionalized tesseract. The central, meaty object was suspended by dozens of Christmas tree light strands, anchored from the far corners of the gallery. Cripes! If I’d known a talk was about to be delivered, I would’ve ducked out. But I was already well lubricated, and a pair of chatterboxing barflies deftly button-holed me, distracting my attention, just as the artist stepped up to the microphone.

He began, “I had an important realization, as I was thinking about this project, or for that matter, how I thought about anything I ever did, or maybe would do from now on. That the persistence of my personal illusion of consciousness does not constitute the primal source of my existence; that every stimulus driving the extremities of my behavior relies upon a long chain of conditioned reflexes, not the least of which is the notion that one has control over the progression of experience.”
Under my breath, I commented that I could just throw up when confronted with this sort of prattle.

“In the final analysis,” he continued, “I have to state, that my every action has been categorically contrary to my own conscious will; that there has been virtually nothing I’ve ever truly preferred to do, that my body or mind has engaged in or produced–thus far. And, untethered by the countless and myriad conventions that do so bind us, I should be thrashing around on the floor, screaming at the top of my lungs. Kindly, permit me to demonstrate.”

And he did just that: dropping to the floor, in a fetal position, he began kicking his legs whilst projecting the most gut-wrenching wail. More incredibly, my inebriated companions took this as their cue to do the very same. Within a minute, everyone in attendance had followed suit, leaving me the lone remaining standee. The cacophony was deafening, and I couldn’t move from the spot.
“Whaaaaa!” I screamed, abruptly sitting straight up from the bed, the clock displaying “03:14.”

It was the sort of nightmare that flared up after an emotionally exhausting day. Considering the bizarre subconscious pantomime, a basal irritant clearly needed teasing out of my addled brain, like a burr in one’s sock. Lately, I had noticed a sort of separation in my thoughts, as if my body could carry on without me while I concerned myself with more pressing issues. Actually, I thought that went on anyway, didn’t I? Every last itty-bitty-bloody action I’d ever executed was predicated on a will to perform that action, regardless of any evaluation, conscious or otherwise. But I was fully aware that it was my subconscious that ultimately controlled the behavior. And anyway, it’s that hidden layer of consciousness that experiences the business end of being a living creature—it does the actual living, while the conscious mind just tags along for the ride.

From time to time, I wonder how the relationship between the two minds is reconciled. After all, the unconscious mind is occupied with the neural housekeeping of bodily coordination, proctoring an absolute deluge of sensory impulses, safely out of the way of any executive mind interference. I’d considered situations where the two minds conflicted, musing that it must happen on occasion. I imagined wild electrical storms taking place in the brain, conflicting ideas violently zapping and sparking across dense networks of neurons.

And if one were ever tempted to hunt down these imaginary points of mediation between the two realms? Would one perhaps catch a glimpse of the so-called “ghost in the machine” — to discover it hunkering down in the remotest infinitesimal cracks of the synaptic hinterlands? But then, there might well be nothing there.

Ha! Nothingness. I thought so. And what if that is the true legacy of our existence. What if, in their quest to explain our presence among the cosmos, the most inspired minds in the world—conjuring incantations above the most sensitive instrumentation and driven by the ultimate logic of theoretical convolutions—were to finally arrive at the balanced perfection of the null set? What then? What would it mean to a family of thread-pullers and bark weasels, those fortunate enough to be employed in more menial labors, spending each night mesmerized by the television set, all their toils boiling down to naught in heavy syrup? It occurred to me then, the Aist Vidragol knows, just like “The Shadow” do.

I was surprisingly alert when the sun rose. That’s the good thing about getting plastered in your dreams: no hangover. While getting dressed, I invited Ron to meet me for coffee at Buddy’s diner, just around the corner from my place. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t agree to an early morning rendezvous, given the family chaos that engulfed his home at that hour. But this apparently highly active artifact, now waiting in our lab, was a desert oasis with a huge billboard pointing to it from overhead. Parched explorers we now surely were. This project, whatever it was, really stoked our mental boilers, super-heating our naturally unquenchable appetites for the next development.

Intoxicating aromatic molecules of coffee teased the deeper recesses of our sinus passages as I broached a topic that was really somewhat out of character for me. I really don’t know why, but I was curious about the possible consequences our activities might be fomenting in the upstream echelons of UCERN administration, or beyond. Were we making waves, so to speak? There would be natural temptations to exploit these “techno-artifacts” in ways we’d definitely eschew as ill-advised, unethical, even downright predatory in some way.

“I’m not aware of anything outrageously exploitative, Milo. Still, you’ve gotta know, there’s a pretty steep cliff overshadowing my paltry pay grade,” Ron offered. After a reflective pause, he pinched the bridge of his nose and remarked “You know, there is some pretty interesting work going on in the Dimensional Transitioner group. They might like to know about our experiences with inter-phasic manipulation, based on these little capsule runs.”
“Mm. They might, “I speculated, wondering why the change of subject. “Can you imagine what would happen if somehow a person took a ride in a sub-dimensional transitioner?” I wondered aloud. That made him laugh a bit too hard, nearly driving the mouthful of coffee he’d just taken, back out through his nose. Tears in his eyes and pressing his face hard with the back of his hand, he blurted out “That was cruel, Milo!” “I didn’t see that one coming.”

