30-Day Flash Challenge, Day 11
This is the third installment in this story
I make it to Gstaad before being captured. But it’s not one of Bobby’s goons that catches me. It is the entity that left me the four-dimensional sunglasses.
I felt jerked sideways as in a direction that I can allude to but not show you. I knew at once I was being pulled into the fourth dimension. Our entire realm is a minor subset of this higher dimension. I knew whoever left the glasses for me was the one yanking me out of my space and into theirs.
It couldn’t come at a better time. Despite all my careful plans, I knew Bobby’s guys were getting close. Too many odd occurrences had been happening. Those guerillas would never find me in this space. But if my rescuer doesn’t have my best interests in mind, then it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The too big face floats before me; my eyes have a hard time focusing on it. I don’t have the glasses with me, they might help, but then I would be able to see inside everything and everyone here. Honestly, I don’t care for either option. I hoped my eyes would adapt soon as I preferred not to throw up near or on a being upon whose mercy I depend.
—
Sensations are overwhelming, swirling, kinetic here. I see everything in 3D chunks. When I move my head, the chunks change. Sometimes they gently shift and morph into something else. Sometimes they quickly reveal entirely new objects or beings of which I was unaware. It’s all profoundly unsettling and disorienting. When I turn my head or move my eyes at all, I see the entire space shift, pivot, and slide. Intuitively, this seems logical to me. If a 2D being were in my 3D world, he would be constrained to see 2D slices of that world. He would have to move his head or eyes to see a different plane, and it would all be profoundly disorienting. That was how it was for me. I blinked a lot. Long blinks to keep panic from seizing my brain and jumping to my feet and looking for whatever portal I was just drug through.
Our first attempts at conversation were frustrating for both of us. Eventually, the figure that looked like an animated cubist painting picked up a small, undulating box that is black, green, blue, and a fourth color that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before; it is all of these colors and none at the same time. It shifts and oozes. Or maybe that’s just my limited perceptual facilities trying to adapt to the burden of handling one extra dimension of data.
The creature placed five pads on my skull. Then, with the device, it, as far as I can tell, read my brain. Then it created a translator device for me. It converted what it was trying to say to me into English text. And I get the sense that I’m in the room of a child. That is the technology their children have. I might be in a lab of the greatest scientific minds here, but that is not the impression I get from this room.
The flickering, herky-jerky limb of my host gestures towards me and at a screen it wants me to watch. On it, I see a puppy, a plain, non-flickering, three-dimensional golden retriever. Then it points at me.
Yep, if I’m not mistaken, my host has just informed me that it considers me its pet now. Oh, that’s terrific, I tell myself, not sure whether I believe it.
The entity is much larger than me, much more evolved, and blessed with all a technology that seems a great deal like magic. I resign myself to being the best pet I can be. It beats being on the run from Bobby.
—
It took about three weeks (I have no conception of time here), but eventually, the visual sensations began to organize themselves into predictable patterns in my brain. There were still glitches here and there as my brain resynchronized with the vast amounts of new sensations and new sensory modes, but slowly I began to understand how to move in this space.
While it is probably not literally true, I feel myself become thicker here, like I’m slowly extruding into a new dimension, growing thickness where previously I had none. Am I becoming 4D? How should I know? I’m just a puppy.
—
Being a puppy, while intriguing for a minute, wasn’t all it cracked up to be. I tell J’Aquineder I want to visit my world. It either understands me, or it’s grown bored with the novelty of having a human pet, either way, it makes no move to stop me when I slide sideways across the portal back to home.
I click into this space.
As I find my feet again, this entire space seems smaller because it is smaller. Existence is more constrained here. Understanding floods my mind. I’m awash in revelations about space and time. It’s then I realize that I am no longer a mere citizen of the other realm; I’ve changed. Now I’m a resident of a higher dimension.
There? I’m merely a pet.
Here? Here, I’m a god. I can perform magic that makes my earlier exploits with safecracking seem like child’s play.
Here I can still feel part of me extending beyond the axis of this place, anchoring me there. It’s my strength. My foundation and when I move here, the motion is always rooted there. I am a four-dimensional being. I fear no man in this place.
Not even a vicious thug like Bobby.
I may be just a four-dimensional pet, but this doggy has teeth. Bobby will soon learn that.
Stories by Shawn 
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