Jadie in Five Dimensions

by Dianne K. Salerni

  My eyes travel toward my brother. He’s watching me while pretending not to and probably wondering if I’ve figured out his secret. I have, but I’m reluctant to involve him in my secret until I know more about who the Lowells are, why the Seers separated me from them, and how this impacts my family.

  So I won’t ask Marius for help (yet), but I might get something useful from a person I dislike. He dislikes me too, though he’ll trade information without asking too many questions as long as he thinks he’s getting the better end of the deal.

  8. JADIE

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” Ty asks, his eyes on his computer.

  I glare at his back.

  He didn’t turn around to face me when Mrs. Rivers showed me to his room, which is as creepy as I expected. It’s weirdly neat compared to Marius’s room or Sam Lowell’s. Everything is clean and in its place, but there are horror movie posters on the walls, a pet snake in a glass cage, a partially dismantled robot dog, and a baby shark preserved in a glass jar. Gross.

  “Ahem,” I say.

  Ty swivels around in his chair and tosses his long bangs out of his face. “Ahem? Did you actually say ‘ahem’?”

  Do people not say that? It’s written in books when a person wants to attract someone’s attention. My cheeks burn.

  “Did you want something?” he asks. “Or did you come by just to drop a little onomatopoeia into my day?”

  This is why Ty is my next-door nemesis. I force myself to relax my jaw. Unfolding a Post-it note, I show him the string of numbers I copied from Alia’s bracelet. “These are the coordinates for a course correction. Do you have any way of identifying the location?”

  At first, he leans back in his chair and says nothing. Ty has a way of making it look like he’s falling asleep while you’re talking to him, which irritates both his peers and his teachers. I wait him out, and eventually he admits, “I might. Let me see.”

  I hand the Post-it over. He sticks the paper to his desk and opens a file on his computer. “I’ve been fooling around with these numbers for a while now.” Over his shoulder, I see a spreadsheet with coordinates entered into columns, along with place names and other descriptions, like on the street or in a second-floor stairwell.

  “Has Marius been helping you collect these?”

  He enters my numbers into the spreadsheet without answering. “Do you know where you were?”

  “An apartment in the US, I think. Can’t you tell me where I was, from the numbers?”

  “Correlating known locations with the numbers is what’s helping me figure it out.”

  “Can you give me an area of the country?”

  Ty swings around in his chair again, making me jump back. “Why does Miss Perfect Jadie Martin want to read the Seers’ code?”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  “Straight-A student. Soccer star. Popular in school. Of course, I’m sure it’s overcompensation for being abandoned as a baby.”

  I raise my fist. “How about I pop you in the mouth? That wouldn’t be perfect.”

  “Everybody would assume you had a good reason.” He turns back to his computer, closes the spreadsheet, and opens a window filled with weird programming language.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “Before I give you any information,” he says, “I want you to tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to know this?”

  “Why do you need to know why I want to know?”

  “It’s my price.” Ty types in a few lines of code and scans the screen. “If you’re coming to me with this instead of asking Marius, there must be a reason.”

  I knew there’d be a price, but I thought he’d ask for a future alibi or my firstborn child, like Rumpelstiltskin. Clenching my teeth, I fantasize about hitting him over the head with that shark-in-a-jar. “I saw something that interests me. I want to know where it was.”

  “You want to go back to that spot?”

  “No. Like I said, it’s in the middle of somebody’s apartment. I want to know where in the country it is. Is it a bus ride from here? Or a plane ride?”

  “Must have been something pretty interesting.”

  I turn around and head for the door. “Forget it. I don’t need you.” A pulse in my throat reminds me that I do need him. Walking out is a bluff.

  “Ho-o-o-old on.” Ty drags out the words like he doesn’t really care if I leave—but I think he’s bluffing too. “Do you have your bracelet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” Taking something from his desk that looks like a wand attached to a small box, he stands up and gestures with his hand. Reluctantly, I raise my arm. Ty grabs it, turns the bracelet around on my wrist, and touches the wand to a specific spot.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Called for a ride.” He pushes the button on my bracelet with his thumb.

