The Purple Dimension

A decade ago, Earth's physicists discovered a new particle several magnitudes smaller than the quark. Men believed, yet again, having found the smallest building block of matter forming our universe. Media tried and failed to interest the general population. But this discovery would change the Solar System.

The notion that "a smallest particle" even existed was pure fallacy. Humans as they pushed to understand the small, saw something new and each time convinced itself this was it. Certain there was nothing was smaller, it proved itself wrong decades later with another smaller building bock. Men knew it’s Universe was large beyond scale but on the microscopic scale, humans thought there was a lower limit. Manking was obviously wrong, but it helped most sleep at night.

As if to forewarn against a new future particle trashing this latest discovery, the latest particle was baptized with the last letter of the alphabet. Thus, the zex was born. If anyone cared, it was a thousandth the size of a quark.

But the first practical discovered use of the zex proved to be breathtaking. Zexs, to scientists, are massless particles like photons or neutrinos. The zex, when coupled to a photon, creates a stable pair for exactly two picoseconds, or more understandably, two trillionths of a second. As both massless particles unite or break, they drop any pretense of existing as a dual-wave particle group. Their spins intertwine, and the newly formed pair resonates as a heavy particle with mass. While complex, what remains is a reinforcement of field theory over particle-wave duality. Twelve people on Earth really understood what all this meant.

An expert on CNN joked “the zex is the key of your car, you don’t need it once you are moving, but it’s critical when you need to start the car. We managed to remove the key of the moving car and guess what, stoping it creates a problem we call zeP. See the P for parked.”

Once again, to most sports and music overshadowed particle physics. These enhanced, ephemeral light particles, called zePs, have two particularly interesting properties. First, they emit a perceptible green hue to the human eye made of a visible particle smaller than a photon. Scientists remain uncertain of the nature of this green energy, but what is also known is that the pair, during its short life, can bounce off a mirror and push against it. The effect is akin to water from a fire hose hitting a brick wall. Physicists were the first to understand the potential uses of light possessing transferable momentum. The expert added, “We take for granted how the powerful light of a lighthouse doesn’t push a boat on water. Light bounces off, as fast as it came in but it is unchanged, why is that? Light is the only thing Our little zex key makes the light able to push. It gives it momentum.”

Men, most of them simply did not care. They should have.

The first commercial application of the zeP pair, was on the AirBus's Light Drive. A new technology was mounted in the engine room of the Airbus A2070, the ship taking Sophie and the Electoral 2072 contestants to Mars. The propulsion mirror dubbed the Light Drive was a plate able to accelerate the ship under the impulsion of light from a laser located in Earth's orbit. A laser was pointed at the back of the spaceship and instead of bouncing off, it pushed. Thanks to this free acceleration, significant subluminal speeds were now possible as long as a plate was in line of sight. This was courtesy of Earth's largest computer program and the smallest known particle, the zex.

Men was decades from commercializing this very new discovery but in a matter of months, Marilyn Monroe had it added to the ship taking her players to Mars. The three month trip between the planets could be shortened to weeks.

Light shone, it moved and in second arrived.

The Light Drive powered and zexs flooded the dead of space.

***

Mall-ik, the quantum alien, was in awe of the destruction occurring before him.

He floated alone in the purple space of his microscopic world. Ahead, larger than a city, a flow of massive zexs poured into his world form a giant green rift. He was alone here in the Purple-colored space, but he was not scared -- alone he felt safe for the first time in quite a long time. In this adjacent quantum world, Mall-ik, a young member of a race called Metils, was floating and pulsing. From the boy's vantage point, his world was much different.

The Purple was a world built on different fundamental laws of physics. Here zexs had been known for eons. In this quantum place, the zexs appear as massive colorful spinning boulders made upon hundreds of layers of spinning particles the size of meteors. Each was capable of large-scale destruction, these thousands were oblivion.

On Earth, zexs were small, here they were massive. It was, for the moment impossible for inhabitants of both worlds to even conceive Life on such a difference in scale.

The strange world where Mall-ik resides is simply called the Purple because of the colorful purple hue of its deep space. Mall-ik, a planetoid of spinning rocks was floating alone far from any other life. Gravity could not exist here, as mass did not bend such small space. There were other forces of course.

