Dimensions Within Words

Every possible word would lead to a different life, a different everything.

Danville Lorden stood at a crossroads in time and space. Eighteen years ago, he’d nearly bled to death from an aneurysm and woken up with a whole new concept of eternity. Now, at forty, he stood in a room lit by the cobalt glow of dimensional portals.

The Interdimensional Transport, or IT, was the culmination of five trillion dollars of multinational government spending. As a younger man, he’d fired off his scrawled scientific equations to the top minds at NASA, not expecting a response. Two weeks later, he was in front of congress and phrases like ‘blank check’ and words like ‘incalculable’ rattled around his ears.

For a couple hundred megawatts a week, every corner of the globe could be reached just by walking down a hallway. Folding parts of Earth through fifth-dimensional space required math so exotic only a near-death experience could’ve inspired it. Now, he stared as the first group of Japanese scientists crossed thousands of miles into the facility merely by walking ten feet.

“I have to say,” a gruff voice said, “when you first stood in my office, ranting about space folds, I thought my lieutenants were nuts.”

Danville shook General Plenham’s hand. “Sir, if there’s one thing I appreciate, it’s the government taking my research seriously.”

The general pulled a cigar out of his pocket and lit it. “Any discovery of this magnitude, what with all the money we’re going to save and the revolutionizing of every industry from transportation, payload, travel,” he puffed and barked a laugh, “why, we’d be stupid NOT to fund your invention.” He turned to greet the Chinese delegation.

“I’m glad you were able to convince congress,” Danville said. He paused. Something struck him as off. “Wait, what do you mean by ‘payload’?”

“Eh?” The general turned partway. “I, uh…you know, shipping and all that.”

Danville nodded. “Right, right.” He looked around, lost in thought. If the general meant ‘shipping’ why did he say ‘payload’?

“Doctor Lorden!” A dark-skinned woman said in Arabic. “Your invention works!”

“Yes, yes it does,” Danville said, shaking her hand. “It worked in short bursts last month, but I’m glad it works long-term. Being able to open it for days is a huge boon.”

A British man approached. He shook the woman’s hand. “Doctor Makara.” He turned. “Doctor Lorden.”

“Doctor Hemmings,” Danville said. “Your field-shift equation was a godsend. I was worried the field wasn’t going to be able to shift far enough.”

George Hemmings scratched his beard. “Well, you know, I may not have your intellect, but I can calculate circles around others.”

Danville saw the Indian delegation setting up their section of the celebratory banquet. A woman in an elaborate sari gestured. “Doctor, you should get the first pick since this is all your creation.”

He helped himself to a plate of tikka masala. “Thank you so much.”

All the praise made him uneasy. He wasn’t one of those narcissists that constantly centered themselves. Still, the money and the fame paid his bills and guaranteed his comfort for decades to come. He’d be remembered long after his death. The authentic Indian food filled his belly and slammed his taste buds with flavor. To live at the center of the maelstrom of his new life? Now, that, he could get used to. Especially if he could get Milly’s number and rekindle their old relationship.

As he watched the politicians, billionaires, socialites, and scientists mingle, he sat, sipping wine, and thinking of words passing through the holes in space.

Payload.

The general’s statement came unbidden back to his mind. Why had the general used that word instead of ‘shipping’? General Richard Plenham was no motormouth, no undisciplined blabber. The man spoke in specific terms and objective ideas every time Danville had ever spoken to him. No, if the man said ‘payload’, he clearly meant it.

“Payload,” Danville whispered to himself, “in military terms, means a weapon.”

Okay, that made sense. A general like Plenham would certainly need to keep the military use of portals in mind. That wasn’t new, he’d talked about it before. So, why had he felt the need to backtrack?

A chill like melting ice dripped into Danville’s mind.

He’d accidentally revealed something unintentional.

Danville set his wine glass aside and retreated to the nearby control room, where he sat at a console with pad and paper. The pessimist in him started with the worst-case scenario. If nations used portals to launch first-strike nuclear attacks against each other, what would the result be? Implications flooded him like a river poured into a glass. Even if the portals were closed, the electromagnetic pulse might affect the dimensional folds as they collapse.

Equations appeared on paper as his hand moved. His hand could barely keep up with his brain. As his eyes burned the writings into his brain, images flashed in his mind of uncontrolled spatial warping. How hadn’t he seen this possibility?

A Greek man in a suit smiled and extended a hand. “Doctor Lorden!”

Danville blew past him. “General!”

General Plenham turned, set his cigar in an ash tray, and looked at the panting man, amused. “Doctor, what’s the rush?”

Danville held the notebook up as nearby scientists approached. “General, I need you to call Washington and tell them to get on a conference call with every government and share this information.” The general opened his mouth, but didn’t speak in time. “No, listen. If a large enough EMP were to strike in the microseconds after a portal collapse, such as one caused by a nuclear attack, the spatial warping would permeate outward and cause chaos.”

