Hemera

Copyright © 2013 by Bryan Senior.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013912237

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4836-6598-6

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4836-6597-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4836-6599-3

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 07/16/2013

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 1

The sunrise was, as always, absolutely on time, and Hemera soaked in the light of a new dawn whilst listening intently as the glorious chorus of birdsong settled down, reducing its volume and shifting tempo, blending together to become the more familiar background hum of whispered tweets and twitters as the day shift took over. A blackbird clucked and clacked angrily, warning the others that a cat was on the prowl by marking its location with a series of flits and darts between bushes which criss-crossed the path of the intruder. A dipper raced past on its way upstream, tracking the beck a mere foot above the water, winding and twisting along the way to avoid minor obstacles, navigating the route with a precision that would shame even an advanced Tomahawk cruise missile. A small mixed group of blue tits and long-tailed tits flitted from treetop to treetop high above her head, only their tiny mouse-like squeaks alerting her to their presence. ‘No doubt on their way to the fat balls. Note one for today: Check bird-feeding stations. We are into autumn after all… albeit only just,’ she thought.

Allowing her mind to wander into the waters of the beck where it bubbled beneath her feet and against the rock on which she sat, Hemera found herself once again reflecting on her first meeting with Professor Doherty and the way he had replied ‘ah, the day has come at last!’ when they were first introduced at the beginning of her postgraduate training, and every morning since when she had arrived at the laboratory. One morning, only a few weeks after starting her research work there, she had arrived soaked through to the skin after being caught in the open during a cloudburst. Trudging forlornly past the Professor, who was already busy at his terminal, she quietly dared him to spout his now customary welcome, which, of course, he did. After snarling a few expletives quietly to herself, she had enquired as calmly as she could under the circumstances, ‘Is that all you can say?’ No response. ‘I am standing here shedding water like a fucking beached whale and that’s all you can bloody well say, is it, Professor fucking Doherty?’ His reply had not been as she had expected. ‘There’s often much to be learnt from a name. Now tell Penny in reception to order you a taxi home and back so you can get changed out of that fucking ‘beached whale’ costume and into something that doesn’t breathe out of the top of its head and leave puddles in its wake. Oh, and the next time you see a whale standing on a beach, please get me a photo and I’ll add it to my Weird Album.’

That brief exchange of expletives had changed her opinion of the Professor, in so much as he could actually curse out loud. That meant that he may even be part human. But what had he meant with his reference to ‘a name’? So in true research fashion, she had looked up her own name and found under Greek Mythology:

‘Hemera (Ancient Greek: Hμέρα, day, pronounced [hɛːméra]) was the personification of day and one of the Greek primordial deities. She is the goddess of the daytime and, according to Hesiod, the daughter of Erebos and Nyx (the goddess of night).’

So after many years tolerating the taunting by her less-than-amicable acquaintances giving her nicknames such as ‘haemorrhoid’ or ‘haemorrhage’, thanks to the Professor, she had been able to take pride in her real name with its ancient connections and had taken to signing herself Hμέρα’, though she did insist on being called ‘Emma’.

The following day she had come to this same spot to welcome the sunrise and had done so every working day since. Oddly enough, the Professor had never remarked on the fact that, come rain or shine, she always arrived at the lab half an hour after sunrise, which naturally varied according to the seasons. No doubt he had his reasons.

That was eight or was it nine years ago, but over time it had turned out to be an invaluable period of quiet solitude during which time she could prepare herself for another day of unpredictable events which seemed to follow the Professor like a pack of hungry hounds held close to heel. Heaven only knew what sort of chaos would be let loose if ever the bugle sounded.

Her respect for the Professor had grown into an almost childlike admiration after he had so inconspicuously guided her through to her Doctorate in Astrophysics and Particle Theory in his own inimitable, often wholly eccentric fashion. Nothing had ever been, nor was anything ever likely to be, even remotely predictable where the Professor was involved. Yet today seemed somehow special, and so she set aside a moment to probe her innermost self and try to grasp at least the slightest inkling of what this day might bring. After all, it wasn’t yet 7 a.m., or was it? She’d watched the sunrise, but how long ago had that been?

