Dissolved in Some Ineffable Tide
Fiction - by Deborah L. Davitt
You might remember some headlines back in 2016 about the first time a gravitational wave was detected. Astronomers told an indifferent world that these events were the result of black holes merging.
Which might even have been the case.
My degree is in astrophysics, which amounts to student debt, an unending job-search with overstaffed, underfunded research facilities, and a junior job at a planetarium as little more than a movie usher. Gone are the days when the docents would bring out their laser pointers and direct students’ attention to this constellation or that, spread out across the star-filled dome. These days, it’s all three-dimensional fly-throughs of the Giza plateau and morning sun-salutation yoga to bring people in the doors of the Adler here in Chicago. Yes, the higher-ups are all working astronomers. Not us on the ground floor.
It’s said that if you were to be drawn towards the event horizon of a black hole, you’d be spaghettified—drawn into long streams of matter, pouring endlessly from your screaming mouth to your atomized toes. I sometimes wonder if you’d be aware of your dissolution. The part of me that still believes that there’s mercy in the universe hopes that, like a candle, your consciousness would just . . . go out.
You might have a frozen eternity in which to experience it, your dissolution lasting for epochs. But I’m almost certain—for reasons that will become clear—that neither of these is the case, and that reality is far worse.
On January 4, 2017, concurrent with the GW170104 event, I’d stayed late—to nearly 4 am local time, working on a job application for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Which is why I was at the planetarium at that god-forsaken hour, when I saw the dome move—quiver. And then something came through.
Streamers of something poured through the dome, continued through two floors of empty space, and then poured through the floor, too. A flow of filaments like a waterfall, and yet somehow, intolerably stretched and curved. All I could think of was the cosmic foam in which all our galaxies supposedly move and flow, surfactants bubbling through some ineffable tide.
Attendant on this apparition was a kind of hissing sound that I could feel more than hear, like a razor sliding down my spine, with just enough pressure to avoid breaking the skin. I stood completely transfixed, my coffee cup shaking in one hand, and tried to justify and explain to myself what I was seeing, even as what looked like . . . facial features . . . horribly distorted, poured past. A screaming mouth worthy of Munch. Elongated eyes and hideously ovaled pupils.
Had this once been human? Was it something else? I couldn’t tell you which creeping thought was worse.
And then it was gone, and I didn’t know what to make of what I’d seen. I couldn’t very well go see a therapist—documented paranoid schizophrenia, which this certainly felt like, would be grounds for denial on a security clearance, which half the jobs I’d applied for required. Instead, I found a way to look at the security camera footage from the dome that night. What I saw shook me further. No streamers of liquified reality. No filaments of cosmic foam. Just me, staring, open-mouthed at nothing at all.
Meditation is cheaper than therapy. I tried that, melatonin, and CBD oil. Hell, I’d have tried voodoo if my insurance had covered it, and if I’d thought it would banish the sneaking thought that I might be going insane.
But when the results from LIGO were published in June of the same year, I realized that at the exact moment that the detector had caught a gravitational wave, said to be caused by the merger of a set of black holes unfathomably far from Earth, I’d seen some sort of . . . spaghettified creature, passing through my local dimensional reality.
Or thought I had, anyway.
June 8, 2017—just seven days after the LIGO data was published—it happened again. This time, at 8 pm here in Chicago, so after closing, but this time, there were other people around. Chief among them, my boss, Dr. Lucy Senna. She’d been a cheerful and encouraging presence during my tenure here, and had written me several letters of recommendation that had gone nowhere.
This time, I had my phone in my hand, shakily trying to capture footage as the filaments streamed from ceiling to floor. Dr. Senna dropped her coffee mug and crossed to me, her face pale. “You’re seeing this?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“You see it, too?” I asked, suddenly grateful for her presence.
“Yes. It’s just, the previous times, I was the only one—”
Wait, what? I wanted to ask a barrage of questions, like why didn’t you report this? But that’s when the sound hit, and this time, it was far more intense. I could feel the buzzing discordance reaching inside me, squeezing my brain and internal organs. Pulling me forward, and yet compressing me. A searing stab as my eardrums perforated, then a hot rush of blood leaking from my eyes and nose, and I know I screamed—
Waking up in the Mercy Medical ER was a slow and painful process as I faded in and out of consciousness several times. When I finally managed to stay awake long enough to talk to a nurse, I asked, “What happened?”
