Following the beams of flashlights, Mariann and the professor walked down a wide main hallway covered in a heavy layer of dust. The true measurements of the hallway as well as the whole facility were impossible to imagine. The hallway seemed to be wide enough to allow 2 lanes in either direction for massive transporter-erector vehicles, while the height of the hallways easily reached the height of three story apartment buildings. The ceilings above were filled with massive lights, each seemingly the size of a passenger car.

The right hand wall was filled to the ceiling with strange electro-mechanical machinery connected with cables that were thicker in diameter than Mariann’s whole body. The cables seemed to disappear into the floors. One could only imagine that when switched on, these machines swallowed an unfathomable amount of energy while producing an infinitesimally small effect, whatever it was. And that’s why this many machines in parallel were required to aggregate the results and achieve anything at all.

The left side of the hallway had a wall that was covered in metal panels and layer of rust-covered small-gauge steel net. Every couple of done meters there were metal doors with small windows and next to each door there were non-functioning consoles with many analog dials and indicator lights. Something told Jaan that behind these doors were the many sections of computing machines which controlled the facility,

It was almost unimaginable that actual humans had once built this place. An inordinate amount of people spending time and resources to erect something which in the terms of common science stood on top of a tower made of goose feet. It was also hardly imaginable that they had managed to keep it all in check and functioning as intended. This wasn’t just a cybernetics department of some university, this was the real thing. An experiment in the deepest sense of the word. An experiment they were afraid to stop because the repeatability of that experiment was unthinkable.

Mariann stopped walking.

“Do you see?” She asked, pointing the beam of of her flashlight into the distance.

“What am I...” The professor started to ask but then fell silent.

It wasn’t about what the beam of light fell on but rather about what it did not fall on. In this hallway there was some other source of light besides their flashlights. In the right side wall, under the ceiling up high there was a long row of low yet wide windows from which emanated a barely noticeable orange glow. They simply could not notice it before now as the light from their own flashlights dulled their vision.

“There’s some scaffolding on the wall right over there.” She said, finding said scaffold with the beam of her flashlight. “I’m taking it.”

With a steady pace they walked up to the scaffolding and the then looked up it. The scaffold reached the ceiling and the row of small orange windows seemed to be on the seventh or eighth layer of it. She switched off her flashlight and placed it on top of a nearby machine of unknown purpose made of thick gray metal. After doing that, she started to climb the scaffolding.

The whole structure creaked and shook as she made her way up it. It even started to rock back and forth slightly almost threatening the fall into a pile of planks and pipes on the floor. This made her change her tactic and she made her way to the narrow side of the scaffold, using that to continue her journey upwards. However even after making it up, she had to rise to her tiptoes to be able to see out of the window.

“What do you see?” Jaan asked.

“The sky.” Mariann said. “And clouds. I see an endless orange sky and in the middle of it shines an orange sun which is bright but it doesn’t blind me. I see a layer of clouds slightly below us, but there seems to be another one above us. But nothing more. Only a sea of white clouds below, errant white clouds around us and some weaker clouds above us. And between them slightly higher than us shines an unearthly and powerless pale sun, coloring everything orange. Giving it roughly the same tone as street lighting.”

She fell back on the flat of her foot and then leaned on the wall, closing her eyes to try and make sense what she saw.

“There is no life out there. No time. There is nothing. We are definitely not in the same world we woke up in last morning. You should come up too.”

“Better not.” Jaan said. “I don’t want to rain down along with all this metal.”

“Maybe it is really better if you do not.” She sighed.

She then started climbing down, easily making her way down in a couple or minutes.

“I never imagined.” Jaan said. “That your body carries this kind of strength.”

“Well, going spelunking in abandoned sub-terranean bases is not for the heavy nor the weak.” Mariann said.

She picked up her flashlight and the continued walking.

“To be fair, what I saw from the window only raises questions.” She said. “First the Germans. Then the Russians. The matter that we seem to be hanging in the sky somewhere, the lonely view I saw behind the window.”

“Are you scared?”

