It…felt. That was the only way to describe the indistinct sense of identity that drifted from the fog of unconsciousness. Slowly at first, it became aware of limbs and body, spreading until recognition struck. A person. It…no, he. He was a man. That much he knew. He could hear sounds as well, the omnipresent hum of fluorescent lighting and the soft beeping of machinery. Squeaks of shoes on linoleum floors broke up sterile machine noises in the background. The sound of someone chewing quietly lent an organic feel to an otherwise cold, industrial sense of the place. His nose twitched at a familiar aroma. Turkey.  Onion.  Tomato.  Sandwiches?.

He flexed the fingers of one hand, then the other, feeling slight resistance from something light that was covering him. Sheet. Timidly, he lifted his eyelids and peered about the room: white walls, fluorescent lights, a white sheet and a blue blanket, odd looking bed. Hospital. Words drifted up from somewhere, but he didn’t know from where. One bleary glance told him that other people were in the room. His eyes refused to focus properly at first.  Some reclined in the strange hospital beds. Patients. Others wore white coats and draped gowns of varying colors and stood about the room. Doctor, nurse.

The light hurt his eyes, so he closed them. Amid the general backdrop of pain throughout his body, he slowly discovered that aside from the bodily ache that stretched from his marrow to his skin, and from head to toe, nothing seemed broken.

“Doctor, Subject Four just moved,” intoned a pleasant alto, female, resonating with a nervous timbre. He opened his eyes again, with less pain this time. He saw the doctor approach, stethoscope in hand. The doctor was an older man, with grey in his hair and a look of gentle experience mingled with excited curiosity. The nurse, wearing a severe bun and white uniform, took another patient’s pulse while occasionally casting a furtive  look in his direction.

He spoke the first thing that came to mind. ”Where am I?” More questions came pouring out as clarity started to return to his addled consciousness.  His tongue felt like a dried out footy sock shoved into his mouth as he attempted to speak further, “How did I get here? And more importantly why do I feel like I was run over by a road train? I hurt everywhere.” He was shocked at how dry and powerless his voice sounded. I don’t usually sound like this , do I?

He tried to clear his throat, but instead a painful rasping escaped his lips. The doctor, sympathy etched across his features, reached over to the bedside table and poured him some water, then raised the bed to a seated position. With no less care, the doctor handed the man the glass.  

“We were hoping you’d tell us,” the doctor encouraged with a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, you haven’t broken anything.”

The water felt glorious sliding down his throat, but something caught the man’s  attention.

That smile. The doctor looked innocuous enough. It was the eyes. The smile never reached those brown irises hiding behind a pair of spectacles. Now that he was looking closer, the doctor appeared tense.

The doctor swallowed repeatedly.  He also brushed the hair back over his ears more than once, even though his close-cropped hair needed no attention.  And the medical man’s posture was as rigid as his death grip on the medical chart he kept checking.

“God don’t tell me I actually was run over and forgot it?” he remarked sarcastically before taking another gulp of water, eyeing his caregivers. He felt dehydrated and his stomach gurgled appreciatively.

“No. That’s . . . not how you came to be here.” The doctor replied.  He shot a concerned glance towards the nurse before looking back at him. “My name is Doctor Gillette. This is Nurse Janet Simpson. What’s your name?”

He opened his mouth to answer the question and then closed it. Feeling like the village idiot, he answered haltingly, “…well this is kind of embarrassing Doc, but…I don’t know. How come I don’t know my own name? What kind of accident was I in?”

Doctor Gillette gave him a look of concern that appeared a bit more genuine this time. “Seems like you might have some amnesia there.”

He took out a pen and notepad and slid them across an overbed table. “Try signing your name, and take a look at the other patients. You all arrived together, so you might remember them.”

He took the pen in his left hand. It just felt more natural and he signed across the paper with a flourish. “Er, my name is ‘Snake’ apparently. That’s a bloody weird name.”