Her voice sounded dull as she explained that I had perforations in both eardrums. Lucky to still have my hearing, etc., etc. Followed by her non-explanation of, “There was some sort of chemical leak at the planetarium, is what the first responders think. You need to rest.”
There was something off about her eyes behind the plastic shield, above her mask. Most nurses don’t wear face shields unless there’s a concern about fluids bursting. Too distancing for proper empathy.
Those thoughts came through clearly. Words were much harder. “My boss . . . she was standing next to me . . . “
“Dr. Senna?”
“. . . yeah.” Every word felt like trying to dislodge concrete from my throat.
“She’s expected to make a full recovery.” The nurse’s eyes flicked to the door, and then back to me again. “The chemicals were heavier than air, and you both suffered from hypoxia. You’re lucky someone saw where you both collapsed and dragged you out in time. You might have had some odd hallucinations. Lack of oxygen to the brain does that.”
That didn’t explain why my eyes hurt. The perforated eardrums. The spinal pain. I stared at the backs of my hands, seeing hematomas where the capillaries had burst. That wasn’t a low-oxygen problem, unless you’re talking low atmospheric pressure. Which, given that we were standing at sea-level in Chicago, didn’t seem likely. And, remembering the feeling of pressure, of being pulled towards the filaments . . . no, that definitely wasn’t a low-pressure thing. This was a high-gravity thing, wasn’t it?
“The floor and ceiling,” I muttered to myself. “They should be compressed—the ceiling should have fallen down, shouldn’t it . . . ?”
“Excuse me?” the nurse asked.
“Nothing. Sorry, I don’t know what I was saying.”
When Dr. Senna wheeled herself into my room later that afternoon, her face was a mass of bruises under her salt-and-pepper hair, the lines of her face starkly reminding me that her age was closer to sixty than to fifty. “Are they trying the whole hypoxia line on you, too?” she asked.
“Doesn’t fit,” I noted, trying to sit up in the bed. She poked a button on a controller, and the back rose, making me feel about twelve. “Feels like gas-lighting.”
“Might not be intentional.” She sat back, her lips curling down. “People see what they want to see. I know. I’ve dealt with it before.” A pause, and then she went on quickly, “It’s a problem in every field. Unintentional bias changes how we see data.” She shifted, trying to get comfortable in her chair. “Did they return your phone?”
I nodded to it on the tray beside me. Screen shattered, battery nonfunctional. “Going to need someone to get the data off the card for me. If there’s anything there. Security cameras didn’t show anything the last time I saw it.” I kept my voice down, aware of the nurses passing in the hall outside. “And if someone hasn’t already erased everything.”
She snorted. “You’ve watched too many episodes of the X-Files. The government isn’t competent enough for omniscience.” Dr. Senna looked up at the ceiling. “No, there’s a rational explanation for everything. And I want to find that answer.”
“You said you’ve seen it before?”
She nodded tightly. “Come find out what it is with me. I’ve thought for ages that I must be delusional, but. . . if you’ve seen it, too . . . .” Relief in her expression. But also, a glimmer of obsession in her eyes.
It should have bothered me. Should have warned me.
My roommates, Mai and James, arrived to pick me up from the hospital—something I hadn’t expected of them. James, who’d been my boyfriend when we moved in, was in the middle of moving out. He’d found a decent-paying engineering firm, a new girlfriend, and a new apartment, in that order, so I was surprised he still cared enough to come pick me up. “How the hell does a planetarium have a gas leak to the dome?” he demanded as I swayed in the back seat.
“Don’t know,” I replied honestly. “I thought we were on full electric there. There isn’t even a boiler room.”
Through half-closed eyes, I could see the set of his shoulders shift. Irritation, anger—not with me, but at the source of an insoluble problem that shouldn’t be a problem. “My firm does a lot of work with the city,” he finally offered. “Something has to be not up to code there. I could poke around.”
