by J Boyd Long
“Well, sometimes when I’m in here creating, ruling, and destroying, I start experimenting because I get bored. I might start off adding a few different spices to those eggs, for instance. After I do that for a few months, I might decide to add some peppers, or tomatoes. That might evolve into adding fruits, or baked goods, or who knows what. Ten years down the road, I’m in here shaving tree bark into my eggs, and stuffing it with Spanish moss, because I don’t have anyone here to tell me that that’s ridiculous, you see? I’m creating, and ruling, and destroying the eggs, and I’ve gone crazy with it, because I don’t have anyone to keep me in check. So, don’t trust anyone that tells you they only have one god, because their choice for moral leadership clearly demonstrates their lack of objectivity.”
“Wow,” Quentin breathed. “That was absolutely incredible.” For a moment, he had managed to get wrapped up in Bob’s monologue and forget all about the DimGate, Gerrard Zimmerman, and the mess they were in. It all came rushing back at him, and he forced himself to quash it and share in Tocho’s joy, at least until they ate some breakfast.
“I told you,” Tocho laughed, clapping his hands. “Don’t you just love this guy?”
“You make an impressive argument,” Eissa agreed. “As an atheist, I really don’t have a dog in the deity fight, but I like what you’ve got going on there.”
“We’re also glad that you’re the one cooking the eggs,” Tocho called to Eissa. “No pine bark in mine, please.”
“Chow time,” Bob said. “Come grab a plate. We’ll eat out on the porch, if you’re up for it. It’s a beautiful morning. Don’t forget your coffee, and there’s more on the stove if you need it.”
They settled into a comfortable silence on the porch, enjoying the food and the atmosphere. There were occasional grunts and positive assessments of the quality of the food, but little more was said until they were finished eating. Quentin felt his blood sugar stabilize as he ate, and sighed in relief. He tended to crash when he was too hungry, but he rarely recognized it until he ate something and his system returned to normal. Walking here on an empty stomach had clearly pushed him pretty close to the edge.
When they were done, Bob set their plates on the floor of the porch and let out an ear-shattering whistle. “Sorry,” he said, grinning at the cringes of his three guests. “I should have warned you. Hazards of living alone, as previously discussed.” He winked at Eissa.
A moment later, there was a rustling sound as something raced through the woods towards the house. A small dog burst into sight, bounded up to the porch and immediately began licking the plates with gusto.
“That’s Bartholomew Wildered,” Bob said, introducing the dog. “I just call him Bewildered, for short. He’s not very bright, but he has a lot of enthusiasm for life, and that’s an admirable quality in a companion.”
He sat back down in the rocking chair, and looked over at Tocho.
“So, what brings you out to see me?” he asked.
Chapter 7
Quentin smiled as he watched Bewildered clean up the breakfast dishes. The normalcy of the moment struck him as almost absurd, after the crazy events of the last few days. The tranquil atmosphere and much-needed meal soothed his tattered nerves. The stress of their predicament was ever-present, but the sense of urgency had abated. He shifted his chair so that he could see the others.
Tocho took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He regarded his feet for a moment before speaking.
“These two came through a DimGate.”
Bob’s bushy eyebrows shot up, and he glanced at Quentin sharply. “Are they-”
“They didn’t know what the gate was, or that they were leaving their dimension,” Tocho said quickly. “They found the DimGate quite by accident, and they came through it. They’re lost and confused, and I’m pretty confident they’re not DimCorp.”
“Oh, my,” Bob said. “Well. That’s a pickle.”
Quentin looked from Bob to Tocho, and back to Bob. They knew about the DimGates, and they knew about DimCorp, but who were they? They weren’t corporate types, that much was clear, but it was dangerous to ask pointed questions of strangers without feeling them out first.
“Well, it was more complicated than that,” he said. “Which part is the pickle?”
“To be sure,” Bob said. “Things are never as simple as we present them, and that’s understood. The pickle is that you came through a DimGate. The good news, or what I hope is the good news, is that you aren’t DimCorp people. However, that begs the question of how you accessed a DimGate, and how you ended up here. Let’s start with how you found a DimGate.”
Quentin glanced at Eissa for help, but she was watching Bewildered. There was no way to know who these guys really were, or what their position was in all of this. It was difficult to know how honest to be with them. If they were bad guys, thought he didn’t get the feeling they were, then lying to them wouldn’t really gain him any ground, as he was already at their mercy. If they were good guys, then they would need all the information he had to help them get back home. He decided to tell them everything.
“I’m an IT tech at a company called IBZ Energy. I fix computer problems, keep the network going, that kind of stuff. A few days ago, I saw an email from the chief of security to the COO, and it explained how they killed some people who were protesting a pipeline being built on their land.”
“Wait,” Bob said. “You work for IBZ Energy?”
Quentin nodded. Bob and Tocho shared a quick glance, and Quentin tensed as he recognized the worry on their faces.