Here was the problem, to the inhabitants of this world, deadly rifts had been appearing with no discernible pattern in their world. Through these rifts, rivers of massive zexs poured in. The simplest description of the boy was a large modern art ball made of flashing pieces of uneven glass, where each piece was attached to a ballet of strings and light kept bouncing between the plates. The creature pulsed and not unlike Loric the magician, blue sparks of energy bounced between the rocks of molded glass.

The zexs, these deadly enormous missiles ahead of him were created in the green tears of the Purple's quantum dimension and travelled as fast as bullets only to crash into more deeply inhabited areas of the Purple. Zexs were here meteors sent down to destroy cities.

The slaughter has already killed over a billion Metils, the strange inhabitants of this world. Thankfully, after a green rift appears, it quickly moves at a fixed speed in space and vanishes as suddenly as it appeared.

As predicted, the large glowing green tear appeared, and the rift was standing before Mall-ik. It had just opened deep in space, in a portion of the Purple far from any inhabited area. He was the only one in danger for the moment. While the beauty of the rift could not be denied, the situation was dire. Mall-ik was not here by mistake; he had to translate to this area using his technology and report back quickly if the rift opened, which it just had. Instead of reporting, the boy pulsed and small groups of rocks floated out of his body in four directions.

He was alone. This was beauty. This young male creature was used to solitude and there was a mastic Attraction.

He had hoped the engineers were wrong and the rift would not appear. For the first time, the precise space-time coordinate of this rift had been accurately predicted by a young Metil scientist, once ridiculed for coming up with his wild theory. The prediction had chilling repercussions: the theory predicts an increase in the number of rifts and the destruction of all life in the Purple within years.

Mall-ik, a young guard, had been dispatched to monitor the edge of the rift's opening. The boy was a ball made of seven spinning concentric moving layers, each formed by millions of smaller pieces. Mall-ik was a complex cloud of spinning gyroscopic rock with lights bouncing between those rocks.

Metils are normally made of five layers, and a few of six. A handful of individuals in the race are ever been born with seven spinning layers. These rare individuals held higher public offices, but that was not the case for Mall-ik. He was a pariah. In this world, the concept of particle spin is well understood. Pairs form and consistently orbit themselves in the same direction.

Mall-ik, even with his seven layers, was working as a simple security guard. With the opening of the rift, this guard's mission had just transformed into a suicide mission. He continued to float, alone, in the dead of the purple space. He forgot to report the aperture of the green glowing surface. Projectiles began to gush in, flying close to him in every direction. But he was oblivious to them.

Before him was a sight impossible to ignore. The rift through which the zexs streamed looked like a city-wide flat surface, a large mirror between two worlds. Mall-ik could see the zexs materialize at the interface as they shot into the Purple. The velocity of the zexs was shocking for such heavy structures. These were missiles of devastation like buildings falling to crush city dwellers.

Mall-ik's world, as every world in the Multiverse, was built on its own unique set of laws of physics. The Purple had no gravity, three electro-weak forces, and two magnetic forces unrelated to the weak fields. If Earth floated in oil, then this place was vinegar. The space in this world had different tints where areas of increased energetic space were more deeply shaded. Creatures like the Metils lived and fed in these deeper energy areas the same way humans enjoyed a sunny beach.

The ruling body of the Metils was known simply as the Group. They were truly belligerent. The creation of zexs, if at all possible here, had long been outlawed. There was no legal justification for creating zexs, aside from military uses, but the Metils had no known enemies. They had long destroyed all other forms of life here.

The Group was this race's last hope of closing these rifts, which appeared to be a new natural phenomenon. One of their scientists had a theory but was jailed for his radical new ideas, but as billions died pointlessly, he was now allowed to resume his work under close supervision. Thanks to the latest accurate prediction, the Group could finally rule out the most reasonable hypothesis that no real enemy was attacking them. The barrier between this world and its neighboring world was fading.

The edge of each of these rifts was irregular, like a sunspot. According to the scientists' calculations, the rift that just opened would be the first of three. The first would be the smallest in size, and shortest in duration.

The Group assigned a young security officer to monitor the first rift. That creature was no expert and knew very little of the theories. They picked Mall-ik, he was expendable and could die. Mall-ik was unclear if he was watching a gate between worlds, or a natural phenomenon. This is where the rift would open. His job was simple, after reporting the aperture if a zex was ejected from the rift and shot in a direction where it headed directly toward their warm spot where Metils lived, he was to warn them. Privately, the Group hoped one zex would kill Mall-ik before the day was over.