“No. I cannot say I am scared.” She said with a faint smirk. “But I have no answer for it. I don’t even have the proper thinking for it. This is not usual and it causes me some discomfort.”

“I didn’t think there was anything that could cause discomfort for you.”

“There are many things which case discomfort for me.” Mariann said. “That’s why I’m here. In this world. To get away from most of those things. And discomfort is mostly caused only by the initial contact.”

The long wide corridor with a high ceiling seemed to end in the distance. But not with a fork or some door but a massive gate with a horizontal seam, similar to the gate they had accessed this facility. The gate here however was absolutely massive. As wide as the hallway and about half the height of the ceiling. However before reaching that, there was a short section of the hallway with a row of tall yet narrow windows in either wall.

Only a single glance out this window was enough to be frightened through and through. Surrounding the hallway section was an endless darkness extending everywhere the eye could see. There were lights outside the window but these only managed to illuminate scaffolds and lattices made of round metal beams painted bright red. The beams looked absolutely massive, even the thinnest ones seemed to meters in diameter. The bigger ones may have been as wide as the very hallway the were standing in.

Despite being able to see the red beams they could not see what they were supported on nor what they were supporting. They just seemed to grow out of endless darkness at the bottom and extend into endless darkness above. There seemed to be no connection between those red beams and the hallway they were standing in, but there seemed to be an intersecting hallway of similar dimensions behind the closed doors in front of them.

But there was something else they could see. The edge of a massive silver sphere slightly above them. The section visible to them had no points of contact with the red round structures nor the hallways freely hanging in the middle of the darkness. And the other peculiar thing besides its size was that it seemed to be unblemished and incredibly smooth, with a positively mirror finish, which still only reflected back that endless darkness.

“Do you perhaps know why these hallways are this massive?” Mariann asked.

“Because of the computing machines in that department behind the panels to the left?” Jaan replied with an unsure question.

“No. Because of transportation. Perhaps you noticed that at the place we arrived at, a pair of rails disappeared into the darkness on the left? Or that there’s a massive gantry crane above us extending the whole width of the tunnel. Why are the gates as big as they are? Because a naval container must fit through. Or an eight-wheeled MAZ-543.”

“What was the point of this facility?” Jaan now asked. “Honestly speaking, you do know, don’t you?”

“Not really. I have an inkling. I have a feeling. But I don’t know whether it is correct. That’s why we are here. To learn the truth.” The girl in black smiled. “Oh, look, a door. I wonder if it’s locked.”

She pointed the beam of her flashlight to the massive gate at the end of the hallway and in the bottom section of the gate there really was a door. Small compared to the size of the gate itself, but with perfectly normal dimensions for a human to use.

Mariann walked up to it, Jaan in tow. The door had perfectly normal steel door handle, something from a standard Soviet lock and door handle factory. She pushed down the handle and opened the door, stepping into darkness. The professor who did not want to remain alone in this unknown facility in which numerous Russians had already disappeared in and not that long ago, took a deep breath and followed her in.

On the other side of the door, there was that intersection of gigantic hallways they had noticed before. An intersection the size of a main intersection of a city. But it was located inside some place. With enough clearance and wide lane markers on the ground for the oversized military vehicles to use. He raised his beam to the ceiling and saw massive bundles of cables and pipes running along the ceiling.

But the most interesting aspect of the wide hallways here was a bulging wall which seemed to be following the shape of the silvery sphere they had see from the window.

“There’s a large complex of freight elevators to the left. One could also get out from there.” She said.

“Out?” Jaan asked. “What does ‘out’ even mean in this context?”

“A few things. If you think about it, whence we came from is not really the entrance. The entrance should be over there if we suppose that it opens to a world familiar to us in any way at all. If we suppose it to be a point of origin of sorts from when they started to build the facility, an anchoring point of some sort. Meaning that in theory one could enter this place by that so-called door.”

“Okay.” Jaan said, still in thought. “You mean to tell me that somewhere out in the world, possibly near the Nameless Town, there is a closed hangar door?”