Then suddenly, the beck was gurgling and reality was once again knocking at the door. It had clouded over, casting a twilight hue over the landscape and robbing her of any natural time check. She looked her watch. It was 7.15 a.m.

‘My God, I’m late,’ she started, then, standing, she said determinedly, ‘If I’m not five minutes early, I’m late.’ Then setting off at a pace, she puffed, ‘But not so very late.’

Slowing to a jog, she panted, ‘In fact, I’m hardly late at all.’

Then slowing to a walk, she said, ‘I can be ten minutes late, out of breath, and sweating or…’

Then strolling, she said, ‘. . . I can be twenty-five minutes late, cool, calm, and relaxed.’

Then, at a jog, she said, ‘Split the difference. Fifteen minutes late and marginally flustered having had a run in with a bull.’

She paused briefly by the opened iron gates at the end of the driveway, brushed down her skirt and checked her blouse, then casually made her way past the parked cars to the main entrance. Oddly, one of the cars was Penelope’s. The receptionist was unusually early.

‘Good morning, Penny,’ chirped Emma.

‘Good morning, Miss Emma. I must say it’s unlike you to be late. In fact, I’ve never known you to be this late before,’ the receptionist replied, gloating conspicuously.

‘Yes, I had a bit of a run-in with a bull. Old Sutcliffe’s put one in the field I normally cut across. Took me a bit by surprise, but I made it over the wall,’ she lied badly.

‘That is not a good way to start the week. I’d have taken a rest by the beck as well had that happened to me.’

It wasn’t the fact that Penny had caught her out that irritated Emma, rather it was her wry, all-knowing smile accompanied by the glint of victory in her eyes, with the clock on the wall gleefully announcing that it was in fact 9.40 a.m. She checked her watch. It showed 7.15 a.m. Hello, Monday morning.

‘Don’t worry, Emma, I’m sure Professor Doherty is in a good mood, though he hasn’t bobbed through for his morning cuppa yet. You never know, he might decide to have you for breakfast instead.’ Penny was beginning to enjoy this particular Monday morning, and the image of the receptionist standing atop a grand rostrum holding aloft the blonde scalp of a lowly research assistant found its way into Emma’s mind. Now that bugged her.

It is not easy to take defeat nonchalantly, and that is precisely what Emma totally failed to do. Uneasily flicking back her shoulder-length blonde hair, she turned sharply on her heels and stormed out through the back door leading to the laboratories in a very un-nonchalant manner, composing herself once again as she walked down the corridor past the door marked ‘Professor Weird’, though most of the staff just referred to him as ‘Prof’. The fact that he wasn’t really bothered what people called him was just one of his less weird traits.

She stopped a couple of paces past the door, surprised that it was left slightly ajar. Oddly, there was a chair placed in the corridor against the wall, which, for some unknown reason, she felt obliged to make use of.

Sitting down, she gave the appearance of a naughty schoolgirl waiting outside the head-teacher’s office to answer for some heinous crime against the school administration. The Professor would be behind that door, or would he? He was hardly ever in his own office. So why had she sat down? She had lied to Penny, everyone did that, but not only had she been caught out, she’d been caught out by the ‘Queen of Office Gossip’. Now that was a cardinal sin. She imagined that Penny would be on the phone right now, slipping into any conversation, however unrelated, how unusual it was for Emma to be so late for work in the morning. Whereas Penelope revelled in the gossip generated by staff turf wars, Emma hated it because she was always too engrossed in her work to take much notice and so never got the hang of it, but she knew enough to realise that she had to get to the Professor before old Lady Office Gossip did. That’s why she’d chosen to sit, she decided, to get the apology out of the way.