  Before I can react, I’m yanked kata, out of the room. The world contracts to a squished line and vanishes. My bracelet clicks into a port-lock on the Transporter. A few seconds later, Ty lands beside me, his bracelet connecting with the port-lock on an adjacent platform. I reach across the gap and punch him in the arm with my free hand.

  He yelps. “Ooouuw! Isthathoooo yutreeee tagiiii dingya faaaaavooooor?”

  It takes a few seconds for me to understand what he said. In 4-space, sound waves travel differently than they do on Earth. You get the hang of untangling words after your brain adjusts.

  What Ty said was: Ow! Is that how you treat a guy doing you a favor?

  “You hijacked the Transporter!” After Marius’s stunt this afternoon, I’d suspected he could do this, but it’s still a shock. “We’re going to—”

  I bite off the rest of my sentence, but he guesses what I was going to say and sneers at me. “We’re not going to get in trouble, Miss Perfect.” He throws back his head and hollers, “Hey, Seers! Come and get me!”

  I glance around warily, but 4-space is full of the same unidentifiable globs it always is.

  “Nobody’s watching,” Ty says. “I come here all the time.”

  “How?”

  “There’s an optical coupler in the bracelets that gets activated when we receive a course correction, which is delivered through old pager technology from some guy working in a customer support center. I traced the signal back to his computer, hacked it, and found the code.”

  It takes more than a couple of seconds to untangle those words, but I’ve seen pagers on old TV shows. What he’s saying is that someone pages our bracelets with a course correction, and the signal activates contact with the Transporter. In spite of myself, I’m impressed. “I knew you didn’t pulverize your old bracelet by accident. You took it apart to find out how it worked.”

  “The Seers aren’t as advanced as we think,” Ty says. “The Transporter isn’t very sophisticated either. Isn’t that a gear? And that looks like a roller chain.”

  He points at a clunky thing to our left that’s metallic and jagged, and something else above it. They might be a gear and a chain, but it’s impossible to be sure. Our eyes can’t see the entirety of four-dimensional objects, only cross-sections of them. It’s like handing a sliver of pineapple to someone who’s never seen one before and expecting them to know what the whole fruit looks like.

  “You know what?” Ty grins at me. “I think the bracelets are on a four-dimensional fishing line. The Transporter reels us in and casts us out.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “It might be.”

  Normally, I’d tell Ty that I don’t care how the Transporter works, just that it does. But that’s not true anymore. Everything he’s saying supports what I’ve started to suspect. Miss Rose and the Seers have been feeding Agents platter after platter of baloney sandwiches.

  “It’s completely automated,” Ty continues. “All the times I’ve come up here unauthorized, Miss Rose has never said a word to me.”

  “Marius comes too, doesn’t he? This
is how he got reversed.” The four-dimensional sound waves don’t conceal my disapproval.

  “He wanted to see if he could get used to it. Stop acting like Marius is a helpless dolt. You are so superior sometimes, Jadie.”

  I’m positive Marius said it was Ty who encouraged him to reverse himself, but I don’t bother arguing. “Why’d you bring me out here?”

  “I can take you to those coordinates.” Ty fishes the Post-it out of his pocket. “You don’t need a plane or a bus ride to get there.”

  “I told you. It’s someone’s apartment. If we show up at the wrong time, we’ll be seen. I’d like to get close to the spot, but not exactly there. Can you do that?”

  Ty shakes his head. “I think these numbers are similar to longitude and latitude, but we only need two coordinates to identify locations on Earth. The Seers use four, which makes sense because they can place us down in a subway, on a street, or up on the twentieth floor of a building. If I change one of these numbers even slightly, I might bury us in a wall or drop us from fifty feet in the air. Your numbers won’t help me figure out their system if you have no idea where you were.”

