Chapter 08 - A Grasp of The Situation

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The next time Add opened his eyes a metallic ceiling with LED-Lamps greeted him. He was lying on a soft bed in a large room. Glancing around he found out that he was in the infirmary of the Forward Operating Base (FOB). Captain Add tried to sit up and found a dull pain course through all his body. He felt as if he had been heavily pounded by a squad of troopers. His head was in a worser condition. He felt as if it was being hammered by an invisible ram. But being a veteran of many wars he had been through worse. He clenched his teeth and tried to steady his mind. The events of the recent past had left him in a daze. As a Captain of a Starship and as veteran trooper, he had been through various situations, many which made good men despair. But these things, 'Gods', 'Magic', 'Another universe'....were a complete new concept to him. Massaging his temples he was reminded of the mysterious beauty who called herself Mistelteinn. She had appeared and disappeared many times in the recent past, and now Add had no idea where she was, but he had a gut feeling, that, the self-proclaimed 'Daughter of the Goddess of Darkness, The Vorpal sword that slays gods..." Was in no way a simple girl.

"Oh so you have woke up ?"

A calm voice broke him out of his thoughts. Unknown to him, Major Irisdina in her Military overall, that somewhat exposed the perfect curves of her body, was standing at the doorway fo the room her bows furrowed and her gaze sternly locked onto Captain Add.

"Ah yes, i woke up not too long ago...say Major....how long have i been out exactly ?"

Add replied non-chalantly causing the beautiful major to frown. She walked up to the bed and pulling a chair sat down facing Add. Her gaze boring into him as if he was some criminal. Captain Add sighed. This girl was quite stubborn.

"You've been out cold for two days and a few hours now Captain. When we brought you back from the forest you were as still as a corpse. Your pulse and blood pressure had drastically lowered and the medical analysis showed that you had a high chance of cardiac failure. Luckily you recovered over time." She replied blandly.

"Is that so....." Captain Add shrugged, dying to him didn't mean much anyway. "....I guess I have a lot of things pending huh.... Well then let me go check on my stuff...." Though his body still ached, he managed to steady his legs and walk towards a cabinet. He fumbled along the medicines and took out a bottle of aspirin. Popping a few pills into his mouth he returned the bottle and walked towards the door. Major Irisdina didn't speak as see silently watched the Captain walk out. Suddenly she spoke in a tone that was full of sarcasm.

"So Captain Add, i was wondering when did you become a superhuman who can chop apart a giant with one swing of his blade ?"

Hearing these words Captain Add stiffened. 'Of course they know', he thought. After his flashing performance it would be strange if she didn't ask him anything. This girl was really meticulous.

"....Its magic...." He calmly said and walked off, causing the Major to grit her teeth in anger.

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Add slowly made his way to the living quarters. Taking a bath and tiding himself up, he dressed up in a pair of his usual white shirt and black trousers. Then he took an EP and wore it on his arm above his wrist. It was basically a mini computer built on carbon-fibre arm-band. It had a small screen and a keypad made of touch-sensitive material. In a simple analogy it was a personal computer worn on the hand like a watch. It was powered by a few Nano-Archon cells. Using it he was now connected to Lapis. Lapis being an AI could operate as long as she had a server. The battleship Illiana had a group of six quantum computers which served as the sever for Lapis's extended planetary operations. Contacting Lapis Add decided he had some things to put in order.

He made his way landing pad where the dropship was stationed. On the way he met some of the other occupants of thr FOB who gave him suspicious gazes, but he ignored them.

"Lapis, Prepare to depart, take me back to the Himmelreich...."

(Affirmative Host)

He had barely taken a seat when Irisdina once again appeared before him.

"I believe you owe me an explanation Captain." She firmly stated.

Add looked at her silently for sometime and sighed.

"Fine...but first I myself need some answers, so I am heading to the Himmelreich, so do you want to tag along ?"

