“You don’t know what it is like.”
“Nothing happens. You’re frozen in time.”
“And co-existing in all time—” he blurted. “I’ve seen it all Peel. I know what’s coming.”
The Major felt like a cold bucket of water had just been thrown over him. He remembered again the transition, and how that had freaked him out. Anderson might have been a cold-hearted assassin, but he was still human. He felt the same emotions any human did. Could Peel then be inhumane to this man? He knew the answer to that one immediately.
“Very well, get down on the ground.”
Anderson did what he was told, awkwardly because of the zip lock tie still around his hands. Before, in the hanger and in the aircraft he had been confident and powerful, now he was broken and defeated. Peel reminded himself not to get ‘thrown’.
“Face to floor. Don’t move a centimeter. If you do I’ll shoot you.”
“Bullets don’t travel through the air, remember?”
“Who said they need to travel through air to reach you?”
Anderson said nothing, understanding, then lay down as instructed. It was clear the man was terrified. He was shaking. “Two of us are going to die before we get out of here,” the assassin said without inflection or tone.
“Who?” Peel asked regretting his question as soon as it was asked, knowing this could be a scam by Anderson to unsettle them all, to gain an advantage.
“You, Peel, and Nicola. I’ve seen it.”
The Major growled. “But some of us get through right? There is a way out.”
Anderson snorted. “For me, yes.”
“What are you doing?” Nicola demanded marching to Peel’s side. She kept one eye on Reznikova who was busy again with the next set of equations, and one eye on Anderson. She was trusting neither. “He’s safer suspended, Harrison. You know that.”
Mentally Peel counted to five before answering, because he too felt ready to snap and he was the last one of them who could afford to. Someone had to remain level-headed and unemotional in this situation. “I don’t think it is safe for him to be suspended.” He instructed Anderson to describe what it was like, which he did.
“It’s bullshit you know, what he’s saying.”
“Maybe.”
Nicola pressed the Glock into Peel’s hands, relinquishing the weapon. “You trust too much.”
“You’re right.” He took the Glock, pointed it at Anderson mostly for Nicola’s comfort. “I don’t trust anyone, Nicola, except you. I just don’t want to become…” he gestured to the cell that imprisoned them, “…someone who condones all this. There are enough fools in the world doing that already.”
His girlfriend stared at him for a moment, blankly, and he wondered how long she would put up with their differences. His attitude obviously scared her, he could see that now. Like all of them, she too felt the pressure, and understood as well as anyone the consequences of becoming stuck. All she was expressing was what she thought was best. “I respect that Harrison. I really do, but—”
“But when you are confronted with the horrible reality, it’s difficult to maintain your convictions?”
She smiled, happy perhaps that Peel understood her at such a deep level. “Exactly!” She touched him on the arm, gently and affectionately, now that she felt connected to him again. “I’m going to make sure Reznikova does her job. You okay with him?”
He nodded.
“You sure you don’t want to throw him?”
“I’m sure.”
Time passed. Reznikova became increasingly more frustrated with each passing attempt at a solution, and Peel began to fear that the puzzle of the dodecahedron was beyond her.
He heard a shuffle, turned his attention again to Anderson who was shifting his body, perhaps to find a more comfortable position, or perhaps to loosen his bonds. Peel checked that the man’s hands remained secured.
“I don’t understand why you are working for the Russians?”
He snorted. “They pay better.”
“It has to be more than that. Smuggling weapons of mass destruction into a city to kill millions of people, stealing alien artifacts that are potentially just as dangerous, you don’t do that for no reason?”
“Fuck off Peel.”
“You know what I know? Most fanatics had something happen to them, something bad. Being extreme is the only way they can face the demons inside.”
“Why do you care?”
The Major shrugged. “I like to understand people. It puts motive into context, and then I’m better able to predict them.”
“You’ll never understand me.”
Peel laughed. “That statement in itself tells me you’ve still got secrets to hide, and you are driven by ideology, or fear, or both. You’re military trained, obviously, and I’m guessing by your skills and your attention to detail, you’ve been trained in the US Armed Forces. So why turn against them?”
Anderson reddened, his body quivered with fear remembered from a vivid experience in his past. “You ever been left to die—no not die, but to be ‘absorbed’ by the monsters we’re currently fighting in Antarctica?”
This was news to Peel, that Anderson might know a whole lot more than Peel had initially suspected. “You were in Elder City?”
“That surprises you, doesn’t it? Yes, I saw one of those shoggoths, if you’ve heard of them. We called for back-up, but the chain of command refused to rescue us. Said they were talking to dead men walking.”
“What’s a shoggoth?”
Anderson snorted and chuckled. “You have no idea.” He used both of his bound hands to wipe spit from his lips. “I feel sorry for you Peel. No, in fact I envy you. When you finally meet a shoggoth in your future, and if you live through the encounter, I tell you, you too will end up scared shitless all the time like me.”
Peel shook his head. “Then you’re lying Anderson, or you lied before, when you said Nicola and I won’t get through this.”