She dipped into her shoulder bag then, removing a hairbrush and mirror, began to tidy her hair whilst regaining her composure. Satisfied with the grooming and replacing the accoutrements back in the bag, she reached into her inside jacket pocket and donned her black-framed designer spectacles to complete the serious researcher effect which she preferred. Glancing upwards and to one side, she found herself looking straight into the grinning face of the Professor watching her from around the door frame.

‘It’s Monday morning, Professor,’ she said quietly in the belief that occasionally stating the very, very obvious would bring a little light relief.

‘Ah, the day has come at last,’ he replied. He continued, ‘Well, don’t just sit there! Come on in, we’ve got work to do. Oh, and bring the chair in with you, please.’

This was not as she had been expecting, but he had aroused her curiosity and somehow relieved any sense of guilt that she may have held. Had her feeling down by the beck been justified? she wondered. Standing, she turned and entered the office, dragging the chair and quietly closing the door after her before turning to face her mentor.

As she approached his desk, he indicated invitingly for her to seat herself opposite and then reached into the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk to produce a bottle labelled simply ‘Rouge’, then two cut crystal wine glasses and finally a corkscrew, arranging them invitingly on his desk.

‘I trust you had an enjoyable weekend,’ he said, whilst deftly popping the cork and pouring a short measure for Emma to test, before continuing, ‘You were right, by the way. It is to be a rather special sort of day. Well spotted!’ He topped up her glass and poured one for himself.

‘What do you…’ but found she was lost for words.

‘Don’t worry. Things will become apparent as the day progresses. Cheers!’

‘Cheers,’ she replied, still clueless as to what on earth was going on, let alone what they were toasting and quietly wishing that this morning could start again in a slightly more normal manner.

‘Let’s start again, shall we?’ the Professor began as though he had read her thoughts. ‘Though I would put normality on the back burner for a while if I were you. Drink up and enjoy. You’ll need it for later when we visit my private lab.’

She sensed someone giggling somewhere in the background, but with it came the familiar, comforting feeling which she had come to associate with her times by the beck, so she settled for the more obvious question.

‘What private laboratory? You’re always somewhere around this complex.’

‘I’ll show you later, but we’ll have to use the back door whilst there are people around. Now there’s a thing. I’ve only seen you so far this morning, so where are the rest of the bodies hiding?’ he asked uncomfortably. It wasn’t often he was in the dark about the internal machinations of the complex.

‘Well Penny, is as usual, manning the front reception, and if I recall, the rest of the bodies are upstairs in some head-banging session to do with funding. I thought you were supposed to be there as well—it was arranged last week. As luck would have it, I was late getting here this morning otherwise I would be stuck upstairs with the rest.’ At least she’d got the admission of being late out of the way to keep Penny at bay.

‘Did Penny see you come in late?’

‘Yes.’ Once again, he had seemed to read into the very core of her thoughts. How did he do that?

‘Well, research can mean that you occasionally find yourself so deep in thought that you lose track of time, or time loses its hold on you. Personally, I prefer the latter. It is very refreshing, though it can take a little time to come round.’

‘But how…’

‘A little bird mentioned it in passing, a long-tailed tit I believe it was, yes, definitely a long-tailed tit, though it could have been a blue tit the way they group together. Here, have some more wine, and for heaven’s sakes, relax. The day is still young. You’ll be learning about some very weird things today.’

‘But how…’ but she cut short the obvious question about the birds and took a long drink of wine instead, which she had found to be unusually refreshing. At least that she could understand. Holding out her now empty glass for a refill, she once again changed the subject of the question she had been about to ask to something a little less weird though, and in doing so, she realised that she was about to invite herself into the strange realm of the Professor’s private research.

‘When can I see your lab?’

‘We haven’t finished the wine yet,’ he stated. Then reaching into the drawer, he said, ‘Have a mint chocolate. It is past eight after all.’

