“Are you aware of 4 dimensions Ada?” A very angry looking old man asked me.

“Yes, of course! But the weird thing there is not a four-dimensional obje- ”

“It is one. A four-dimensional object that exists beyond our known reality, has finally come to us. We, physicists, have been sitting around for too long. Now it is time to get to work.”

“But how in the world did a 4-dimensional object come here?” I asked the kinder looking scientist next to him. 

       “ You see Miss Ada, space flows where the time goes.”, He waved his hands wildly as he explained the rest, “ It is known to us already that the universe is expanding, so a four-dimensional bubble has luckily chanced upon its path of movement. When a four-dimensional object comes to a three dimensional one, what we humans can view is only its 3-dimensional shadow, similar to our 2D one. That is why the shadow is a neverending burst of various 3d shapes. The bubble collided with a part of D.C., but it was small enough not to cause any casualties, according to the esteemed Sir Roger here-”, upon which the old physicist knitted his eyebrows and sat down to think. 

I noticed that many famous scientists started filling up the dingy room that hardly had a window. I felt a little left out, being a commonplace low-level nuclear engineer, but I was the one who spotted it first, and I had nothing to lose.

Sir Roger clapped his hands with a large smile at the intellectual gathering, “People have been saying that theoretical physicist is one of the dumbest jobs ever, and now a time has come where only we can help. Sir Drake and I, are naming this research lead, as the IT project, which stands for Interdimensional Trespasser. And from now on we will refer to the 4-dimensional creature as IT.

                                        Our game plan is for anyone from the project team to be able to see IT before IT expands into nothingness. But we have no technology at present that will enable us to morph through space and time to create a 4-dimensional robot-”

A scientist with a blue jacket snorted from the crowd- “We can’t even create a 4D cube, let alone a whole robot.”

“What you say is true, M. Iseult.” Sir Roger said in disdain. “But are here to solve problems, not excruciatingly de-sacralize them.-” 

                     “To get into the 4th dimension, we need directions we haven’t experienced yet. We know up, down, left, right, and sideways, but what we ideally need to create is inward and outward.” A scientist clamoured nervously. 

Sir Roger stated that he knew the fact already, but how would one go about with it?

         “We could de-LHC some quantum particles to completely alter the mechanism of the body of the passenger, moving his body outward and the organs could regenerate due to atoms?” That was me this time. My voice was dry and I felt a hundred beady eyes and enormous grey brains staring at me.

“ This is not science fiction Ada. Are you proposing that we create a Large Hadron Collider, except instead of colliding, it averts itself?" Sir Roger asked me.

“A Large Hadron Invertor, I suppose. CERN has already done something with Axions and Photon Regeneration, I think?-”

“Yes, OSQAR!” said Sir Drake, “It exposed a laser beam containing photons to a 9 Tesla magnetic field. This field – the strongest ever used in an axion search – causes some of the photons in the laser to turn into axions. I, lead the experiment.” He proudly beamed. “It helped prove the Big Bang Theory and the String Theory, which says that elementary particles like quarks and gluons are connected via oscillating strings.”

“Could you create something like that, with the atoms in our body?” I asked, with the enthusiasm of a preschooler who spelt something correctly for the first time.

“ Well…you know we can’t breach the fundamental law, atoms can neither be created, nor be destroyed, you are asking for none of that, but only to switch the juxtaposition of the quantum particles, which has a 50 per cent chance of not failing.

But the question is, how exactly do we achieve that?”

“Using warp speed!”, a red-haired young scientist squealed, “I wrote 3-4 papers on it. If we can initiate warp at the right moment, when in heavy-ion collisions, after the quark-gluon plasma there is a hadronic gas phase. So during that phase, we can warp the candidate, switch atoms, and morph the candidate using warp, to the coordinates of IT! And then the person can get a look at the first extra-dimensional object ever existed! Oh! And we can throw a camera in the atom switcher too!”

Sir Roger, who had been quiet for quite some time, said “You all make it sound so easy like it is an Alice in Wonderland show where she eats and becomes small or big. We may have the technology, but the Queen of Hearts holds us back.”, he sighed deeply.

                  “ Who is he talking about?” I whispered to a nearby visitor.

                       “Politicians, media, the government. These are a physicists nightmare.”

From a pubic invitation, the IT project turned into a highly private deal, because of the drawbacks they much feared they would get from points of authority, looking at the scale of experiments they were running, and some unethical.