“Nah.” I paused. “They won’t be open for a month,” I went on, feeling blank. Concussed. “God knows what I’ll do for rent in the meantime.”
“. . . I could cover that for you.” A pause. “I was already going to cover my part till you and Mai got someone to sublet for me—”
“Which you are legally required to do,” Mai put in tersely from the passenger seat beside him.
“—the point is,” James went on, giving her a look of intense dislike, “it seems like the least I can do till you can find someplace else to work. I mean, you’re not going back there, are you?”
I didn’t answer. Because as much obsession, as much need to know as had glimmered in Dr. Senna’s eyes . . . I felt it, too. Gone were my thoughts of escape to the JPL—I wanted an answer as badly as she did.
Within months, LIGO released more data to add to our accumulating evidence. The second occurrence of the spaghettified matter seeming to stream through the Adler had coincided with GW170608—thought to be, again, signs of the merger of two black holes. “There’s problems with this,” Dr. Senna told me. “First, two dots of data are a line, not a pattern. And second. . . ?” She looked at me expectantly.
I grimaced. “Depending on distance, the black holes, which haven’t been identified in the literature, could have actually merged hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. So, if this is related, we’re seeing something that happened at the same time as the merger, and only now can be seen as the gravitation wave. . . brings it to us, like flotsam on water? Or it’s a plain coincidence, and the two events aren’t linked.”
She smiled. “Correct. Your name is going to look excellent next to mine on the paper we get out of this.”
It didn’t sound condescending or false, but maybe, like so many other people, I was hearing what I wanted to hear. Observational bias. It doesn’t just apply to survey data—it applies to hungry post-grads searching for a mentor to trust, a way out of just-above poverty living.
But in spite of my trust in Dr. Senna’s judgment, it occurred to me sometimes that perhaps we should be more afraid. That this unexplained phenomenon could be dangerous, and that keeping the data so close to our chests and not involving others in the research might be a bad idea. But that being said, what data did we have, beyond personal experience? My cell phone camera hadn’t picked up anything more than the security footage. What could that mean? How could we both see something, sense something, that wasn’t within the visible field of light that the cameras could detect—cameras set up to record the same wavelengths as the human eye?
My theory was that we weren’t detecting the event with our eyes, but with one of our other senses, and that our brains were merely interpreting the data as visual information because our gray matter simply wasn’t set up to interpret it in any other way. Dr. Senna disagreed. “No, we have to go with what we’ve seen and heard so far. Better cameras. Better audio capture equipment. If that fails, we’ll have to fall back on more recondite measures.”
She wouldn’t discuss any previous incidents that she’d witnessed. But she pressed me for what I’d seen and heard the first time, and the second, while we worked to set up cameras that could capture both UV and infrared signals. We didn’t have the budget to build our own gravitational wave detector—we weren’t being funded by the NSF, and we certainly weren’t Caltech or MIT. So we had to keep all camera footage saved for months, waiting for the next LIGO announcement.
As it happened, the next event made that footage unnecessary. It was July 29, in the full swing of summer vacation. The Adler was open, welcoming people who wanted to escape the heat and occupy their bored children for an afternoon. And at just before 1 pm—just before our showing of Pluto: Dwarf or Planet?—as tired parents and cross children filed in, Dr. Senna and I both looked up. And once again, we could both see the ripples and distortions in the dome that presaged the event.
“Get everyone out,” she ordered, grabbing one of the cameras. “You know what happened to us last time—we can’t take the chance with an audience!”
I pulled the fire alarm and started getting people out. In the flickers of red light, I could see the first filaments descending towards Dr. Senna, where she stood, seemingly fearless, aiming her camera up at the ceiling. “Dr. Senna!” I shouted through the clamor of the alarm, through the first buzzing not-sounds razoring across my spine. “You have to get out, too!”