Major Irisdina raised her brows. It appeared as if she was in a dilemna. Finally she gave Miharu a few commands. The tank and LAV had been brought back to the base and were scheduled to be repaired. There was not much to do on the base so she ordered them to stay alert and survey the surrounding area using mini drones. She gave temporary command of the base to Miharu in case any situation arose. With his aching body, Add was in no mood to fly. Luckily this dropship had an auto pilot option, so lapis could easily fly it. In a few minutes, the duo reached the Illiana from which Add flew a shuttle to the Himmelreich.

"Welcome back...."

Greeting them at the dock was The researcher with a devils body Serena. She was wearing a simple shirt with a tie and a black pleated mini skirt while black stockings covered her sexy legs till the thighs. A large white laboratory coat that reached till her knees gave a 'Scientific' vive. While the loose buttons of her shirt which gave a glimpse of the deep valley and her black underwear along with the lolipop she had in her mouth gave off a very.....hmmm....Seductive feel. Yet her expression was that of a boredom. Add mentally sighed. This lady was either trying to show off her sex appeal to the universe or she was an airhead...probably a bit of both...well those scientists were always beyond the understanding of common people.

Before they had departed for the Planet, Add had requested Serena to go through the archives on the ship and the data recordings of the last warp which brought them here, in hopes of finding an answer. And she hadn't disappointed him. Serena led them to the her lab which was originally a research lab used for medical purposes during the war. Now she had converted it into her own personal laboratory. Add didn't mind. The ship had hundreds of such rooms which lay vacant without any use. The total area of the lab was over two thousand square feet separated into five compounds.

"So Doctor, did you find any possible causes for our situation ?" Add calmly asked.

"Of course, I did. It took some effort though, but i have a probable cause for this 'Inter-Cosmic-travel' we experienced. Please have a seat first."

Add and Irisdina sat down while Serena who had now put on a pair of glasses (which just for info, were fake) began explaining on a large screen. It looked like a teacher teaching her students.

[A/N : Following descriptions have been taken from various posts on the INTERNET and edited to some extent. In no way do I own these articles nor do I claim ownership of them. All rights reserved to their authors.]

"What is a dimension?

What do we mean by 'dimension'? An intuitive description of dimensions is that it's the ways in which we can move – up and down, left and right, forward and backwards – which leads us to believe we live in a three-dimensional world."

Let's think about what this means in terms of giving someone an address. You can specify where you are in two dimensions. For example '10th street and 5th avenue' a simple two dimensional address of how many blocks north-south and how many blocks east-west you are.

But what if you are on a particular floor of a tall office block? Then you'd have to say "5th floor, on 10th Street and 5th Avenue". You have specified three things – how far north or south, how far east or west, and how far up or down – so you have given three coordinates, specifying a point in three-dimensional space.

In fact we are used to living in four dimensions. If you are arranging a meeting then you need to give one more piece of information: the time of the meeting, say 3pm. With four coordinates you can describe any event. These are the usual four dimensions viz; Length, breadth, Width and Time. We don't tend to clump time with the spatial dimensions but if you think about it, any event really happens in a space-time with four dimensions. You can measure differences in time just like you can measure differences in space – we measure differences in space with a ruler and we measure differences in time with a clock. So anything you can think of in terms of space you can think of in terms of time.

We can learn a lesson from this: our human perception of dimensions is limited. We only perceive three dimensions. We can understand that time is an extra dimension, an extra location for any event, but we don't see time in the same way. We experience it very differently from spatial dimensions as human beings. This hints that human perceptions of things may not be the end of the story in terms of what's possible.

Mathematically the number of dimensions is just the number of coordinates you need to specify a point. We're familiar with specifying points in four-dimensional space-time, but can you imagine a space where you need five bits of information? Or six? Or seven…? Mathematicians regularly work in higher dimensional spaces, but they are not the only ones. For example if you're a sound mixer making music you might be working with 12, 24, or even 128 tracks. At each moment in the music each of the, say, 24 tracks has a specific volume, defining a point in a 24-dimensional space of sound. The number of dimensions is just the number of bits of information you need to specify a point.

