Icicle: A Tensor Matrix

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Thorpe awoke abruptly. One moment he was in a deep sleep; the next, he was wide awake, fully conscious of his strange surroundings. And strange they were. He seemed to be inside whatever it was he had collapsed around himself, but it wasn’t like the Klein bottle into which he had rolled himself before he went to sleep. It was moving around him, and he was moving around it. He had a clear sense of fore and aft, left and right, and even up and down. But he also had a clear sense of something else—words failed him, but he thought of it as inside and outside, an additional dimension that somehow seemed quite natural in his present state.

My present state, he thought, and what is that? I must have died. I think I remember that. And now I’m no longer dead—but neither am I alive. Pieces of his childhood flashed through his mind—Sunday school…Heaven…Hell, but he shrugged those off as childish memories. I died, but no Heaven, no Purgatory, no Hell…I’m alive! I definitely exist. I have some control over my environment. He thrust his arm through the wall of his encasing structure. It felt like his arm penetrated something…but wait…I don’t have an arm…yet Thorpe felt fingers moving at the end of the hand he didn’t have.

He was dreaming…about a flowing Klein bottle and something else…but it danced ahead of him in his dreamscape, and he could not quite define it…

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

It had been several hours since Thorpe collapsed himself into a seemingly impenetrable tesseract. Daphne had volunteered to stay around for the night and had spent most of her time on a lumpy cot Dale had pulled from the utility closet. Her Link awakened her with an alarm she had set to monitor any change in the dynamic hypercube. She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and shook out her copper-red curls, running her fingers through her tresses.

The tesseract still performed its rotating-self-penetrating dance, but something protruded, fuzzy and difficult to bring into focus—Protruding from the top, she thought, but the darn thing has no top. She stood and stretched, fingers clasped over her head.

“Define the protrusion,” she said to her Link.

“It’s a fourth-order tensor,” her Link responded.

“Zoom in,” she ordered, and as it did, to her astonishment, the fuzzy, hard-to-define objectified tensor morphed into a completely normal human hand with four fingers and a thumb, all wiggling.

“Can you create something the hand can grasp?” Daphne asked her Link. A soft-looking green ball appeared in the holodisplay. “Move the ball toward the hand and press it against the palm.” The fingers closed around the ball, and the hand disappeared. “What happened?”

“The tensor collapsed,” her Link informed her.

“And the green ball?’

“It disappeared.”

“I know that. Where did it go?”

“I don’t know.” The Link sounded a bit bewildered.

But of course, that’s not possible, she thought, staring at the rotating-self-penetrating image in the holodisplay. Links have no emotions.

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Something soft and rubbery touched his hand—The hand I don’t have, Thorpe thought. He closed his fingers around it and pulled his hand back inside. He held it up and looked it over.

This is weird, he thought. I don’t have arms, I don’t have fingers, I don’t have eyes, so how the hell am I holding this green rubber ball, squeezing it in my hand, and looking at it? He stretched and stood to his feet, tossing the ball from hand to hand. The structure surrounding him expanded to accommodate his height. Then he slipped the ball into his right trouser pocket. Pocket! Where the hell did that come from? What is this? He sat down, putting his head in his hands. As he did, the structure collapsed in around him, but he spread his arms out, stopping the collapse, and struggled back to his feet. I didn’t understand all the innards of my car, but I was a good driver. I don’t have to understand this to use it…

Thorpe came to his feet again, noting that he was wearing a pair of sneakers, withdrew the green ball from his pocket, and holding the ball in front of him, pushed his way through the structure encasing him.

More dreams…a swirling dervish…a green rubber ball…sneakers…an awareness other than his…

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

Daphne watched the tesseract for several minutes as it remained unchanged. Then, in a twinkling, so fast she nearly missed it, a fully dressed man stood beside the dancing image, tossing a green ball from hand to hand. He looked straight at her—not so much at her as through her. He turned to the tesseract and kicked it, except instead of his foot landing against the moving dervish, his foot penetrated it, looking ever so much like a foot in a swirling white cloud.

I’ve got to communicate with him, send him a signal of some kind, she thought. “Send the Icicle a microvolt pulse,” she said to her Link. A moment later, a brilliant lightning-like flash struck the holographic man, and he collapsed into the swirling tesseract.

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Thorpe stood tall outside the structure. He tossed the green ball from hand to hand; it felt good. He examined the structure in which he had lurked moments earlier. Its four-dimensional shape, as seen from outside, was new to him but easy to understand. The left and right, fore and aft, up and down, and in and out made perfect sense, something to be accepted, like the green ball. He kicked at the structure, and his foot penetrated the side without the least bit of resistance. As he pondered his seeming acceptance of the weirdness around him, without warning, a lightning bolt struck him.

