XXX
“Where are we, T?”
“It looks like a hospital of some kind.”
The instant they stepped through the blue door, they left behind the flickering blur of white, and after tripping over a cable of some sort, they entered, or rather stumbled into, a dark and grimy corridor. The ground was slippery as if it was covered in green moss, and the walls reeked of mould. It was a constant struggle for The Young Cripple not to gag. This didn’t seem like, after all, the kind of hospital where people came to get better.
A sign on the wall read, ‘Arc’.
“Let’s search, room by room. One of them has to have my body.”
As they neared the first door, The Young Cripple froze again, overwhelmed by fear. The doors were massive, and they were covered in what looked like a black, sticky tar that was so hot that steam poured off them like freshly cooked pies. It was smeared all over the handles and locks, and along the sides of the walls too, that adjoined each cell.
As the girl’s concern mounted, the dials on the radio started to turn on their own accord, tuning into her fear. The volume was low, so they wouldn’t be given away. This, at least, T could control. But the music itself was so the contrary to how she felt that it almost tripped The Young Cripple into a comatose slumber.
“You’re not the first one ever to be frightened you know,” said T. “Just so you know, it’s just a feeling that will pass. It’s not real, and whatever is behind that door, is never as big or as scary, as what you’re keeping inside your head. Ok?”
The girl nodded.
“I know.”
“It’s just in your head. It’s just in your head.”
“Easy for you to say,” said The Young Cripple, moving towards the first door. “It’s a lot harder to escape from something when it’s in your head. You see it, everywhere you go, no matter where you hide.”
“I’ve never been scared of anything,” said T.
“Nothing? Not spiders, hungry wolves, hunters with axes, or giant snails…that carry icky diseases?”
“You were human. You were literally a host for disease. You were a microcosm of bacteria and infirmity. Your fingerprints would kill coral, no matter how clean they were; that’s how much disease a human carries. Humans carry aids, typhoid, the flu, colds, gonorrhoea, dengue, herpes, hepatitis, salmonella, tinea, malaria, measles, meningitis… God, that’s just the start of it. Humans are a transport system for infection. And you’re scared of spiders and snails?”
“I don’t like small things. Snakes….”
“What about snakes?”
“They’re small and evil.”
“I think evil is a little strong.”
“They bite for no good reason.”
“I think a giant foot falling out of the sky is a pretty good reason. How would you feel if a skyscraper was about to step on you, and your only means of defence was a measly bite? What would you do?”
“I thought you were on my side here. You’re supposed to be making me happy, not angry.”
“Well,” said T. “Are you scared?”
“No,” said the girl, sternly. “I’m annoyed now.”
“You’re welcome,” said T, proud. “No, let’s get to this first door.”
There was a sigil in the middle of the door. It wasn’t any type of picture or symbol the girl had ever seen before so she didn’t know how she should feel about it, and usually, when she didn’t know how to feel about something, she got scared.
“Don’t worry about that. It’s a type of mathematics. I’ve come across it once or twice, but I don’t know what it’s called, or even what it’s used for.”
“It’s creepy,” said The Young Cripple, tracing her finger along the equation inscribed in the door. “Is that even possible? Can a number be creepy?”
The hairs on her neck and arms shot up, and shivers tingled along her spine.
“One quick look. Open the flap and see if my body’s there. If not, we’ll move on, super-fast. You can do this. This is just…opening a window.”
“Opening a window,” said The Young Cripple to herself. “I can do that.”
She had to reach on her tip toes, just be tall enough to reach the flap on the door. It was a small metal covering that was bolted shut on one side. The Young Cripple struggled to push the bolt upwards and release the flap. As she pushed and shoved, she shut her eyes as tight as possible, as if this would convince the squeaking metal parts to be as quiet as she needed them be. As she writhed, the radio started to release a hissing static, and from behind it, what sounded like maddened laughter.
“Stop it,” she whispered.
“It’s not me,” said T. “I can’t control it, just like you can’t control the way you feel. It does it on its own.”
The static was loud so loud now that they needn’t whisper anymore.
“Shut it off.”
“I’ll try to turn it down.”
It didn’t work, though. The longer it took, the greater was the girl’s desperation, and the more intense were her feelings, the more perverse was the sound coming from the small speakers. It was when the girl gave up fighting the sound that she managed to focus on the laughter coming from inside the static. And then she heard, what sounded like a familiar voice; of someone she knew before she died.
“I know him,” she shouted, bending down to the radio.
It was The Young Boy, still alive, in the world she had come from. He was cursing; throwing vile obscenities with the same demented mania as a toddler, with a handful of breakables, perishables, and needless - unwanted toys. The Young Girl could hear too, through the static, a voice, which sounded like a mix between two dogs fighting over a bloodied bone, and a controlled demolition – of a building, or an entire rainforest.
The Young Cripple leaned into the radio and listened intently.
“I won’t do it,” screamed The Young Boy, through the static. “Go to hell.”
The Young Cripple dived back as a burst of static almost deafened her. It was The Demon, screaming in vile obscenity. The girl could barely make out its voice, but it repeated the same words over and over.
