Author: Majoki
“Someone tell me what’s happening!” Subtechnician Tantynn yelled as he spaghettified. A physical state that closely resembles the squiggles of a toddler’s finger painting.
Specialist Pingul sighed. Which probably looked to an outsider as if her head had warped in a most cartoonish way. Which it kinda had, but not in any dangerous fashion. At least not yet.
It was just flutter. And flutter took a little getting used to. If you studied it like Specialist Pingul did, it felt like no big deal. Even though, without the proper countermeasures, it could rip you and your dimension apart. So, the stakes were pretty high. Still, Specialist Pingul got tired of newbs like Subtechnician Tantynn freaking out over a little interdimensional turbulence.
Sure, working in a superstring lab exploring M-theory meant they were going to experience things the general population never would, though most folks at some time in their lives experienced a kind of interdimensional turbulence. They just described it as deja vu.
Which made sense to Specialist Pingul. Deja vu was a kind of brain flutter, a feeling of familiarity you can’t quite place, a very personal perturbation of space-time. Akin to that, Pingul and her lab colleagues tested brane flutter, a superstring worldvolume instability that could cause real existential problems, as in existence itself.
Flutter. It seems like such a harmless term. Aspen leaves flutter in a gentle breeze. A passionate kiss may make a lover’s eyelids flutter. Gossamer butterflies often flutter across flowering meadows.
But we’ve all heard about the Butterfly Effect. Flutter can change everything. Aerospace engineers know that all too wellI when confronting an aerodynamic instability that causes some or all parts of an aircraft to vibrate. If not immediately dampened or controlled, increasingly severe oscillations are likely to damage or destroy the craft.
The smallest of imbalances can lead to the largest of problems.
And if you scaled that interdimensionally with p-brane vibrations, you were talking about a wave function collapse of potentially epic proportions. So, Specialist Pingul and her labmates were tasked with preventing Big Bang 2.0 as they tested ways to manipulate interdimensional interaction for scientific progress. And, to be perfectly honest, for fun and profit.
Who wouldn’t want to discover a way to skirt our confining four dimensions, especially time? Imagine finagling spacetime militarily, financially, politically, or personally. Like the metaverse, the possibilities appear endless. As well as the perils.
Specialist Pingul knew they still had a long way to go to reliably access and stabilize the workings of interdimensional realms. It was one thing to be momentarily spaghettified like Subtechnician Tantynn; it was another to harness enough dark energy to pierce the veil and bypass our narrow Newtonian mechanics, leap beyond our current understanding of the spacetime continuum, and establish a foothold in the Interdimensional Age.
Much like earlier pioneers, daredevils, and explorers trying to lift humanity into Earth’s skies and then beyond, there were still dire problems to solve, grave risks to take, and deep sacrifices to make.
Yet, just the thought of pushing humanity’s limits, striving to enter the almost ethereal, made Specialist Pingul’s heart, oh so wildly, flutter.