Turning toward the board, I wheel myself from behind my desk. I draw a circle on the white board, label it "C", a diameter I label "D", and then write an equation infinitely simpler and more immutable than any of Künskens': π = C/D. "Pi is the ratio of circumference—how far a circle is around—to its diameter—how far it is from one edge to the other. It’s an unchanging constant and a fundamental building block in math.”
Nothing. Gazing out the window. I resist looking myself. Looking again at Liz Polaski in her white cotton blouse and grey pencil skirt, red hair in a loose ponytail. I’d say she’s in her mid-40s, almost twice my age, but I guess I have a Mrs. Robinson thing. She has her English class sitting out in the grass, reading to them from some book.
And honestly, I don’t want to look past Liz, past the five-meter high chain link fence that borders the school grounds. Beyond it lies the facility's 4,000 hectares grounds. Its main complex towers above the endless, even horizon like a watchful god. Beneath its grounds, right now, supercharged particles are traveling at near-light speed in a 20-kilometer long, magnetically-guided circular track. Their collision will tell us if Künsken's predictions were 40 years ahead of their time.
Or perhaps the collision has already occurred.
I force myself to not look outside, not look at the clock. If I can focus on the lesson, so can my students. But the knowledge that I should be on the facility's staff, not pretending to be a teacher because it was the only job I could get, gnaws at me.
A pulse of pain throbs behind my eyes.
I shouldn't let myself get so worked up.
I push my chair's wheels in opposite directions to face the class, but I don't turn as much as I want. Maybe I need the chair looked at. I give an extra push to face them.
"Can we do this outside?" someone asks.
"No," I reply, my voice lacking a polite, teacher-like tone. Only ten more minutes until lunch and it's not like I want to be here anymore than they do. Not to mention another twinge behind my eyes. "We're going to do an experiment. If we finish before the bell, you can leave."
Faces turn. Attention is given. Using a large, chalk-tipped compass, I draw a circle on a piece of corkboard on my desk, measure its diameter, write the number on the whiteboard and grab the box of pushpins from a drawer. "Everyone come forward and take a pin. Put them around the chalk circle. I want the whole circle filled in." The students do as instructed, eager to get this over with. They watch me wind a string around the circle of pins, measure and write its length on the whiteboard. "Now, we have diameter and circumference. Back to your desks and tell me what Pi equals."
They rush to their seats. Hands unzip backpacks, calculators clatter on desk tops. Not helping my headache.
I look at the clock: 11:52:44.
Since reality didn't rend and tear a hundred and sixty-four seconds ago, I assume the research team is pouring over the data.
A deeper, more bitter pang of resentment grabs me. Even with just a Bachelors, I understand the Künsken Equations at a more fundamental level than most of the PhDs working there. Having found the bars and coffee shops where they hang out, I've talked to them, flirted with the women. Learned what I could about the experiments. Tried to find a way onto the team, even as a junior assistant. I had to be close. Had to know more. At first, they were curious how someone like me knew so much, but then I'd go and mention Künsken's fifth paper.
Sure, they're all about the first four papers, theorizing how a particle collision could create a stable wormhole by unrolling a micro-dimension to travel along. But they dismiss his fifth paper with as much fervour as I embraced it. They laugh me off, turning back to their drinks. Just like my advisor calling me mad when I proposed doing my thesis on the fifth paper. He refused to accept it and wouldn't write a letter of recommendation. So despite completing my Bachelors at Caltech in under two years, my career is going nowhere.
I can't help it. I look outside—
The headache must be worse than I thought. My eyes can’t focus, like the complex is over the horizon.
"Three point two six," one of my students says.
Another: "Three point three."
"Three point two five nine."
More voice shout, throbbing in my head. I hold up my hand for quiet and ask: "Did everyone get 3.26?"
Heads nod. I grab a calculator. This is the first time I've done this experiment with the pins and string. There's a sampling error since the pins form a multi-sided polygon, not a true circle, but the ratio should come up short.
"Can we go?"
"You promised."
A few keystrokes later and I see the ratio's correct. How could I screw this up? Though something about Künsken's last paper nags at me, I say: "Sure."
They burst from their seats and run for the door, amplifying my headache. A few seconds later, they go streaming across the blacktop. Liz tells them to walk in that unquestionable tone veteran teachers have and returns to her reading.
Rubbing my temples, I tell myself I'm not bitter that I'll never run. Never be part of the group. Always be on the outside. Maybe it's ego, but these headaches give me a sense of kinship with Künsken. By all accounts, he was an overlooked, bookish kid who suffered from headaches growing up in a town of farmers and tradesman. Friendless, we spent a lot of time wandering alone outside of town. Good grades got him into college, odd jobs around town allowed him to afford it.
Once there, he remained bookish and friendless, yet excelled in his studies. Working at a part-time job, he invested his earnings in the stock market, studying its fluctuations, and made a fortune. He received his PhD less than four years after enrolling in a Bachelors program.
But his skills at predicting stocks brought him fame, not his research. He taught sporadically, never remaining at a university for more than a few years before being let go. His four papers were published in obscure journals over a fifteen year career. Described as esoteric or alchemic physics forty years ago, it wasn't until results from CERN showed Künsken had been right all along.