“Yes. Somewhere there might be a closed gate.” Mariann said. “The other option is that this exit is not an anchoring point but rather a side experiment. An experiment into the unknown world outside the complex. This supposes that the facility has either from the beginning or since some moment in time in between been untied from the world familiar to us. And thus the role of that gate has changed.”

“You mean to tell me that people entered this place from over there, they turned on the facility and then started to research into what was really behind the gate?” The professor asked.

“Yes. I would not at all be surprised if this is how it really went. This facility is essentially like fire for prehistoric people. Here they managed to get it going and they used it to do the maximum amount of work until it died down or went out of control.”

“Okay...” Jaan said pensively.

“But...” She raised her index finger. “There is a third option.”

“A third option?”

“Yes. What if the first people to come to this place did not use the service gate over there, but instead the same place we came from. What if the facility, or some rudimentary part of it was in existence before their arrival.”

“You don’t mean to say...” the Professor asked, already seeing where the girl was aiming.

“A possibility the ideas of both the Russians and the Germans started with. Something the powers that be grabbed onto with all ten fingernails and which the employees here forgot as the first thing when they first made contact with the dreamlike and empirically unsound yet fully functional science. There is a door to exit this place, to the external outside, to the world familiar to us. But those who discovered this place entered via the gate complex, not the entrance. And they wanted the gate complex to act like an entrance, despite it never having been created to be an entrance in the first place.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” The professor asked. “Honestly, I am having trouble understanding where your words are going.”

“Come then.” She replied. “Ahead of us is something that will help you to understand everything. The center of the facility. Right here, behind this door.”

She opened another metal door and then disappeared into darkness. Jaan followed her.

As soon as he had closed the door after himself, something happened. First a weird snap happened in his mind as if he had just awoken from a daydream or some thought he had been hard at work on. He was standing in darkness, trying to understand where he was, why he was here and how he had ended up here. Then, before he had even managed to give a proper analysis on the entire situation, one by one small yellow and orange lights appeared in the darkness. And then there was light. Along with the lights coming on, he also suddenly remembered answers to all three of his questions.

They were standing on a circular walkway made of metal grating. The walkway surrounded a strange apparatus in the middle of it, which looked like a huge pitch black lens of some kind. This whole circular section they were in felt much smaller on the inside than it had seemed on the outside. Also, while the strange device in the middle of the room was like a strange obsidian lens a few meters in diameter, the concave walls of the room were a monochrome screen capable of showing images only by switching the yellow and red indicator light on and off.

“Jaan.” The girl gently said.

He turned back towards her and now noticed that something had appeared in the air above the strange lens. It seemed to be a three-dimensional hologram of the whole facility, looking like a space station from Soviet utopian science fiction. With the central spherical section and the gate complexes on thick stalks on either end of the center section. One side was colored yellow, the one one blue and in the middle the colors mixed producing green. Which was the upper and which the lower side was easy to understand. Much more complicated a question was, which was the left and which the right side. Or rather, from which side of the room had they entered it.

“Are you starting understand it now?” Mariann asked.

“Understand what?” He asked. “I can’t even understand the machines here.”

“Could you perhaps tell me from which side we entered this room?”

“We came...” Jaan started to think. “From there.” He pointed to the door behind him.

“Are you sure?” Mariann asked. “Do you see where you’re pointing?”

Jaan looked at his hand which was pointing at the door behind Mariann.

“What the…?”

“Look again.” She said.

He focused on his hand again and it was pointing to the door behind him.

“The fuck…?”

“You’re seeing it. This is the center of the facility. In here there are fields of some elementary particles hitherto unknown to common science which interfere with the neuro-chemical processes which make up or convey human consciousness. At the same time, these fields are necessary for the human consciousness to be able to persist at all, since we have to deal with the matter that we have two doors, two sides of the facility.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“So I haven’t yet gone insane or had a stroke?” Jaan asked.

“Nope. I’m affected too. I can try to raise my right hand in here however many times I want, but statistically I will be raising the correct hand on half the time. In this room it is impossible to tell, which is the left and which is the right side. Not subjectively and not objectively. Also, there is another mechanism taking care of the objective aspect of the matter.”

“Why is such a strange thing necessary anyway?”