George Hemmings took the paper and stared. He almost dropped it. “My god, you’re right.”

The general folded his arms and nodded. “If you think this is urgent, I’ll do it.”

“It is,” Danville said. “Because we don’t know if this effect is local, or…!”

The room shook. A flash of light came from one of the portals and it collapsed with a snap, the room’s glow lessening. “What was that?” asked a German politician.

“The Belgium portal collapsed,” Samantha Makara said.

“Get it open again!” the Belgian delegate yelled.

“Right away,” George Hemmings said, dashing to the control room. He typed away and hit a command. The machine at the center extended a shaft outward and electricity crackled off it. In seconds, a new portal opened.

No one reacted, except a Belgian woman, who let out a cry and covered her mouth.

“What?” someone asked.

The woman fell to her knees as a small figure approached. A little girl said, “Mom?” in Belgian, and approached.

“How?” was all the woman cried.

A chill came over Danville. All he could think was, ‘she can’t be allowed to touch that girl.’ He dashed to the control room and slammed a key command, and the portal closed instantly. The Belgian woman sobbed and screamed.

“What is going on?” General Plenham cried.

“I know,” George Hemmings said, approaching.

Danville stared. “Time.”

The general whirled to face him. “Time for what?”

But no sooner had he said it than he knew.

“Someone sent out an EMP that collapsed the Belgium portal,” Samantha Makara explained, “and the ripple went through space, but also time.”

“We opened a portal to the past,” Danville said. He turned towards the Belgian woman. “Didn’t we?”

“My daughter,” the woman explained. “Died last year.” She gasped. “Oh god, I get it.”

“What?” but Danville didn’t really need to ask. He had an idea.

The woman turned to him, pale as though she’d seen a ghost. “She was talking about how she once saw me through a hole. Before the cancer.”

General Plenham raised his hands. “Now, everyone! Let’s just all calm down!”

But Danville couldn’t calm down.

He’d built a time machine by accident.

God only knew what horrors could be unleashed by having the ability to walk across time as well as space. He had to stop this.

He had to stop himself from building it.

“Doctor Lorden!” George said. “Are you okay?”

Danville was not okay. “I’ll be fine. I just have to get some air, think about this.”

“We’ve all got a lot of thinking to do,” General Plenham offered. “This is a new discovery and can’t be taken lightly.”

Danville headed to the lower level, where the prototype had been tested not long ago. He could reverse-engineer the time aspect of portals from the facility’s measurement of the fold collapse.

A half-hour passed as he typed equations into the small portal generator. A quick hotwiring of the console later, and he had the backup power wired to the machine. All he needed now was some memory blanking drug from medical. Being a military research facility, they had experimental drugs galore, and one of them could harmlessly erase memories. He grabbed a bottle of L22-Alpha and headed back to the lower level.

After locking the door, he set the machine to create a controlled collapse. The machine sparked, created a portal, and it popped. The room quaked. He then typed in new equations and opened a new portal.

August 9, 2201 appeared before him. 11:55 PM. His twenty-second birthday, and he’d gotten up to use the toilet. He’d always kept a water bottle by his bed for thirst. Future Danville reached through, grabbed the water bottle off the bedside counter, and dropped the tablet in. He set it down. The portal closed as the pill began to dissolve in the water.

“Now,” he thought, “my younger self won’t remember the inspiration.”

The pop of the portal snapped him back to the present.

A woman walked in. “Doctor Lorden!”

He turned. His mind raced. Finally, a name came with the image. “Martine!” They hugged. “Remember when we met at the International Technology Conference in Brussels?”

The Belgian woman laughed. “Since then, we’ve both worked on cutting edge technology. Me, on cancer nanorobots, and you on your time…whatsit.”

“Time Data Transmitter,” Danville said. “It allows us to send information through time.”

“Thanks to you,” she praised, “very safe.”

“Much safer than portals,” he said.

At once, he felt confused as to why he’d said that. He turned his head about. What had he come into this room for, anyway?

“Mama!” a little girl cried.

“Renee,” Martine said, “meet my former colleague, Danville Lorden.”

The girl shook his hand as he bent down. “Hi, Mister Lorden. Mama says your work’s very important.”

He laughed at her accented English. “Yes, it allowed us to cure your cancer by having the treatment sent backward.”

The mother and daughter hugged him again. “Well, come back out here and celebrate your invention! You’re the man of the hour, after all!”

He sat down and thought of all the wars they’d stopped by sending information back through time, and all the lives saved by medical breakthroughs from the future. All in all, it’d been a wonderful time in human history.

Only two questions poked irritably at him.

Why was the word ‘payload’ in his mind?

He held the contents of his right hand up to see, not having remembered picking it up.

“And why,” he whispered to himself, “am I holding a bottle of L33-Alpha anti-aneurysm medication?”