The next hour (or was it two?), they spent discussing the merits and shortcomings in the various fields of subatomic particles, black holes, infinity, relativity, Chaos and String theories. Emma was on familiar territory. She could at least hold her ground in conversations like these.

‘Well, that’s the wine finished,’ the Professor announced finally, breaking into her train of thought. ‘Time to visit my private little lab,’ he said. Then he added, ‘We’ll pop another cork when we get back.’ He stood and walked out through the office door towards the main entrance without a backward glance.

Emma hardly noticed that she had left the office, obediently following the Professor and, like one of her imaginary hounds, she stuck close to the heel of this strange man as they passed through reception.

‘We’re just nipping down to the beck for an hour or so, Penny. Emma apparently witnessed an unusual event there earlier this morning, making her late for work which is in itself unusual. I’m so glad she mentioned it. You know how I love anything even remotely out of the ordinary. It’s given me an excuse to get some fresh air as well. Have the others finished their meeting yet?’ The Professor could lie more convincingly than Emma.

Emma watched with detached fascination, the blood first draining from then flooding back to the receptionist’s face as a bright red flush, then, turning slightly, she licked her thumb and marked the air in a show of one-upmanship.

‘No, sir, they’re still in session,’ Penelope responded sheepishly.

Walking outside, it felt quite refreshingly cool, with the sun hiding itself from view behind the clouds which had formed just after dawn and now threatened rain, a distant roll of thunder seemingly confirming the likelihood. They turned around the corner of the old part of the complex which had been built as a mid-Victorian period country house to be later used as a small hotel, then offices, and finally as the research facility with the laboratories spreading out from the back across what had once been extensive lawns.

Halfway along the building’s side, the Professor stopped, then dipping into his trouser pocket to produce a strange-looking key, he reached down and unlocked a hatch door. He explained, ‘This was once used as a cool meat store, then as a beer cellar, then finally it was left empty and forgotten by everyone.’ Then adding through a mischievous little grin, he said, ‘Except me of course.’

‘Of course,’ she replied, barely audible and thinking how readily he was exercising that grin of his whilst all the time a voice teased the back of her mind with ‘I know something that you don’t. Surprise, surprise and chuckling’ making her believe that she was overreacting to the earlier exchanges with Penny.

Emma had never even noticed the hatch, let alone wonder what lay beneath it. But now the scene was set. ‘Here I am about to accompany a mad Professor through a floor hatch into the cellar of an old country house whilst storm clouds gather all around, the daylight fades, and someone giggles in childish anticipation in the background. All I need now is a great flash of lightning, a crash of thunder, a sudden cloudburst, and a zombie clawing its way out of the bushes with arms outstretched ready to throttle the life out of me,’ she thought. At least there were no vampires around.

There was a sudden great flash of lightning accompanied by an instantaneous crash of thunder; the heavens opened, and she was racing down a flight of old stone stairs into the deep darkness of the cellars below.

‘Don’t switch the light on until I’ve closed the hatch… all secure. OK, the light switch is at eye level on the wall to the left. Excellent! I’ll just lock the door. You were quick to get out of the rain, I must say.’

Emma felt strangely relaxed, unusually so in the circumstances, but then if you are going to feel relaxed in strange circumstances, how else could you feel? She stood back as the Professor alighted from the bottom step and moved aside to allow him access to the door now behind and to the side of her. She presumed that being the only door other than the hatch they had come through, this door would be the logical next step. Then realising that she had used some reference to logic in assuming the next step, she dismissed the thought and decided to ‘just go with the flow’.

‘Well, you seem to be in the right frame of mind, curious and maybe a little excited, but before we go in, try and leave pure mathematical logic on the back burner. I’ll explain more later.’ He unlocked and opened the door, inviting her to enter first.

The lights flicked themselves unto life as she passed through the doorway and unveiled what was probably the exact opposite of what she had expected to see.