“Because this is the way they achieved the two opposite sections of the complex. The raised the center to the 4th dimension and then mirrored one side across the 4th dimension, essentially changing it’s chirality. That’s how they created 2x9 gates and 2x27 positions. Since the center of this section is in the 4th dimension, it is acting almost like as superposition of both chiralities.”

“I think you can already imagine the question I have.” Jaan said. “Are we currently in superposition of our three-dimensional selves?”

“I can understand what you’re trying to say, and my honest answer is that I don’t know. If we were right-handed before stepping into this room then I don’t know if we will be left-handed if we step out of this section into the other side, with our bodily features mirrored. But there is one other thing to note in here.”

“What?”

“This facility, on whichever neutral plane it exists, is movable, in three spatial dimensions. At the moment it is tied to the 2x27 background system but it is possible to connect it to different background systems. It may also be at an angle with regards to the 2x27 system.”

“I can imagine it as a simile but I cannot imagine how it could be possible physically.”

“Physics won’t help you here. People who operated this in the past broke the balance so profoundly that I wouldn’t be surprised if they untied this facility from all possible connections and background systems it was tied to and let it freely float in indeterminate space, meaning it may never be tied down ever again.”

“You’re telling me of experiments, the mirrors and a facility of some kind that would seem to be older than the people who built it in the first place. What’s the point of it all?” Jaan asked. “Why are we here?”

“The point?” Mariann asked. “I can explain you what the point was that the Germans and the Russians had. Twice upon a time Germans fought a world war in Europe. The year was 42 and they needed a quick plan to conquer the UK and the US. They bullied UK with primitive rocketry, which although novel at the time, did not have much effect. The best idea they had for the US was an Amerika bomber with early jet engines, which would be carrying a Heisenberg device created by the Uranium Society.

But then the Germans found something they maybe should not have found. And above the long distance bomber, a nuclear weapon or everything else triumphed the goal how to achieve a phenomenon that in here, Waffen SS soldiers enter and over there they come out. On the surface, quite simple idea, right? But considering the nature of this facility, the difficulty was not about the “enter here, exit there” aspect but about ensuring that the “there” they could achieve was located in this world and not in any other. And that is where the insurmountable problem lied.”

“So…?” Jaan asked with doubt.

“The Germans did not get too far with their ideas, the war managed to end before that. 20 years passed and the Russians discovered the Germans’ secret. It was immediately obvious that nuclear weapons are useless if each side has about 22 thousand of them. But if the American nuclear launch sites are suddenly taken over by men dressed in olive drab who appear out of nowhere then that would be agreeable. But oh woe! The Russians stumbled upon the same problem as the Germans had: the problem of here and there.

Thus, a whole separate science was established to explain what is “here” and what is “there.” But again oh woe! Before the Russians could achieve anything serious, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. But the Russians who, unlike the Germans, had actually managed to build something, were not going to just give it away, they planned to return here. For this purpose, one operational detachment remained into the facility and for the first time the facility was untethered from the background systems it has been connected to up until now. Up until now the facility had been connected to our town and the world from at least one point. It is possible that after this had been achieved, the experiments continued along their old paths and the things slowly slid into the state they are currently in.”

“And what is the current state of things?” Jaan asked.

“That the artificial has become natural.”

The girl smiled, she pressed various buttons on the console which wrapped around the black lens. She pointed at the bottom of the hologram, at the many cylindrical objects there, sticking out of the bottom half of a sphere.

“Those are the reactors. Those are used to generate the force fields here. The Center Station has similar reactors but on a much smaller scale. Each gate requires at least one reactor.”

“Every gate needs a single reactor to work?”

“Every active connection requires the output of at least one reactor. The Russians called them reactors because based on their power output they are most similar to nuclear reactors, but nobody really knows what kind of energy generating processes are really contained within. They only quantified and directed it.”

“And how is that related to what you said before?”

“The idea the Russians had was to make the facility autonomous until such time that they return. In some way they managed to achieve that. They came here and untied it from all locations the 9+9 gates were connected to.”

“And?”

“And then from the 1+1 service access.”

