As Fellis watched the trees go by out the window, the feeling in the back of her mind that things weren’t quite adding up steadily grew. It was the forest that did it, of course. “There’s so much of it…”
The man sharing a car with her looked up from his newspaper for a moment, but looked away when he caught her eye. He hadn’t been the most companionable, but grew less visibly nervous with each of the times she’d been questioned over the last twelve hours, first by the conductor, then by a Mounted Police officer, then twice by Dominion Police constables. Still, he had yet to say a word to her.
The sheer amount of forest they’d gone past was mind-boggling to Fellis.
“We must’ve seen a thousand kilometers of track by now, eh?” She didn’t really expect the man to respond, but she’d taken to talking to him anyway. “And the whole time… trees. Trees everywhere!”
She sat back down in the empty space where a seat would normally be. Luckily, there had been a car in the train missing a seat, or she would’ve ended up riding a livestock cart, despite how long she argued with the manager of the train station the afternoon before.
“How could this be possible? Nobody would make a simulation with this much unused space, would they? But everything looks so real… No, nobody could do this without anyone knowing, it’d take way too much fuckin’ processing power. And it’s not like any simworld I’ve heard of…” She stood back up and looked out the window again. “But why would anyone put me into a simulation and try to convince me it’s not one, anyway? Shit doesn’t make any sense…”
Fellis pulled out the pair of headphones from her saddlebags, put them on, and started looking through her phone for something to listen to. Her companion looked up over the top of his newspaper and smiled. Listening to her singing to herself had been the highlight of the strange trip so far. He almost wished he could ask her to let him hear the music, he’d grown so curious about these songs.
Fellis lifted one ear of the headphones off. “I’m gonna go to the dining cart, you want anything?”
“N…” The man cleared his throat. “No, thank you.”
Fellis let go of the headphones and they lightly snapped back into place, as she shrugged and stepped out of the car.
*****
Fellis polished off her final glass of whiskey. She was in an awkward position, squeezed into a booth with her left two legs kneeling on the bench and the other two splayed under the table. It made reaching back into her bags even more awkward than usual, as she combed through her bag hoping to find some change she’d missed.
Just as she was about to give up and head back to her car, the man who shared that car stopped by her table, carrying his breakfast.
“May I sit here?”
“Yeah, sure.” Fellis gestured to the opposite seat. “So, you’re talking now?”
“I apologize, I…” He sat down and stared at his plate for a moment. “I wasn’t sure you were real.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve been having that effect on people lately.” She chuckled. “I’m Fellis, by the way.”
“Ramesh.”
“So, Ramesh, sorry if I’m making assumptions here, but would you happen to be related to mister Shankar?”
“Haroon Shankar is my father.”
“I see…”
Fellis fidgeted with her empty glass as Ramesh began to eat. Neither said anything for a couple minutes.
“Hey, Ramesh, you’re going to Toronto, right?”
Ramesh looked up to see Fellis staring out the window yet again. She had a clearly worried look on her face.
“Yeah, I study at the Conservatory of Music.”
“Of course. So, long story, but…” Fellis looked over at him and gave a weak smile. “I kind of thought I’d be going, uh, well, somewhere else, basically… and I’m not sure what I’m gonna do when I get there.”
“Where did you think you were going?”
“It’s hard to explain, but… a different Toronto.” Fellis sighed and put her hands over her eyes. “Or a different version of the same Toronto, I guess… You know how you thought I wasn’t real? That’s how I’ve been feeling about… everything.”
Fellis stayed silent and watched Ramesh finish his meal.
Ramesh pushed his dishes aside and leaned back in his seat. “You know, you’ve been talking to me all night and I didn’t quite understand a word of it. If it had been someone else, I would have assumed they were mad. But, well…” He gestured to Fellis’ body, sweeping his hand in an arc from a point indicating her head, then down her back.
“Yeah, sorry about all that. I think I’m slowly building up to a major fuckin’ freakout.”
“So, in plain English, what do you need?”
Fellis cocked her head to the side, thinking. “I suppose… if I could get my synthesiser charged, I could take care of myself, start to figure things out from there.”
Ramesh’s bemused expression told her that she’d failed to speak in ‘plain English’.
“Electricity. Any source of electricity should do it.”
*****
Fellis stared at the panel, silently urging it to light up. All eyes in the room were on her, although about half of them glanced around now and then, waiting for someone to show up and explain the prank.
Dim light suddenly fell on her face, and she jumped up. “Yes!” Fellis leapt over to the professor and threw her arms around him. “Oh, thank you so much. Ah, I knew that’d fuckin’ work!” She bounded back to the machine that sat on his desk, and began to manipulate the panel. “Ok, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
By now all of the students had stood up, the ones at the back straining to get a better look.