She had expected a massive array of computer banks, with coloured lights continually winking at each other at varying frequencies; great metal spheres discharging fearsome electrical arcs of huge voltages between them; benches strewn with flasks of boiling liquids set on tripods and connected to an array of Liebig Condensers dripping their produce into further flasks; maybe a bank of burettes ready to perform titration; glass-fronted, wall-mounted cupboard units full of jars of chemicals. Liquids, crystals, powders, and nondescript quasi-gelatinous substances of unknown source in all known colours; Bunsen burners ready to be sparked into life; a confusion of feed, transfer, and discharge pipes; a huge blackboard from dado to picture rail with chalk-marked scrawls of equations, calculations, corrections, crossings out, and reminders covering the entire length of at least one of the walls; sinks full of ‘to wash’ equipment and bins full of ‘to dump’ waste and marked ‘Hazardous’.

Instead, she found herself straining her eyes, trying to identify something on which they could focus. All she could see was white light without any point of reference to give a sense of scale. She knew that she was looking into the lab, but…

‘Before we start, I’ll stick this marker to the wall so you can rest your eyes,’ he began and appeared to stick a black disc the size of a penny to the wall next to her. He then continued, ‘You can turn around now and look at this black dot whilst I put some lab overshoes on. Let your eyes focus on it while I stick another dot on the far wall so you know where it is. I don’t want you bumping into it!’

Standing transfixed by the black dot, she could still taste the wine on her tongue, but there was no sound, no smell. She reached and touched the black dot an arm’s length away. That seemed real enough. At least she could touch it and feel it. Looking down at her feet to check that her legs were still there, she noticed the wet footprints on the floor where they’d come in, but no door.

The Professor returned, and she looked over her shoulder at him.

‘All right there? Now I’ve stuck another dot on the far wall, and I want you to tell me how far away it is.’

Emma turned around fully to face the far wall and looked at the dot. She took her time studying the far dot before answering thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know how big it is, and so I can’t gauge how far away it might be. I don’t know how far away it is, so I can’t gauge how big it might be. There’s no point of reference. There’s nothing to compare it with. I couldn’t even hazard a guess.’

‘Many astronomers seem to describe the pre big-bang universe as being the size of a pea, or perhaps an orange, even though such comparisons are meaningless because there would have been no other point of reference. It just is. Here, put on these lab shoes then walk over to the other dot and wait there while I get some equipment out.’

She set off cautiously. All her senses could tell her for certain was that she was walking upright towards a dot of indeterminate size an indeterminate distance away. She stopped after the first few steps and instinctively held her hand out in front of her face, then carried on at a similar pace. How many steps had she taken? She looked back to see the Professor smiling gently back at her. She guessed that he was about five yards away but could only do that because she knew how tall he was. About ten steps later, her hand touched the other ‘dot’ which was about the size of a side plate.

She turned around again, this time laughing, though whether in relief or amusement, she neither knew nor cared.

The Professor was laughing along with her but managed to muffle his chuckling to call over, ‘An interesting experience, is it not? May as well be pitch black with just a light at the other end, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, but in negative.’

‘That is relatively speaking, of course. This dot is the size of a side plate or saucer,’ she replied, still laughing. ‘Can I come back now? I promise I’ll be a bit quicker this time.’

‘Yes, but first, I’d like you to peel that side plate off. It should leave behind a dot the same size as this one here.’

The ‘side plate’ removed, she walked back to the Professor, who was, as though by magic, sitting at a computer terminal. ‘Don’t even ask’, she thought to herself.

‘Now you know both how big it is and how far away it is, so now you can view it as a point of reference, but the only way you were able do that was to actually go there. Now I’ll connect those two points, thus.’ He tapped a key on his computer terminal, and she saw a fine laser-like beam span between the two points. ‘You see that?’ he asked.

‘Of course, I can see it. It’s a laser. Nothing new there.’

