This is the End 2(10)

That’s an embarrassing thing to admit—believing I could feel spacetime—and certainly not something I was taught by Michio Sata, my timecasting instructor. But I’d done a lot of research on the intranet to try to figure it out, and I thought I had a possible solution.

Years back, supernatural phenomena were proven to be bunk by science. Ghosts, ESP, monsters, God, magic, religion, and all of that other mumbo jumbo was abandoned by the majority of society. But a small fringe group hypothesized that belief in the supernatural was genetic. In certain situations, people were able to sense and sometimes control aspects of the eleven dimensions. Little things, like knowing the phone was going to ring two seconds before it did, and bigger things, like Indian swamis who could stop their heartbeats and balance on two fingers, were all related to the interaction among dimensions.

Certain people were more sensitive to this interaction than others. Throughout recorded history, these people were attributed with divine or supernatural powers. Magicians, prophets, mystics, miracle workers, clairvoyants, soothsayers; these folks could tune in and channel other dimensions. Some were treated like gods for having this ability. Others were burned at the stake.

This hypothesis never graduated to a theory, because only a few of the imploded dimensions could be proven mathematically, and the only one that could be seen was the eighth dimension, through tachyon emission visualization, and we weren’t even completely sure how it worked.

But, strange as it sounded, I believed when I was tuning the TEV into spacetime, I could sense if I was hitting the fabric or not, then adjust accordingly.

Nothing supernatural about it. Just a genetic ability, like being good at basketball, or having 20/20 eyesight. Still, I didn’t talk about it much, for fear of being laughed out of the Peace Department.

So I took a deep breath, let it out slow, then reached for the dial to see where this blood came from.





FOUR



When I’m tuning in to the spacetime fabric, my brain sort of splits in half. Not literally, or even figuratively. But I don’t really know how else to describe it. One part of my mind is intensely focused. The other part just spaces out, like I’m daydreaming.

Each click of the focus dial is one-hundredth of a millimeter, and most people can’t distinguish the movement. But to me, each click feels like a huge chasm that I’m traversing in slow motion. People watching me have commented that my fingers aren’t moving at all. But they are, on a very sensitive, very minuscule level.

First I needed to locate the eighth membrane. According to Michio Sata, the world’s first timecaster and the genius who helped invent the technology, there was no way to actually locate its physical presence. Either you could sense it, or you couldn’t. I could, and when I tuned in to the 8M I sensed that it looked and felt like a furry, bloated, red raisin. But the descriptors looked and felt aren’t appropriate, because I really couldn’t see or feel anything. It was all happening in my head.

Even though I hadn’t done a visualization in a long time, I focused in on the 8M pretty quickly. But it seemed strange. A little too small. A little too orange. I chalked that up to being out of practice, and then switched from the focus dial to the fine-tuning dial.

If one out of a thousand could locate the membrane, only a fraction of them could fine-tune. Unlike the raisin sensation, fine-tuning appeared in my imagination like a long, winding road. I had to follow its twists and turns, using the dial, maneuvering this way and that way until I reached the pinpoint of light at the very end. But it wasn’t actually light. It was more like a single point that pulled light in.

The point itself was weird as hell, and supposedly different for everyone who found it. But if you could sense the point, getting to it wasn’t any more difficult than driving a vehicle.

“Oh, my…”

I opened my eyes and looked at Neil, who appeared to be disappearing and reappearing, switching on and off like a flickering monitor. Actually, it was me and the TEV who were disappearing. Though I didn’t understand the science or the math, I was getting close to the octeract point; the center of the spacetime eighth-dimensional hypercube. While I didn’t understand what any of that meant, I knew what it felt like when I got there.

Strangely, it felt like petting a bunny between the ears.

As I got closer, the octeract point unfolded, and I sensed my mind being stretched, like it was made of chewing gum and someone was tugging on either end. One more delicate twist of the fine-tuning dial and the light enveloped everything, providing me with the very real but decidedly un-macho bunny sensation.

I locked the dials. The flickering had stopped. The world was tangible and real again. Neil’s jaw was hanging open.