The famous scientist Einstein combined the three spatial dimensions with additional dimension of time into four-dimensional space-time hundreds of years ago. But at around the same time the Physicist Dr.Klein began to wonder if there were more than three spatial dimensions.

General relativity, which was Einstein's big idea, said that dimensions could be curved. This sounds strange at first but we are used to that as well. The surface of a general planet for example : Earth is two dimensional and it's curved. We specify a location on the surface of the Earth using two coordinates: longitude and latitude. But these coordinates are periodic – you can come back to yourself if you travel 360 degrees around the Earth. The surface of the Earth is a two-dimensional surface inside a three-dimensional space."

Serena was explaining with a projection of the earth. Unknown to the two ladies, a trace of nostalgia and melancholy passed through the eyes of Captain Add.

"Dr Klein hypothesized that, physical space could be curved in a similar way. That particular dimensions don't go on forever in space but the dimensions of space itself could be so curved that space comes back on itself like a circle."

"That sounds a bit weird. Then, could we go off in a rocket ship in a particular direction and then arrive back where you started, just like circling the earth in a plane? Would we notice these curved dimensions?"

Irisdina asked skeptically. Serena nodded as she explained.

"This would depend on the size of the circle around which the dimension curves. If the circle was, say a hundredth or a thousandth the size of an atom, then that is so small you probably wouldn't even notice the presence of that dimension. Imagine rolling up a piece of paper very tightly into a cylinder with a tiny diameter – from a distance you wouldn't notice that it was a cylinder at all, it would look just like a line.

Thinking in terms of coordinates, this would be just like when giving an address in three-dimensional space using only two pieces of information. If my house is located at, say, 4th and 5th streets, and is one step up from the road, I don't normally specify that because it won't really be noticed. If you're traveling four streets one way and five streets another and you come to the house and it's 10 centimetres above the ground because of some tiny step, it's irrelevant to the big picture.

Dr. Klein proposed that you could have one extra spatial dimension but if that dimension was curled up into a circle with a very small radius, smaller than any other scale that was around, then you wouldn't notice it."

"So doctor, how is this relevant to our current situation ?" This time Add broke the flow.

"But it is! As the shortcut to intergalactic travel, passing through a wormhole is a topic that can’t be avoided. Though the 'warp drive' allows us to create a shortcut through space time, we are still bound to the four dimensions. As to, "how to travel through wormholes", had a lot of interesting hypotheses in the physics world. Among them, Doctor Klein’s hypothesis, again, had the most authority. He suggested an hypothetical particle which could, in simple terms, ignore the four dimensions and travel freely. We call it, the 'Klein Particle'.

"Is it...." (Add)

"That’s right. To put it in a simple analogy, mass and energy through two completely parallel tunnels cross the wormhole." As she said this, Serena grabbed a laser pointer to draw a cylinder on the screen. Then she drew two parallel lines, one pass through inside the cylinder, and another pass through outside the cylinder.

"As long as you send the energy at the entrance of wormhole through the tunnel into another dimension to the end of the wormhole and meet with the mass that passes through the wormhole there, it would avoid the part where entropy decreases in the wormhole."

"Detach the energy? Wouldn’t that mean that a living creature die instantly?" Add didn’t understand.

"Therefore, this is the brilliance of Doctor Klein." Serena smiled as she twirled the lolipop around, in her mouth. She drew t1 and t2 at the ends of the screen and gave then a value to 0.

"Time. Based on research, within the wormhole, time, space, and all physic principles are ambiguous. To put it in simple terms, you could spin around a few times before walking to the exit, or you could instantly head for the exit when you enter the wormhole. As long as you find the 'perfect route,' you could decrease the time to pass through the wormhole to 0."

