THE CUBE

by Alex Gore

  Behind his closed lids he imagined a white mare, stepping slowly in the fields towards the horizon, raising its exquisite slender knees. Regal force was flowing from every fiber of its sculptured body.

  The white mare was alone in the field. Suddenly it turned back its head, moved its ears and snorted, having smelled the approaching storm. In the distance a whole herd of horses were galloping in terror towards it.

  The bodies of the horses were as numerous as the blades of grass in the prairie. They were all in different colors, but there was not even one white among them. They approached the white mare and stopped breathless. It raised itself on its hind legs, whined victoriously and smelled each one’s snout and mane. Then it turned, neighed with a war cry and dashed towards the bright and cloudless horizon, galloping faster than ever. The rest of the horses followed it in a group, leaving the storm behind to breathe the dust, raised by their wild unshod hoofs…

  Norman woke up startled, he saw the same dream, that the doctor had put into his head, over and over again. He liked it, because it always managed to relax him, to overcome his fears and worries…

  He got up and went to the bathroom, where he splashed water on his face and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He was getting old. He needed to eat better and start exercising again… And call his family, they were probably starting to worry.

  Suddenly he saw a silhouette, standing right behind his back. He pulled himself abruptly from the sink and looked back.

  There was nobody!

  He was probably hallucinating… Maybe he was too tired and overexcited of what was going on.

  No, the man behind him was real. And his face was exactly like his own in the mirror. Only his glance seemed strange. Scary, glassy, with red pupils and goggled eyes.

  Norman took his jacket from the chair, put it on and left the room. He needed to speak urgently to the scientists and find out what was going on.

  Control room, Day 5, 6:55 p.m. Hans lifted abruptly his hands from the computer, pushed his chair back with force and cried: “Ready!”

  After that he rapidly altered the energy of his movements, slumped slowly in the chair, leaned back, locking his hands behind the back of his head and said self-complacently:

  “I know what happened to the ship.” His voice sounded perfectly calm, as if he were announcing that he passed by the 24-hour kiosk and bought alcohol free beer.

  There was not a trace of his feverish anxiousness from minutes ago. He crossed his legs like a diligent student, who had delivered early his term test to the teacher and was now going to cast arrogant glances at the rest of the class.

  “Hans, you really are a genius, who knows everything about everyone”, Alan said, stressing viciously on the last word.

  “I definitely discovered what went on with the submarine and how it appeared amidst nothingness.”

  “We are listening to you”. Norman was just entering the room, then he released the top button of his jacket and sat comfortably on a chair.

  Hans stood in front of them, as if giving a lecture, took a marker and started drawing on the board.

  “Look, the ship was constructed in 2020, wasn’t it?” “Hopefully, in 2019”, Sergey corrected timidly.

  “Let’s assume it was made in 2020. The ship was not designed for missile attacks against the USA, since it is not your ordinary submarine, but has a different mission. The core is a hypertemporal engine that bends the space-time continuum, creating an artificial small black hole, through which the submarine sneaked like through a needle’s eye in another universe. That’s it, yes?” Hans winked at Sergey.

  Everybody was listening to him intently, even Alan did not argue.

  “What have you got to say about this, Ivanov?” Norman turned to both Russians, who were sitting aside from the group. He had talked to them privately and had received their secret revealing information. Of course, he had sent an email to Washington on the safe line right away. His report was most probably already in the Oval office.

  Sergey sighed, looked at Ivanov, then said:

  “Colleagues, I must inform you about the real mission of that ship. Or rather the task we suppose it would be assigned when it is built after two years.”

  “I knew there was something fishy and that they hide it from us.” – Alan slumped deeper in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest and prepared to hear the whole story and the truth. At last, he told himself.

  “There is a top-secret team, that has worked at the Russian Centre for Nuclear Physics for ten years, dealing mostly with temporal chains and achieving singularity in the conditions of the earth surface. The other vein of research is directed towards studying the behavior of biological systems in the conditions of extreme pressures and parameters, close to singularity.”

  “Whoa, Seriozha, please, pal, let’s talk in plain good English.” Michael was absolutely lost about the babbling of the Russian.

  “Simply put, our team is on the verge of crucial discovery, that will very soon alter the ideas of mankind about space travel. I mean, even to the most distant stars in galaxies at the end of the visible Universe. And we will be able to conquer not only space, but time as well. The team, led by Professor Andrey Michailovich, in which I myself am honored to take part, found a way to pass living organisms through time and space, artificially creating miniature black holes. The passage of matter and, correspondingly, information, was successfully executed on multiple occasions.”

  “Can I ask, how does this happen?” Alan just could not believe it.

  “I cannot tell you all the details about the project itself, but I’ll just explain that upon generating a great quantity of energy, focused on minimum space like a cone in one point, a tunnel is created, through which we managed to pass multicellular organisms three years ago. Then, a year ago, we successfully used vertebrates, and I suppose, a chimpanzee next month would have given us the final assurance that we move in the right direction.”

