The Paramount Dimension

by Joseph Calev

  “This isn’t right!” the Sareya I knew yelled. “We shouldn’t be watching this. But I can’t make it stop!”

  I knew instantly who “he” was. Rapid calculations flew through my head to undo this, but no matter how much I tried, the scene continued. Her mother threw a blanket over the baby and everything got hazy.

  Although the baby Sareya could no longer see with a blanket over her head, she could still resonate, but it was so weak there were only the dull shapes of her mother and father with their faces turned away. Then there was a third.

  “We have to go now!” Sareya yelled. “I don’t want to see this.”

  Her breathing quickened, but neither of us could stop the scene. Who was doing this?

  “Tell me the math,” I pleaded. “How do we get out of here?”

  “Well, well, leaving, weren’t we?” a cold voice said.

  “I don’t know!” Sareya cried. “It won’t let me stop!”

  “What do you want?” her mother asked through a sob.

  The third shape gave a quick laugh, then said, “How kind of you to offer. As a matter of fact, I do want something.”

  The three stood there for a moment while Mordriss just glared at them. Other than being slightly taller, I couldn’t make out any details. They were just long blobs.

  “There’s a certain artifact I understand to be in your possession. I understand Algard may have given it to you.”

  “Algard the headmaster?” Sareya’s father asked. “We’ve never spoken, but whatever you want, it’s yours.”

  “We need to go!” Sareya shrieked, but no matter how much I tried to reverse the particles and go back, nothing happened.

  “It’s a very simple badge with ‘Oreca’ on the front. On its back is a key. It’s very special to Algard, which is why of course I must have it.”

  I stopped trying to go back. Had he just described my badge?

  Both parents shook their heads. “Please!” her father pleaded. “I’ve never seen it.”

  His wife screamed as Mordriss tossed her across the room with resonation and pinned her against the wall.

  “She will suffer.” Mordriss was dead calm. “And you will watch.”

  Sareya’s father fell to the floor. “Please! Please!” he pleaded. “If I knew this item, it would be yours. We have nothing but each other.”

  Mordriss gave a long laugh, then dropped Sareya’s mother.

  “I believe you. Of course, you don’t know.”

  Both parents were breathing heavily now, but gave long sighs. Then their movement stopped as Mordriss cracked his knuckles.

  “But I’m sure you’re aware from past precedent that it doesn’t matter.”

  Sareya’s mother gave a bone curdling shriek as her form began to crumble together, and the Sareya I knew was sobbing. There had to be a way out. She couldn’t witness this again.

  With every bit of my energy I strove to reverse the particles, and slowly the screams fell to oblivion and Sareya and I were together in the cemetery.

  Though my first priority was to comfort the crying little girl before me, I now knew what I had to do. Entering Oreca Gifted no longer worried me. Whoever gave me that key wanted me to go there, and I suspected the real terrors awaited inside.

  17

  I held Sareya through her tears for some time. It seemed a crime that horrible events like these were preserved in this world to experience over and over again.

  When I bid her farewell, it was time to strategize. Mordriss had mentioned the very same key that someone had bestowed on me. Though I still had no idea what it unlocked, it was now both my ticket into school and a liability. If Mordriss did return, I now possessed what he wanted most, and someone knew I had it.

  I needed a vehicle for a trip two light years away. Annie had one, but would she let me borrow it? Most people built their own, but I had neither the know-how nor the time to do so. There was only one choice.

  “Annie, may I borrow your ship?” I asked at dinner.

  The poor woman nearly choked on her pasta. “My dear, I’d be happy to take you wherever you’d like, now that you can create your own wormhole.”

  “I kind of need to go there myself.” My head was down. There was no hiding it. “I want to go to Oreca Gifted.”

  She shook her head and chuckled. “There’s nothing to see, my dear. I already told you. It’s just a field. That’s all simple folk like us will ever see.”

  “I need to speak with a professor there. His name is Algard.”