“This is it!” she called back, her voice exultant. “Zsofia, this is the data we need—”
And then the impact wave of the filaments caught her, and pulled on her, and I saw her face turn shocked, just for an instant, heard her scream as it became the razor’s edge of the not-sound, and her heels pulled down into the floor as her body stretched and became the strange congruences of the cosmic foam—
I didn’t have the luxury of waking up in a hospital room this time. I got to sit in a police station till I was debriefed by two tired-looking detectives. Everyone, based on the security cam footage, was treating Dr. Senna’s disappearance as a death—accidental, wrongful, or intentional, seemed to be what they were trying to ascertain. I just took deep breaths, kept my head on the table for as long as they weren’t in the room, and tried not to think about the alternatives.
Maybe she wasn’t instantaneously atomized by whatever had hit her, but was instead stretched between interdimensional surfaces? Maybe she’s still technically alive in some sense, and aware of it—
“Why did you pull the fire alarm, Ms, ah. . . ?”
The words pulled me back from where my mind had strayed. I looked down at my shaking hands and replied, “Vancura. It’s Hungarian. My dad wanted an old-country first name for me, which is why he saddled me with the spelling of Zsofia that no substitute teacher was ever able to pronounce when reading it from the class list.” I felt completely distant from the proceedings, as if I were floating above myself, watching the Zsofia in the chair rattle on inanely.
The detective didn’t smile. “The fire alarm, Ms. Vancura. Why did you trigger it?”
I let the person in the chair talk quietly, ramblingly, only nudging herself/me occasionally. Let them see and hear the truth. Let them see how open you are in your shock. It’s true, isn’t it? “Dr. Senna and I were both injured in the last, ah. Incident.” My fingers fiddled with the Styrofoam cup of water in front of me. “We both thought we saw something up on the dome—like smoke, maybe? She said to get everyone out. Fastest way was the fire alarm. And if it was like last time, with the gas that knocked us both out, that no one’s ever been able to figure out where it came from? I didn’t want all those kids to fall unconscious.”
Which, other than the word smoke, was the god’s honest truth. For kids to be unconscious as long as we had been, if it had been a hypoxia event, and not some form of gravitic distortion? They’d have died. With their parents collapsed atop them.
“You’ve been working with her pretty closely the last few months?” The detective with the faint gray tinge to his complexion, as if he was nursing some terminal illness in secret, asked now.
“Yes, she’s become my mentor. I’d asked her to write some letters of recommendation a few years ago, and when those didn’t pan out, she offered to bring me into her research. Getting my name on a couple of published papers would go a long way in the job hunt.”
Again, both truth and a lie of omission.
“What kind of research were you doing with her?”
“Mostly research on LIGO studies of gravitation waves and black hole mergers. Had to be in my off-hours, because no one at the planetarium has grant funding to work on that, and you can’t work on off-grant research while on grant time.” I shrugged, while the floating bits of me laughed from the ceiling. So ethical, aren’t you?
“We’ve had a chance to go through her computer,” the other detective, a black woman in her thirties somewhere, hair close-cropped to her head, interjected. “Couple of work-in-process papers. Pretty hard going for us amateurs. Interestingly, your name wasn’t on them.”
Both floating-me and the version of me in the chair froze momentarily. “Well, she mightn’t have put my name there while it was still in progress,” I answered slowly. “I sent her data by email—that’ll be there.” Again, truth. Any LIGO data I’d collated, looking for patterns, had been sent to her academic email address. The camera feeds had been tied to other accounts—all under her name, not mine.
Floating-me felt a deep surge of irritation. She lied. She was going to keep my name off the paper and publish the paper solo. Reap all the rewards.
The me that sat in the chair thought, miserably, Or she was trying to protect me from a career-ender of a publication, because if we didn’t have rock-solid proof that stood up to peer review, she might wind up running the projector, but I’d wind up working as a barista, at best.
“Any idea why she had cameras set up, independent of the security feeds?” Back to the gray-faced man in his gray suit. Somehow, he felt dangerous, his hair combed back with what looked like Brylcreem—as if he were a refugee from the fifties, displaced in time.