  “Wait, you mean you haven’t yet created this method of travelling through time?” Michael interrupted him.

  “Yes, actually the Eye of the ship, or as we used to call it, the Core, is not completed yet, but as you could see yourselves on board of the submarine, we have obviously managed…”

  “And you have not only completed it, but it worked.”

  “Successfully, that’s right!” Sergey was obviously very proud of their discovery which formally had not happened yet.

  “I would not choose exactly the word ‘successfully’. It was hardly that for the seamen on board.” Marcela did not particularly share the enthusiasm of the young scientist.

  “One way or another, the ship had been… or rather will be completed successfully and has realized the trans-temporal dislocation.”

  “Who knows where you might have sent it and what it has brought back with itself.” Alan also found it hard to regard a dead ship in the middle of the desert as ‘success’.

  “I have no idea where they sent it in two years’ time and where it was, but I can tell you for sure, that this is the engine that we work on at the moment. Otherwise we don’t have a clue what happened to the crew or even who was in that crew.”

  “Let’s hear what Hans has to say, he said he knew…” Norman waved to the German to continue.

  “A very interesting theory, no doubt”, Alan teased again.

  “Thank you for your keenness, Alan”, the Professor nodded ironically. “The last message from the submarine was ‘1986’, right? This is really a year, but if a ship has passed through space and time, must it confine to some standard dimensions? If we write this year in a two-dimensional plain” – Hans took from the table a blank sheet of paper and wrote with big figures ‘1986’ – “What can you see, my dear fellows?”

  “I can see the year in which Lady Gaga was born”, Michael laughed.

  “Wrong answer, dear.” Hans was talking slowly, methodically and confidently, the way he conducted lectures before his students. “You can see the ye
ar the submarine was sent to and from which it took this square, ideally smooth thing…” Hans was as if giving a theatrical performance and was dying to increase the tension in his audience.

  “Come on, Professor, this can’t be”, Marcela couldn’t help interfering. “Do you tell us it was built in 2020 and travelled back to 1986?”

  “2019, hopefully” Sergey murmured barely distinctively under his nose.

  “Not at all.” Hans turned the sheet of paper upside down and all of them goggled their eyes. “I tell you it went much further back in the past. To 9861.”

  Turned upside down the sheet really showed the year 9861.

  “Amazing! How did you guess it, dude?” Michael was sincerely fascinated with the plump scientist.

  “How is it ‘back’?”, Alan wondered. “It says 9861, doesn’t it?”

  “I remembered that when you travel in time, ‘up’ and ‘down’ do not make much sense, don’t you think? And to you, Alan, I will just remind that there was a dash before the year on the screen.” This time the Professor turned directly at Alan. “At least I thought it was a dash. Now I know it stood for ‘minus’. This is a year before Christ, according to the Gregorian Calendar. The ship traveled to 9861 B. C.”

  “Okay, but that does not change things too much, and besides, the question remains: what the fuck did they do so far back in time and what did they find?” Alan was not ready to step back yet.

  “The ship was sent 11 881 years back in time with an experimental mission”, Hans continued. “The purpose was to check the effectiveness of the Core, the exactness of calculations and the influence of singularity on biological units…”

  “That is, to find out if people from the crew will survive” Marcela said, remembering the black notebook.

  “The time is not randomly picked, is it?” Michael asked.

  “That’s right, Mike, can you please stand for me in my attempts for collective encephalization?”

  “About ten thousand years before Christ we date the great flood, the Bible one as some call it. As you can guess, it is a damn good period for any kind of water and sub-water vessels.”

  “Can I ask you how exactly you ‘date’ this flood of yours?”, asked Alan, never ready to surrender.

  “In many ways, one of which is the carbon analysis of different fossils of sea animals on the earth surface. Or, let’s say, according to the erosion of the stones of the Egyptian Sphynx. Research points out that the erosion on the pyramids and on the Sphynx itself cannot be caused by the wind and the climatic conditions in the desert, but it is the result of sea corrosion. Because the entire desert, in which we are at the moment, was under water about 12-15 thousand years ago.” While he was talking, Michael was looking at Alan, who only averted his head and did not continue picking up on everyone.

  “And most of all it is an ideal time period from the point of view of safety. Thank you for being so thorough, Mike”, Hans said. “The ship has successfully made the temporal jump and has accosted on the bottom of the desert, where we are now… only it happened twelve thousand years ago. It found the Cube, which is a product of a civilization, unknown to us, and is manufactured with an unknown technology.”

  “And it is utterly inexplicable how it entered through the much narrower opening in the metal corps of the submarine”, Marcela interjected.

  “Yes, correctly noted”, Hans went on. “I myself cannot give a sufficiently adequate answer to this question. I gave some thought to the problem and reached a couple of scenarios: first, it is possible that there was a larger opening or entrance in the ship that was subsequently welded…”

  “No way, Hans”, Alan interrupted. “We all know this can’t be true and the jacket has been thoroughly checked for welding, imperfections on the surface and repair works.”

