remap -5

Down the Dimensional Rabbit Hole: Milo Meets Space/Time Creatures

The story thus far— No! Don’t spoil it, Bradley! Let ‘em Start from the beginning.

All right then, if you mush cheat: When a strange cube is materialized during a high-energy physics experiment, a series of increasingly bizarre phenomena unravels. The object, evidently from an exogenous intelligence and later revealed as the Aist Vidragol (AV), sets off a global cascade of scientific, military, and philosophical inquiry. At the center of this maelstrom is Milo, a scientist haunted by visions and dreams that seem seeded by the AV themselves. As his lab deciphers the cubes' strange behaviors—including their ability to assemble, emit audio, and worse—Milo finds himself drawn deeper into something vast and disquieting…

7

The meetings, examinations and recriminations were endless, technicians and nosy gadge-addled interlopers pawing and probing at the new thing the AV had just bequeathed us. There was argument and speculation aplenty over whether this unique object was composed of materials solely generated by our own technology, or if the resulting hybrid, self-progenerating assembly actually re-processed the depositor’s output. After the stunning demonstration of its materialization, every one of us practically expected the thing to wake up and reveal the meaning of life. Dubbed the “Little Guy,” it nonetheless remained as inert as a stone paperweight, with a wind-up key nowhere in sight. “Just a demo, I’m guessing.” Ron chuckled. “No doubt, the beta will be released soon.”

I had to get some fresh air, sauntering out to the parking lot. On an earlier suggestion from Ron, I decided it was a good time for an exchange of fresh ideas with some of our collegial brethren, specifically the Dimensional Transitioner Group, known colloquially as the “Space/Time Creatures in Search of a Black Lagoon.” Rumor was they had devised a method to fold space into fewer than the usual number of dimensions. I felt like that was worth knowing something about, especially in light of our experiences with objects that possibly existed in not-the-usual number of dimensions. I rang up Gaynard Grey, thinking he was probably hooked up enough to make some introductions. “Well Milo. Thinking of climbing out of one rabbit hole to jump down another?” He was chiding me, of course, while tacitly reminding me that exceptional weirdness would probably continue to dog my footsteps, all the rest of my days. Later that afternoon, I got a call from Charles Mackee, “Creature in Chief” at DTG, with an invitation to come on over. I felt a little spark ignite my step.

An effusive, late-middle-aged fellow, with a limp that suggested knee replacement was imminent, Chuck met me at the main access corridor, where we entered an airlock, and donned TriVac white-suits, snoods and booties. I had no idea what to expect of their lab, which was seriously huge, with a twenty meter ceiling, and spreading out a quarter mile in every other direction. Clusters of office cubes and covered passageways populated parts of the staging floor, massive, high-voltage switchgear, cabling and monitoring stations strewn as far as one could see. From dead center of the cavernous vault, there rose a pentagonal metallic platform, roughly fifteen meters across, and teaming with umbilical systems beneath, apparently the launch deck for a gleaming cylindrical tube, poised directly above, which was horizontally suspended from an electro-magnetic trunnion. Perhaps four meters across by ten meters long, and slightly flattened to an elliptical profile, the tube was festooned at either end with a thousand writhing data snakes and power couplings. Various draped gantry cranes and bucket-lifters tended the installation, with near blinding work lights mounted on everything. An open circular portal interrupted the tube’s midsection, the interior then pitch-dark. Perhaps a dozen technicians puttered about, each methodically regarding, adjusting, installing or testing some manner of mostly unidentifiable, ancillary gear.

“Just wow! I had no idea this was here, Chuck.”
“And, very few others know about it. Can I call you Milo?”
“Please.”
Nodding at the tube, “Does that actually go somewhere?”
“Go, yes. Where it goes is perhaps a matter of interpretation.”
“I’m all ears. But, it isn’t a giant hypersonic agitator, by any chance?”
“Well, if it was one, would you like to go for a spin?”
“Heh! Some diminutive, erstwhile passengers now reposing in our freezer, might demur given that choice.”
“Right. The breathing problem.”

“So, this is a classified project, right? Why am I here?”
“Well, full disclosure, you’ve always been a team member, since its inception. We just weren’t ready to have you come aboard, until now.”
“Really? That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? I mean I only just now thought about meeting with you folks.”
“That may be. But, you had the kernel of that idea planted at our behest. You have a naturally inquisitive mind. It was only a matter of time before you’d show up. And we’re the patient sort.”
“You’ve known about the cubes, I suppose? The Aist Vidragol?”
“Well, certainly! We’ve been working with Gray’s team since nearly the beginning. And, with the output of your recent developments, the information floodgates have swung wide open. We’ve even begun to correlate a Rendence matrix that might well fit some of their patterns.” My ears pricked right up at that.

