The days passed. I began to get used to the sensation of “rising” and “falling” across the W axis. It was quite a unique feeling, as if gravity was instead a force of indescribable pressure, and it gave me a buzz of what could only be called excitement, accompanied by tingles in my hands, but it faded to normalcy before long. The light rush to my head at being back here was replaced by the dull grey I’d gotten used to over my time stranded here. Just simply emptiness, as if my body was a puppet for my brain to exhaustedly carry along, fuel when it was empty, and empty the exhaust into the proper facilities. The only break in the dullness was when a door locked and I was forced to turn the other way, or when I was forced to take a break and confront my newfound fear of opening the bedroom doors, with the anticipation that I’d find corpses inside… or something worse.
Bodies that had killed themselves were relatively rare, after all. Most looked as if they had simply stopped working one day, collapsing wherever they stood at the time. Something, somehow, had to have caused it. And given the sheer frequency of said corpses, it was increasingly unlikely that me and the entity were simply missing each other for days on end. No, it was much more likely that either this dimension itself had deadly effects… or the strange shadows in the corner of my eyes weren’t hallucinations but instead some sort of creature of the night, stalking, staying out of sight until and playing with its prey.
“Doctor?”
I did not flinch.
“Doctor Hugh, is that you?” I turned around and met a face I didn’t recognize. She was young, maybe just out of college, with a mane of curly red hair that framed her short stature. She was wearing cargo pants with many pockets, a jacket with the lab logo, and a large sturdy-looking backpack. In her hand, she held a device not unlike the one I’d lost so long ago.
There was a tightness in my chest I couldn’t recognize, “So I am. But who are you?”
No sooner had the words left my mouth, she squealed with joy, and I couldn’t hide my wince. She didn’t seem to care though, rushing over and nearly bowling me over with a hug. “I found you! I was worried we’d lost you for good!”
My skin crawled, but strangely, I couldn’t bother to move. Instead, I let out a sigh. “Yes, yes you found me. You still have not answered my question, however.”
“Right! Sorry, I just haven’t seen anyone for almost a whole month now. My name is Amanda Kelly. I was hired after you went missing, but they hadn’t announced it until I already moved nearby. Which was really annoying because you were the main reason I-“
And she just kept talking, and talking, and talking. I could practically feel the soul draining out of my body. Was it too late to go back to isolation-induced insanity?
“Why are you here?” I interrupted.
“Oh.” She blinked. “They put together a search party to find you and I volunteered!” She said proudly, turning her nose up. “And then I got lost.” She slumped. At least she was easy to read, I supposed. “I was scared I wasn’t going to find my way back to the team but then I found you, the one we were looking for! Isn’t that ironic? Searching party member gets lost and then finds the lost person, there has to be at least two layers of irony there-”
“Where are the rest of them?” I brought her back on track.
“Well, uh… my foot kinda just slipped on a curve and I uh… ended up here? The rest are back near the entrance base” Her ears turned red.
I felt a headache coming up.
“So, we’re both stuck here.”
“No! Well, I don’t know how to get out exactly, but, if we can just get back to these 4D coordinates, it should be fine, right? She showed the screen on her device, the numbers representing the four axis as it had for himself.”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “Oh sure, it’d be really easy if that were the case, wouldn’t it? Why, I’d be out in no time at all if that were the case!”
“…It’s not?”
My smile dropped. “No, it isn’t. In fact, I’d say we’d be incredibly lucky to still be on “our” fifth dimensional plane, let alone the higher ones. And even if that was the case we’d still have to be lucky enough to find the right “traveling points”. Let’s just say I’m hoping we find any exit at all, and I’ll take what I can get.”
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My throat was getting sore. When was that last time I’d spoken?
Her eyes grew wide. “Five and above? I thought that was just a theory!”
“Oh, it was. Do you want to know why it wasn’t confirmed?”
But Amanda finished for him. “Because it’s impossible to traverse or measure with our current technology.”
“Correct.” I nodded, “And whenever we were successful through the help of some anomaly or another, we were never able to retrieve the team or signal back. I theorize it’s to do with the fourth dimension being more “interesting” mathematically than the higher ones but I have no idea how that works practically.”