  “I agree, I just outline the possible explanations. The second probability is for the Cube to have passed through the corps by way of some teleportation.”

  “Teleportation?” This time it was Marcela who interrupted him. “And how could this be achieved?”

  “Well, I know it sounds like an impossible magic, but actually it’s not so hard to be done… at least in theory. There have been certain experiments in this direction ever since the beginning of the previous century. The principle consists in passing the molecules of one body through the intermolecular spaces of another body and that’s it – done! The only problem is the spatial memory and the restoration of the initial structure. Because if you pass a horse and a man through a metal wall, it is highly likely that you receive a centaur with a horseshoe on his head on the opposite side.”

  “Okay, Professor, we got the basics”, Norman interjected. “Have you got any other suggestions?”

  “The third possible version is that it is alive.”

  “Oh, that’s really too much now!”, Alan exclaimed, raising his arms in the air.

  “What do you mean ‘alive’, Hans?” Marcela asked in a calmer tone.

  “The Cube was purely and simply created in the submarine itself.”

  “I hope, not as a result of a sexual act between a parallelepiped and a sphere, which it took by force.” Michael said, amused as always.

  “It was conceived? As any living creature? As me and you?” This time Marcela raised her voice a little.

  “Since I presume everyone will blame us”, Sergey said, “I am telling you in advance, we don’ know anything about such theories.”

  “I never mentioned anything about birth”, Hans said. “But there is a chance for some species to be able to reproduce in a way that is unknown to us. Don’t forget that the passing through a black hole is accompanied by huge radiation loads. And it does not have to be created inside, it might have been brought in while it was still young, sort of a ‘baby-cube’. It was inserted through the small entrance and then, when it grew up…”

  “But radiation is detrimental for living creatures”, Marcela noted.

  “For us, who are carbon-based – yes, but we cannot be sure about ‘them’, can we?”

  “Actually, the strong ionizing radiation stimulates the growth of arthropods. Giant scorpions have been described in the vicinity of sources of radiation“

  “Add the strong gravitation, that would slow our growth. But what if it acts on them in the opposite way?” Sergey added.

  “So, anyway, sex between cubes is out, is that it?”, Michael said still giggling.

  “Cut the bullshit! Everyone!” Norman shouted. “We leave this matter aside. Professor, go on.”

  “Yes, of course.” He cleared his throat and continued: “The ship has activated the hyper-temporal engine or the Core in order to return back along the temporal line in 2020, from which it started.”

  Hans took a thick black marker pen and started drawing on the board.

  “Time can be represented in different forms according to different scientists. I can draw it for you, if you wish.” Hans started drawing on the board again. “It might be spherical or square, depending on the perspective. In this case it is a part of a flat plain, which, however is crossed perpendicularly by another temporal plain.”

  “Much like drawing a house, isn’t it?” Michael asked. “That’s right. Only the observer is on the canvas, while the

  drawing person is in perspective. It’s turned backwards.” “But how is time a plain?”

  “In fact, it is spherical, but we perceive it as a plain.” “I don’t get it.”

  “Imagine a bug, crawling on the surface of a balloon that is

  much, much bigger than the bug itself. For us, who observe from aside, the balloon is spherical, but for the bug it is an endlessly vast plain… This is the form of our Universe, while time and space, as Einstein proves, are inseparably connected and you cannot alter one without altering the other. Actually, time and space are one whole entity. In one plain everything went out to plan and the ship just took a walk along the line to the past, then came back to 2020. But after the space-time continuum was bended, th
e line of life goes to another plain, in the so called ‘unplanned events’. Accordingly, ‘a cone of bending’ is formed.” Hans turned the board at an angle of 45 degrees. “And, bum! – a new plain of events.”

  The scientist was most of all amused by watching their faces, showing zero realization of the information received.

  “Yes, actually everything is spherical”. The plump scientist was diligently using the marker to create a thick background for the sphere, forming on the board. “Both time and space… no matter how you look at it…”

  .

  .

  “Hans, you are totally crazy, man. Does anybody understand something, because I totally don’t.”, Michael complained.

  “I understand. So far, you’ve been explaining it very well, Hans. I just could not get it how the ship came to us in 2017.” Marcela had almost assimilated the scheme on the white board.

  “The Cube”, Hans said.

  “What about it?”

  “It was by no means made on the bottom of the ocean or in the sands of a desert, at least not a desert on the Earth. Probably it has participated in the bending of the temporal line.”

  “So, the submarine had an accident in the past, in 9861, it was manufactured in the future, in 2020, and is here with us in 2017 only because it took on board an alien cube, made of devil .knows what, with music playing from it.” Marcela summed all this up loudly, without having had such an intention. She was in confusion and reasoned without realizing that her thoughts were audible.

  The Base, watch-tower, Day 5, 10:46 p.m. His eyes were closing.

  Since Greg was found dead and John and Taylor had disappeared, the shifts became too hard. It was impossible for him with only three other men to cover the shifts of seven people.