Hearing this I thought of my graduate school days at SIMCA Tech. The eminent visicist, Rufus Burntuckle reigned sublime over the Inert Logic Extraction facility, where unrefined matrices went for dislocation or abstraction. His ascent to academic veneration was fueled by seminal works on the polymorphic lattices of Whitiger’s Kaleidoscope and the Latté Swirl Conflecture. Dubbed “Rendence Diffusion,” Burntuckle refined several involute matrix methods, which lead to the unraveling of Fletcher’s Encotions (The transcendental matrix of refraction analyses, postulated by the generation of standard self-referential inversion tables. The basis for perceptual recursive logic, as demonstrated by Burntuckle, et al) and the deconstruction of Moire’s Illusion. For the most part, those who really understood this work found themselves sequestered deep within the maze of various anonymous facilities, unknown outside the national security services, that is. I acquired a fascination with Dissolution Matrices when I accidentally signed up for Burntuckle’s lecture class. Initially thinking it was a prerequisite for phyto-synthesis 201, my expectations were serendipitously overturned. I’d always been mesmerized by Moire’s Illusion, and so thrived among the elegance of its arcane components.

At the end of that semester, a UCERN recruiter suggested that I could make a career of this work, if I were to become a Registered Fixer. It seemed to me that such a turn might represent a valuable distillation of much that I’d found meaningful in the practical cynixes (scientific regrets). As it happened, I needed only a ew credits in applied mechanical husbandry, and some hands-on tampering with the apprentice program, to get my certs – upon which I was immediately, and unceremoniously inducted into my first assignment, decoding mid-stream static at UCERN’s big Echo Reluctor.

Twenty-some years later, I bristled at the notion that my destiny was not of my own making, but I suppressed that indignation for obvious reasons. Feeling like a pawn in the upper echelon’s calculus was a humiliation that would require some serious introspective reconciliation. Still, I realized it was exceptionally foolish of me to believe that our activities would have no further repercussions beyond Ron’s little lab.

And now, here I was, brought in to deal with someone’s remapped perception of—what? I could only imagine. What was it that I kept telling myself? “In for a dime…?” Maybe I’d like to have spent that dime on a call to my mother, to tell her about the burnt-up cookies I’d secretly tried to make while she was out shopping, then buried in the backyard behind the petunias. But then, regret was a waste of time, especially in the face of what these folks were about. And besides, Mom was no dope.

“That thing sort of looks like a chopped out piece from a space liner, Chuck. What’s the connection to the AV? Working on a way to go visit them? We don’t even know where they are in space/time, or dimensional disposition. They might not even exist in any conventional sense.”
“Sure. While all that may be true, Milo, maybe we don’t exist, either. I mean, we’re all swimming around, confined to our own perceptual pools, contriving a model of reality to coincide with self-referential logic. We appear to interact with the world, and with others, all of which might simply be the experience of but one great, unified experiential entity. That might include the AV.
But it also might not!”

I didn’t see any point in arguing the merits of solipsistic philosophy, not with the materialization of a real-world experiment approaching fruition, right in front of my very own nose. Whether or not the mind and history of every living soul was nested within some all-encompassing illusion, mounted upon the head of a pin; one stuck into the shell of a turtle atop an infinite stack of turtles, simply could not be known. That was doctrine beyond which I claimed no authority, no ability to speculate, and thus far, no real interest. Still, Mackee’s group was crunching data that I might find tasty. And that temptation was a ticket to ride their train to perdition.

“So, what would you guys like to lay on me, Chuck? You’ve certainly whetted my appetite. You know, I haven’t done much practical lattice work in nearly twenty years, though I try to keep up with the journals.”
“Why, I thought you’d never ask, Milo. Let’s look around here some more. Then, we’ll repair to the chopper.”
Maybe I wasn’t up on all the slang. I really hoped he didn’t mean we were going for a helicopter ride. But it seemed like a credible possibility.

We circulated about the launch deck for another half hour, peering in at this and that console station, making the acquaintance of logistical staff and various technicians. All expressed fond regards for Chuck, and vice versa. I noticed that everyone on the floor wore what appeared to be some kind of antennae: a twenty-centimeter long, variegated gold ribbon, attached at an angle, along the lapel area. “It’s a deposition meter,” Chuck explained. “With all the exposed reluctance fields in here, we’re very conscious of attracting vaporized lanthanides. A couple angstrom layer of neodymium on a white suit can queer every mass gauge within several meters. Anyone doing an accelerator transit has to be ‘dead clean’ to prevent being dismembered.”
“Geez. That takes a solid gold level of trust,” I inferred.
“You better know it. We’re a tight crew, Bud. Oh. And welcome aboard!”

Along an extensive vertical wall, a promenade of plate glass overlooked the assembly area, revealing an enclosed mezzanine of some half-dozen floors of offices and labs. From the air lock, the elevator descended fifty meters to the business end of the big bad Bernauzzi accelerator: the biggest machine I had ever seen. This was “The Chopper,” a particulate parser to break down and cry over. The control chamber was enclosed within some fifty thousand miles of bright copper wire, which wove around and through an endless array of harnesses, titanium tubes and reaction vessels, in some respects, rivaling the celebrated original particle accelerator out in UCERN’s back lot. A long row of console cubicles lined the bridge of the cavernous main channel. We strolled along them, pausing at an open door that bore my own nameplate — of all things.