‘That is not strictly true. Were it a laser, you would not be able to see it anyway because the air is sterile, with nothing in it to reflect the light. Now don’t ask me where I got the equipment from, let alone how I know how it generates the beam—it just does. What is important is that you can also sense that it is there and that is literally all it is. It is just simply there. It is, however, only there in the first dimension. It has length, but it is infinitely narrow. Your eyes don’t detect it, but something in you does and communicates it to you via your sight. But that’s another matter which we’ll bypass for the moment.’

He paused for a moment to give Emma a chance to let it sink in.

‘So you’re saying that what I am seeing is not really there and I’m not really seeing it, but something in my mind is telling me that it is there because it is,’ she said slowly, grappling with the idea. ‘And here’s me thinking that the day couldn’t get any weirder.’ But something in her mind was grasping the concept as the mathematical expressions of infinity, recurring sequences, and the square root of minus one sulked in a quiet corner of her subconscious, having been found out for what they really are.

‘That’s only the first dimension. Now let’s move on to the second,’ he continued, pressing another button on his keyboard, causing a third dot to appear on the side wall.

‘I could easily tell you how far away that is and how big it is by triangulation from the other two points. That is of course only if the Professor so wishes,’ she commented lightly.

‘That would be far too easy. What do you think will happen when I connect that third point, something weird, perhaps?’

‘It will depend on my own point of view as to whether I consider it weird or not, and at the moment anything even remotely predictable would be extremely weird, but what the hell.’ She then concluded, ‘I think it will show us the second dimension.’

She was catching on quickly, but then that was really only to be expected. She was after all being encouraged, but how or by whom she had no idea, putting it down to her own natural intuition.

‘I think you might well be right. Now before I connect the three points, I’ll do a bit of decorating. I am open to suggestions, but I think you might like this one,’ he said, tapping the keyboard once more.

Suddenly, she seemed to be standing at her favourite spot by the beck, the walls, floor, and ceiling exhibiting moving images of the scene in a ‘wrap-around’ fashion.

‘How the hell do you do that? That looks to me to be a live image, I mean it’s pouring down with rain, like when we came in,’ she gasped, taken aback by the normality of the scene which seemed completely out of place in the weird world of the Professor’s lab.

‘I sent a probe down there to send back the pictures. They’re only in two dimensions at the moment I’m afraid, but we’ll get there. It seems odd to me that you appear to be more at ease with what I’m talking about here than something that you see every day. I note that it seems to have had the opposite effect to relaxing you.’

‘I’ve come to expect the inexplicably weird wherever you are involved, but this is my own private spot, a beautiful, relaxing, and carefree place of tranquillity where I can be alone with my thoughts at the start of each day, then, lo and behold, here it is amongst all this chaos. It just doesn’t seem right, that’s all.’ As she said it, she had the strange feeling that someone was gently hugging her, saying, ‘There, there, go with the flow and everything will be just fine. Trust me.’

‘I am sorry, that must have felt like a terrible invasion of your privacy. Please accept our, sorry, my apologies,’ he said with genuine sincerity.

She noted his ‘slip of the tongue’ but let it go. The wall and floor were once again white though the sky had retained its natural colour with hints of blue beginning to show as the storm passed over. ‘Very appropriate,’ she thought, regaining that peace of mind and composure the beck normally afforded, as though it were a part of her. Whatever it was, it put her at ease.

After an adroit pause, the Professor continued, ‘Now I’ll connect these three points thus.’ He tapped another button and said, ‘And we have the form of a two-dimensional triangle. OK so far?’

‘Yes, I can see the triangle, though I’ve no doubt it’s not really there but just simply is. It has length and width but no thickness or depth, right? In fact, it is like a mirror’s reflective surface but without the physical presence of the actual mirror.’

‘That is a very good analogy, Emma, though a sheet of plate glass offers a better comparison in this circumstance, in that when viewed from a certain angle, it becomes reflective, otherwise it is transparent.’

‘Hang on. So from what you’re saying, if I looked at it from a different angle, say over there’, she said, pointing to the far corner, ‘I wouldn’t be able to see it, right?’