“I’m not lying. You still don’t get it; there is a shoggoth and a man in here with us. I’ve seen it. We’ve both cohabitating the same timeline, even though we’ve entered at different points in time. They came in earlier, but we’ll meet them, in the end. Just before we find the way out.”
Peel shuddered. “As I said, what’s a shoggoth?”
“Creatures from the higher dimensions you and I can’t perceive. You really don’t want to know any more than that.”
“Da!” Reznikova cried from another floor/wall. Peel turned to her, seeing the Russian agent stand, pleased with accomplishment. “I’ve solved the next equation— Well, I have two solutions, one more obvious than the other.”
“Wait!” Peel called out, remembering what Anderson had said about co-existing timelines. If he were correct it would explain the bullets and splashed blood suspended in the tetrahedron earlier. He wanted to be ready, before they moved on again. “We don’t know what’s in the next cell.”
Reznikova smiled slyly. “Of course we do, an icosahedron, and the last cell.”
“No, I mean we don’t know what else will be in there with us.” He gestured to Anderson, ready to say there was more they needed to hear, when the Russian agent beat him.
“It’s this answer, or this one,” she said pointing to two solutions on the floor. “I’m going with this one.”
She pressed it before Peel or Nicola could move fast enough to stop her.
The room didn’t shift, twist and transform. Instead Reznikova froze in stasis like Anderson before her. But the effects didn’t last long. Within seconds, she disintegrated into individual atoms, then presumably into protons, neutrons and electrons, and then to dissipate to even small subatomic particles until she was nothing. Or at least that’s what Peel thought he saw happen.
“She was accelerated into the dark energy death of the universe,” offered Anderson, with insight that frightened Peel because he really did now believe the man had seen everything this puzzle had to offer at every st
age of its existence.
“What do we do?” Nicola asked, paler and more distraught than he had ever seen her in her life. “We’ve lost our mathematician?”
Before Peel had a chance to change his mind, he said, “Push the other button.”
Nicola did, and the dodecahedron transformed, gaining eight additional floors.
#
Stage Four, Dodecahedron, July 1995
Eight sides became twelve, and a new puzzle in the Pentapod’s shoggoth trap enclosed the soldier and the monster. Coaldale felt queasy with the change and not just from the shifting gravity, knowing that he was both one step closer to freedom from this hell and one step closer to becoming the useless commodity in the riding shotgun routine he was playing with the shoggoth. That could only mean one outcome, and he had no desire to die like Jansen had. If it came to that he would shoot himself, but until then he would continue to seek an escape route. There had to be a way out, if only he could find it.
The next cell was different only in that it held a small object, glowing with a faint blue reminiscent of the ocean seen on tropical beach. It hung suspended in the cell’s center, and it was another dodecahedron approximately the size of a football.
“Do you see anything unusual in this room?”
Coaldale regretted immediately staring into the room’s center. The shoggoth didn’t hesitate as it reached out fifteen feet with a long, tentacle arm grown in the moment to snatch down the artifact, and hold onto it.
“Is that what you came here for?” Coaldale asked, one bit curious and nine bits terrified. The shoggoth was much closer to its goal now.
“Yes.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s a powerful solvent, used to break down multi-dimensional physical structures.”
“Like the walls of the weaponized puzzle?”
The shoggoth smiled with eight mouths and watched him with nineteen different structures of eyes. Its porridge-like consistency undulated like a crawling leach, stretching and contracting as it moved, as if it were trying to get comfortable. “Yes, it could, but you don’t want to dissolve these walls. We would accelerate into the future and the dark energy death of the universe. Our final moments would be no different than if we failed to solve the next equation.”
“Then what do you need it for?”
“That…” the alien creature responded with an inflection in its tone as if it was enjoying itself, but Coaldale doubted it had any emotions that could equate to human feelings, “…remains to be seen. Now get to work, two more rooms to solve.”
“Two?”
“Although I can’t perceive them, existing as I do in the higher dimensions, this puzzle is patterned on the five perfect solids of three dimensional space.”
“Platonic solids?” Coaldale asked, remembering geometric lessons in mathematics at high school, and later from studying engineering at college. On each of the five solids the faces were congruent. Each solid were regular polygons with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. There were mathematical formulas that proved only five perfect solids could exist in this universe. The shoggoth was correct, they had traveled through four, only one more awaited.
“It always interested me,” continued the shoggoth in its guttural chorus, “the peculiarities of creatures that live in the four dimensional space-time structured universe. As I said before, you can only tie knots that hold in three dimensions. Your species exist in the only dimensional combination where objects and creatures can be tied down.”
Frustrated Coaldale blurted, “What does this have to do with anything?”
“You cannot be free in your dimensional state, and you don’t even know it, can never perceive how you are bound and constrained.”
“Yet you can’t perceive this place properly, can you? That’s why the Pentapods built these traps, knowing how you are limited in your dimension confines as much as we are.”
More eyes popped from its ever shifting, pulsating shape. “Like I said, you have no idea. Now get to work.”