We walked in and sat down, facing each other from a pair of ergonomic chairs. “Well, isn’t this posh,” I said. "I seem to be ensconced already!”
“Okay, Milo. I know exactly how presumptuous it was to bring you here, and all the rest of it. So, let me give you the whole pitch.“
“We will have to spend some quality time among the Aist Vidragol, ultimately. It is our destiny. We pretty much think we know how to go there, even if we’re just too simple-minded to know what there is. But there are a whole lotta folks hungry for answers. They’re exhausted by the daily grind of what otherwise looks like a finite solution to all there is. You can rest assured, I’m one of ‘em. I am also sure there’s enough evidence to justify going all in for whatever this endeavor is leading to, even if I can’t yet say just what that destination might be. Here, my friend, we are building an alternative to thinking about thinking. We are going to break The Dark wide open, to expose all of its absolute transcendence, to bear the dimensionless Void that we may know it is us!”

I felt the thrill of a presence well up from within me, the primeval call of countless generations, evoked by an invocation delivered with near-supernatural fury. The man had suddenly become as one possessed of another realm, beads of perspiration now rising in the five o’clock shadow above his upper lip. He inhaled a deep breath and briefly shook. Leaning in nearly in contact with my forehead, as if to convey privileged information, he lowered his voice to a near hush.
“Milo, you and your colleagues have born visual witness to a portal into another dimension. That you could not fully access a foreign realm, be it for incompatible ignorance, or limited technical capability, is of little consequence. I’m confident there will come a time, maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now, when the opportunity to exploit that which you have subconsciously absorbed, will avail you of a key to the next iteration of life’s potential. I intend to be there, if it is at all within my power to see you fully prepared to achieve that nexus.”

I swallowed hard. You could imagine that kind of talk set my teeth on edge. It really felt like he was preparing to launch my ass into oblivion. That was not very appealing, of course, even if he didn’t suggest this transition of my existential venue was necessarily imminent.
“Now, I can imagine that might sound pretty spooky, Milo - even threatening. But I happen to know that you’ve already begun to pre-position yourself for the kind of sub-dimensional high jinks that only a precious few could possibly imagine.” He turned to light up the view panel on my desk, and selected the remote observation monitor that had been set up in our lab. “Little Guy” sat center screen, appearing just as lifeless as when I’d left it sitting next to the newly upgraded MD unit that’d produced it. Clearing his throat, Chuck spoke towards the viewer with projected expectation.
“Doctor Hasenveldt, would you kindly step in and do the honors?”

Anji’s white-gloved hands appeared on screen, conveying a glowing cube, the one just taken from the reflexer, to a resting position alongside the replicant MD unit. The “Little Guy” seemed to wake up suddenly, like a small child on Christmas morning, adroitly rising on three pairs of horizontal motivators, then positioning itself directly above the cube. The unit’s proboscis extended itself into the cube, then began dismantling it into its former miniature component cubes, each one subsequently being rearranged to become elements of a square plate, roughly three centimeters on a side, by one cube thick. When the little array was complete, the object re-ignited with the same glow as it had emitted, when in the reflexer. Anji placed a second cube adjacent to Little Guy, to repeat the process, its sub-cubes being added to the perimeter of the plate, the glow immediately spreading into the extended area.

“This will obviously take some time, Milo. Let’s get some coffee, while they complete the assembly.”
I wondered aloud, “How many cubes will it take?”
“All of them, I imagine.”

We sat down in the kitchenette while a fresh pot of coffee was brewed.
“How did you know what to do with our little bots - which didn’t even exist until a few hours ago, Chuck?”
“Yes. Well, you can thank your friend, Gaynard Grey, for that. He has some kind of swami hieroglyph interpreter on staff, “Grizzly Foo Fah” or some such, who produces these amazing runic drawings that have illustrated what to do with the cubes. The originally encoded diagrams coalesced from your retro-reflexor visualization work, quite a while before that little ‘bot-kabob’ even came into the picture. Some of the audio-pictorial transcripts were also pretty instructive, like spit-painted handprints or bison hunt drawings on a cave wall.” I guessed that analogy had something to do with the AV being as advanced beyond us, as we were beyond the paleolithic era. Ancient artists had left a message few would fail to understand; the AV have done the same, n’est-ce pas?

“I’m confused about one thing, Chuck. Why not present all this directly to our group?”
“Well, it’s not that we needed to keep anything from you. I do hope you won’t interpret that bit of working strategy as subterfuge. It just looked like the longer your group stayed focused on the meat and potatoes of the communications puzzle, the more likely our chances of a successful mission. And you surely have proved that was a good plan. Everyone is onboard, our efforts meshing seamlessly.”

Illustration: Bradley N. Litwin 1998, “Elevator to the ‘Environment’” from the original interactive web-based experience, formerly published at Jujubee.com.
Copyright©2025 Bradley N. Litwin