‘Wrong. Remember what I said about the line and how it was that you saw it.’

Emma began slowly pacing back and forth, arm across the waist and supporting the other elbow, with her chin resting in a cupped hand. This was an important point to grasp, and it wasn’t to be solved by mathematics. An image of Saturn came to mind viewed from orbit in the plane of the equator. The rings were as but a barely visible line scribed across the middle of the planet’s disc. She knew the rings were there, but from here, they were just a line, so she imagined shifting her position, moving slowly round at a right angle to this imaginary orbit towards the pole and the rings began to show themselves. She was forming a picture in her mind of the transition from the first dimension to the second dimension by viewing it from a point in the third dimension. Finally, she said, ‘I was imagining Saturn and its rings.’

‘I thought you might be. Now what about looking at the triangle from a different angle? Will it become transparent at some point do you think?’

‘No. I am not even seeing it with my eyes. Something in me can sense that it’s there and somehow relays it to my conscious through my optic nerves. No matter where I viewed it from, it would still be there. Wait a minute…’ She paused for a thoughtful moment before continuing, ‘If those lines have length but are infinitely narrow, surely the actual point of convergence having neither length, width nor height, is a two-dimensional singularity. Well, that’s how it seems to me anyway.’

‘Go to the top of the class, Doctor Booth, aka Emma. You can certainly recognise a singularity when you see one, which is of course impossible. Now we have a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, so I’ll need to press on.

‘Are you still with me?’ he asked, not waiting for a reply. ‘Good, now before I add a fourth point, I want you to explain what you think will happen when I do.’

‘Well,’ she began, ‘with two points of reference, we created a line in the first dimension but could only view it from another point in the second dimension. Then, with three points of reference, we created an enclosed area in the second dimension but could only view it from a point in the third dimension. In each case, dimension equals points of reference minus one and can only be viewed from a point in dimension plus one. By that logic, we could only view the third dimension from a point in the fourth, which is of course impossible.’

‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ He tapped another key, and a pyramid appeared from the triangular base. ‘Now what do you see?’

‘It’s a pyramid,’ she sighed. ‘So much for the theory!’

‘There is nothing wrong with your theory.’

‘But that means that we are observing it from a fourth dimension which is also impossible. Yet I know that it is there, rather I can sense that it is there. I can almost feel its physical presence.’

‘That’s because your sense of touch is better than sight alone at identifying the nature of a three-dimensional object. Your eyes needed some backup so your mind reaches out and feels it. How many times have you reached out to touch something to make sure that your eyes weren’t playing tricks?’

She thought back for a moment and remembered reaching out to touch that first dot and then holding her hand in front when walking towards the second. From somewhere deep within her subconscious, a thought manifested itself with a grace akin to a nuclear submarine breaking the surface after a steep climb and then crashing back on to the waves to settle with a question. ‘What if you add another point?’ she asked eventually.

‘OK, so first, where do you want it, and secondly, what do you think will happen and why?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

‘Right then now, first let’s get this computer screen on the wall over there.’ A screen showing a three-dimensional image of the pyramid appeared on the wall to the right. ‘Now I’ll cut the links at the walls and ceiling. There we are. Now it’s all yours.’