  I heave a sigh. “What do you want from me?”

  A hungry gleam sparks in his eyes. “Your mission coordinates. All of ’em. With as much information about their physical locations as you can figure out. That apartment you were in—if you’d looked out the window to see what floor you were on, it would’ve told me something. Every piece of information I get helps me break their code.”

  I wonder what he plans to do with the code if he breaks it, but I doubt he’d tell me the truth if I asked. “If I do that, you’ll find this place for me?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  9. SAM

  When Sam’s father drags his suitcase into the apartment, bad news is visible in the slump of his shoulders. “Hey, son, how are things?”

  Things are not good, but Sam doesn’t want to hit his dad with the situation the moment he walks in the door. “Did it go well?” he asks instead. The answer is obvious, but not asking makes it seem like failure was expected.

  His father shakes his head. “They were nice about it. Gave me some leads on other jobs. Hang on a second. I’m dying of thirst.” He disappears into the kitchenette. “How’s your knee?”

  “Fine,” Sam lies. He shifts his laptop to the coffee table and waits, jittering his good leg up and down.

  Ice clatters into a glass. Water runs from the tap. “It isn’t the end of the world,” his dad says. “We’ll tighten our belts. The internet has to go. You can use the Wi-Fi at the library, right?”

  Inconvenient, but doable. “Sure, Dad. But there’s something else…”

  His father returns with a glass of water and sees what’s wrong. “What the…? Were you and your mother rearranging the furniture?”

  Sam sighs. The bookshelves have been pulled away from the wall. The closet is open, with its contents dumped on the floor. “J.D.’s baby album is missing.”

  “Missing? What do you mean, missing?”

  “Mom noticed it wasn’t on top of the bookshelf. We thought it might’ve fallen behind, but it wasn’t there. So she pulled the place apart looking for it.”

  “But how could…” Sam’s father waves a hand as if to ask how the album could move itself into the closet, but his voice tapers off because he knows how. Just like Sam knows.

  “She says someone stole it.”

  Dad shoos the cat off the sofa and sits down next to Sam. Removing his glasses, he cleans them with his shirttail. “Where is she?”

  “Asleep. Finally.” It had required all Sam’s powers of persuasion to convince her to take her pills. “Dad, I looked everywhere. I don’t know what Mom did with the album.”

  Dad winces and closes his eyes.

  What other explanation is there? A burglar stole pictures of a child who’s been missing for years and is presumed dead? Mom won’t remember hiding the book; her actions are a symptom of her paranoid delusion. But that doesn’t make it easier to deal with.

  Sam barely remembers his baby sister, but he does remember the tumult when J.D. disappeared. His mother had temporarily vanished from his life too. Though the injuries she received that day hadn’t been life-threatening, her emotional state landed her in the hospital.

  In the twelve years since, Sam has watched his mother relapse every time something bad happens to their family. Like when a hit-and-run driver clipped Sam’s bike and he tore his ACL. Or when a random stranger on a plane got the job his mom wanted. She believes sinister, nameless enemies are out to destroy her family, and nothing has ever been able to convince her otherwise.

  “I’ll call her doctor.” Dad puts his glasses on and pushes them up his nose. “Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry? Sam’s stomach burns with acid. Dad’s unemployment checks barely cover food and rent, let alone doctors. He’s paying for Mom’s meds by credit card, and cutting off the internet isn’t going to make a dent in that growing bill. The longer Sam’s parents go without jobs, the deeper his family sinks into a bottomless hole of debt and the further his mother spirals into paranoia.

  Sam would happily work if he could, but jobs are hard to find when you’re a fifteen-year-old boy with an injured leg. His eyes wander back to the laptop.

  “How’s the project going?” his father asks, interpreting his son’s gaze.