He often returned to Smythers, buying up the land outside town where he'd wandered as a kid and the facility sits now. As a man, he wandered there, pondering his theories. Despite farms surrounding the town, this land had always sat fallow, the few farmers who'd bought it saying nothing would grow there. Small town rumours of the land being cursed amplified when the few people who knew Künsken reported he used to say nature would talk to him out there, whispering its secrets to him.
These rumours cast Künsken as peculiar, but his fifth paper turned people against him. In it, he took his equations further, to an ultimate conclusion. Testing his theories, he warned—and theoretically demonstrated—it would open a Pandora's Box. An unravelling reality beyond human comprehension. Like probing the mind of God, it would bring obliteration, not enlightenment.
Yet reading his fifth paper changed my perceptions of the world. I didn't understand how anyone could fail to grasp the irrefutable conclusion that the fabric of reality was an oversimplified illusion. That our 3-dimensional perceptions had evolved to protect us from reality's true nature. Physics and mathematics rested on a delicate framework that could collapse with the slightest nudge. So many of my classmates just didn't get it, only able to see his graphs in the two dimensions of the page, not the five he'd intended. Judging variables as unknowns needing to be solved, not as true unknown factors to which we three-dimensional beings could never assign values. I debated it online, enduring endless insults and finding none who truly understood the elegance of the equations.
The irony is Künsken didn't lived to see the fifth paper published. He'd killed himself by then, a suicide note explaining it was inevitable someone would test his equations. More than that, his pondering the deepest recesses of reality had created a multi-dimensional space in his mind. It had allowed something in the farthest bowels of the universe to reach out to him. To mark him. If a doorway opened, he feared the indescribable wonders and horrors that would emerge from the
hidden dimensions would seek him out.
At least, he concluded, his headaches had subsided.
That's why I understand why Künsken willed his considerable fortune be used as seed money to build a collider for testing his equations on the property he had purchased. Künsken had been a ridiculed outcast his whole life. He dared the world to prove him wrong. The world itself was the stakes. His hometown was ground zero.
Forty years later, a consortium of scientists and commercial interests accepted the dare. Once home to just eight hundred people, the facility's construction crews brought roads, restaurants and hotels to Smythers. Staff brought their families, which meant schools, which brought a desperate search for teachers. All one needed was a Bachelors degree. It gave me the chance to get closer.
The bell rings, stabbing my head, and a moment later stampeding feet and gleeful voices fill the hallway. Another moment and hundreds of kids bolt outside, breaking into small groups that claim spots of grass.
As I grab the eraser, Liz walks in and hops up on my desk. "You ran the experiment?"
"It says Pi, the great universal constant, is 3.26." Something is wrong with my chair. It takes more than a complete turn to face the board.
"I thought you had a physics degree," she teases.
I motion to the figures on the white board. "Run the numbers yourself."
She grabs my calculator. From how she's sitting, I could have a great view of her legs, but the headache is pounding an uneven rhythm.
Her eyebrows knot at the result. "Well, you did something wrong, speedy." She hops off my desk, squeezes my shoulder to let me know she's kidding, and grabs the compass, intent on repeating the experiment.
I'm barely aware. The pain in my head is uneven, but there's a pattern. Complex, sophisticated. Oscillating in multiple dimensions.
"Does—" The tone of Liz's voice pulls me back. Next to me, she's tense turning the compass. Watching, it's taking the compass longer to complete the circle than it should. Like there's more than 360 degrees to traverse.
A kid's voice outside: "Hey, look!"
I look up. A handful of kids are standing, pointing. Pointing at the horizon.
"Liz," I say, wondering if my eyes really have gone bad. "Outside."
She looks. Sees what I see. Sees what the kids see.
The horizon is curving. "Oh my God."
The agony in my head pulses, filling my mind, pushing beyond it.
A wordless understanding arises.
I haphazardly shove pins around the circumference of the circle Liz has drawn.
"What are you doing?"
It's language. Something so foreign, so immense, is trying to communicate. "What if Pi has changed?"
"What? I—"
Künsken's predicted this: unravelling a micro-dimension could cause another dimension to curl up, possibly changing universal constants—Planck length, speed of light, Pi.
"The collider—" I gasp.
"That was today?"
The circle looks smaller than the one I drew, but it takes almost all of the string to wrap its circumference. After using every iota of willpower to measure the string, I punch the measurements into the calculator and hold it up for Liz to see: Pi is 3.71.
She says something, but I don't hear. Holding Künsken's graphs in my mind, I apply it to this communication and the pain shatters. The message, loosed from the constraints of my three dimensional perception of space-time, expands along infinite dimensions. It would take a life time to explain its intricacies, but it boils down to a basic concept:
We have been noticed and it is coming.
"What does that mean?" she repeats.
Entry to a wormhole comes via a three dimensional space—a sphere. A finite space. "Look out your room's windows," I tell her.
She runs to the door without question. From there, she can see into her classroom and out its windows toward town.