“Call my name,” it said, in a deep gurgle.
And each time it spoke, the static swelled until, like daylight, it cast The Demon and The Young Boy into the recesses of The Young Girl’s now desperate imaginings. The last words she heard were of The Young Boy defiantly saying, “No.”
“Where are they?” she said, shaking the radio. “Where is that coming from? I know him. I know him. He’s in danger.”
“I don’t know,” said T. “The signals come from everywhere, from all parts of the omniverse. But I never know where exactly.”
“But if we can hear it, then it has to near, right?”
The girl was speaking with such bravado. T had yet to see her like this.
“I suppose. Seems logical enough.”
“You think I’m nuts?”
“It’s not that. I think you believe it’s someone you know, I….”
“I’m not crazy. It’s him,” she said, remembering herself sitting by the campfire and listening to the boy as he told his whole life story, filling the emptiness that she had had in her spirit, with apprized companionship. And then she remembered The Demon, and how it held the boy’s hand as she pendulated above a stage, with a pistol to her head. “We have to find him. We have to help him.”
“What about my body?”
“That too. My friend’s in danger. We have to do something.”
“What if there’s nothing you can do?”
And she remembered then, The Experiment.
“I put him in that danger,” she said, her voice hollow. “There has to be something we can do.”
“Ok, but don’t get your hopes up. It’s a signal. God knows how old it is, and how far it had to travel…and how long that took. This might have already happened,” he said, before a long pause. “It might have already ended.”
The Young Cripple felt a tremendous weight
in her stomach.
Guilt.
“It’s my fault he’s sick. The least I can do is try.”
There was a long negotiating silence between the two.
“Ok then,” said T, in a decisive manner. “We’ll try. We’ll help your friend as well. Somehow.”
“Thank you,” said The Young Cripple, kissing the top of the radio.
Somewhere in this infinite reality was T’s body, and it just blushed.
“Ok, so on the count of three then,” said The Young Cripple, her hand on the latch, so absolutely sure that all it would take would be one more heave.
“On three.”
“One,” said the girl.
“Two,” said the boy.
“Three!”
And she was right. The latch tore right off as if made of paper. And before she lost her balance, The Young Cripple swung the flap back and peered into the room. Aghast, she fell backward and knocked her head on the ground.
“What? What was it? What did you see?”
“I don’t know. But it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, what did it look like? Was it big, was it small? Did it have two heads?”
“Everything,” said The Young Girl. “It had all that. And everything else too.”
“Show me. Lift me up, so I can see.”
“No, let’s keep going. I don’t need to know what something is to know that I never wanna see it again.”
“If it could get out, don’t you think it already would? We’re safe here. Nothing behind those doors can get us.”
“How can you be so sure of things, and you don’t even know where we are, or where we’re going?”
“I don’t need to know where I am, in order to get where I’m going.”
The Young Cripple stuck out her tongue.
“Ok, but just quick, ok?”
The Young Cripple crept up to the door, and, as she slowly stood up onto her tippy toes, she held the radio high above her head, so her friend could see what was inside the room.
“It’s spectacular,” said T.
“Are you bonkers? It’s terrible, horrible, and ugh,” said The Young Cripple, unable to finish her words.
“It’s from another dimension,” said T. “Aside from our three.”
“What dimensions? A bad dimension?”
“A dimension is a dimension, just as a box is a box. What’s inside though…. Wow, there’s so much colour. And shapes I have never seen before. They just fold in and out of each other.”
“Can I see?”
“You gotta squint, or else it’s just a deranged blur. But if you squint and just, I don’t how to explain this but…don't try to see.”
“That made no sense. Let me see.”
The Young Cripple pulled the radio down to her waist again and once more stood up on her tippy toes, peering through the slat on the door. Her every nerve was tense, with her fingers pressed like a spider, ready to jump.
“Well?” asked T.
Her first instinct was, like before, to dive away from the door, as far as she possibly could. That thing, whatever it was, was hardly as festive as T had described it as being. The Young Cripple saw no distinct colour, merely blur after blur, with deformed shapes getting bigger and smaller, and then before her very eyes, turning into shapes that the sight of them alone gave her vertigo, to the extent where her head started to spin, her legs tingled and went numb, and it felt as if her insides were being pulled from her mouth.
But just as she lost feeling in her hands, and as her body started to give way, she caught sight, at the very moment she was losing consciousness, of the most incredibly fantastic and superbly spectacular display of shape and colour that she had ever witnessed, ever, in her whole entire life. If the human language was designed to define and map a three-dimensional universe, then no words at all would suffice what common and narrow eyes would negate as being true. She herself had not one word to say, she didn’t even mutter a sound.
For the briefest of moments, she saw that there was so much more to existence than what she knew - a great deal more than what she had learned or what she had been told. The moment was brief, though, and as quickly as she had become enlightened, The Young Cripple was overcome by vertigo once more, falling to the ground with a great thump, into a useless, awkward slump. This time, though, as she caught her breath, she broke out into tears.
“Are you hurt?” asked T, concerned, he himself having suffered quite a knock.