“And?”

“And then from the 2x27 plane itself.” She paused, staring at the professor. “You get it? They untied the facility from all background systems, they sent it to float away into the indeterminate space between areas and locations. There was no way to access this place, there was no way to exit this place. They cut it off from everything that surrounded it. The Russians hoped that their philosophical theory about the nature of the gates helped them out, but this only worked in part.”

Mariann fell silent for some moments, considering the words to use.

“The fact that you have contact with some gate means nothing. It doesn’t mean that your location is fixed with relation to the gate, just like seeing the Moon does no mean that the Moon is somehow fixed with relation to you. It also does not mean that you have any idea what lies beyond the gate.”

“How is that possible?” Jaan asked. “You say that this complex is untied from all locations in the world. You say it can connect distant places with each other. How we were in the Town, but now, suddenly, in this facility were no longer even on Earth.”

“Very good. You are starting to see it.” Mariann smiled. “Your rational mind is unable to accept it all. This is a healthy reaction.”

She pointed at a small table with wheels, covered in yellowing documents.

“The common understanding is that the most direct route between two location is a straight line. The slightly more intelligent understand that the real distance is zero if two distant points can be brought as close as possible to each other, so you can step off one and onto the other.”

She picked a document off the table and folded it.

“Those even more intelligent will manage to figure out that bending space and time like that is an infinitely difficult thing to do and even the Russians could not, even in here, never mind the Town or the Institute, come up with even practical mathematics for it.”

“So?” The professor asked, having not noticed that the girl had intentionally used the word ‘even’ thrice in one quick succession.

“It is much easier to bend space very little or not at all, and instead set between the origin and destination something that already is appropriately bent. This facility is exactly that.”

Mariann took another piece of paper and rolled it up, bending it slightly to connect two points on a different slightly bent piece of paper.

“So, instead of bending space between two distant locations, instead this facility is bent in space in such a way that it fits between the two points?” The professor asked, he spoke slowly and pensively trying to put appropriate amount of weight on each word.

“How?” He suddenly asked. “How is that possible?”

“They are not bending the facility itself but the space it is located in. Just like the drawing on the paper cannot understand when the paper is being bent or crumpled, the facility and the people within cannot understand when the three-dimensional space-time fabric it lies on is bent.” She explained. “To me it seems that bending the space-time itself was not the greatest problem for them. The greatest problem was about singling out and locating the same location in space and time each and every time. For me that would be the greatest conundrum in such an experience. Or to illustrate, how is a stick man drawn near one edge of the paper to know what’s near the other end of the paper without being raised into a higher dimension. Or when he bends the tunnel, then that the other end touches the same paper and not any other random one.”

Mariann dropped the folder back on a metal table and then headed towards the door along the grated walkway. It wasn’t even important which door it was. It didn’t matter whether it lead back to the room they had been in previously or into one she had not yet been in, If she did not end up on the side she wanted to, then she only needed to retry the same door until she found herself from the location she was pleased with.

“Stay after me!” She said in a stern voice. “You don’t want us to end up in different wings of the facility after going through the door. Should that happen it will be devil’s own job getting back together!”

She opened the door to exit the sphere and staying close to one another, they walked through the door. Again a strange feeling assailed Jaan, as if his mind has stopped for a moment. Or as if he had just now awoken from a daydream.

Before them again were the extremely wide and tall tunnels made of concrete elements. An underground street with lane marking to allow fast and safe traffic for three meter wide special chassis vehicles. Seeing how the beam of flashlight jumped everywhere in the long hallways as they walked, it felt like these were the very same tunnels they had been in before and from which they had stepped into the control center of the facility. But then the beams of both flashlights stopped on something which immediately convinced them.

Maybe fifteen meters ahead, there was an emaciated human figure lying on the floor in tattered clothes.

“A body?” Jaan asked.

“A skeleton.” Mariann said in a cold voice. “And this is not the only weird thing in this hallway. The other wing of the facility had been dusty from years of disuse. The only activity within had been automated heating and ventilation. But the dust here...”

She crouched down to touch the dust with her fingers.

