Chapter 100.

“Two weeks. It’s... really been... two weeks already?”

“Is there something strange about that?”

“The nightmare I had also lasted two weeks. The nightmare only ended when I discovered Adele. Well... that’s not quite correct either. I had another nightmare after that involving my fourth ex, but it was much shorter.”

“Always with women on your mind. Aren’t you quite the player?”

“You’re the one who pried into it.”

“Want to place bets on whether Adele is really your neighbor?”

“If I can have a bonus on my next paycheck.”

“A bonus? After not working for two weeks?”

“It’s a joke.”

“Well I don’t really mind, but if you lose, your penalty will be a harsh one.”

“Deal.”

“Oh? You seem pretty confident, Mr. Genovese.”

“I bet she’s not there. It’s definitely not possible no matter how I logically think about it. There’s absolutely no way she suddenly became my neighbor when she only just recently lost all her memories.”

“Is that so? Well, I’ll happily bet that she is there.”

I was just in denial. Even I didn’t trust anything I said. If she really was there, I’d definitely take the biggest L of all time. But I was in a direct confrontation with the bastardly nonexistent being known as the god of foreshadowing and I didn’t want to accept it.

“You really don’t look confident despite your choice.”

Of course I’m not. In reality, I was just pleading with the god of counter foreshadowing in my head that my nightmare didn’t turn out to become reality.

When we got out of Val’s car, the first thing that greeted me was a familiar building that towered over us from high above. It hadn’t been long since I moved here, but a lot of memorable things had already transpired since I started living here.

“Are you scared you’re going to suddenly lose consciousness again?”

“It’s not necessarily just that. Surprisingly, there are many things I subconsciously fear that I’m not fully aware of myself. I really don’t know what I’m most scared of when there’s such a large selection of fears for me to choose from, but If I really had to choose one thing that did scare me, I can say with confidence that uncertainty is near the top of the list.”

“What a flavorless response. I bet you must have been terrified out of your mind when you first learned Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.”

“Haha. That shitty principle gave me nightmares as a child. To be able to know one quantity but not the other at any given point in time; where the more precision you know one, the less precise you know the other. A principle where you are always left in the dark about something. Isn’t that among the greatest fears all?”

“You really had nightmares about it? Are you serious?”

“Of course not, but it is still a scary concept. There are many strange, inexplicable discoveries in science. The fact that simply observing a nonsentient object such as light changes its properties or behavior, doesn’t that make you question whether light isn’t just a higher dimensional being who gets shy when you look at it or bold when you ignore it? To be one thing, but another at the same time. Wouldn’t that fulfill the requirement of a higher dimensional being?”

“Light? A higher dimensional being? Haha, that’s an interesting take on it.”

“It’s all just nonsense at the end of the day though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because even if it were a higher dimensional being, as a third-dimensional being, we would never be able to observe its fourth dimension with our own eyes. As long as we’re three-dimensional beings, that is.”

“So if a fourth-dimensional being existed in this world they would be able to observe the fourth dimension to light?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Genovese, how do you think one would become… no, maybe create a fourth-dimensional being?”

“How would I know? Become or create a ghost?”

“A ghost?”

“If ghosts were real, the only thing I assume they might be would be a higher dimensional being. That would be the only scientific explanation I could accept if they really existed. That’s the conclusion I came to recently after mulling over it from a scientific standpoint.”

“Since we’re in a world with three expanded spatial dimensions and we cannot interact with their higher spatial dimensions, it would explain why at times we may observe them as being incomplete, seemingly massless, even holograph-like three-dimensional beings when in our world. Only when their awareness is focused on a particular plane and they want the observer on that plane to see them can we vaguely perceive or interact with them. We may be able to see the ghosts as three-dimensional beings, but in fact, they actually have this nth expanded spatial dimension to them.”

“Just like we can stick our hand through a two-dimensional plane at will to allow a two-dimensional being to see a line in their world. It works the same way here. When a ghost wants you to see them, they touch upon our plane and allow us to see them in the shape of a strange incomplete three-dimensional being. They appear incomplete to us simply because we can’t truly observe them in totality with only our eyes that can only depict two-dimensional images.”

“Basically, in quick summary, our body’s equipment is trash. Defective goods if we wished to truly observe a higher dimensional being’s form. We only perceive depth, three dimensions, because our brain overlaps and combines two sets of two-dimensional images in an interesting way. If a single eye could capture a three-dimensional image by itself, I really wonder what the world would look like with two of those eyes. It could potentially look something like overlapping holographic images, but that is just a theory.”

“Mr. Genovese, are you actually a quack rather than an electrical engineer?”

“Of course not. I’m just an average man living an average life, there are many people before me who already came up with this sort of theory. I’m far from being the first. I’m sure you know about M theory already, right?”

“Yes, I have”

“Then you should understand where I and many others might have derived a theory like this to explain ghosts, right?”

“I guess so. But why do ghosts look so scary to us?”

“Because we can’t fully observe or identify their real appearance as it changes in whatever manner they want. We may be able to somehow feel or sense something is off with them, but we can’t quite put our finger on it, so our mind instinctively labels them as something scary. Well, whether this is right or not, thinking of them like this is the only thing that would allow me to keep my cool if I ever confronted one of those mysterious higher dimensional beings.”

“So, if a ghost existed and they really were a higher dimensional being, in theory, they could appear at any point in space or our timeline, couldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a ghost, so how would I be able to confirm that? Maybe they can do one, but not the other at any given point; similar to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or the dual nature of light? So, although they can shift between plains that are slightly misaligned to move to another point in space, maybe they can’t actually exist in multiple places on that same plane while moving between locations when they are inside that world without leaving for another plain.”

“Maybe they are limited by distance as well. So perhaps the number of projections they can cast on our plane is limited by the number of plains close enough to each other for them to utilize. Maybe by a means of a quantum tunneling-like mechanism they can make it appear as though they are in more than one place at one time when in reality it is just another part of their body that entered a plane closely overlapping with ours.”

“This would be analogous to how the number of projections we as three-dimensional beings can cast onto a two-dimensional plane with our body alone. Thus, the further apart the locations on a singular plane they want to project themselves onto, the lower the total number of bodily projections they can cast onto a singular plane. The spread their projections can reach on a single plane can thus be thought of as the size of their body.”