"I’ll give you an analogy. A door frame is put in front you. You have a ball in your hand that represents your temperature. Based on the rule, when the ball passes through the doorframe, I will take it away from you. So instead, the instant you're about to cross the door frame, you throw the ball up and the ball would fly above the doorframe. Then, once you go through the doorframe, you catch the ball, and successfully passed through the door with the ball."

"I see." Major Irisdina half understandingly nodded her head.

"Therefore, how did we pass through this door?" Serena asked them sitting down on a desk. Her beautiful legs laid one above the other.

"Could it be....the Supernova collided with the warp and caused a change in the space time co-ordinates ?" Add replied

"Mhhm, you are half right.... To speak simply, and it is only a theory as of now, when the ship was just in warp, the space time fabric was already being stretched and compressed, which is very normal. But then came the humongous energy of the supernova, a force nothing else can rival in the cosmos. I believe that this energy when met with the space time distortion of the warp created that miracle of an entity-----"

"The Kelin Particle.....isn't it ?" Add sighed.

"Yup! And precisely because of this particle the very nature of the warp changed into that of an wormhole. But thats just half of the story."

"There is more !?" Major Irisdina was loosing her head now. For a strict military woman like her, these stuff were way beyond her league. She glanced at the Captain who eas quietly listening with narrowed eyes, nodding once in a while. 'Freak' she mumbled.

"According to the butterfly effect, the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. While this may not generally be the case, it's a good example of the butterfly effect, or the idea that tiny changes in complex systems can cause huge effects, or that an infinitely small change can lead to an infinitely large result. For example. Consider a child who has obtained a nail and is playing with it while walking on the road. He drops the nail accidentally and moves on while the nail rolls onto the road. Now a car traveling on the road had its tire punctured through, causing the driver to lose control and have an accident. Now the passenger of that car was a general of the army who was supposed to command a war. And because he was in an accident, he could not do his job and it resulted in the country losing the war and being wiped out. Now like this, if we take a particular point in time, there can be numerous futures from that point forward which we cannot predict. An infinite number of universes based on the 'what ifs'. For example. What if the boy hadn't dropped the nail, what if the general's car missed the nail what if...

According to my guess, the moment the supernova interfered with the warp and formed the Klein particles, it created a gate through the fifth dimension and opened a way into one of these infinite universes which runs parallel to ours. And we arrived at that point where we would have in our universe if the supernova had not hit us."

The room turned silent. Who knew a simple transport mission would change into such a bizarre and interesting phenomenon. Major Irisdina furrowed her brows. She understood that the situation was very complicated.

"Doctor, ill ask you a simple question. Please speak the truth" Add stood up, causing Serena who was fiddling with the screen to raise a brow.

"Hmm?"

"Can we go back ?"

Serena narrowed her eyes gazing into the Captains for sometime. But as if not finding what she was looking for she sighed and said.

"Captain, ill be frank. As of now, the answer is No. We cannot. Not unless we figure out how to control klein particles. And even if we did, we would need to know the fifth dimensional coordinates of our universe, or else we will end up in yet another parallel universe."

Add closed his eyes in deep thought. Till now he had a feeling that they were stuck in this universe. But he suppressed it. Maybe he didn't want to cause panic in his heart, maybe he was just denied the truth, but now it was clear. He exhaled tiredly and looked at Serena.

"Doctor, Can you continue working on these....Klein Particles...?"

"Sure, I was planning to do so anyway. The ships data logs have mountains of data of that warp, I believe I can find a lot from those.." She replied with confidence.

"Then so be it. I will support your work with all I can. Even if we cannot make it back, at least if we can tap into the mysteries of Klein particles we should be able to achieve miracles. Ill leave this to you then."

"Sure thing...."

Captain Add and Major Irisdina left her lab and moved towards the bridge. Along the way Major Irisdina was silently thinking about how to tell the truth to her troopers when suddenly Add broke the silence.

"Well then Major. I believe I owe you an Explanation yes ?"

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