“What was that?” Quentin asked. “What’s wrong?”
Bob shook his head. “We’ll come back to it. I guess we know which dimension you came from, anyway. Please, go on. I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”
Quentin swallowed the lump in his throat and continued. “Anyway, Eissa and I decided that we couldn’t let that happen without some kind of consequence, so we snuck into the office the other night to see what else we could find out about this kind of stuff. Our plan was to get all the info we could and turn it over to the FBI. We ended up in a room with this DimGate thing, and I turned it on, thinking it was a computer interface of some kind, but it turned out to be this portal, and then the security guard was trying to kill us, so we had to come through it. As soon as we crossed over, the door disappeared, and here we are.”
Silence settled over the porch as Quentin leaned back in his chair. He took another swallow of his coffee and glanced at Bob, trying to gauge his reaction. Bob’s face was unreadable. His forehead was wrinkled, and his eyes were squinted as he stared across the yard. Quentin looked the other way at Eissa, who gave him a small shrug.
“Well,” Bob said. He cleared his throat. “Well, I guess DimCorp has been busy, if the gates are working again already.”
Quentin couldn’t hold back any longer. “What is this DimCorp? The security guy in the email, Carl Holt, his signature said DimCorp. There was all kinds of DimCorp stuff on Zimmerman’s computer, but nothing at all on the regular IBZ network, or even the internet.”
“You stumbled on to some bigtime doings,” Bob said. “I guess you’ve probably got more questions than we do, huh?” He chuckled.
“Yes sir, I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Well, let’s try to answer some of them,” Bob said. “I guess we could start by saying you actually do work for DimCorp, after all. IBZ is a subsidiary of DimCorp.”
Quentin shook his head. How could that be? If a company was big enough to own IBZ Energy, there would be something about it on the internet. You couldn’t keep something like that a secret, especially inside the company.
“I don’t think that could be right. Until this week, I never heard of DimCorp, and I’ve worked at IBZ for years.”
“I understand your confusion,” Bob said with a smile. “DimCorp owns a lot of businesses in a lot of dimensions, they just don’t use the DimCorp name. It’s complicated.”
“Okay, let’s set that aside
for a minute,” Quentin said. “Can you explain this dimension thing? I guess I’m sort of coming to terms with the fact that there’s more than one dimension, but what are they, and do you know how we can get back to the ours?”
“Well, that’s a big question,” Bob said. He stroked his beard absently. “There are a lot of dimensions, and they’re all different. Are you a history buff?”
Quentin nodded, surprised by the question. “Sure, I like history.”
“That’s good, it’ll make this easier. Let’s pick a big moment in history, a major turning point. Think of a discovery, or an event of some kind. What’s something that comes to mind?”
Quentin thought for a moment. “Well, I guess Columbus discovering the Americas was a pretty big deal.”
“Indeed,” Bob said. “Excellent example. So, in your dimension, and others that share a timeline up to that point, Columbus landed on the beach, partied with the locals, traded some goods, and all that, right? Then he went back to Spain, shared the news of his discovery, and the whole colonization process started. Sound about right?”
Quentin nodded.
“Now then. In this dimension, and all the ones that have split off it, Columbus got killed when he arrived. The natives killed his crew, burned his ships, and started forming alliances with other tribes to protect themselves from the Europeans. So, you see, when a major turning point in history occurs, a new dimension is formed. One dimension has one outcome, and the other dimension has the other outcome. Then they both move forward to the next turning point in their perspective timelines.”
Quentin sat still, stunned to silence. The very concept opened up so many possibilities in his mind, so many ideas and questions zipping around, that he couldn’t focus on anything for more than a second before moving on to another thought. He tried to list some other major events in history; the death of Alexander the Great, the fall of Rome, World War II, the discovery of penicillin, invention of the steam engine…
“How many dimensions are there?” he asked at last. “I’m just… that’s a lot to take in.”
Tocho laughed. “Understatement of the year, my friend. I know exactly what’s happening in your head right now. I remember when he explained it to me, too. I couldn’t form a complete sentence for a week.”
“I don’t think anyone knows how many dimensions there are,” Bob said. “It’s a lot.”
“And the DimGate takes you from one dimension to another?”
The smile faded from Bob’s face. He rummaged in his pocket and came out with a pocket knife and a small piece of wood, which he began whittling on as he spoke. “Well, that’s where DimCorp comes into the picture. They invented the DimGates, and they’re the only ones who have the technology to travel between dimensions, as far as I know.”
“What do they do with them?”
“They get rich, of course. They enslave a group of people in some under-developed dimension, have them work a copper or gold mine, or a logging operation, or something. Then they take that stuff through a DimGate to a developed dimension like yours and sell it for a nice profit.” Bob blew the shavings from his piece of wood and examined it closely.
Quentin shifted in his chair. The contented feeling from breakfast was gone, replaced by curiosity tinged with unease. The idea of an endless stream of dimensions, each playing out an alternate history, was a fascinating idea, but it was overshadowed by the knowledge that something unscrupulous was taking place on a major scale.