The scientists calculated that the shrinking 4D bubble would only stay for a few more months before it disappeared completely. So we got on to work from the day I found IT. For attaining warp speed, the scientists used dark energy, which was in abundance in the known universe. I, moved around asking everyone questions. 

              “Why did our many astronomy units and research centres not see the bubble coming? They should have spotted it from far away in the galaxy right?” I asked a scientist huddling around the repulsive gravity containers. 

                      “ If we enter a flat land, where there are only flat people who know just left and right, then they would not be able to see us, since they do not know up and down. We don't yet know the concept of inward and outward, and the universe is full of hidden matter, plenty of space. The bubble came using the hidden space, so even our high 23rd-century technology would not be able to detect it.”

Warp was then established, using repulsive gravity, antimatter, and faster than light speed. They injected it into a ship, one of the finest, and watched as the test run showed matter increasing in the back and decreasing in the front, so swiftly that it looked like the object hasn't moved at all as it warped from point A to B.

Meanwhile, another group created an Inverter Tokamak,(IT again) a form of a plasma membrane that had free particles in it, programmed to switch the atoms in the body forward, and ideally regenerate everything from cells, tissues, organs, skin and muscles, outward. China’s artificial sun would be jealous.

After the building, it came to the experimentation. 

“Everyone wanted to help create it, but none of these people wants to go in the tokamak..”

                               Sir Roger said, after eight weeks of constant worry and questioning. None of the intelligent scientists wanted to be the one testing the thing they created. Everyone feared the probabilities of what might happen if things go wrong, the pain of atoms being torn out of the body and misplacing themselves-

                                                   “I can go if the others are okay with it.”, I said, although not entirely sure why I said that. 

Sir Roger opened his arms and eyes wide, in disbelief. He said no one wishes to go, so Sir Drake would read out the precautions to be taken, as he wildly shook my hand in thankfulness. 

The precautions were many, and what I wore did not matter, because, in the fourth dimension, all clothes would merely be a line on the sides. 

I got in the tokamak, and for the first time in my life, I felt important.

 I trusted the math.

I was warped into the tokamak, blurred and buried with cartloads of anaesthesia, and I could not make out the quantum particles jumping in and out of my body, to switch the atoms’ positions.

All was blank and dark, I could only make out my hand distinctly different than before, with my bones, muscles, and nerves displayed. 

I had been turned outward.

________________________________________________

The next thing I remember is being in front of a … IT.

Was IT like I imagined? No. We are not merely cubes, spheres, cylinders and cones. We are a unique blend. So was IT. With the colours of a prism, like dark matter’s dusty purple hue reflected of ITs many folded glass bead daggers. I could see my organs in ITs reflection, and something in my hand. A camera that had been thrown into the tokamak, run in separate algorithms to make it 4 dimensional. 

I took a few pictures of IT, whence I realized, IT was not alive.

IT was a corpse. IT was a plaything of the 4th dimension, but lifeless all the same.

The cosmos is irresponsible. Whatever happened to any sentient beings here, it wasn’t good. If we crossed into a two-dimensional world, we would be crushed and ground like paper. What I saw was the crushed remains of a friendly visitor, who did not know what was coming. The 4th dimension was unpredictable. Enormous. So vast, I could not imagine it. 

My pictures will turn up in tomorrow’s headlines, with my name emblazoned on them. My parents will be proud, It will be all everyone talks about for the next few years. But no one will know about our multiple, sprawling, scary, horrifying destinies. 

We might be next.

When I got back, the atmosphere was much unlike what I thought it would be. Sir Riger was muttering under his breath, "Big picture made up of little pictures ... Hard to care about two armies fighting. One wins, one loses. Can't anthropomorphize galaxy." and others were discussing the dark forest theory. 

Apparently, the world as we know it, would be engulfed in the 4th dimension, because of the constant expanding.

Red lights blared from every corner.
Deafening noises awoke the sleeping humans in the opposite hemisphere.
A dark purple line shot across the planetarium, and started to shred the atmosphere.

Our three dimensional world was collapsing. The dark forest was taking over. 

In just a few seconds, just like Schopenhauer said, Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.

The melting earth floated across the sadistic galaxy we called our own amidst the songs of the star weaving clouds. We made such a commotion, living the way we live, killing our own people, and now everyone, every celebrity, politician, monarch, the beggar, the human is no more. 

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing. Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. 

Existence precedes and rules essence.

The universe is silent now. 
War is peace.

 “The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.”

- Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.