  “About as good as everything else.” Sam reaches for the computer and lifts it onto his lap. “I thought making a three-D model of the impossible cube would help. But it didn’t solve my problem. I can’t use the same strategy to create my Escher buildings on the screen.”

  Sam has been an M. C. Escher fanatic since he was seven, when his dad gave him a set of the artist’s best drawings, including the Belvedere that still hangs in his room. “A structure like this is impossible in our universe,” Dad said to young Sam when he pinned up the print. “But my job is studying dimensional universes where this building makes sense.”

  For a long time, Sam thought that meant his dad worked in the Belvedere building.

  In reality, Sam’s dad is a theoretical physicist compiling his own universal theory. When Sam was old enough to understand, his father was happy to explain. “Scientists have equations that describe how large objects like suns and planets move, but the equations don’t work on tiny things like atoms. Other scientists have equations that explain what atoms do, but they don’t apply to suns and planets. What I believe is that both sets of equations are part of a much bigger set of mathematics. We’re like the three blind men in the story who lay hands on an elephant without knowing what one looks like. One touches the tail, another the trunk, and the third feels only the side of the elephant. My job is describing the whole elephant when I only have access to those little pieces.”

  Sam’s own interest in Escher’s work has always been for its visual appeal rather than dimensional physics. And when the coding program fell into his hands, he immediately thought of Belvedere.

  Six months ago, after the bicycle accident ruined any chance of him joining the track team, his computer teacher offered him use of the program. “A college buddy runs a video game start-up company, and this software is on the cutting edge of graphics coding technology,” the teacher explained. “I don’t have time to work with it, but you’ve got the programming skills and the drive, and it’ll keep you busy while you recuperate.”

  So, mostly out of boredom, Sam used the program to create the beginnings of a world with impossible geometry: Möbius strip roads, buildings built from impossible cubes, creatures that tessellate from flat to multidimensional and back again. When he shared his preliminary design with his teacher, it became apparent that the gift had been more than a way for Sam to pass the time.

  “My buddy loves what you did!” the teacher exclaimed to Sam in a follow-up phone call. “Says there’s nothing out there like it! If you complete this multidimensional landscape, you’ll be paid fo
r the design.” He named a price that made Sam’s heart leap.

  “It’s a landscape, not a whole game,” Sam felt obligated to remind his teacher. “And does he know I’m only fifteen?”

  “He likes working with young talent, and he doesn’t underpay them, the way some businessmen might. He’s got a college-age kid who’ll work with you on the plot of the game and another who’ll write the dialogue. If this comes to fruition, you’ll get your name in the credits and a percentage of the royalties. First you have to make that landscape work.”

  Now it was more than a pastime. It was income his family sorely needed. But as Sam tried to flesh out his original idea, he immediately hit a wall.

  Showing his father the gaps and glitches where his landscape is full of holes, he explains, “No matter how I enter the data, the program can’t figure out how to display the buildings from different angles. Maybe it can’t be done.”

  His father moves the computer onto his own lap. “Let me look at the code. There isn’t anything that can’t be done if you think about it the right way.”

  Except convince Mom there’s no secret organization out to get us. Sam suppresses his sigh.

  After scanning several pages of code, Dad frowns. “This software is designed to make two-dimensional images fool the brain into thinking they’re three-dimensional. But you’re trying to make them look four-dimensional, and this program has no idea what that means.”

  Sam thunks his head against the back of the sofa. “So it’s hopeless.”

  “I didn’t say that. This software may have the capacity to learn. I’ve been working on a mathematical application of ana and kata. If you trust me with your laptop, I’ll upload my math tonight.”

  “Of course I trust you,” says Sam. “But, um…” His eyes wander toward the bedrooms.

  His father’s face falls. “If I have time. We’ll see how she is.”

  Taking care of Mom comes first. But they need money to get her proper care, and selling this game design is the only way Sam can help. It’s a shame Mom did something to his sister’s photo album, but, in Sam’s opinion, there are worse things she could have done.