Initially, he felt his entire universe expand around him, but not just around him—he seemed to expand along with it. It was as if he split into a thousand pieces that quickly coalesced back into whatever it was that he recognized as himself. Giving it no further thought, he collapsed himself to safety back inside the structure—his hidey-hole.

Thorpe ached in places where he had no places. He felt weak and disoriented, but he was still whole, he decided, as he felt himself from head to foot. He curled up, but just before he drifted into a dreamless sleep, for a brief moment, he felt like there were two of him, as if he were looking at his curled-up self from a distant point.

A bright flash pulled him to full wakefulness. A swirling vortex surrounded him, pulling him into itself. He resisted mightily while casting his gaze down its length. A figure! He saw an unmoving figure at the end curled into a fetal ball. The figure was fuzzy, indistinct. With great effort, he brought the image into focus…and gasped…it was himself! Then, HE was the curled-up figure, and sensed that he was gazing at himself…and then he was once again gazing at the distant figure.

With an effort, he broke free from the vortex and found himself standing in a small room that was almost entirely filled with a swirling dervish that looked much like a Klein bottle whose surface was in constant motion. The bottle’s loop extended into a tunnel on the opposite side of the chamber. It was wildly confusing; he needed time to sort things out.

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

When Fredricks and Dale arrived a couple of hours later, Daphne replayed the event from her Link.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

“I think you hurt him,” Fredricks said, replaying the event again. “How much power did you put into that pulse?”

“Less than a microvolt.”

“Check everything over carefully,” Dr. Fredrick said to Dale. “Make sure the firewall is intact, and the real-time backup is still functioning. After that, check the expanded matrix.” He pointed to a larger electronic box resting on the workbench. “Make sure it can contain Thorpe when we move him.” He turned to Daphne. “Stick with Dale. Back him up and make sure he misses nothing.” He turned toward his office. “Let’s leave Thorpe alone until he decides to come out of that hypercube,” Fredricks said, shutting his office door.

The rest of the day was uneventful. Fredricks worked on a forthcoming paper while Daphne and Dale traced the circuitry of the electronic matrix that formed the core of the device that held Thorpe and then the backup matrix and the trunk between the two. Then they did the same with the expanded matrix that would become Thorpe’s new home.

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX—BRAXTON

Something roused him from his reverie, an undefined activity from outside the chamber that caused flashes of colored light to appear briefly in a patterned array across the chamber walls. Then the flashes moved to the flowing surface of the Klein bottle loop in the tunnel, and then to the swirling surface of the Klein bottle in his chamber. He reached out gingerly to touch the surface where a flash had been. His hand penetrated the surface as if it were not there. On a hunch, he stepped into the surface…and found himself inside the Klein bottle with a curled-up figure of himself at his feet, Quickly, he stepped backward through the swirling surface and sat down on the floor to think.

LOS ANGELES—DAPHNE’S APARTMENT

Daphne arrived at her apartment in a high-rise on Santa Monica Boulevard at the western end of the Miracle Mile. It was a comfortable unit that met her needs, where she was as safe as one could expect in modern Los Angeles. Her gray tabby, Max, met her at the door, mewing softly, tail straight in the air. Daphne set about feeding Max and changing his litter, and then she fixed herself a light meal that she placed on the raised eating counter in her small kitchenette.

As Daphne sipped a glass of chardonnay and dabbled at her food, she hooked her Link into the lab feed to check on Thorpe. All she saw was the dancing tesseract in the air before her. Max jumped onto her lap, watching the swirling form intently.

“What do you see that I don’t, Max?”

Max responded with a chirrup and jumped at the swirling dervish, passing through the holoimage to the floor behind. Daphne laughed, pushing her high stool away from the counter.

“It’s not real, Max. You can’t catch it.”

But Max didn’t give up so easily. He walked around the image to where it faded out and then strolled through the image to Daphne. He stood on his hind legs, forepaws on the rung of a second stool, and uttered a quiet chitter, and then he turned to look at Daphne.

“What is it, Max? Do you see something more than just a swirling dervish…something I can’t see?” Max jumped into her lap, alternating purr and chitter while she stroked him gently, occasionally scratching the prominent tabby-M between his eyes.

Max commenced a quiet howl, a sound Daphne recognized as his danger alert. Moments later, the tesseract briefly expanded to fill the entire kitchenette. Then it collapsed to the size of a basketball on the floor beside Thorpe, who suddenly appeared, looking into the distance in a way that convinced her that he could not see her. Max started and hunkered down in Daphne’s lap, growling softly, ears laid back with fat tail and fur rising along his spine.