There was a smile on her face as if she had walked away from a doomed fate, unharmed. Yet, contrary to her smile were the tears, the endless stream of tears, as if a faucet on her face were broken.
“That was the most beautiful….”
What followed was a series of heavy breaths, as if she had just run ten miles, then following that, a delicious kind of silence. And she cried the whole time.
“I’d never imagined…”
“How could you?” said T. “Imagine a single line seeing a cube for the first time. It would have no words either. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an extra-dimensional being. It’s hard, though. As I said, you have to see without looking. You have to imagine without thinking. Otherwise, our narrow minds and our even narrower eyes cannot see, and cannot even fathom what unravels outside of our perception. You never get bored, though. You never get used to it.”
“I wanna look again, can we?”
“There’s still a lot for us to see and do; a lot of thread to unravel. Don’t spend all your pennies on the first ride you see. Let’s try the next door. Remember we have a mission. And the longer we take, the longer we leave ourselves exposed here in the open. Anyone could be watching.”
The Young Cripple stared upwards, looking for some kind of security camera. She saw instead what looked like eyelids, attached to the ceiling. It wasn’t her first assumption. She thought maybe they were vents, or storage lockers, because of how they stuck out, so bulbous-like. But when one of them twitched and opened slightly like her dog used to when it was dreaming, The Young Cripple gasped silently, clasping her hand to her mouth. She could see a giant, grotesque eye in the ceiling, beneath a green, scabby cover; but only the white of the eye, for the iris was still covered, as the eyelid twitched away.
“They’re in The Arc, boss.”
It had barely taken a second for the apprentice bookkeeper to narrow his search of the infinite facility down to one quadrant, now seeing on his monitor, a grainy image of the discrepancy.
“What’s she doing?” asked The Accountant, dressing in combat attire, and strapping a ridiculous amount of obscene looking weaponry to his appendages. Wonderfully embroidered onto the back of his long black trench coat were the words, ‘Certainty or Bust’.
“She’s going room by room, boss. Having a peek by the looks of it. Then falling over, crying a bit, laughin’, huggin’ herself, a bit more dancing by the looks of it, then off to the next door. I can’t see properly, though. Looks like she’s talking, but I can’t see anyone with her.”
“Zoom in then.”
“There’s a power problem, boss. Cameras won’t open all the way. The whole sector looks like it's offline or something.”
“Well get it back online.”
“It’s not my field.”
“Find the problem then. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. Before all hell breaks loose.”
He scoured the monitor as best he could, with what little image he had at hand.
“There,” he said. “You see that? By the door.”
“What is that? Is that a plug?”
“Extension cord,” said Bean.
“You gotta be kidding me. What the fuck is an extension cord doing by a doorway?”
“Don’t look at me.”
“Jesus H Christ. Alright then, fuck it, we know where she is. Let’s just go down and fish her out, and get The Arc back online.”
“Might not be that easy, boss.”
“Oh stop being such a pessimist. Have
a little faith would ya? You geared up?”
Bean ran a final check on his arsenal.
“Good to go.”
“Right. We get in, we swoop her up, and we get her back here a.s.a.p. No funny business, alright? And you let me do the talking. Here, clip this on your belt.”
“Right, boss,” said Bean, sheathing his blade, while his superior attached a cable and carabiner to a latch on his belt.
“In case we get separated,” said The Accountant.
Bean nodded.
“No bloodshed, not unless necessary. We don’t know what’ll happen, alright?”
“Alright, boss. Chill, I’m on it.”
“I’m serious. I don’t know if she’s divisible or not. We don’t know what kind of math she is. If she’s a zero, of any kind, she’ll break the number line. It’ll be like a bloody black hole, got it? She’ll swallow Aleph-Null. So…no cuts, not unless you’re sure that there’s no option whatsoever.”
“Listen, boss, with the power fuzzy on The Arc, it might not…”
“Have some faith, boy.”
The two stepped through a door in their office. As with any door, as they entered, the two bookkeepers imagined where it would take them, expecting to arrive at The Arc, not a foot away from where they last spotted the discrepancy. You can imagine their surprise then when they ended up somewhere else altogether.
“I tried to tell ya, boss. If The Arc’s offline then these doors can go anywhere.”
“Whattaya mean anywhere? There has to be some kind of contingency for this type of thing. How do we implement order?”
There was a sound overhead as if the sky were batting its wings.
“The Arc is the order, boss. You know that.”
“I can’t be expected to keep up to date with everything.”
“The Arc means unification, right? So if The Arc is down, that means our algorithms mean diddly squat.”
“We’ve just lost control of the situation. Now every bloody door here is pure friggin’ probability?”
“So then, all of this is now down to….”
“Chance,” said The Accountant, slumping his shoulders as he did. “I hate chance, I really do. As long as The Arc isn’t feeding Light to the generators, our algorithms don’t work. We got not control. We can’t predict shit. And these doors, they’re nothing more than…”
Had he the flexibility, he might have very well buried his head in the dirt.
“…than what?”
“Bloody wormholes,” said The Accountant.