  She was briefly motionless, then said, “I see.”

  “Do you know him?”

  She slowly shook her head. “No. Not personally, but he’s the school’s headmaster.”

  Annie stood and resonated outside. I followed.

  “Yes. You may borrow the ship. I’ve never heard of anyone getting inside without an invitation, but who knows.” She looked at me and smiled. “You’re already unusual.”

  Annie handed me the credit card.

  “The ship already knows where the school is. You can leave now, dear, but have it plot a course to arrive in the middle of the school day. Good luck.”

  Annie watched while I constructed a wormhole, then verified that it was correct. With one half of the hole next to the house, and the other inside the ship, I had my ticket home. One side would travel with me, while the other would remain, though that wasn’t my primary concern. How exactly was I going to enter a school that didn’t want to be found?

  When I entered the silvery flying Volkswagen, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how to fly this thing. There were no controls, nor was there a screen anywhere. Only a few chairs and a glistening white floor adorned the inside. Given that I was about to request enrollment in the most advanced school in the universe, it seemed more than a little embarrassing to ask for instructions.

  “I need to fly to Oreca Gifted, arriving in the afternoon,” I said out loud.

  Nothing happened.

  I closed my eyes and felt the entire vehicle resonating to me. There were no wires, controls, or machinery on board. The craft itself was no more complicated than a cardboard box. It only looked a bit nicer. Frustrated that I’d been defeated on such an elemental step, I exited to search for Annie. Only, she wasn’t there, nor was her house.

  A bright green field stretched for several miles in either direction. The sky was deep blue, and I was midway up a tremendous but gently inclining hill that dominated the view. The grass was similar to that on Earth, but every blade was straight and utterly perfect with a tiny drop on each tip. A small pillar poked out from the top of the hill.

  I walked a few steps up, and noticed that my path had ruined the hill’s perfect texture: Each drop had fallen and the grass was downtrodden where I’d walked. There were no other steps in sight.

  Was this a test? Perhaps, but at the very least I could try not to make a mess, so I concentrated on levitating myself just above the blades, then floated to the top. The pillar was a large plaque.

  DARVALDUS, FOUNDER – ORECA GIFTED

  So, I was in the right place. In absolutely no time, in a manner I still didn’t understand, Annie’s ship had gotten me here. Yet, just as she had said, this memorial was the only thing in sight. Remembering what Sareya had taught me, I closed my eyes again and felt everything around me.

  There was no wind. Each blade of grass was motionless. There were no animals for miles, and trees were only in the far distance. Underneath the ground was a body.

  I jumped back, then stared at the plaque. Since I could now handily see underground with resonation, I glimpsed the corpse just below. This was the founder’s grave, only there was no bone fragment outside to touch.

  Of course, this was a test. Certainly, every entering student would be expected to know resonance, essonance, avalance, and orasance. There was only one way inside, and it was disgusting. I would have to visit the founder.

  I’d never used resonance on anything but warding off squimmers, so it took a f
ew minutes of concentration to grasp every piece of dirt that surrounded the decayed body. Who knew how long it had been there, but I was about to see for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was explain why I’d broken the founder’s corpse on the first day, so I carefully lifted each clump of dirt as the body returned to the surface.

  At last, what floated before me were the ancient bones of someone who could’ve incinerated me with the snap of a finger in real life. The hair and clothes were long gone, though a few pieces of flesh still hung from the browned skeleton. Being as delicate as I could, I reached up and touched it and blink! I was in a classroom, where Darvaldus was lecturing about avalance.

  The room was dusky, and the stout man, so old that he needed the pulpit for support, was going into the intricacies of biologics. It sounded interesting, but the math was way above my level. Where did I need to go? Since Darvaldus was the founder, he must have hidden the school. I only needed to find the right day.

  Recalling one of the few times I paid attention in class back on Earth, I utilized a binary search. Since on this day the school was already built, I went far back to when he was a third-level child. All I needed to do was keep dividing the time in half, and I’d find the day.

