Dimensionality - Interlude

”Do you know who ate all the donuts?”
The question came from a balding, obese man who was sadly in his thirties. Early thirties.
“No”
“Oh”
There was an awkward silence, filled with the wheezy breathing of the obese man.
“So, uhh… you work here long?” he asked.
“Yes”
“Really?”
“Yes”
The obese man wiped his brow. The top of his head was gleaming with sweat. He reeked of deodorant and aftershave in a very offensive quantity.
“It’s just that, uhh, I haven’t seen you around much”
There was no reply.
“You, uhh, a field agent?” he asked.
“Yes”
“Oh, oh yeah. That’s it then. You, uhh, see much?”
“Much of what?”
“You know. Weird shit? Like UFOs and stuff?”
“No”
“No? Oh? That’s, I mean I thought that’s what we did? UFOs and, and things. Cryptids and stuff”
The elevator stopped and Lea gladly stepped out with haste, glad to be away from this annoying person. To her dismay he followed her out.
“We, uhh, got the same way, I think” he mumbled, struggling to keep in step with her.
“I doubt it”
“Oh, oh no, I’m sure. There are only three doors on this floor we just got out of one and I’m not the janitor so…”
Lea’s nose twitched. She didn’t like the idea of this person having high enough security clearance to enter the T-room. It was offensive in an even worse way than the noises his breathing made, or the chafing of his thighs or the odours. Lea knew they weren’t the highest of priorities for the government but their finances weren’t THAT bad, she’d just gotten a new gun from R&D that could…
“Allow, haahh, me” the obese man said, his breathing rugged from the steps they’d taken from the elevator to the end of the corridor where the janitor’s closet was located to the left and the door to the T-room was at the end. He swiped his key card in the reader, it blinked green, and with stubby fingers he nimbly put in the code. A green light blinked and the door unlocked. He reached for it, clearly intending to be chivalrous and hold it open for her, but Lea was having none of that. The door was heavy, but she quickly pulled it open with one arm and held it there, the man walking into the room from under it. The difference in their height was quite something; Lea was 193cm tall and stood out aside most men.

Lea pulled the door shut behind them and snapped on the light switch. The T-room was undecorated with white walls, a white floor and a white ceiling. Well, the floor had been white up until the obese man had left his footprints on it. How did someone get their boots that dirty indoors? Grimacing Lea looked at the contraption that took up most of the room’s other end, the Transmitter. It wasn’t exactly a sleek, futuristic design. In all honesty it looked like a bunch of arms from a car manufacturing plant with wires and tubes attached. Which it probably was, as far as Lea knew they’d never actually bothered to install any cutting-edge technology anywhere they could cut corners. As long as it worked, right?
The obese man had made his way to the computer terminal, turned the thing on and was rummaging around the white cupboards for the coffee grounds. There was an open plastic bag with paper cups in it next to the old coffee maker. It would take less time to make coffee than it would to get the system online. Somebody really should come in here more often and keep the computers cleaned and the OS upgraded, Lea thought. Her eyes went to the ceiling and she tried to imagine the wires and tubes embedded there and in the floor and the walls, the way they ran into the maintenance room accessible from the janitor’s closet. Why it had been set up that way, she didn’t know. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to do maintenance on the equipment from here? The janitor didn’t have clearance to open the door into the maintenance room anyway so anyone who could get in there would be able to get in here too, wouldn’t they? No, if some engineer handled the equipment’s engines and power supplies and such it didn’t mean they had any business with the controls. Still, someone should update things down here more often. And get comfier chairs. The ones here were metal folding chairs with no cushions. Lea sat on one and crossed her legs while waiting for coffee. The obese man collapsed into his and then grunted when the computer screen blinked and required input. The table was too high for him to comfortably use the keyboard from a sitting position. Who had designed that? Probably nobody. Nothing here was very carefully thought out. This entire floor was built into the foundations of a more important facility, it was practically an afterthought. The T-room was in fact based on a bunch of technology the eggheads up above had abandoned as a dead-end. It wasn’t, but they didn’t need to know it. Lea wished this gear was installed somewhere more convenient, though. It took her over two hours to get down here from when she entered the facility. At least it kept things under the wraps, but…
“Coffee” the man wheezed and handed her a cup. Lea felt a twinge of cruelty and simply held it out without getting up, forcing him to pour it for her. Serves him right, being so annoying.

The full pot of coffee had been finished by the time the obese man finished calibrating. Lea had felt rather frustrated at him and was going to take over the computer, but he insisted he had it under control. Once he gave the go-ahead Lea walked up to the Transmitter and manually turned on the various power-switches, which hummed to life. The man entered the appropriate commands into the computer and the limbs moved into their desired positions. Once they stopped moving, Lea flipped the switches for the hoses and they began to sprinkle out a liquid that evaporated in the open air, creating a mist around the centre of the arms. It smelled like Vaseline.
“Go ahead” the man said, and Lea turned the emitters into the ON position one by one. The internal mechanisms prevented them from opening until all were open so they would discharge their electricity at the same time. A snap like the crack of a whip resounded in the room with a flash of light, and then the mist was crackling with lightning for a few moments until the materials settled and the cloud of mist was pulled into a sphere floating in place with the arcs of lightning weaving around it.
“You, uhh, sure you don’t want goggles?” the man asked, tapping the pair of safety goggles on his face.
“Those wouldn’t make any difference if anything bad happened” Lea pointed out.
“Oh”
Lea stared at the shifting colours of the orb. She’d seen this transition before. At first the brown of the mist turned purple, then blue, then green, then yellow, then orange, red, pink, white. Then there was nothing but transparency there, you could see right through the orb. And then to the OTHER side.
“Oh wow” the obese man said.
“First time?” Lea asked, trying to keep calm. This part actually made her nervous.
“Yeah”
“Well it does take the breath away, doesn’t it?”

On the OTHER side there was a space of colours and sounds and even smells if you got close enough, the hole in reality letting them observe quite clearly a point in space-time where a similar device was configured to receive the one they were using.
“Shouldn’t… shouldn’t there be… someone? Agent, uhh, I think his name was…”
“Flax” Lea interrupted. “His name is Flax”
Her stomach was turning. He knew the window for communications, had he lost track of time? Or was it that he was preoccupied with… with something bad?
Seconds passed by like they were minutes. The obese man kept eyeing up the hole and the space beyond it, then the computer screen. He kept running some kind of systems checks that always returned the same results.
“This is not okay” Lea said, pacing around the room. She looked at the closets along one of the room’s walls. The one with the suits in it.
“Y-you’re not going to… go in?” the obese man gasped as she opened the closet and pulled out the skin-tight red hazard suit.
“We only have an hour’s window and I’m not spending it waiting on this side” she said, undressing down to her underwear to fit in the suit.
“I guess I’ll just stay here and… and keep watch”
“You do that” Lea said as she undid the boots and gloves of her suit. They would get in the way.
“I’ll have to shut it down in 46 minutes, according to protocol” he said.
“You do that, too” Lea said, closing her suit and limbering up.
“You’ll have to manage on that side if you don’t make it back”
“We’ll make it back” she said, walking to the portal, her fingers and toes growing longer with each step, her claws protruding out and the material of the suit stretching as she let her limbs take on the musculature she was more comfortable with.
Please be alright honey, she thought as she leapt in.