“...seems to originate from outside. This sand, soil, gravel. The hallways here are full of signs of actual use. There are scratches and pits in the wall surfaces. There are signs leading to all sorts of places and posters with information how to behave in different kinds of emergency situations.”

“Messages of the red propaganda…,” Jaan noted, looking around. “Rust-covered metal pipes, even…” his flashlight stopped on something strange on the wall. “These are roots.”

He quickly approached the wall and knocked against the roots with the back end of the flashlight. The roots seemed to rise up high under the ceiling and even penetrate the floor. The roots made the sound dry wood would make when being knocked on. As he examined the hallways he started to notice this gray wood being elsewhere as well, because of it’s color it seemed to disappear into the general grayness of the concrete. Unforked trunks of roots which were about the thickness of a man’s forearm ran up the walls and created vaults of roots meeting and intertwining above them. Hiding the real sources of light as well as any equipment mounted to the ceilings.

“It is so wonderful of them to place these location maps here.” Mariann said, a little further down the hallway.

She ran her fingers down the map on the wall.

“We are… here. The gate sections are here and… the technical section that services the gates...” She suddenly started to laugh. “Is here.”

Jaan too finally looked at the map and stared at it, frozen in place. When they had entered the complex there had been a much simpler drawing of the facility with the center section and the two sides with the gates. But this drawing also contained a technical section which dwarfed everything else, being located on both ends of the complex behind the gate rooms. And this made no sense, because according to this, the huge underground hallway under the post office was either the unfinished technical section itself, or supposedly occupied the same space at the same time.

According to this diagram, on the other side of the technical section, there were storerooms for samples and spare parts, but also the vehicle depot. Also, the whole facility seemed to be at least 10 stories tall, among other things containing the archives, residential section, fully equipped military hospital, but also an armory of impressive size. Along with facilities for rest and recreation.

“You’re starting to see it, aren’t you?” Mariann asked as she smiled. “This wasn’t just a simple experiment. This was a full-fledged military base. But also autonomous and mobile in a completely new sense. At least it was supposed to be.”

Without any sign of fear, Mariann headed towards the dead figure in the hallway. She directed the flashlight to its pale skull. This skeleton seemed to have survived with almost medical precision. There was no sign of any other organic matter remaining on the bones. The whole skeleton looked like it had been scraped clean from flesh and other tissues, then boiled and then redressed.

Looking at the tattered clothing, this person seemed to be either medical specialist or a scientist. Tattered white lab coat, white dress shirt and black tie. No name tag or any other kind employee ID anywhere on the body. Not even in the pockets. For a moment an option flashed in her mind that this was not a skeleton of a real person at all, instead it was some prop gone missing from a medical office. Put down here to confuse or prank devil know who. At the same time, this thought demanded there to be at least one other live person in this facility. Which would have made things a lot more interesting for Mariann.

“Le’ts go.” She said, turning to Jaan. “Let’s check out the archives first. That should give us at least some sort of idea what really happened here.”

“You already have some sort of feeling, don’t you?” Jaan asked.

“I have a feeling.” The girl nodded. “but I don’t like it. And the more I think about it the stronger and likelier the feeling is.” She sighed, as if trying to pick the correct word and correct thoughts with which to begin with.

“I think we have thus far been viewing the facility from the wrong end.” She finally said. “We talk about how they managed to make a 1x9 system into a 2x9. And it was impossible for me to understand, how. That gray egg full of control panels, gave me some ideas how the technology could be possible. But now, on this side of the complex, a feeling has arisen which should be the closest to the truth thus far.”

Jaan looked at her, expecting her to continue. He did not say anything.

“The wing we entered from...it should not exist.” Mariann continued. “Did you notice the wing we entered from being clinically clean and fresh. Although aged and stagnated, but still without any marks of use?”

“Yes, relatively.” Agreed Jaan.

“But this wing here has clearly been in use as a fully stocked military base. It seems to point at the fact that building the whole facility began in earnest with this wing. Base was built here, garages, warehouses, then it was stocked with weapons. A hospital and barracks were added as well as residential sections for the scientists. Then the reactor complex, one gate section. And that should have been it. Without the second gate wing, the center section is completely unneeded. But we have two sides with gates.”

