Skimming Pebbles, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love Your Mom!

Dimensions. I've been to a few. When Professor Pinter maps out a new one to explore it's increasingly hard to say no. I'm not an adventurer by nature or trade. If these sojourns occurred on a regular basis I'd bow out, leave it to the scientists. It'd make more sense to train a corps of explorers if that were the case, start up a NASA for inter-dimensional travel. Turns out though that it's really difficult to get a good glimpse of an old dimension, much less one undiscovered. The science is far from settled and as far as I know Professor Pinter is on his own. In his laboratory on campus he's got a cornucopia of supercomputers running at all times, each gathering, collating, analyzing and cross-referencing as much data as it can. The man spends an altogether unhealthy amount of time reading their indecipherable read-outs until a pattern emerges, at which point it is time to move. Prof's theory is that dimensions are bits of solids in a massive fluid, meaning if you want to jump from one droplet to another you need to move quickly. Before long that other bit is speeding down a diverging stream.

After all this time, all these trips, that part still worries me. If we spend too much time off our dimension we won't be able to get back. Not for an eternity. We were on a dimension once, that reminds me, where every living thing lived eternally. All degeneration and senescence were infinite processes, basically. I'll admit I don't understand how that works. Conflicts with what physics I understand but physics is more malleable than most people suspect. I have my own doubts but I'll get to that later. While we were there Pinter started wondering which is always dangerous. Because, he thought, there is so much we don't understand about second-order dimensionality, above and beyond that the thing-in-itself (I was a philosophy major when I first met Prof so I'm not shy about playing it up) it behooved us, he got to thinking, to wait it out a quasi-literal eternity until our home dimension returned, just to see. To see what? To see, for instance, if as much time had passed back home. He was serious! And his TA, Samantha, she was convinced that we were so behooved! I had to point out to the gang that if we were wrong there wouldn't be much of a universe or the Earth could be dead. If we tried to jump back without a living Earth to land on...? Besides which we'd probably have gone insane. The people there didn't seem particularly with it, and as long as they had lived they hadn't lived an eternity yet. Finally I got everyone's heads turned right ways and we got back home in the nick of time. I swore I wasn't going to risk my life, sanity and everything else on another tour of Prof's inability to be human. I wrote in my journal "Pinter=Agguirre" and left it at that.

Well, it wasn't his fault he was eccentric. Plus, someone has to chart the ...not stars but starscapes, universes, the beyond. Science needs its heroes and if I can help with catching and dragging the future back to us, so be it.

I was watching the Cardinals getting walloped by the Saints when Prof paged me. He doesn't page me for any old reason so I just rushed out. My pack is always ready, lying in wait under my kitchen table. Grabbed my denim coat, my back pack and my glasses and shot over. I still get the jitters. Like I said, I'm no adventurer. Prof pays me a nice stipend under the table, true, but this isn't in my blood. One time we landed on a planet where there were no animals and, not coincidentally, the air was much less breathable to any living being that wasn't a plant. There was enough oxygen in the air to gasp but it was painful & I was really fucking anxious to leave. The professor doesn't like to get bogged down with gear so we'd never before bothered with oxygen tanks. So stupid. After a few hours I couldn't stand anymore. Admittedly, I was too humbled by everyone else's perseverance, especially Prof whose fittest days are a memory and probably weren't all that fit to begin with, to complain but after a while my head against my will was listing to the side and I was literally sucking on air, trying to get as much oxygen per breath as I could. Thankfully Melvin came close to vomiting. That was enough to inspire a hasty retreat. I don't complain much. I accept the salary. But seriously I mean seriously I don't think I belong to this group. I'm just here. So long as I'm here I'll do what I can.