“Huh, this is weird. My cache address is different? Like, totally different…” The doctor’s face scrunched up with worry, then relaxed. “Weird, this looks like my grist…”
The professor vacillated between impatience and confusion, but little by little excitement was building. He’d only let her hook up her device to get her to leave him alone, despite her showing him her cellphone and promising him technical manuals for devices he couldn’t even imagine. Now, though, that conversation was replaying in his mind, and he started to think he may have almost thrown away a goldmine by trying to turn her away.
“Could… you please explain what’s happening?” The professor struggled to keep his voice even.
“Yeah, for sure, uh…” Fellis paused and looked up at him sheepishly. “Sorry, I seem to have forgotten your name…”
“Palmer.”
“Right, so mister Palmer.” Fellis went back to working on the panel. “This is a matter synthesiser. It takes a data-like higher dimensional substance, which we call grist, and turns it into matter. Um, that substance has a technical name, but I can never remember it off the top of my head, sorry.” She straightened her back as the synthesiser whirred to life. Three arms extended upward from its sides. Nozzle-like bits at the end of each pointed inward and began to glow with blue light as the arms began to swing around wildly. “The word grist is from some old sci-fi story, I think? I dunno, never read it.”
The professor rubbed his temples, trying to process what he’d heard. “So, you’re saying…” He froze as he saw what the device was doing. On top of the synthesiser, in between the arms, a stack of a dozen identical books was clearly forming out of thin air. “When you say ‘higher dimensional’, what do you mean?”
“Oh, that’s not exactly right. Uh…” Fellis put a finger to her chin. “I’m not exactly a physicist, so take this with a grain of salt, eh? But the grist cache is… sort of in neither a higher or lower dimension? Both imply that it’s a spatial dimension in the way we understand it, eh? Maybe lower is actually a closer description, though…” Fellis paused and grabbed all but one of the books. “But the point is that you can access any part of it from anywhere in our spatial dimensions, just by using the right signal. Every part of it is always the same distance from everywhere in our space, I guess.” She walked around the desk and began to pass out books to some of the students.
Professor Palmer leaned over the device and picked up the last book. Its title was ‘Elementary Engineering for Students’. He flipped open to a random page, immediately finding a diagram of something he couldn’t begin to interpret. He dropped it on his desk like it had burnt his fingers. “This… I…” He paused to wipe his glasses on his shirt. “This is some kind of joke, right?”
“God, I fuckin’ wish, eh?” Fellis returned and began poking at the synthesiser’s controls again. “Trust me, dude, everything you’re going through, I’ve been living the past few days. I’m kind of barely holding my shit together, here.”
The professor sat down in his chair, hard. He leaned in close, trying to see what trick was being used to make this impossible device work.
“Anyway, I’m just gonna keep talking.” Fellis stretched her humanoid upper back and rolled her shoulders. “God, I haven’t had a fuckin’ real piece of furniture to sit on in too long. First thing I’m making when I get back.” The device lit up again at her ministrations, and began to create a different book. “So, anyway, grist is sort of encoded, it doesn’t really ‘exist’ like we understand the word. And so, it doesn’t exactly correspond to any specific matter. When we turn matter into grist and back again, it doesn’t have to be the exact same thing it was, even down to the smallest level. But there are limits, based on what signal you used to send it off. Also, there’s, like, fuckin’ encryption and corruption that effect what you can make, but… fucked if I can even begin to explain that shit.”
Fellis picked up the other book and placed it on top of the first. The professor briefly glanced at the title, ‘Intermediate Engineering for Students’. He leaned back in his chair, resigned to the situation.
“All this stuff’s in there. Well the basics, at least.” With a final button press, the arms retracted back into the device. “I’ll see you again, eh? Love to see how you’re gonna handle this.” Fellis laughed as she folded up her synthesiser and unplugged it.
*****
“Hey! I’m back!” Fellis’ greeting was sickeningly cheerful, and she regretted the act almost immediately.
Kevin almost slammed the door in her face. “She isn’t here.” His tone was far from friendly.
“Louise?”
“Yeah.“ Kevin looked her square in the eyes intensely. “My wife.”
“Uh, where would I find her?” Fellis began to feel uncomfortable under his gaze. She’d never really faced a jealous partner, given the nature of where she grew up, but Kevin’s expressions were unmistakable even to her.
“Fucked if I know.”
With that he did shut the door, leaving Fellis out in the cold.