“And we stepped directly into the new wing and not the old one.” The professor said.

“Yes.” Mariann replied. “What does it tell you about the world whence we came from? If they started to build this complex from out world, we should have entered the old section. In my opinion. Which would mean that the origin of a complex could be somewhere else than world we live in.”

“But could it not be about what you said before?” The professor asked. “That this complex has been untied from all background systems. Which means it could have very well turned itself around, or have been turned around by design as the first simple experiment?”

“It is quite possible.” Mariann said with some disappointment. “It may sound funny but it is possible. If my example of a stick thrown into air rotating is similar to how this base relates to it’s background system then it might be possible that the base has turned itself around and created the same connection. Because it is floating freely as it is and the connections it makes are not permanent. But. If the base is really bent between two destinations, then the background system is important, not like with a stick rotating in the air. And if one half only has the gates, but the other end also has all sorts of additional sections beside the gates, then the two section are not equal, they are not similar. At the very least regarding where the center of mass is. Meaning that they may not be equal when gravitation is applied, meaning that they cannot be covered under similar mathematics. And as the background system is important, it may no longer be possible for the complex to simply turn around and end up making matching connections.”

She fell silent for a moment.

“It also supposes that the indeterminate space in which the complex is floating follows the same laws of nature as the cosmic space familiar to us.”

She took one last look at the skeleton on the ground and then continued to head down the wide hallway. Soon they reached wooden double doors in the wall with tall yet narrow rectangular windows.

“Come on!” She beckoned the professor, “I found a staircase.”

They started to descend along a wide staircase, segmented by zinc plated handrails. Every level seemed to be the height of a three or four story building, meaning they had to descend quite a few floors to reach the last level before the technical sections, the level where the archive and the library were located.

“I am in pretty good health for my age.” Jaan said. “but even I am perturbed by the idea that on our way back I have to run up more than ten floors of stairs. It would have been a little hassle, but we could have managed to get the elevator to work.”

“No way in hell.” She said adamantly. “In this facility I hate all elevators. I cannot trust them, they do not act like doors, they act like gates. I can never be sure where they open into. There is no way for me to be sure that I won’t be traveling lower than the lowermost level or higher than the highermost level.”

“Wait a second now!” The professor exclaimed. “This is ridiculous! Such a thing is not possible! Elevators are attached ta cable spool which raises and lowers it.”

“That is the regular and simplified view of elevators. It may hold true anywhere else in the world but not in here. In simple terms, an elevator is a confined space moving back and forth along a set of rails. Within that space you are unable to sense in which direction and by how much the space moves. That’s why elevators fright- I mean annoy me that much.”

“The elevators frighten you?” Jaan asked with a slight smile of schadenfreude.

“They annoy me.” The girl said confidently. “And only in this facility.”

“Why though?”

“Like I said, on one hand, an elevator cabin is an enclosed space the movement of which in space cannot be predicted while inside it. Secondly, every elevator can be thought of as a gate. And in a gate complex floating in an indeterminate space it is not wise to step through every door, especially if you have no idea what lies beyond that door.”

“I am still not following your thoughts.” The professor said.

“Every gate is a singular object. It cannot be divided into components.” The girl in black continued. “There either is a gate or there is not. At the same time it is double-sided. It is a gate from somewhere and into somewhere. At least that is the usual understanding. However if a gate can be divided into two, it turns into a triple-sided gate. From somewhere, into somewhere and nowhere. ‘Nowhere’ is created when ‘from’ and ‘to’ are no longer exclusively tied to each other. If ‘from’ and ‘to’ are no longer physically tied to one another but act as philosophical concepts and not empirical objects, then the understanding of ‘nowhere’ becomes important as well.”

“Why?”

“Modern elevators have double doors, don’t they? Let’s say you’re waiting for an elevator. A bell rings and the doors open and you take a step without looking. But not into the elevator but into an empty elevator shaft. Let’s say you survive. You left ‘from’, but you did not reach ‘to.’”