Outside my windows, the horizon continues to curve. Curve upwards. A few teachers stand, pointing. And the children, taking their cue from the adults, remain motionless.
"It's flat," Liz says from the doorway. She's only ten meters away, but she seems so distant.
The speaker at the front of the room crackles. A voice trying to hide its fear says: "Attention, attention. There's been an accident at the collider. We are asking everyone to calmly leave school grounds and walk toward town."
"Get the kids," I tell her. "Run. Get outside its effects." Corners where walls meet the ceiling and floor begin to bow.
Footfalls pound by in the halls.
"What about you?"
I motion to the chair and a logical bit of my brains tells me its wheels' circumferences are increasing with each passing second.
"Someone—someone could carry you."
Liz leans into the hall, but I shout: "There's no time. Get the kids out."
Her face is pained. "I'll send someone back." And she's gone. I begin to turn toward the window, wheels spinning and spinning but I barely rotate. Liz emerges outside, commanding the kids to follow her. Unquestioningly, they and the teachers obey. A moment later everyone disappears around the corner of the building.
The horizon is now bowl-shaped, the collider complex impossibly distant rising from behind it.
This is no delusion borne from madness. It's truth, the ultimate truth I have sought for three years.
With a sense I can't quantify, I detect the approach of something from a direction moments ago I could not fathom, but now seems so obvious. It has been here so close all along, yet infinitely unreachable.
I wait for the universe to reveal whatever wonders or horrors it has concealed.
A RIDE IN THE DREAM MACHINE
Jessica McHugh
Jess kinda does everything when it comes to writing, both in genre and type, and "A Ride in the Dream Machine" illustrates that with its quirky blend of science-fiction, fantasy, and Clive Barker-esque horror. When the world suddenly tilts and we find ourselves tottering into the blackness, we end up reacting much like the protagonist in this story does, with equal parts loathing, fear, and want. Jess, who's published the novels Rabbits in the Garden (Post Mortem Press) and The Sky, The World, among others, handles this idea with sure hands. You can check out her other works at JessicaMcHughBooks.com.
"Freud deduced that the unconscious mind contains what we actively repress: things we are averse to knowing on a conscious level. He believed that we and our unconscious minds are adversaries locked in an endless battle to keep it hidden."
"What's 'it'?" I asked.
"True desire: the truths about our thoughts and natures that we're too afraid to admit," Professor Langely replied. "As Freud said, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious."
When the clock struck eleven, Professor Langely clapped his hands, bowed his head, and said, "Here endeth the lesson."
I was tempted to hang behind to question him further. The concept of unconscious and therefore true desire asserting its presence during dreams confused me. What of the dream I had about being pregnant with Jack Black's baby, or the dreams about a world I'd created and corralled for eons of hours, or---well, there were some dreams I didn't care to think about. But I still did, all the time. I had so many questions I wanted to ask Professor Langely; unfortunately, I had a different inner struggle to satisfy: one that rumbled my empty stomach with increasing urgency.
The students poured from the classroom like a swarm of wasps buzzing with conversation, but while they flitted every which way, I made a beeline for the cafe. I leaned against the counter with my mouth watering until I spotted the unsavory quality of the selection. The turkey sandwiches seemed soggy and limp, and the salad had wilted leaves of sickly brown among dented cherry tomatoes. I opted for a candy bar and cappuccino from the vending machine instead. I flung my backpack over a chair and slumped down at a table to gnaw at my Snickers in peace.
I was almost finished when Forrest Culver plopped down across from me. His face was beaming despite t
he dark bags under his eyes, but his thick glasses magnified the sags, making him resemble a bulgy-eyed fish. I sipped from my cup and ignored him. I knew that I didn't have to acknowledge Forrest for him to explain why he'd chosen my table. He'd always been the loquacious sort, at least when we were younger. Actually, I was somewhat surprised to see him out and about; he'd been taking a lot of online classes that semester and hadn't left his house for months, and he'd been acting strange since a party we'd attended a few years back. I was stranger since then too, but neither of us would admit it.
"Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing here?" he asked.
"Going to an actual class?"
"Soon enough, I won't need any classes," he said, beaming. "I'm going to be rich."
"Am I going to be rich?"
"I hadn't planned on that."
"Then why are you rubbing it in my face?" I replied.
"You know I've been preoccupied lately, right?"
"You've been a shut-in, Forrest."
"With good reason," he said with a barracuda grin. "It's finished, my friend."
"What's finished?"
"You know," he said and leaned in as he whispered, "The machine."
"What machine?"
"I told you about it last year, remember? The Dream Machine?"
"Forrest, I don't even remember what my last class was about," I replied, "let alone something crazy you said last year."
I did remember him mentioning the project, but the last thing I wanted to do was get sucked in by it again. I tossed my Snickers wrapper away and gave him a goodbye wave.
"Dreams, wasn't it?" he chirped, stopping me in my tracks. "And the unconscious? That's what your class was about, right?"
"How did you know?"
"I was outside the door, waiting for you."
"I didn't see you."
"I was afraid," he stammered. "I didn't know how to approach you about this."
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