The entire crew was there waiting for me. I don't own a car and I don't live directly on campus but I do live near enough to get to the lab by bike within 6 minutes. That's good enough for me. Still, they're not a patient group. There's Samantha who I give a quick hug. We almost had a thing going on but after we visited the dimension where we could literally see each others' fantasies by staring into each others' eyes we thought it best to let things cool off. Maybe in a few years when the ick factors have worn away a bit. There's Miles & Melvin, the twins. I give them a tentative nod. They weird me out a bit. Each has his devotion that's impaired his emotional IQ. Melvin's the linguist. If we have to communicate with other dimensionals he's the one who can usually figure out how. It's uncanny his ability to parse foreign languages and code. I started calling him Cypher a couple years back. When he asked why I told him about the comic book character. This in mind he petition Prof to dismiss me from the group as an illiterate. His brother Miles is less hostile but more belligerent. Real sensitive, that guy. He's a geologist. Then there's Tracy, Prof's niece and the newest member of the group. She's studying electronics. Like everything else here she's a whiz at what she does. Without her assistance on that dimension where there was no land mass where we stood and the entire universe was liquid we'd have drowned. She jump-started the drezcube and flashed each one of us out in seconds. We took a two month break from our travels after that. Supposedly Miles developed a temporary hydrophobia but that may just have been Melvin having one of his patented douche laughs. And then there's me, the last and least piece of the puzzle. I provide the muscle though I also operate as the resident shrink. You see, I minored in psych for a year and a half. Plus, with my philosophy training I'm the perspective guy. I'm supposed to keep everyone's head clear & straight. Mainly I'm just the muscle.

The drezcube is dusty. That always worries me but Prof and Samantha assure me it doesn't matter. I've yet to be convinced. They explain carefully and thankflly non-condescendingly that the mechanics of the cube don't exist in this reality. Inside the machine is a quantum connector to the actual cube which exists in a subspace adjoining our dimension to the greater flood of fluid dimensions. I politely point out that, though I'm no expert, nothing they say makes any sense or even coheres to quantum physics as we know it. That's because our investigations have yet to be published, they respond. We have this conversation at least every other month and I'm never satisfied. I'll admit my skepticism crosses wire with my experiences as a dimension-hopper but I'm not ready to concede. In my prouder moments I like to believe that I'm part of the crew specifically for my arguments. Keeping everyone on their toes. Dispelling complacency at every turn like a modern day Voltaire or Nietzsche. But then I notice that they never really seem to care what I have to say. No scientist I've ever dealt with, either in my studies or in conversation, has ever been as casual about ignoring established theory as these two. No doubt they have hard-drives filled to the brim with calculations and notations. I'm not conversant in their language so they're not about to let me in on their secret knowledge in any detail but I'd really just like to know how they ever managed to link this apparently easily replaceable box of cheap, haphazard wiring and Tracy's off-the-cuff modifications and repairs to an analogue, the real deal really, that happens to exist outside our physical frame of reference. Accident. Miracle. These are the words they throw around. I'm not convinced.

Then again, when they are satisfied enough to publish (and kudos to them for gathering as much evidence as possible before that day), will the scientific community be as confused as I am or will it fit just right? Will the math work out perfectly? If the law of parsimony was satisfied would I be convinced? Or are my doubts too thoroughly internalized? I've just got too many questions right now. I hate the feeling of being intellectually dwarfed by everyone around me. Sometimes everything's just too big for me. Yet I always come back for more.

Tracy's got the cube buzzing its queasy buzz. No one's talking. I stand by Samantha who's considering the wavering fluorescent light. I don't ask her what she's thinking about. None of the others besides Samantha seem to care much but one of these days we're not going to return. We might not even land. Some kind of gravity well always brings us to a rest on a solid surface before we materialize on the strange land before us. When we're returning we take the forward change in time and our momentum into account and can plot a fairly precise return trip. Apparently we cut a path one way and the membrane wants us to use that path on the way back rather than cutting a new one. So much can go wrong. The liquidverse was one example but me and Samantha spent an entire night listing to each other every other horrorverse we could conceive. It was soothing to put it out there. Besides which, for some reason, I don't know if I'd refer to it as a gambler's fallacy but we'd gotten to thinking that naming these nightmares would prevent them from occurring. What are the chances, after all, that we'd land on a world where our every skin cell develops a consciousness of its own and decides to abandon us when we know that that was no more than a ghastly bout of body horror we made up one sleepless night. Or how about Samantha's nightmare from when she was a kid, that clouds would condense to brick-hard solids and fall on her. It was ridiculous to think that within the scope of a few hundred trips to alternative realities we'd encounter something she dreamt up because she didn't understand her dad's explanation of rain. Statistics discounted it. Reality rejected it. But then there was the time we actually landed on an Earth-analogue where the Nazis won WWII. If that hackneyed scenario could emerge in the distant fogs what else might await?

-Everyone ready? asked Tracy
-Ready or Not! replied Professor Pinter
-Close your eyes everyone...
*FLASH*

TO BE CONTINUED...