“But I reached somewhere else.” The professor said.

“From ‘somewhere else’ you can return. From nowhere you cannot. The elevator shaft is nowhere because all the external doors are closed and they cannot be opened. How do you get out from there? Another example. You wait for an elevator, the elevator comes. You step into the elevator. You notice something weird. You think the building has 7 floors but the elevator has 14. But you need to get to the topmost floor, so you push the button for it. You hear a ding, saying that the elevator has arrived, doors open, you step out of them and fall to your death. Because the building indeed only had 7 floors. But the elevator shaft for some reason had 14.”

“Who builds something like that anyway?” Jaan asked. “But I am starting to get you.”

“There is a small addition to that.” Mariann said. “As you fall you start to think that when you stepped into the elevator, you were on the tenth floor. This is the true meaning of ‘nowhere.’”

“Okay, but how does this pertain to the base here?”

“Russians probably developed it the most.” She said. “Let’s suppose they have an approach how to experimentally get the interior and exterior doors aligned to each other. To touch, to move the doors simultaneously. But what if they are not exactly aligned, or are not aligned at all? Will the gate open or not?”

“It shouldn’t open.” Jaan said, in thought.

“How so?” Mariann asked with fake surprise. “If you cook food at home and fuck up the recipe, then you don’t end up with all the ingredients remaining, you get a pot full of inedible crap, which you throw out or eat with a teary face. Now the question is, whether every meal is a simple digital unit or an analogue composite unit. If you mess up the recipe, do you get absolute crap or do you end up with something that is half something you wanted and half crap? Same question applies to the gates here. If you mess something up, do you open a gate to nowhere or do you open a gate to somewhere with is not one or the other.”

“I have nothing else to add, to be honest.”

“Okay. But here’s the main problem. The Russians measured out 27 locations they could connect to. But if there are only 27 locations across the whole spectrum, then the world is digital and a door to nowhere is a significant danger. If there is no door to nowhere, then the maximum number of 27 is arbitrary or a technical limitation of some sort, because in reality we have an endless amount of locations as each locations even slightly different from any other is a new location.

“But this leads us to the next question: if every location that even slightly differs from the others is a new location then it is possible that the gate itself is creating and destroying locations and therefore also worlds. At least in the eyes of a person on this side of the gate. Meaning every location can only be visited once and never returned to because the visited location simply cannot be found again from among all the others.

“This leads to the last idea I have with which to reconcile it all.” She continued. “Namely, although we are centered on a fixed world fabric, we are not located solely on that world fabric but also on an uncountable number of other fabrics. Let’s say the width of our existence is m world fabrics. This would also mean that if we open a gate to a location at least 1m world fabrics away from us, we have opened a gate to a location we ourselves can no longer reach by simply walking. It is possible that the Russians found out that there are 27 different m-infinities which make up an n-infinity. Mathematically it would mean that we must have an equation with only 27 solutions, each of which is an infinity.”

“If I try to imagine your solution visually, I immediately see a problem.” The professor said. “Namely, it doesn’t exclude the chance that people who see each other day to day may be centered on different world fabrics.”

“True, this is something to take into account. The other thing to take into account is that the n-infinity I mentioned before is not a single-dimensional but 0-dimensional object. Which kind of turns our last thought development mostly pointless. Meaning that what we discussed really explains nothing, only offering yet another mythological way to see the world.”

“It cannot be mythological if the science based on it works.” Jaan said.

“Why do you think that?” Mariann smiled. “In here, science actually is working on a mythological basis. Or, I apologize, a philosophical one. There’s not much difference between them.”

“And how does that theory explain your fear of elevators?”

“Because in this facility when I step into the elevator I have no certainty that when I push the buttons on the panel of the elevator cabin, I am actually in control of the elevator. No certainty that after the doors to the elevator close I may yet get back to where I was before I stepped into the elevator.”

“Okay, I see that.” Jaan said, in thought. “How much further do we have to go?”

Mariann took a look over the railing, down the slit between stair panels.

“I think one more level. After that start the bright red steps of the technical section.”