‘So what exactly am I supposed to do with a non-existent, three-dimensional pyramid which appears to be there but isn’t really?’ Emma had raised her voice in apparent frustration, not quite but almost, shouting, ‘Sorry about that,’ she said and relaxed her tone. ‘But ever since I can remember, I’ve had these strange sensations. By what you’re showing me here, it’s one of the main reasons that I studied for doctorates in the fields that I did, though I didn’t realise at the time it seems that my mind can sense the amount of space a three-dimensional body takes up so I can gauge its size. I don’t have to measure it. I automatically know how big it is and how far away it is, but only if I can see it in person. I remember when I was a little girl, I used to go out in the garden at night with my dad and his binoculars. One night he pointed out the spiral galaxy in Andromeda giving me the binoculars. It was the first time I’d looked at it, but I said, Ooooo, that’s bigger than our galaxy, but it’s a long way away. I bet it’s really pretty from closer up. The next day he brought me a photograph of the galaxy and said, You are quite right. It is very pretty from closer up. He never questioned how it was that I’d been able to gauge its size and distance away, let alone where I got my comparison to our own galaxy—he just seemed to accept it. After that, he kept bringing me photographs of galaxies whenever he came across a different one, but I had to look at the real thing to gauge its size as though to feel it, as it were. If I looked at a photograph, all I could see was a two-dimensional image printed on a piece of card. But they were pretty, far better than wallpaper.

‘Just a point though. If as you seem to think, I have such acute "spatial awareness, how come I felt so confused and disorientated with your first two dots"?’

‘That, Emma my dear, is because you were allowing your own conscious to override what your subconscious was trying to tell you rather than accepting it. At least you did put your hand out to try and feel it. Now you know that you can use your mind as well, but then you always have. You twinned your doctorates because you could sense the size of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Even though you couldn’t physically touch them, a part of your brain could feel them. Now back to the pyramid. Make it smaller so it doesn’t clutter up the lab, will you?’ the Professor said matter-of-factly.

‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, and the three points marking out the base moved easily back, now marked not by a black dot which remained on the wall, but by the point of intersection of the lines whilst the lines themselves continued and disappeared into the wall. She stopped the movement when the points of intersection were each a comfortable six feet clear of the walls and paused thoughtfully for a moment before saying, ‘I’d just like to offer a thought, Professor. Those lines are moving as I think they should and arranging themselves in a three-dimensional space as I picture them in my own mind, but at the moment that base is not a triangle. It is just three overlapping straight lines. Is that correct?’

‘That is very correct, Emma, and they will remain to be just three straight lines until you decide on their length. I want to talk you through these next bits step by step. First, walk over and put your hand into one of the lines. You see how it has no effect. The line is still there, unbroken. Now I want you to define the length of the same line by recognising the point of intersection at each end as being a fixed point. Imagine you were holding a tape measure and marking off a point.’

She looked at each point in turn saying casually to herself, ‘Just there, no a little further this way, tick.’ As she did so, the outside portions of the lines disappeared rather like sawing off the overlapping ends at the apex of a wigwag.

‘Now that the first line has a defined length, you can set that as a scale and make all the others the same, but don’t define them as individual fixed lengths just yet. That’s right, now you have a regular tetrahedron, but you can’t see the apex because it is upstairs somewhere, but you know that it is there. Put your hand back in the fixed line again, that’s right. See it still has no effect—the line remains unbroken. Now take this pencil and hold it, very carefully, about an inch away from the inside of the fixed line and keep your bloody fingers out of the way. Good, now without looking at the third base intersection, I want you to lock its position as you did before.’

‘Fucking hell, thanks for warning me!’ Emma swore as the pencil was surgically amputated by the now fully formed triangular base. ‘That thing has a physical presence.’

‘It does, and indeed, a potentially dangerous one. The fixed line has a presence, but it can pass straight through an object because all it does is relate two points to each other. You can put anything between them and the fixed points are still in the same place. You put a two-dimensional barrier between them and the two sides are isolated from each other, which in this case meant that the top of the pencil was being supported by your fingers but the bottom part was isolated from that support and succumbed to the force of gravity as an independent unit. I have experimented with this and found that solids can suffer this intrusion and reconnect, depending on their chemical and subatomic make-up, but any independent movement, however small, renders such reconnection impossible without further external input such as heat. With living tissue, this is of course impossible. It is a case of stand clear of the doors.’

‘I am fascinated, Professor, but scared. Should I be scared?’

‘I’ll ask your friend, shall I?’ And the feeling of comfort returned to Emma with an added, "Cautious, curious