D.E. - SAMVIDA NANDA

D.E.
By Samvida Nanda


It was the 21st Dimension Equation.
Here there were so many planes that we could recognise that every dimension was another Box. Generations of people had travelled between dimensions to search for the mathematical equation that described the structures of the universes. This must be the Box where they had found answers.
And she had been to this dimension before. So she could have been on the team working on the structures. But how did she learn the equation constant? I thought I was the only one who still knew that number. Everyone else from my time had long since...moved on...to a better place.
But what if she had figured it out? Just like we had. What if she had made her own? Even we hadn’t been able to figure out how to create our own Box.
How did she do it? And how in all the universes could she lose the Box?
I have to admit. I’m curious.
What is inside that Box?
How many Dimensions does it hold? Is the series of boxes we travel to also inside some relatively larger box in some other universe where it is but a building block for a child to play with? A child. How intriguing.
But she says the Box was a gift. Did someone from my time..? No. That wasn’t possible. I was the only one who could travel through dimensions for so long. So many times.
Yes. Eternity seemed like it just might be long enough. To find her Box.
We’d wasted a shift by coming to the 2ist D.E. for the second time since our search started. But my hand had slipped. And the coordinates had shifted. I tightened the strap of the glove and we shifted dimensions together for the 7th time since our search had started.
We fell through time and space into the 6th dimension and onto the wall of her room.
6th D .E.
The cityscape hadn’t changed with time.
Except that it seemed to have turned on its side and gone off to sleep. As the darkness combed its way through the window into the room, he pushed back his hair made darker than black by the constant nights of this Box. When she shook her head to his unasked question, her hair seemed to gleam with slivers of silver. He shifted from where he stood on the wall so he stood with her in the shaft of light coming from the holographic moon inside the room.
“Time to move Dora. When to next? The 5th D.E.?” he asked as he refastened his glove.
“’Dora’,” she mused as she let him guide her down along the wall, “all my friends used to call me that. Everyone did really. Except my parents who called me by my full name. And my brother,” she added as an afterthought.
“Oh? What did he call you?”He asked as he set a new level of coordinates with his hand.
“Mostly ‘Hey you’ or ‘that annoying kid’,” she smiled at the memory.
His gloved hands closed a little too tightly upon hers, “the 5th Box?”
Her hand no longer seemed fragile like it did in their previous travels, and her nod was firm.
“How is it that every time I see you, you look younger,” he smiled affectionately.
“How is it that you aren’t in such a hurry anymore to reach the next Box? Besides it will be just as true once we are in the 5th Box” she whispered and twisted his gloved hand into a wave.
I had certain qualms as we fell through the door, and onto the ceiling. I can’t believe she twisted my hand to the coordinates. I was the one who had set them.
The fan blade, swung two inches above my face in a superciliously rhythmic pattern before her face came into focus above it. I tried to orient myself to this new Box, and realised with a wrench that her face was always the first thing that made sense anywhere anytime.
Then I realised the wrench was more to do with the fact that the fan blade had cut him and a long line of blood was tracing its way alongside a rather important vein in my hand.
5th D.E.
He slid away from the offending object as her calm hands tried to pry off the glove so she could see the wound better. She had almost taken it off halfway, when he realised what she was doing. He pulled his hand away and jerked the glove back into place.
“It’ll heal”, he said with a wave of the re-gloved hand, “That’s something my body still remembers to do quite well.”
“Your body does something else quite well too,” she said with a Cheshire cat smile.
“How would you know?”
“Well I keep telling you we can change that.”
“Don’t be absurd. You know how much older than you I am?”
“From where I’m standing... Not all that much really.”
“How is it, that every time I see you, you look younger,” he quipped with the hint of a sad smile.
“How is it, that every time I see you, you look the same,” she replied as she got to her feet and moved further down the ceiling so she stood framed in the one window of the room. Even upside down, the evening sun filtered lightly through to transform her dark brown hair into a cascading multitude of auburn gold curls.
“In a world of changing gravities, my hair still follows its own rules,” she shook her hair out of her brown eyes and looked beyond her reflection to the world outside. The cityscape hadn’t changed with time.
She realised with a stab of nostalgia that this was a universe where the sun still existed. The sun felt different here. She didn’t remember this warmth. She didn’t remember this palette of colours outside of a painting.
Or perhaps she didn’t want to have to forget it again.
“I don’t remember it being so bright,” she said.
“The sun?”
“No. My room. There used to be a mango tree here, outside this window, and it would block out the light. It would reach towards me and I’d climb onto those long welcoming branches and just listen to the sound of the rain as it fell constantly from the gray sky above to the gray gravel below. The green of the leaves was the only splash of colour I knew.”
“And you must have loved the mangoes too I suppose.”
“No. The mango tree never grew any mangoes,” she said thoughtfully.
“Why did we come here Dora?” he asked impatiently, “is your Box here?”
“Back to the Box then? No. It’s not here. I can’t find any trace of it.”
“When to next?”
“The 3rd Box.”
His hand jerked.
“What is it? The cut? Why don’t you take the damn thing off?”