Coaldale turned to the equations. It took him several hours to solve, the mathematics proving far more complicated than the last cell. Eventually he had two answers, both equally valid but one obviously incorrect. He explained his findings to the shoggoth.
“That one,” it said pointing with a tentacle that pulsated like it contained thick, chunky blood flowing through veins just beneath its lump texture.”
“Why that one?”
“Because I would have said the other equation is the obvious answer, but I’m a shoggoth, and these weaponized puzzles are designed not to be obvious to me.”
Coaldale pressed on the solution as the monster suggested, and the final cell materialized around them.
#
Stage Five, Icosahedron, October 2012
Nicola screamed, cowered in a corner. Anderson gagged, but brought nothing up. Peel shuddered, trembled as he raised his weapon at the monstrosity in the center point of the twenty-sided cell. He was ready to shoot, again and again until he was spent, but soon understood that the fusion of man and monster which had chilled them all was not moving, frozen in time as Anderson had been.
“It’s okay,” he called to Nicola, grabbed her close to comfort her. She trembled in his equally shaky arms. “It’s frozen. It’s in stasis.”
“It’s horrific.”
“Don’t throw me in there,” Anderson exclaimed, sweat pouring off him.
Certain now that the alien horror was no immediate threat, Peel observed it in greater detail. It resembled a human-sized omelet riddled with corruption, with a multitude of eyes, mouths, tongues and tentacles protruding like cancerous tumors at random locations from the central mass. Some eyes were as large as a soccer ball and their inky blackness seem to stare back at Peel with an unnatural knowing, like it could still see him even though it was held in stasis. The mouths varied from basic approximations of human equivalents to multi-jawed contraptions with teeth like a power saw or a tunnel boring drill head. Most telling perhaps was the gigantic maw locked around the head of a US Ranger in snow camouflage. When time started again for these two, the soldier was a dead man.
“What is that thing?” Nicola exclaimed.
“It’s a shoggoth,” answered Anderson, squirming, pushing his back into his floor/wall as if there was a way through to the other side, or perhaps only hoping that there was.
“That’s a shoggoth?” Peel spoke through a gaping mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, discovering with unwanted and growing appreciation how utterly functional yet destructive it appeared to him, like a Swiss army knife version of the entire US military arsenal.
“A small one too.”
“They come in bigger sizes?”
“What do we do?” Nicola asked, regaining some of her composure.
“Don’t touch it,” the assassin snarled. “And get us the hell out of here.”
Peel went to the American, the shift between altering gravity vectors easier to adjust to because there were more faces and less of an incline between each floor/wall. When they shared the same floor he remained far enough from the assassin so he could have time to shoot, should his foe strike out.
“This is what you were talking about earlier? This… thing?”
The American nodded.
“You saw all this?”
“You won’t like where this leads. None of us will.”
“And the Ranger?”
“He’s a dead man. Then it will be us.”
Peel paced, not wanting to believe Anderson, but finding that he was going to a dark place and doing just that. Then a thought occurred, and Peel had hope.
“You’ve seen all time in this cell?”
“So?”
“So, you know how we get out, and how long it takes?”
Anderson lifted his zip-lock bound hands and pointed to Nicola. “She solves the puzzle, but then it is the end.”
“How?” Peel growled. “How does she solve the p
uzzle?”
Anderson would only stare through Peel. He had lost all hope.
“I know how.”
From behind them both Nicola had spoken with confidence.
Both men turned to her.
“Look at the Pentapod writing. These are matrices. Look?”
Peel and Anderson stared at the floor. There were indeed three by five matrices everywhere. He read one, knowing enough Pentapod script now to read the numbers laid out before him:
2 3 5
7 11 13
17 19 23
29 31 37
41 43 47
“These are prime numbers,” Peel noted, satisfied that he knew enough mathematics to determine a sequence when he saw one. “I know it’s only the matrix I’ve looked at, but it seems correct to me.” He looked to Anderson and Nicola, but neither expressed confidence in his choice, or that he should hold his hand against it, selecting it as a solution.
“Harrison, you should look at this matrix before you make any rash decisions.”
He came to her side as suggested, sensing that what she was about to show him was important:
1 16 16
8 2 16
4 4 16
2 8 16
16 1 16
“I don’t get this one?”
“Multiplication honey. One times sixteen is sixteen, eight times two is sixteen, and so on. Sixteen is the smallest number with exactly five divisors.
Peel shrugged, scratched his head. “Would it be a safe guess that every three by five matrix in here is a correct solution?”
Nicola nodded, “Unless there is one that is incorrect, and hence our way out of here.”
They explored for some time, covered every matrix with a systematic approach, but in each instance they always found a solution to the matrix.
“We must have missed something,” exclaimed Nicola. She had regained some of her confidence and composure now she had a problem to focus on that she might actually be able to solve. “We need to look again.”
“How long would it take us to work that out? I can see now why it took Reznikova so long in the last room.”
Anderson cleared his throat. “Don’t count on forever,” he spoke now with the same confidence he had projected in the Darwin hanger, as he pointed to the shoggoth suspended in the center of the twenty-sided shape. “It’s moved.”
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