Subject Zero: CONFIDENTIAL (Short Stories)

Adventure Book (3)

     World has Spoken

     I awake after the longest slumber of my life with renewed energy and inspiration! World has returned to me at last, this time with an insight so brilliant it can only be described as divine intervention! I wonder where He got this idea, because there was definitely something that inspired it!

     All this time I've been looking for some common behavior to connect these anomalies, but what if what they all share is their HISTORY — a history that exists beyond this Mirror World, in another realm, or "dimension" of weirdness!? What if these various different creatures all "leaked" from their dimension into ours, and the leak is right here in the Mirror World!?

     If I could locate and puncture this weak dimensional fiber and record proof of the dimension beyond, I would have my Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness!

     It is an idea so pure and powerful I never could have thought of it on my own, and never imagined World coming up with it! Sometimes I cannot believe how lucky I am to have come across my blessed World, who I believe comes from the weirdness dimension! How many other great historical minds has His brilliance inspired? Is He even real — on just a part of my fickle imagination? No matter — His insight is surely real, as are the blueprints and footprints He left me for a portal to another dimension...

     And I was led to a bright, colorful school, filled with fascinating creatures. For instance, a Puppet was able to make me freeze in place whenever she looked at me, and as soon as she looked away, I was allowed to move again.

     In the school, there are many, many doors. Some of them lead to different things, but there is one door no one has been able to go through. I've decided to attempt to turn that door into a portal.

    The purist in me wants to build the portal from scratch. I do have the money for it, but not the time. I will need to borrow certain elements from the resource I have turned to in years past for my more ambitious projects, World.

    June 18, 1984

     The design of the machine has hit a roadblock — my own embarrassingly limited mechanical knowledge. Why did I stop taking Hyper-Advanced Engineering and Fifth-Dimensional Calculus after only three semesters? For what? To "treat myself" to that second semester of Applied Quantum Phase Theory? Well, this is where all my slacking off has landed me.

     I have no choice. I must locate an ally and beg her to join me. She is one of the only three people I trust enough to share in this undertaking. I must persuade her to harness her mechanical genius in service to this project, or else abandon my machine entirely.

     June 20

     Success! She has agreed to join me! With her assistance, I am confident we can complete the portal. She has already made several suggestions that I intend to incorporate into my revised designs.

     June 29

     I am overcome with emotion. My ally has sacrificed so much to come to my aid. She has temporarily left her friend (whom she has been taking care of for the past 32 years) behind with World for the duration of this project.

     My Ally

     The past few days have been the most energizing I've had since I first discovered this world! I don't think I realized just how isolated I'd become until my ally, V, arrived, and her brilliant mind and questionable quirks have made this task infinitely more enjoyable, even though she cannot feel many emotions anymore.

     I often catch her staring at a photo of her friend. She says thinking of her loved one keeps her grounded.

     I enjoy seeing her express emotion, as her's were taken from her because of the experiments she endured in the laboratory. Though she speaks in a droll, monotone manner that makes her sound as if she's dead inside, she also has interesting hobbies and ideas that always make her enjoyable to be around. She's come to terms with the idea that she's not human anymore, but her quirks and devotion are exactly what make her human.

     I keep scrambling this "Cubic's Cube" when she's not looking, and she keeps solving it without hesitation. I think it would make her annoyed to see it unsolved for more than two seconds. I'm thinking of modifying it to be unsolvable just to see the look on her face.

     Today while reviewing our portal blueprints and debating the latest fashion trend of "Leg Warmers," V asked me an odd question. She said that the plans in these blueprints were unbelievably complex, and she wondered if anyone else had helped me come up with this idea.

     I internally debated whether I should tell her about World's idea. She is His friend, too. But V can be a very superstitious woman — she crosses herself when she walks over graves although she is friends with the Undertaker. Although I have always wanted to tell someone about my divine experience, I worry that she might think I've gone mad all these years in seclusion, or worse — that I'm tangled in some kind of unsavory black magic. No matter. I told her that with hard wark anything is possible, and gave her a stack of calculations to quintuple-check. Some secrets are best kept that way.

     It occurs to me that if I must keep secrets from V, I might as well begin writing certain passages of this book in code. I aced Cryptology in college, so this will be fun (at least for me. It would be deeply tedious and annoying for someone trying to decipher it). It amuses me to think of their frustrating effort.

{ End of Part III }

[ "you're nothing but an intruder. get out." }