It occurred to him that whilst he and the doctor spoke the same language there were some differences in enunciation. “Doc. Why do you sound so weird to me?”

Dr. Gillette collected the paper and pen, frowning at the signature before putting them back in his pocket. “I’m American.  You sound British or Australian.  I don’t quite have an ear for accents,” he replied. “Mind if I call you Snake? Take a look at the others. Do you recognize them, can you tell me their names?”

“Oh you’re a Merry, I . . . don’t know why I said that,” Snake shrugged and glanced around the room. With his bed raised, he could see the other people clearly. An extremely handsome Asian man with astonishing dark violet eyes smiled and waved cheerfully at him. An enormous black woman just nodded in his direction, barely pausing in her consumption of sandwich. The light amethyst glint from the sexy black woman’s strange eyes was somewhat intimidating.

Two people with purple eyes? What are the odds?

Two others looked sound asleep: a dark-haired female teenager, and a blonde woman he guessed was in her mid thirties. He took a long look at each of them, hoping for some bells to go off, but nothing happened.

“Sorry Doc, I got zilch. Hmm. Budgie smugglers, mozzies, vegemite, strewth, crikey, stone the crows, I’ve got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock. It’s a colourful language isn’t it?” He grinned and couldn’t help noticing Nurse Janet give a secretive sort of smile. Her reaction cheered him slightly.

“Pilot . . . ” murmured the unconscious blonde woman in the bed next to him while Nurse Janet checked her pulse.

“Wait, what did she say? Pilot?” Snake rolled the word around more, testing its syllables, “Pi-lot . . .” It sounded familiar to him.  The muttered word triggered a feeble memory.

There was a room, crowded with people. The other patients were there and more, unrecognizable people besides, including an older Asian male and a young man with olive skin and dark hair.  They were all seated around a glowing hologram that displayed a complicated three dimensional map. In the middle of the projection was planet Earth.

Other glowing Earths spiraled outwards like a fractal mathematical design, beautiful and precisely complex. Between the glowing spheres were small frames of light, dense with text and what looked like a musical score. Spinning delicately, the text and musical notes changed.

The whole scene gave Snake chills, so familiar and so real, yet he couldn’t place where he could have gotten such a memory. He remembered a question in the background of the meeting, “Can you do it Pilot?”

The remembrance ended and his eyes refocused to meet Gillette’s, “Ohh, hey I . . . I got something back just then. She, the blonde woman, she’s called me ‘Pilot’ before. That’s funny. I don’t feel like a pilot; I feel like a musician. Maybe that’s why my name is Snake. Nah, I can’t actually be a pilot - I don’t know anything about lightships.”

             Stanford adjusted the position of the Instrument again under the stereoscope using the robot arms, twisting it slightly.

“Unauthorised DNA detected.” The machine stated in a dry feminine voice that possessed a faint echo, like two people speaking at once. “Security protocols engaged. Access denied.  Please return me to Pilot. Thank-you.”

“Damn.” A short time ago the Instrument, as they were calling it, started communicating. However, the device’s security protocols quickly suppressed their initial burst of excitement

Stanford hissed in frustration. It just kept repeating the same statement again and again. At least the Instrument hadn’t reacted with the same shocking jolt of electricity as the weapon.  When Dr. Brown had touched it, a visibly arcing charge flung her against the nearest wall,  knocking her unconscious. Hence the robot arms.

The researchers tried to find a plug or entry point with which to attach a computer to the Instrument, but there weren’t any. Unlike a normal bass guitar, which is what the object most resembled, there was no amp jack, only a weird acoustic well that glowed a soft green color. It was an unlikely fusion of metal and wood and a myriad of internal circuitry.

Several of his staff wanted to cut open the casing and look for something to tap into.  The ultrasonic revealed an internal structure, but the analysis merely reinforced their preliminary assessment.

A small, glowing crystal sat nestled within the resonating chamber of the instrument. And like any instrument, the rest of the structure augmented that chamber.

Dr. Wright suggested a different approach.

