Icicle: A Tensor Matrix

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Thorpe looked around after extracting himself from the structure. Since only his head had been preserved, he reasonably presumed that the form he displayed to himself was virtual. Thorpe was well educated, with a strong math and engineering background. He was widely read and had a good understanding of the world he had lived in. He could use the Web and had a reasonable grasp of how it worked. Same with his laptop and the other accouterments that populated the word he had left. He followed space developments, especially those in the private sector. It seemed to him that if humans would ever permanently leave Earth, it would happen at the hands of entrepreneurs, not big government programs. He was especially good at making money with an entrepreneurial flair. This is what had enabled him to preserve his head when cancer had taken him so prematurely.

So here he stood, in what could only be some kind of electronic apparatus. He presumed people were monitoring his activities in some manner, but he had no idea how many years had passed since his death, no idea what levels science and technology had reached, no idea whether he was an unwanted anachronism or a bold new experiment at the limits of modern research.

Thorpe examined the structure that had so recently held him. He had no idea what to call it, but he was very clear that it had front and back, left and right, up and down, and inside and outside. Like everybody, he instinctively understood the three spatial dimensions and had read about how time was the fourth dimension. The structure beside him, his recent hidey-hole, clearly moved through time at the same rate he and everything else around him did. Yet, he could see, and somehow understood four other dimensions distinct from time, something he had never experienced before. A word slipped into his mind—tesseract. He rolled the word around his tongue to see how it felt. Tesseract—a four-dimensional cube as he recalled. He remembered seeing an animated illustration of a tesseract—sort of a rotating cube passing through itself in three dimensions.

Thorpe let his eyes roam over the inside of the space he occupied with his hidey-hole. The floor beneath his feet felt solid. The walls, however, seemed fuzzy, somewhat indistinct, and they curved over his head like a dome. He walked several steps ahead and stopped. Everything looked just as it had before; even his hidey-hole still rested near his right foot; it was as if he had not moved. He pivoted slowly to face the opposite direction. The hidey-hole stayed where it was, but then everything went fuzzy for a moment, and he and the hidey-hole once again had their original orientation. In fact, Thorpe couldn’t tell if he had pivoted back around, or the hidey-hole had flipped to his other side, or if somehow his entire space had slipped through itself, turning itself outside-in, right-side-left, down-side-up, or back-side-front—or perhaps all of these. Things he remembered from his previous life moved through time with three spatial dimensions, but this place had four, something he understood and not, simultaneously.

As Thorpe stared into the fuzziness, part of the wall ahead of him seemed to waver and pull back, revealing what looked like a corridor. He stepped toward it, and as he did, the corridor became more distinct as if beckoning him to enter.

I’ve really got nothing to lose, Thorpe muttered to himself as he stepped purposefully into the corridor.

Shortly, he found himself in another space, larger than the previous one, same fuzzy, curved walls, but with a sense there was a lot more to it than before. Thorpe began to feel uneasy and looked around for his hidey-hole. When he could not find it, a sense of urgency filled him, a feeling close to panic. As the sheer magnitude of what was happening began to overwhelm him, the fuzzy walls collapsed in on him, and he found himself once more inside his hidey-hole—the tesseract.

For a while, he just sat, letting thoughts flow across his mind like a brook over a bed of gravel. I remember things I don’t recall actually happening to me, he pondered. I remember feeling things that I don’t remember feeling.

He eased his way through a whole gamut of memories that somehow were not really his. Then the flash and vortex…from that point his memories were his own.

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

The following morning, Daphne briefed Fredricks and Dale on her experience with Thorpe the night before, and especially Max’s reaction.

“It’s unlikely,” Fredricks said, “that Max can somehow sense another dimension. He is, after all, closely linked genetically to us, and we certainly don’t see it.”

“Not that closely,” Daphne said. “Have you ever owned a cat?”

After a good chuckle, Daphne and Dale turned to the task of linking the expanded matrix with a five-centimeter-thick cable to the original one in which they had dropped Thorpe’s essence. They watched Thorpe’s antics as he seemed to experiment with the nature of his enclosure, and then they activated the electronic pathway from the first into the second matrix. The new matrix was an order of magnitude larger and more complex, although it appeared much the same in the holoimage their Link interface presented to them. Thorpe cautiously entered what looked like a corridor on their holoimage presentation.

“Look, Dale,” Daphne said. “The tesseract stayed behind.”

Thorpe seemed to be looking for it with an expression of growing concern on his face. Then the holoimage expanded to fill the room before collapsing into the spinning dervish as before when Thorpe disappeared from the holoimage.

“What do we know?” Fredricks asked, staring at the swirling, self-penetrating mass.

“He’s mobile inside the matrix,” Dale offered.

“He bolts into the tesseract when he feels threatened,” Daphne added.

“The tesseract finds him, or he finds it when he needs it,” Dale said.

“What we really know,” Fredricks added, “is that that,” he pointed to the physical matrix, “is a very compact, highly sophisticated array of processors, memory devices, and constantly evolving pathways between individual elements into which we transferred the entire (we think) signal set we detected in the Icicle’s preserved brain. Don’t get sucked into the Link presentation.” He smiled at them. “It’s just an artifact.”