Mall-ik was no idiot. He knew zexs were dangerous and unstable. A teacher once told him that only quarks were larger, but right now he did not care. He was floating in the cold purple space where he had been told to wait. The sheer power generated by the rift was palpable at this distance. This was like standing half a mile away from Niagara Falls. The power cracking in the purple space felt strange, like a warming heat. Slowly, he began to pulse from being this close to raw, destructive energy.

Somehow, the deadly rift was not scaring him. Few came back alive after watching a zex from this close, much less a rift where hundreds were created. Mall-ik was standing between hundreds of rocks pouring forth each passing minute. Within each zex, colors jumped from one rock to the next in a kaleidoscope of life. Oddly, these zexs were filled with strange green flashes.

The sight was beautiful. Mesmerizing.

His mind wandered. Metils had no respect for him because of his birth. All of his twenty-seven creators, who merged at the time of his conception, had died as he snapped off from the larger grouping. In this world, parents formed of hundreds of spinning and orbiting rocks literally merged and then like cellular division, gave small groups of themselves to form a child. Birth here was always dangerous. Normally, if twenty-seven merged, twenty-eight would emerge.

All twenty-seven of his progenitors died at the moment of his birth. That was his first sin. The respect of their deaths was the only reason why he was not killed at birth. His second sin was his orbital flaws. Pairs of rocks forming individuals always rotated around each other in a clockwise fashion, what was called a positive spin. In the rarest of cases, one pair of the nearly thousand pairs forming an individual flipped and turned in tandem with a negative spin.

The kindest word used to describe someone with a negatively spinning pair was “bastard.” In the past, if such an inversion happened after birth, the Metil was instantly put to death. Birth inversions were shunned, but just recently tolerated by law. Mall-ik would be lying if he said he was above the taunts. He was an outcast, nothing could change that. As if his inversion was not enough, Mall-ik had seen that morning the second inversion within himself, which meant his certain death. With great difficulty, he managed to hide the pair below the other outer spinning rocks, but sooner or later his concentration would slip, and someone would see his deformity. His days were numbered; he knew as much.

This was probably why he cared little about the dangers of the rift.

This rift was a perfect death but in his mind, he felt something strange, a connection. A strange feeling deep within himself.

Watching the rift, pulsating with the energy, he fell into some type of trance. He no longer cared about his own safety. The sizes were deceiving, he was unaware that he was slowly moving closer to the rift. The rounded, colorful shapes were astonishing. The giant zexs appeared and shot at him from every direction. As he approached, they somehow seemed to shrink, they now felt the size of buildings, not cities.

He had no way to measure distances or time. By floating so close to the rift, Mall-ik began to absorb some of the energy. His five lower layers began to spin faster. He liked it. He turned his attention to the areas of the rift between the forming meteors. There was black darkness, blanketed by stars.

In the Purple, when particulate matter slowed and lost energy to almost nothing, it simply began to lose grip and transition to non-existence. It also becomes transparent moments before it phased out of existence to a nameless place. Because all known worlds also share this strange rule, matter which phases out when moving too slow, it was hypothesized that it all went to a world of extremely low energy, a place everyone calls the Cold. It was inevitable: every particle, in time, merged with other rocks, lost energy, and slowed down. Large structures, like the zex, the photon, and the quark were normally too slow to stay in the Purple.

All matter one day vanishes to the Cold, never to return. Mall-ik was no physicist. He was unable to understand what was going on at the rift, but ahead he saw into the Cold. The world where humans lived. It was there.

The Metil physicist that predicted this rift arrival knew better. He reasoned the Cold could use these dead slowed structures using different laws of physics. The brilliant scientist reasoned large things could be formed by joining up with a hundred such neutrons. Little did he know life on the Cold was formed of billions of merged particles. The Cold, Earth’s dimension even had stars.

Mall-ik was floating in space, at the edge of the rift, where his own portions were moving in and out of existence. If the scientists were right, this region was about to be torn open, and he had a front-row seat. But he was not afraid. He had little value for his own life. As he moved closer, the zexs were shrinking in size. Unaware, he was, in fact, growing in size. His path miraculously avoided the incoming zexs until he was inches from it. To the young creature, the rift was like a wall of boiling magma that he was ready to touch. His large body was now warm. He knew he was dying, yet he kept floating closer and closer.