Her face dropped, and I quickly added, “So, all we have to do is get out of here and find a different exit.”
She sighed, “Right, we’ve got to keep our chins up. I assume from the way you’re talking that you have a solution to get out of this place at least?”
I nodded. “Yes, I do.” There was a bit of silence before I realized she wanted me to explain.
“Basically, we just keep going “up” in the fourth dimension until we find the way out. This place is just a very elaborate maze.“
She looked at me strangely
“I know what ana and kata are, I had to at least know that much to get this job.” She laughed, “You really learn how to measure the fourth dimension without equipment though? How on earth did you do that!?” She asked excitedly.
“Time and experience. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I am the only one on our planet that can do it, at least as easily as I can.” I shrugged.
“Our planet? Did you really find evidence that this dimension connects to other versions of earth!?” her eyes were beaming now, as if she were gazing at a legend, brought to life
“Walk and talk. We have a lot of ground to cover and it’s not getting any shorter. Probably.”
Over the course of the next few weeks or so, we shared what each other missed. For myself, at first I had the brilliant idea of making her read my journals while we walked to give me some quiet time, the silence only broken by the occasional question or commentary. Unfortunately however, I had forgotten about the unprofessional bits of writing I’d left here and there until she was halfway through, and tried to express pity toward me, after reading one of my particularly charged rants. With a flare of heat in my chest, I snatched the journals out of her hands and switched to telling my story orally, stemming all attempts to talk about irrational chemicals with a pointed glare. I was an adult who could handle my own problems; she didn’t have to look at me like some sick puppy to be taken care of.
On her end, Amanda told me all about the events that I had missed back home. Most of it in the scientific sphere, of course. Apparently, someone had confirmed my hypothesis that some spectral entities or supernatural phenomenon actually moved in and out of our three-dimensional reality using the higher spacial dimensions. Unfortunately, no one had answers for why most of those entities could only completely manifest here or in the “adjacent plane,” and not visually displaying the expected growing and shrinking phenomenon like a hyper sphere would if it were to pass through our reality, or why they can’t or won’t rotate fourth dimensionally, among other things. That question was part of the reason I’d prepared a research trip here in the first place, because similar to those entities, moving in the ata or kata directions, was non-continuous, giving one the impression that they were simply jumping between separate worlds entirely.
Although she was annoying, I’d be lying if I said this was anything less than an improvement compared to my prior situation. Given Amanda’s abilities to talk for hours unimpeded, all I needed to do was make sounds or not at the appropriate times and I had a free white noise generator that I could tune into anytime she switched topics to something particularly interesting. And when there was silence, it didn’t have the same subtle biting edge to it as it used to. Effectively, nothing had really changed in my goal or the way I would get there, but there was a noticeable uptick in my physical and mental energy, allowing us to clear more floors in less time. I also felt less distress than I thought I would when I lost my favorite pen in one of the rooms. As embarrassing as it was, I probably would have cried without her there.
Another improvement was the supplies Amanda brought with her. I didn’t touch the rations, and she complied to save them for later too, but we did make liberal use of the deck of cards, dice, and the foldable chess set. I was terrible at that last one, which made me disappointed that I didn’t fit into the genius stereotype, but I could play a mean game of poker and some other gambling games. We didn’t have anything to gamble, so we made up an arbitrary points system we called “superiority points” as a placeholder. The final items were the most useful, however, as they were able to inform us as to our coordinates and angle in the fourth dimension, or measure them from a distance respectively. I didn’t think the former device would be useful at first, but it turned out that my “intuition” for 4D space was only correct 94% of the time; just enough that I didn’t notice. That same tool, the Hyperdimensional Navigation System, was also capable of mapping where we had gone before on its screen, and keeping track of the date and time. Given that also tracked Amanda when she “randomly” tripped into this plane, I had a feeling that with enough data points, we would be able to understand the pattern or at least know enough to predict the trips and either prevent them or use them to our advantage.
Time didn’t exactly fly by in this monotonous world. But by the time we made it out of the “looping” hotel corridor, I was surprised to see that, minus the time I had spent alone, it had taken us a whole four whole months to reach the “exit door” together.