Still, Ron was a man of deeper insight than most.
“You know, Milo..” pausing while still imagining how it would be done. “We haven’t seen evidence of anything more deleterious than a lack of oxygen snuffing the mice. Suppose you made a miniature sort of external aqualung/re-breather that could fit within the capsule, alongside of the little critter.”
“That’s a lot of hardware to fit in a little glass tube, Ron.”
“Well,” he chided. “You’re the RF. If anyone could…”
“Hmm. Maybe I should take a walk out to SDT for a little peak, sometime.”

“Meanwhile, what do you think about our little glow-in-the-dark toy?” I asked.
One could easily anticipate the scenario of events that would soon follow: the reflexer protocol would be run, probably right away. The disappearance of that last cube seemed a strong indicator the AV had extracted whatever it had been after in our realm, then composed a response we wouldn’t fail to comprehend. Alas, the logic of that later speculation held some assumptions that reached a bit too far, none of it well justified – especially considering what little we’d accomplished to date. We were still like infants: watching someone put a toy behind a blind, being surprised by its subsequent reappearance, not yet comprehending the permanency of objects.

But what would we do otherwise: wait to see if the glowing cube would spontaneously cool down or get hotter, turn off, explode, multiply over time? All was more or less ridiculous on some level, even though given past experience, none of it entirely unlikely. Perhaps a minute passed while we just looked straight at one another in a sort of shared trance.
“I tell you what, Milo. Let’s get Gaynard to come down for the test.” It was a pretty good idea—just the sort of thing they appreciated. So far, Grey’s group had managed to tease out a long parade of garbled graphics, some intermixed with linguistic foo fraw from other cubes in the reflexer, nearly all of which might take decades to untangle. Now, we were hoping to see the game ratchet up a click or two, and I liked the “All hands on deck” approach that Ron was embracing.

4A

You wouldn’t think putting the visiocet back on would be a relief, what with all that jagged swooshy flash-bulb turbulence. But it was. Stunned beyond astonishment, I appealed to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to shit or go blind, man.” It was as if I had suddenly found myself within one of those crazy cubes that we’d pulled out of the hypersonic agitators. I recalled how the antbugs had come back covered in bundles of crimson fibers, in which we also found the little sub-cubes embedded; how the antbugs scrambled about, passing through each another; how they later spontaneously modified their habitat into little cubical chambers, connected by rectilinear pathways. They resembled electronic circuits, all festooned with more microscopically thin, bioluminescent strands. I concluded that I was just then subjected to what the antbugs had been. And I wanted some red tendrils, too, dammit!

Initially, my seat in the SDT was determined through a winnowing of candidates, all of whom had a wide range of scientific disciplines and practical interests. There was the usual battery of physical exams and diagnostics, along with psychological profiling interviews and tests of sorts I’d never heard of. I could not imagine the connection between how I was predicted to behave on this mission and questions like, “Do you think the world would be a better place if words like ‘maybe,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘possibly’ were removed from the language?” Had I once been so glib as to say, “In for a dime; in for a dollar?” Desperate thoughts raced through me like a pack of hyenas competing over a fresh kill.
“Good grief!”

“Griz! Are you still there, buddy?”
“Sure, Milo. You okay?”
“I was just wondering, is it permanent? Can we go back?”
“Back where, Milo? Where do you wanna go?”
I had to think. The mission. Was I on a mission? What did I think I was going to do? What did they expect? I suddenly remembered that I’d brought test equipment with me: a micro-gravitometer, an inverse time plenum isolator, a pair of Nicodawgs, and a couple of unlinked AV dice. None of it seemed relevant at that moment. I thought that anything anybody wanted to know about existence in a sub-dimensional void was probably pointless. That is, unless they intended to be transformed into some alternative form of queerly negativized non-matter.. with a cherry on top!

Where would I wanna go? How would I get there? I couldn’t even say with certainty where I was anymore. Was there even still a “where”? Was there still an “is”? I decided there was still an “is,” since I was still thinking about it—given that there was an “I” to think about it. Then again, I wasn’t sure if thinking was truly tangible, or if it was merely a theoretical supposition, or if it was genuinely self-referential by definition—thereby becoming a disqualifiable premise—the fiat of a living brain, which may or may not engage in actual or even virtual thinking. If it was an illusion, what was being deluded? I concluded that one dared not consider whether it was possible to think oneself into oblivion.

“I’ll tell ya what`, Milo. You seem like you’re not so sure about sub-dimensional possibilities. So, let’s suppose for a minute you could go back to, let’s say the UCERN SDT launch pad, where we started out. Would you just take a deep lungful of the electric air, and head back to the parking lot? Would you take a drive through the Sine Lumiary, soak up some bright, maybe stop for a bite at Alta Mammie’s? Would you do stuff like that? Really cram it to your senses ‘til ya flopped down in the sack for a pocketful of confusion? Would ya?”

“Well, that does sound kinda good, Griz.”
“This thin skew as wsa tormented by, Milo. Garge wanda plaque?”
“What??”
“What what?”
“What’d you just say, Griz?”
“What? You’re tre-monting yourself with old dist inking business, Milo. Donya wanda plaque? “
“But, what made you start talking like that? Did you do it on purpose, just to mess with me?”
“Talakin white glut, Slimo?”
“There! Youd is jid-aggin. Aaaaa! Byem dwingid gnaw!”

The next exciting chapter of “remap” will be posted 5/26/2025

copyright©2025 Bradley N. Litwin