I shook my head. “I know she was concerned since the last incident. I mean, I was, too.” A rapid thought from the me at ceiling height: If they go back in the security footage far enough, they’ll find you helping her set them up. “Look, I helped her set them up. She thought she could catch someone messing with the ventilation system if she had different angles from the regular cameras. And since I didn’t seem to be finding work elsewhere, anything that made going to work every day feel safer . . . I’d assist with.” An unhappy curl of my lips. “Kind of like I’m trying to help now.” I put my head down in my shaking hands. “It wasn’t gas this time, was it? I mean, I looked back at her, and she just . . . I didn’t feel an explosion, but she was there, and then she was gone—”
Good. Keep rattling. Sound as disoriented as you actually are.
The gray-faced man coughed, and then told the first flat-out lie in the room, “You wouldn’t necessarily have felt the explosion, if it were small enough. Our working theory is that someone planted a bomb near the lectern, and it caught her.”
I looked past his left ear and nodded vaguely. “I guess that makes sense.”
But the me near the ceiling laughed. Oh, yeah. A bomb so small, you couldn’t feel it, but there are no body parts left. No fingers, no toes, no spleens, no blood. Yep, people get atomized like this all the damn time. I wonder if he’s a specialist in cover-ups, or if he just sees what he wants to see, like Dr. Senna said.
The female detective didn’t smile as she stood. “That’s all we really had for you, Ms. Vancura. You can go, but let us know if you plan to leave town.”
I blinked. That sounded like I was . . . a suspect? “I don’t know where I would go.”
“Oh? There’s a letter to you from Caltech on the professor’s desk, addressed to you at the Alder.” She paused, clearly watching my expression to measure the effect of her words. “Didn’t you know about that?”
Floating me descended and passed through my body. Suddenly, I felt as if local gravity had increased four-fold. “What? No. Have you read it?”
“Well, it was open, so we took the liberty. Caltech was offering you a teaching position. Seems like maybe the professor didn’t want you to know that.” She paused again, then purred, “Any idea as to why she’d be leaving your name off your joint research, and preventing you from moving on?”
I looked at her. She must have practiced this routine after watching CSI too many times. Everyone wants to look and sound as cool as their heroes, I suppose. “I have no idea,” I answered blankly, not trying to stand up. My legs would’ve been too wobbly. “I thought she was helping me.” Was she, though? “Hey, I’ve been talking to you in the spirit of good citizenship. Now you’re starting to make me feel like I need a lawyer.” Shit, shit, shit. How am I supposed to afford a lawyer? Am I going to have to call James and ask for the name of his roommate from college who just passed the bar exam?
“I don’t suppose there’s anything else you’d like to say about your relationship with your mentor?” Brylcreem asked. Innuendo oozed off his words. “I mean, she was in a position to do you a lot of favors. Hell, on your pay, even eating a nice dinner every now and again has to sound good.”
I looked at him and tried not to laugh. Part of my head informed me, They’re trying to piss you off, because angry people don’t think well. Stress cortisol locks out the cerebral cortex. Which says everything you need to know about today’s society at large—a bunch of angry people not thinking well. So anything provocative is deliberate. “Nice use of the traditional stereotype about women in academia.” A deep breath to calm myself after allowing myself that single snide swipe. “Even if I swung that way, which I don’t, I’d never date my boss. It’s stupid and unhealthy and only leads to trouble.”
I returned my eyes to the dark gaze of the female detective. She still hadn’t changed expressions. “I don’t know why Dr. Senna opened my mail. But I’m pretty pissed about it, whatever the reason. I mean, it’s a felony, isn’t it?” I poked my memory, then gave up. “I’d like to have the letter, though—or a copy of it. I’d like to get in touch with Caltech and see if the offer’s still open.” A helpless shrug. “If it is, I’ll give you my forwarding address and all contact information. Past that, if you have any further insulting questions,” my temper started to get the better of me, “I’ll have to find myself a lawyer.”
They let me go, a copy of the Caltech letter in my pocket when I left the station. I read it at home, curled up on my bed, listening to Mai and our newest roommate argue in the kitchen about whose turn it was to clean the dishes.
Between the usual departmental headers and footers, the words gleamed in the low light of my lamp: At the personal recommendation of Dr. Senna, we’d like to offer you a position on our high-energy detection project. Please call me back at your earliest convenience. We have much to discuss, particularly in relation to your ongoing work with her. – Dr. Siddharth Agarwal.