Then Mall-ik saw images in the rift -- he saw Sophie. As he did, he saw her look back. She saw him, a red sparkle in space. The boy was unable to understand any of what he saw.

The sight was amazing. A powerful flow of even larger particles, photons, all of the same type and size arrived from a distance and hit a mirror. The source was localized in space next to the rift. The photons on the mirror morphed like werewolves under a full moon into monstrously sized zexs. The shells were torn off, and green energy spat out. The system on the other side of the rift was creating the zexs. This was too complex to describe. He stood in a place that resembled magma from a volcano jumping into the ocean.

Mall-ik floated even closer.

Space exploded around the young guard. The sight was beautiful. Mall-ik ventured closer to the green light beam, like iron drawn to a magnet. He let the photons pass through him; they did. The Metils were a race transparent to photons, as long as they were pure.

Mall-ik was now on the edge of the rift.

He could see strange images. There was a tube, a ship in space. Though Mall-ik did not know it, he was seeing the Airbus A2070 taking Sophie to Mars. In the back of it was a Light Drive. The plate at the heart of the drive generated zexs, giving them time to merge with a blue photon.

The guard did not understand what he was seeing. He did not know of the Light Drive, the ship, or even Sophie. All he knew was that as the photons of the laser hit the dark plate, and chaos of wasted energy was gushing out in the newly opened rift. Matter was being destroyed in quantum waves crashing in space. From his vantage point, this was like using a tsunami to move a beach chair.

Mall-ik was floating in the anomaly. He could feel the unpleasant ripples of space from where he stood. He knew he was not supposed to be there. Then, in the deep darkness of space, he perceived something. He had no eyes, no body, yet the world around him lit up with bright colors; tints he had never seen. Anyone else would have recoiled, but not him. He was absorbed by the beauty. He was absorbing part of the energy from the rift. Unbeknownst to him, he was shifting his scale. He was still small, but he had left his quantum world. He now blinked like a firefly in the dark new world.

What he saw in the Cold was beautiful and mysterious.

Ahead of the anomaly, he saw the loud thundering source of chaos. It was the light drive and the ship. Next to the noise were many shining shapes floating in space. These looked alive, like bees swarming around their hive. The shapes seemed to have structure, coherence. Overwhelmed, he moved closer and counted over a hundred shining clouds, each forming a network of electricity in a defined space. These were sentient beings of some type. They sat in the ship. Mall-ik was seeing the brain activity of each person onboard the ship. The electricity created by each neuron in the brains of those onboard left a trace that resembled many of the lower forms of life in his world. He also saw energy in the ship.

One of the living creatures was a bit smaller than the others. Its network of energy was not shining silver. It was gold. He knew her. In his heart she was important.

Then also one of the farthest from the dangerous anomaly. This was all very confusing. As he approached, he did what was ordinary for him: with part of himself, he mimicked the structure and reproduced the pathways. This was how his race communicated.

Mall-ik was replicating the human pathways the same was the sand creatures on Mars had copied the brain of the explorer. The Metis were unrelated to the Martians yet both managed life in its purest form. Humans had bodies around their brain.

Sophie’s being began to float in. Every memory, every feeling became his. The pathways began to send him messages and even emotions. Part of his mind was now a copy of Sophie's brain. What she was thinking, he was thinking. What she was seeing, he was seeing. The information he received was impossible to digest for an alien being. In his normal form, he had no eyes, no body. Then an emphatic bond formed. He felt sadness and worry. He was alone, far from home. That emotion he could relate to. He was also sharing the thoughts of an orphan; also easy to understand.

She blamed herself for her family’s destruction. He could relate.

Mall-ik felt the girl; she had a name. She had a father, and he was on the ship. How could she be an orphan and have a father, he wondered. Mall-ik knew this was dangerous, and he tried to disconnect from her. He could not. Instead, out of confusion and against his better judgment, he plunged into the memory. She was from the third planet, which she called earth, and she was going to the fourth red planet, which she called mars.

The boy, irresponsibly slipped, moved and from there, things got really strange.