“What? No. I... “He raised his traitorous hand to push his black hair out of a suddenly sweating face.
“Let’s move”, he took her hand sharply twisting it.
His hand jerked again.
I can’t breathe. My lungs are literally being squashed as they try to expand in the restricted confines of this dimension. I panic and take in an even larger breath. Or at least I try to. Then I get something. It’s a link. A trace to her Box.
5th D.E.
About to collapse from the sheer lack of air but triumphant from his find, he transports back to the 5th dimension. He falls, this time onto the floor of her room, and takes in five long breaths. “I can’t believe we went into the 2nd Dimension by mistake, but Dora...” Exhausted but elated he turns to find that beautiful face and tell her that he found the link to her and her Box. He closes his eyes confused.
He opens them again to discover that he is indeed alone in the room.
The sunlight filters through the window through which the cityscape hasn’t changed. But the light is filtering through gaps. Gaps that are between the leaves, of a rather large mango tree.
Damn. My wrist just twisted in the wrong way. Not in some physically bone breaking way. Just not in the way I wanted it to move. I raise my hand to pull the memory chip and glance at the cityscape of the 21st Box. It hasn’t changed at all. I miss the memory chip completely this time. My actions are falling not short, but in the wrong directions. I take in a deep breath and try to calm myself. I fail, and decide to take a swing at the stupid machine. I fail at that too. And end up hitting the holographic wall next to it.
The wall crackles like a network of stars and then settles back into a regrettably solid wall.
In a world in which we shift between universes with a flick of the wrist, how is it that I can’t even open a stupid juice box without spilling it over myself like some baffled seven year old.
I realise I said the last sentence out loud and there is an annoyed seven year old staring at me.
She doesn’t know how lucky she is. One more shift of universes and she will be young enough for her mind to perceive the final dimension.
A Box with an open structure. That’s where everyone from my time will have moved to. A place I can’t go because my mind will never be able to perceive it. Not in all that pocket of eternity that I have to myself to travel in. All to myself.
The machine beeps loudly. “Location to be determined?” it asks me the dreaded question. Do I search for Dora’s Box and with it receive certain answers; or do I search for Dora herself. An image of a young girl with Dora’s eyes flashes before my eyes. I guess it’s Dora then. Then I realise it really is Dora. I spin around so I’m no longer looking at her reflection in the machine screen. I’m looking at Dora. My Dora.
21st D.E.
“How is it, that every time you see me, I look younger,” she whispers and throws her small hands around his neck and pulls at his eternally jet black hair, “I knew you’d come here. I knew it,” she trembled so much that she didn’t notice the tremble in his hands.
“You stupid girl. You wasted a switch. I was coming to find you in..well..where and whenever you were. And now you’re..”
“Seven years old.”
“So the next time you travel..”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes, “come with me?”
“Dora.. You know I can’t even if I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“ I just can’t age like you”
“No! Why don’t you want to?”
“Of course I want to. I just can’t become younger through dimension travel like you.”
“Yes you can! It’s that glove isn’t it? That’s what stops you from aging. That’s why you never take it off! Don’t you see! It’s controlling you!”
“Dora. Don’t you see? It is controlling me. I have a genetic movement disorder. It was confirmed to be Parkinson’s. So every time I shift between dimensions I become younger, but my body falls apart. But because of the nature of a movement disorder through the movement of space, my body just ages to its previous state. So I stay constantly at this age. The glove helps me control the Parkinson’s. It injects Dopamine into my system and...”
“So you really can’t come?” she snapped.
“Dora I ..”
“You have the coordinates for the missing Box?” she asked in a toneless voice.
“Dora?”
“You search for it. It was given to me for safe keeping. I was supposed to keep it closed forever. Since you have your forever, You keep the damned thing and You cut your curiosity from opening the Box.”
“Dora.. it could hold the answers to structures. I could find a way to find you.”
“You have no idea what is in that Box. You just want it to be more structures. You could even find more structures. But you could never follow into the open structure.”
“Dora.”
“I’m getting sick of that name.”
She twisted her hand and burst into a million trillion particles. Sure to come back together at the nZero Dimension.
“Pandora!” he yelled helplessly.
nZERO D.E.
She stood in front of a blank canvas. Anything she made on it would be part of her new reality. A child with a new set of crayons, a young boy named Picasso stood beside her and pulled at her brown locks, “It took me only four years to learn all the skill in the world. But lifetimes to learn how to draw like a child.”
“I’m sure people will quote you on that one day,” Pandora smiled as she took all the crayons out of the box. She consciously crushed the paper box in her tiny fist. She drew a large circle on the canvas, and dropped the yellow crayon she had just used into Picasso’s waiting hand. She stepped back to look at her big yellow sun. She drew a huge tree and then a mango on the ground beside it.
She picked up the mango from the ground and started to walk away from the canvas.
She turned and erased the Box drawn on the corner of it. She had tried to draw him coming out of it so many times. But he never came to life like all the other things.
She left the canvas blank.
D.E.
There is a Box within a Box within a Box. And every time you open one, a little girl named Pandora shudders.
Fin