Phase Q/Return to the Garden
You hazily materialize in a garden.
The garden floats in space.
All around, in 360 degrees in six dimensions, life grows and glows around you.
Well, sort of.
It’s not technically alive.
Yet, the feeling of life vibrates through the garden, even more powerfully than anything you’ve ever known before.
You virtually explode with life, yet with control.
Everywhere around you, and even within you, a new form of activity stirs. Instead of the old struggle of life, that simple desire to keep on kicking against the every-crushing sea of hurdles and threats, you teem more swimmingly with a fresh kind of activity.
Like flying.
You transmorph through thirty thousand stages in less than the blink of an eye, without a transmorpher. It just comes naturally, or, well, automatically.
All around you, friends from previous lifestyles come and play with you. Natalya is there, without a trace of the sinful or vicious ways that beset her at various points in her life. The Fyucheez from the quicklab are there, goofing around effortlessly. Even your old chums from back before you found out about the tubeworks are there.
“What a revolution!” casually tosses out Lupak.
“All right!” you agree.
With synthaudio filling your audio-processing core, your rhythm automatically shifts and sways and flows like a dozen professional dancers, all slammed into one glamorous body.
“Do you know what you’re doing yet?” asks Natalya.
“Still no, or rather yes,” you say. “That is, uh, um, I think I get what’s going on here, at least I feel like I can do freely in accordance with the thing. However I admit I’m not quite sure where we are, that is, our coordinates in dimensionspace.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” says Valbeena.
“Yeah,” elaborates Lupak. “We’re not actually in dimensionspace.”
“Um, uh, oh,” you say.
The flowery hallucinations continue to follow your every wish. Sometimes they even seem to come before your wish.
“So, um, where exactly are we?” you ask.
“Let me field that one,” says Lupak. “You see, what we did is a kind of reconstitutination of mattergy. So you see, technically there isn’t even a where here. Or, rather, a where.”
“Uh, um.”
“If you want to know about the spacey details, we stretched spacetime enough that we could fit a wedge one quark wide between two points. Then we pumped in charm, essentially creating a kind of self-eating or self-generating antivacuum. It’s kind of the same thing, just two different ways of looking at things.”
“Um, er,” you add.
“So basically we’re in a different world, it sort of started out as part of dimensionspace, although that’s not technically correct because to be accurate it doesn’t actually have a start or an end.”
“So, how do you get back and forth with dimensionspace? Or do you?”
“No, that’s kind of one of the drawbacks. Once you’re here you can’t exactly leave.”
“Well, can you inexactly leave, then?” you ask.
“No, uh, not exactly.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Natalya casts you a quizzical glance.
“At least it feels like a really top-notch spot,” you say.
“Yeah,” says Lupak. “About that…”
Phase Q: An interactive adventure.