  As a child, Darvaldus was shorter, but otherwise looked mostly the same. Then I was again back in a dank classroom. A few teachers sat in the back, while several rows of mostly bored students listened to the founder give a lecture on the avalance of biologics. Word-for-word the material was the same. This guy was even brighter than Raynee.

  As I moved back and forth through his life, I found that he spent the overwhelming majority of his time teaching. It wasn’t all avalance. There were advanced courses on resonance, where he discussed how to communicate with other living things by constructing sound waves. He discussed theoretical aspects of orasance, or how to control it if it were controllable. Finally, he covered some crazy uses for essonance, including nested wormholes and dimensional portals that allowed same-dimension-set travel—or basically moving turnips across them. The only thing he didn’t touch on was cenosance.

  At last, I reached a middle age Darvaldus standing in the same field as I. He stood exactly where the monument now lay, and held out his hands wide.

  “Our world needs a school!” he shouted into thin air. “Where the brightest of every time can challenge their wits, and be pushed to their limits. Yet such an institution needs protection. It must remain an imperceptible entity from those not worthy of it. Only those accepted into its hallowed walls may venture here, and so on this day, I shall hide it!”

  I moved forward and watched patiently while he just stood there. In just a few moments, I would know the secret. Then, I would be walking in those exact hallowed walls.

  “Now! Pay attention, and I shall do it!”

  That seemed an odd thing to say. There was no one for miles, or at least that he saw.

  “Doop! Dee dop! Dop. Doop doop doop. Ya ka woop!”

  He was now dancing with his arms in the air across the field. After completing a full loop around me, Darvaldus faced me directly.

  “You didn’t think it would be this easy, did you?” he asked.

  I searched around me for another person, but there was no one.

  “Well? I’m speaking to you.”

  “To me?” How this could be happening?

  “You didn’t seriously believe digging up a grand master was going to work, did you?” He was scratching his chin with his gaze right into me.

  “How are you doing this?”

  “While time can’t change, it’s certainly doable for those who know how to reorganize particles a bit. This prevents overzealous applicants from digging up my bones for the answers to their own deficiencies.”

  “So, you made all of this up?”

  “Of course! Did you finish any of my lectures?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Yeah. Pretty boring shit, wasn’t it?” He winked. “Almost as much a waste of time as disinterring my bones.”

  “You won’t give me even a little hint?”

  The old man approached me, then peered into my eyes and lifted my palms. “You’re a pretty stupid one, aren’t you? Just learned wormholes yesterday, right?”

  I stepped back.

  “Well, off you go. Back to where you came. Just don’t mess up my field when you leave. And put my body back where you found it!”

  The orasance session ended. I was standing at the top of the hill, alone. His bones still hovered above me, though not by his doing. His mouth was crooked as if sneering, but in this world he was long dead. With no one watching, I gingerly placed the skeleton back in the hole and covered it. Even the blades of grass were returned, along with their dew drops.

  I groaned out loud. How else could I get in? There was nothing in sight. The school did a perfect job of not being found. Darvaldus had thought of everything, or had he?

  Certainly, there was a way for actual students to enter. I thought back to his lectures. How many people spent hours, maybe even lifetimes, trying to listen to them all? Yet Darvaldus himself had dismissed them. He wasn’t looking for memorization maniacs. He wanted those who saw what others couldn’t.

  I wasn’t going to leave this field until I figured it out.

  I noticed it. The path I had earlier traversed was gone. Every blade of grass was straightened. Every dew drop was replaced. For someone as brilliant as Darvaldus, that must have been intentional. I then realized, he had given me a hint! I wasn’t to mess up his field.

  While still hovering, I lay down and examined one of the blades in detail. Other than being completely straight, there was little difference from standard grass on Earth. The dew drop, though, did look a little strange. The blade ended in a tiny point, as thin as a needle. How did it manage to balance?