It’s in position now. Stanford focused on the softly glowing translucent crystal. “Alright. Crystalline formation. I’m not a geologist, but this doesn’t look natural. Solid, with a secondary dendrite formation inside it. Its appearance is reminiscent  of a snowflake.” Stanford summarized for the benefit of his colleagues who stood at their stations, monitoring the continuous output of multiple apparatus. At any moment, he could ask for anything from barometric pressure to radioactivity and they could give him a number.

Dr. Christine Brown and Dr. Bob Wright watched their screens as Stanford expounded on his observations of the crystal for the audio recorder.

Although the three of them shared similar fields of study, both Dr. Brown and Dr. Wright worked for NASA in the Jet Propulsion Lab, whereas Stanford remained an outside consultant.

Naturally, he’d seen them both around at various conferences. After their last, joint project, he considered Bob more of a friend than casual acquaintance.  

Christine sported a bandage on her hand from where the weapon had electrocuted her earlier that day. When Stanford tried to suggest that she take time off to rest, she’d threatened to castrate him with a rusty spoon and told him there was no way she was letting this opportunity pass her by.

True to her word, there she stood doggedly compiling data and readings.

Stanford adjusted the magnification of his lens concentrating on the strange structure within the crystal. This was the power source for the whole device. After blowing the fuses on four multimeters of increasing capacity trying to determine the electrical potential, they had begrudgingly set aside that curiosity. For now.

He blinked slowly, twice and then a third time when his thoughts still refused to order themselves. His excitement combined with the sleep deprivation into a volatile cocktail and the coffee only made it worse.  His mind ran through a multitude of potential applications rather than obediently deciphering what was right in front of him., That energy source!  We could be on the verge of a breakthrough for humanity here.

“Storage or generation? I know crystals can contain salts; you think it’s galvanic?” Bob inquired and broke through Stanford’s swirling thoughts.

“I’d say generation, given the off-the-scale power reading. No Geiger reaction, not even a blip, so it isn’t nuclear. No observable chemical reaction, so it can’t be galvanic. Green and translucent might suggest bio-generation, but at this magnification, I’d see any organisms.” Stanford proposed ticking off possibilities on his fingers and sighing.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried refocusing on the microscopic detail.  Failing, he rubbed his eyes clear of sleep and frustration.

Bob and Christine reviewed other readings, brows furrowed as further intricate details flashed onto half a dozen monitors. Their eyes were bloodshot from hours under harsh fluorescent lights, fueled on caffeine and pastries.  Diagnostic work on the machine progressed and anticipation crept into their every feature as they marveled at what they saw.

Stanford leaned forward and traced the hexagonal outline of the crystalline structure with a capped pen on one monitor, then looked quickly back and forth to several others.

He spoke slowly and carefully as the new idea emerged like the sun over a distant horizon, spreading fresh light over his weary thoughts.  “You know, it reminds me of a piezoelectric crystal. They’re used to generate ultrasonic sound waves, and this looks like a guitar. We also use piezos to generate electricity.”

“Dr. Ellis, you might be onto something. If it is, our piezoelectric crystals are the equivalent of zinc and copper nails in a lemon by comparison.” Christine interjected with a brightness in her tone that he’d not heard in hours. “The structure inside, does that look like a fractal repetition to anyone else?”

“It could be a Julia Set or some other form of repeating structure,” Bob replied. “Any way to test it’s a piezo?”

“Well any piezoelectric material produces electricity from mechanical compression. I’m shooting blind here. This maintains a charge which a piezo shouldn’t.” Stanford took a sip of coffee, or the sewage this place called coffee anyway. “It must be that secondary formation.”

“If it is a piezo - hmm, mechanical stress would produce a response.” Stanford stated.

“Okay.” Christine said. “This power unit moved five people and all this equipment who knows how far. . . if we thump it with a hammer, we could release a lot more energy than we want. Like a monkey with a bone club prodding a nuclear pile,” she concluded wryly.