I stared up at the ceiling. Why would Dr. Senna have kept this letter from me, if she’d given me her personal recommendation? Why would the detectives have acted as if this were a damning piece of evidence? With no answers appearing on the plaster overhead, I gave up and dialed the California number on the letter. The time difference might mean that Dr. Agarwal was still on campus.
I wasn’t expecting him to pick up immediately, nor for his voice to be suspicious or hostile. “If this is the Chicago police department again—”
“No, no, sir. This is Zsofia Vancura.” I paused, and the whole day hit home at once. I hadn’t cried, but now, I could feel the tears building up behind my eyelids. “I take it you’ve heard—”
“Are you on your cell phone?” he asked hurriedly.
I blinked. “Yes?”
“Best not to get into too many details, then. God only knows, in this age of warrantless wiretaps, if they’ve bugged it.” He sighed, and I stared at a wall, wide-eyed. Now that was some X-Files level paranoia—the kind Dr. Senna had pooh-poohed. But maybe Dr. Agarwal had reason. “I’m going to arrange with my department to get you a plane ticket here. Pack light. It’ll be a job interview, two, three days stay. We can talk about poor Lucy then.”
“Dr. Agarwal, isn’t there anything you can tell me now?” I asked, my throat tight with all the questions I couldn’t ask. What had she seen before? Why recommend me only to hide the letter? Why did the event kill her, but leave the floors and ceiling untouched?
A pause. “She always wanted to meet the totality of existence. To see it, touch it with her hands.” Cryptic words. “Think about dimensional reality,” he added after a moment. “It’ll take at least a week, maybe two, to arrange your trip. The travel office never moves quickly.”
So I thought about dimensional reality as Mai cooked noodles in sesame oil and chili sauce for her breakfast the next morning. “You want some?”
She always offered. I never accepted. Two hallmarks of our four-year tenure as roommates.
“Thank you, but my stomach’s still upset,” I admitted as I sat down at the table. “I’ll have some toast in a bit.” A pause. “You ever think about higher dimensions?”
Mai, whose degree was in biology, and who worked as a tech in a hematology lab, gave me a patient look. “Which ones?”
“Well, there’s the three physical dimensions—length, breadth, and height. There’s time.”
“And if we add a fifth dimension, we can traverse the others with a tesseract, if I recall my Marvel movies and Madelaine L’Engle books correctly.”
I laughed, looking out the window. Wondering if the cars I saw there were the ones that were there every day, or if any were out of place. X-Files paranoia. “The first two dimensions higher than time would share the conditions of the Big Bang—they’d have started when this universe started, or so the thinking goes. They’d either share or set the conditions of this universe. Like, the speed of light, how gravity works.”
“This is the kind of theoretical navel-gazing that gives me headaches.” She came over to the table with her bowl of steaming noodles, and started to eat. “So, what’s above that?”
“Traversable time,” I answered. I’d been reading about it overnight, since theoretical physics had been, prior to this, outside my job description. At least, multidimensional theoretical physics. “Access to parallel worlds, other universes. Up around dimension ten, the instructions for all space and time—maybe wound around like DNA, maybe not. And up at dimension eleven, in theory . . . eh. God, or whatever you want to think of as the intelligence or being or energy that created it all.” I shrugged. Religion wasn’t a subject I discussed much. “And here’s another thing that makes my mind spin. If a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow. . . then a fourth-dimensional being would cast a three-dimensional one. And on up the line. We could all just be shadows of shadows.”
Mai gave me a look. “And this line of thinking started with Dr. Senna’s death?” Her tone suggested, We can talk about what you’re going through now, if you really have to, but I have to leave for work in twenty minutes, so make it fast.
Same old Mai. Cheerful and kind, but brusque and opaque. “I guess it does make me think about mortality,” I replied, but let my tone become dismissive.
But Dr. Agarwal had been so pointed about the topic, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About how theorists compared how our three-dimensional bodies cast two-dimensional shadows to the strange geometry of other dimensions. That those dimensions, while they could be infinitely compactified, were still congruent with our own, and that a being of the fourth or fifth dimension would cast . . . what, a three-dimensional shadow here?