  What if the school were in an alternate dimension? After holding my palms out for a few moments, I felt the edges of a portal and popped through. Again, I found myself in a classroom hosted by none other than Darvaldus.

  “Today, our lesson is on the avalation of squimmer shit.” Recalling that they were a cross between a squirrel and a mermaid I’d encountered my first day, I resolved there was nothing to see here.

  I exited to another world, which covered the metaphysics of squimmer shit in a wormhole. Yet another was populated entirely by squimmers, which each shit every three seconds. A final world contained laughing squimmers and excrement flying in every direction. I got the point. Darvaldus had thought of that angle, too. Every single dimension reachable from this place involved squimmer shit.

  Yet I knew the school was here. Could it be invisible? I considered wandering the field, but it couldn’t have been that easy. I was more likely to run into invisible squimmer shit than any building. No. It was here, in this dimension, and wasn’t invisible.

  I stooped back to the dew drops. They were the most unusual thing here, but why was I so concerned about balance? There was no gravity, so if the drop wanted to resonate on the grass tip, nothing prevented that. But why would every blade have a drop? And then I knew.

  Somehow, Darvaldus had placed the school inside one of the drops. There was no other place. I remember a science teacher once telling me “When all the possibilities are exhausted, consider the impossibilities.” The only question was, which one?

  I did a few calculations in my head. If the field stretched for five miles in each direction, though it seemed more, then there were approximately one hundred and thirty-trillion dew drops. A simple investigation wouldn’t work. There had to be another way.

  Could resonation work? I closed my eyes, and tried to sense which drop was different. There was no wind. Every blade was the same. I was onto something. The drop I was seeking would have a nearly imperceptible difference in vibrations. This wouldn’t be easy.

  For some reason, I felt myself thinking of Raynee. Her face was before me, urging me to be calm. I could do this. I felt the blades nearest to me, the trees miles away, and everythin
g in between. Complete peace was required. Which blade was wobbling, not even a micron more, because its dew drop contained something different? I reached out my arms and became part of the field. Every grass blade became my intimate friend. I felt it.

  Less than a half mile away was a drew drop a billionth of a gram heavier than the others. The school must be there. I resonated to it. Then it was gone.

  Of course, they had to cover for someone walking over it. The entire institution couldn’t be toppled by a rampaging two-year-old. The drop changed its location upon approach. How could I enter it, then?

  I had to make myself smaller. Actually, it was even worse. Once that small, the distance across the field would be tremendous. Both myself and Annie’s ship needed to shrink. We hadn’t covered that in school, and I was fairly certain it was a more advanced subject. I was screwed.

  Or was I? This was a simple scaling operation. Just like I could resonate objects from one place to another, I could reduce the empty space within them. The mathematics were accessible. The only thing was, I would have to do this to myself. One miscalculation, and all that would remain of me would be a microscopic blood stain on a blade of grass.

  There was so much at stake: my real parents, Raynee, my future.

  It was worth it.

  With a last gulp, I returned to the ship and concentrated on scaling down. After a few tense moments, I was hurtling along in a sea of green.

  Again, I felt for the different drop, then imagined a path toward it. I figured that must be how the ship worked. No speech recognition was necessary. It just knew. At this size, the drop loomed as a behemoth, but again it disappeared.

  I had to be smaller. Shrinking myself so miniscule that I felt myself passing out, I again located the drop and navigated forward. Now there was a tiny opening on the front, a trillionth of a human hair wide. My heart pumped rapidly as I slid through.

  There was nothing. I was in the depths of space. Ahead were the stars of a billion galaxies. The school had its own universe. I was such a fool. There was no possible way I’d find it, even in a billion years.

  I sat there for some time, just pondering the stars and hoping to find some pattern. The last time I’d been in space had been with Sareya. She’d given me everything I needed to know. Nearby was a black hole, so massive that it was swallowing an entire galaxy.