Stanford grinned in agreement, “Well, I don’t feel like playing the monkey. Let’s forgo the mechanical stress test until we can devise appropriate precautionary measures.”

“Why embed the power source in an instrument to begin with?” Bob pondered.  “If it is a piezo crystal, is it to produce, or possibly, absorb specific sound frequencies? We could focus different sounds at it, see if that elicits a response.”

“Alright, we’ll start with sound waves. See what happens.”

Doctor Brown waved over one of the lab assistants and sent them off for equipment before turning back to the two men.

“Something else occurred to me.” Stanford admitted, rising from his chair and stretching.

“What’s on your mind?” Bob asked.

“How much do you know about Dr. Juan Maldacena’s theory on many interacting worlds?” Stanford queried.

Bob nodded, almost as if he’d expected the question. “Stan, quantum mechanics isn’t my field. As a physicist, you’d have greater familiarity with the subject matter than me. I think I know where you’re going though. You’re thinking alternate reality instead of a wormhole, right? That Subject Four isn’t a clone,” He paused with a thoughtful expression before continuing, “Maybe. But we are way past the edge of unproven theory here. I wouldn’t even know where we’d begin to test it.”

“We at least know an Einstein-Rosen bridge is theoretically possible,” Dr. Brown remarked. “However, I’ve never heard a theory on crossing from one timeline to another.”

Stanford shrugged and cleared his throat, relieved that he wasn’t alone thinking about alternate realities.

“Let me summarize the salient details for you both. Maldacena’s theory states the universe exists in nine different dimensions and one of time, time being the constant. Rather than an infinite number of separated dimensions, he proposed a number of connected dimensions to explain certain aspects of quantum mechanics. Particles that interacted on the quantum level, occupied the same space, at the same time, in each different dimension.”

Bob shifted his feet slightly, his expression reserved. “Yeah, I recall now. Quantum evidence of interaction. Said he could test for it mathematically. Tried to get access to the CERN laboratories to demonstrate his hypothesis.”

“It’s…plausible isn’t it? With what we are seeing?” Stanford challenged.

“You’re talking about the other equipment?” Dr. Brown asked.

“Right. I mean what kind of alien uses a worn backpack: a brand I could buy at Walmart no less? And the boots? Standard issue military, except for the fancy pair. The glass in those helmets, the fabrics. It’s all too similar,” Stanford asserted, running a nervous hand through his already tousled hair.

Bob glanced at the five bags of other equipment before conceding the point. “Okay, say you’re correct. This equipment is similar because these are travellers from a connected dimension. Does that change things for the military, at all?”

Admittedly, Bob got to the crux of the matter.  Stanford sighed almost dejectedly and responded, “No, you’re right. They’ll still look at these people as threats. It’s just . . . if I’m right, it means two things. First, those visitors are people just like us with basic human rights. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with Colonel Jackboot Hardass in charge of ‘questioning’ them.” Stanford licked his lips.  This crossed into uncomfortable territory from every perspective except the military’s.

“Secondly, we could be looking at proof of alternate realities and examining a device designed to take you from one to another.” He frowned back at the instrument. “Dr. Brown’s joking aside, I do feel like an ape prodding a nuclear pile, and I’m the one who has to explain that theory to Colonel Hardass.”

Bob’s eyes held a ‘better you than me’ look of commiseration as he laid a friendly hand on Stanford’s shoulder.

“Dr. Ellis, how do you propose we verify whether or not the Instrument interacts at the quantum level ? Firing a laser at it is only slightly better than clubbing it.” Dr. Brown asked with a frown.

A lab tech waved at them with an impatient gesture and saved Stanford the trouble of formulating a highly experimental testing procedure on little sleep and half baked theory. It appeared they were ready to start the sound wave test.

Stanford stepped forward to observe the test, he wondered . . . if these are people from an alternate version of reality, why did they come here?

Next Chapter: Date:  2nd of February 2017Location: 52° 4’12.91"N 4°18’2.61"ETime: 3.21pm