Which is where the whole notion that we humans are just holographic projections of some other reality, or computer simulations inside something larger than our universe came from. It all really went back to Plato, of course. Shadows on a cave wall. But don’t tell theoretical physicists that they’re really just repeating the ideas of a Greek philosopher from the fifth century BCE. They don’t like that. They’ve got math, after all.
What would the shadow of a higher dimensional being look like, if we’re not them? Would their shadows have mass? Probably not any more than our shadows here did, but would they . . . block the light? If not light, could it block or shift other universal constants, like gravity? Could their presence change the speed of light, alter time itself?
I drove myself to the closed Adler early in the morning on August 14. My flight was scheduled for later that day, but I couldn’t sleep. Something told me I wasn’t done with the place, or it with me.
I didn’t meddle with the police tape. Just sat outside in my car, thinking about dimensional reality. Of intangible matter streaming through our reality. Of our solar system, our galaxy, so huge in relation to us, drifting through cosmic foam, being drawn towards the mystery of the Great Attractor—that gravitational anomaly drawing our local cluster to it, in the direction of the Southern Triangle in our sky. “The totality of existence,” I muttered. “Gravitation waves that are the shadows on the cave wall. Higher dimensions.”
I put my head down against the steering wheel, trying to picture it all. Even a creature one dimension up from our own reality would be . . . indescribable. Incomprehensible, Unfathomable. It would cast shadows in our world that we couldn’t understand, describe, measure, or explain. There would just be effect without cause, cause without effect. Primitive humans around their campfires would have called them gods, but could they deliberately affect our level of reality any more than we could affect our shadows?
And what if they could? What names would they have—if they had any concept of names. How would they even communicate with us, or would we just be . . . reflections of their reality, distorted and without real meaning for them? Finger-puppets on Plato’s cave wall, not real, just distorted images of their ideal forms?
A buzzing sensation across my skin, like razors applied, feather-light. You’re almost there, Dr. Senna said, and I turned, apprehensive, to find her—or rather, some version of her—sitting beside me. Her shape stretched and wavered, her mouth still formed that intolerably elongated oval, and strands of matter seemed to pour through my car’s roof and through the seat beside mine. Agarwal’s close, too. The Totality. It’s not a place. It’s a Them. It’s all of Them, and I’m a part of Them now. The way I always have been, since the first time I saw Them/Me. It was always me in the matter stream. I am the closed circle, effect preceding cause.
It was her, and it wasn’t her. Not really. The face locked in an eternal scream, the terrified eyes dissolving into nothingness, but the tone . . . utterly placid. She wasn’t there, not really. And if she’d become part of this Totality, she wasn’t . . . who she’d been. She was Them.
I closed my eyes, but I could still hear her. Still see her. “Time is meaningless when you stand outside of it,” I said out loud, remembering my undergraduate readings of Boethius. I’d thought the old Roman full of shit at the time. “You’re in the dimensions above linear time, so effect can precede cause without paradox.”
We step over time the way you step over a ruler on the ground.
And in that moment, it all made sense, in a terrible, terrible way. The gravity waves were simultaneously occurring in the past and slowly transmitted to Earth and were the symptom of her emergence in localized patches of our linear time. She could even appear before her . . . her ascension. . . affecting things millions of years ago and far distant at the same ‘time’ as her appearances. . . because linear time was meaningless to her.
Still, my head spun with trying to conceptualize the totality of it all.
A pause. You could join us. You will join us. You have joined us.
I opened my eyes. Looked at her shadow, her and not-her at once. And whispered, my throat dry, “No. Hell, no.”
And then I drove, heading frantically for the airport, leaving her behind to her eternal dissolution, eternal rebirth, my heart beating in my throat in raw, existential terror.
It didn’t matter that I’d said no, in this moment of time. Through those strange congruences over overlapping reality, They’d always be everywhere. Everywhen. And someday, it seemed, I would agree, and be dissolved in some ineffable tide. As if the choice were known by those outside of time, yet not predestined, because I’d always already chosen it.
But not today. Never not today.