“So, in our dimension, IBZ Energy is an oil conglomerate. How do they fit into all this? Why do they have a DimGate in the corporate headquarters?”
“DimCorp probably owns several big corporations in your dimension. Not all of their business comes from inter-dimensional trade, as they like to call it. They own banks, real estate companies, all kinds of stuff. IBZ is a big one, though. They get oil from other dimensions and refine it into all kinds of stuff. Some of it stays there, and some of it goes to other dimensions. They probably have their own DimGate so the top brass can have meetings and so on. They’re a big part of DimCorp.”
Eissa raised her hand. “How are you two involved in all of this? How do you know so much about it if you’re not part of it?”
Quentin flinched at the blunt question. Eissa’s lack of tact embarrassed him on a regular basis, but Bob acted like he didn’t notice.
“Tocho and I spent a lot of years trying to shut DimCorp down. We were a two-man army, of sorts.”
Eissa laughed. “Really? You two don’t seem like the crusader type.”
“Well, it was more of a vengeance mission for me in the beginning,” Bob said. “DimCorp has done far worse things than killing a few protesters, trust me. At the top of DimCorp are the people who think that there is nothing more important than money and power, and they don’t care what, or who, they destroy in their pursuit of more and more of it.”
“Yeah, we know the type,” Quentin said with a scowl. “Zimmerman, the COO of IBZ, comes to mind.”
Tocho nodded. “Yep, he would be one of them. Tell them how you found out about the DimGates, Bob.”
Bob brushed some wood shavings out of his beard, and cleared his throat. “Back when I was a kid, maybe twenty years old, I used to go hiking out in the sticks. I’d take as much food as I could carry, and stay out there a week, sometimes two. One day, I walked up on this logging operation. I hated it, because they were cutting down this beautiful virgin forest, and just leaving one hell of a mess. I was young and full of righteous anger and ideology back then, so I decided to spy on them for a few hours, figure out how I could sabotage the operation, and make them shut it down and go away.”
He paused for a sip of coffee, and scratched the dog before continuing.
“I was thinking I would cut the fuel lines on some of the equipment, put dirt in the crankcases, you know, eco-warrior kind of stuff. I spent a whole day watching them, sneaking around the perimeter, scoping it out. After a while, I got a sense of what was happening. There was a crew of guys cutting down the trees, another crew of guys stripping the branches off, and a third crew hauling the trees up to this building in the middle. It wasn’t a big building; it looked like any Quonset hut kind of workshop. They would chain a bundle of stripped trees to the back of this big tractor, and it would drag them into that building. A little bit later, it would drive back out, sans trees. What I finally realized is that there wasn’t enough room inside for all the trees he was hauling in there.”
“Oh, so there was a DimGate in there,” Eissa said. “They were just hauling the trees right into another dimension?”
“That’s exactly what they were doing,” Bob said. “I snuck across to get a look inside there. That tractor drove in, dragging a bunch of trees chained together, and just drove right through the back wall where this tarp was, one of those that’s just a bunch of canvas strips hanging from the top of the doorway. There was a massive lumber mill on the other side, with trees piled up a hundred feet high in every direction.”
“I really didn’t have any way to comprehend what I was looking at, so I didn’t handle it very well, of course. I turned back and ran across the clearing to the woods. It took me a few months to get my head straightened out after that, and when I did, I decided that those people were stealing from us. I didn’t know anything about dimensions then, all I knew was there was a group of people cutting down a forest, and hauling it through a wall into someplace else, and that wasn’t right.”
“So, what happened?” asked Eissa. “Did you go back and blow it up?”
“I went back, yes,” Bob said. “It was about six months later by the time I talked myself into it, and made a plan. I finally managed to find my way back there, and it was all gone. No building, no tractors, no people, just a massive clearing where there used to be a forest, and all the wreckage that gets left behind after something like that happens. There were limbs and branches and such everywhere, and the ground was all torn up.”
“You missed them,” Quentin s
aid.
“Yep, and it’s probably for the best,” Bob said. “Like I said, I was young and idealistic and inexperienced. I probably wouldn’t have done much other than get myself killed. It did set my life in a particular direction though, and I was ready the next time I found a door. It’s a really long story, and I won’t go through it all since it took twenty years for it all to happen, but essentially, I made it my mission to close the DimGates and stop the pillaging of other dimensions. Tocho here was my partner in crime, so to speak.”
“Are you from same dimension, then?” Eissa asked Tocho.
“No, I’m from a different dimension,” he said. “It’s quite a bit different than yours and this one. It split a long time ago. My world was being openly ransacked by the Odims, which is what we called them. Other Dimensioners, just shortened. My people were slaves, forced to work in mines, mostly tin and copper in the place I lived, but pretty much everything that was a mineable resource was being pulled out of the ground around the world.”