One
Joe Shuttleworth drank. He drank because of the hatred he felt. He hated his life, he hated his home and his wife, but most of all, he hated his job at the zoo. He drank to forget the cruelty of caging animals, animals that should otherwise have been left to roam free. He drank too much and he knew it, but that was not what was on his mind at the moment.
Joe Shuttleworth walked along the old canal towpath. He had little on his mind other than placing one foot in front of the other. A task that one usually took for granted seemed at that moment to have needed all his wit and strength of mind to accomplish.
'One of these days Joe Shuttleworth, you will fall into that canal, and that will be the end of you.`
His wife's voice intruded into his thought processes making him stumble slightly. He laughed to himself or at least he thought that he had. A few ducks overhearing the noise took fright and scuttled comically away in a cacophony of sound. They sought out the solace of the water as they always did in times of uncertainty.
The walk from the Fisherman's public house to his home was only about a quarter of a mile but it could take Joe as long as an hour to reach the cosy bastion he called home. Strangely, the walk from his home to the Fisherman's only ever took, at the most, fifteen minutes, but this observation was beyond his mode of thought at the moment. He was, as they say, away with the fairies.
His chuckling eventually subsided and he found that he was seated on a rather antiquated bench with weather worn planking and chipped paint. It was of the type usually found in parks throughout this green and very municipal land and not at all intended for actual use. They were mainly for aesthetic purposes, laid out in neat formations, their lines only spoiled by the people that irritatingly sat on them.
His world suddenly, and without warning, decided to start to spin. At least, he presumed that it was the whole world; there was nothing to suggest to him otherwise. It would seem mighty unfair that he was the only one that had to put up with such an occurrence. It came right out of the blue and seemed to be accelerating all the time. The world became a blur of intermingled colours buzzing past his head faster and faster. He felt the need to lie down, and did so on the rather uncomfortable bench. He closed his eyes only to find that the blackness behind his eyes started to emulate the world outside. This, he felt sure, was most un-sportsman-like in its execution.
The spinning inside of his skull now imparted a message to his grumbling stomach, his mouth watered and he knew what was coming next. The loss of his already paid for stomach contents, were not lamented by Joe, in fact he was glad to be rid of the aqueous poison. It seemed to ease the spinning somewhat and he felt a little better, but just in case, he thought that he would remain where he was for a short time. His eyes closed again and the world passed into that hidden land where dreams rule and anything is possible.
He awoke some indeterminate time later; his eyes slowly opening letting in daggers of bright light that stabbed his brain. It felt for a moment like his brain was a little mammal curled up inside a cave and when he exposed it to light it became frightened, and ran around on the inside of his skull banging into it; at least that is what he became aware of once he had shut out those shards of piercing light. The brief image that his brain miraculously managed to take in and make sense of in that short few seconds his eyelids had opened, suggested to him that he was not where he expected to be, or for that matter, should have been. He knew that now he would have to take another look and allow those vicious stabbing lights of pain to pierce his already hurting brain.
Opening his eyes against all his better judgement forced him to blink awhile. He allowed himself to become used to the bright lights, but even before he could focus, he was able to perceive a dull grey colour that seemed to enclose him. He swung his legs sideways off the intolerably hard bench so that he was now sitting upright. His head ached with an intensity that suggested that at any moment it might explode into a myriad of fragments. What he had seen before his rather bloodshot eyes did not seem to make sense to him, a grey room, empty except for himself and the strangely out of place bench. Joe lowered his head into his hands as the full force of a barbed hangover took over his whole being.
"Never again!" He said to himself, trying desperately to recall how he had come to be here, and failing miserably.
Had he at anytime looked up, he would have been fairly surprised to have seen two tall, rather grey looking characters pointing what would have looked rather like a calculator at him, although of course it was not. Far from it in fact.
Joe sat intensely still, hiding his face from the reality that surrounded him. Through the intense pain, something gently intruded and permeated every synapse of his brain, it moved around rather aimlessly inside his mind for a time, before Joe eventually became aware of it. Once he realised that it was there, he took notice of it, paid it some attention, and all of a sudden something formulated inside his head.
"What is it?" A disembodied voice slipped into his consciousness. He wasn't sure but he somehow felt that he had not so much heard it as thought it. Yet it wasn’t his thought, it belonged elsewhere to someone else. He was just wrestling with this problem when it happened again, only this time the thought had a different voice.
"Monkey! Where did you find it?"
'Monkey,1 Joe thought 'Monkey, Who are they calling a monkey?' This according to Joe was his own thought although of course he couldn't be overly confident of the fact. It was then that he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Swimming into focus in front of him stood two tall, thin, bald people, but the most startling thing about them was their pale grey skin and jet black almond eyes that seemed bereft of any trace of emotion.
"Whaaaaa...?" Was all that Joe managed to splutter out, though never an overtly articulate man this did seem to convince the two chaps of their correct diagnosis.
"It just sort of appeared, must be an anomaly." The voice, gaining confidence, seemed to grow louder and more clearly in his head. It seemed to have by-passed all of the usual channels that in a polite society it should have gone through. Instead, it decided to impolitely cut out the middleman and go straight to the brain.
"Tech's, picking up samples again. You'll have to deal with it." Joe looked around him searching for the instigator of that last voice but, according to him, unable to locate the guilty party instead settled on the two odd people standing in front of him.
"I'm not a monkey." He spoke out loud. One of the pair pointed the calculator-like device at him again.
"He says that he's not a monkey," Said a voice that uncomfortably reverberated inside Joe's skull. Joe thought this intrusion rather churlish of them. If indeed it was they.
"It has ninety nine percent of a monkey's DNA. What else could it be?" "I don't know. Says it's not a monkey though." The voices inside Joe's head were most pleasant and soothing, not at all as startling and unnerving, as they first appeared to have been.
"Who... who are you? Where am I? What's going on?" asked Joe. Now that he had begun to find his feet he decided that the best course of action should be a mild panic possibly building towards full-scale hysteria at a later date, much he realised depended on how things developed. After all there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, perhaps it was only that he had gone mad. That he could quite comfortably live with.
"Not very bright is it? I would say for sure that it is a monkey or an ape of some kind. Anyway... send it back.
"Can't, not yet, maybe later."
"Errrm excuse me, what's happening?" asked Joe.
"You deal with it. It hurts my head thinking down to its level." One of the strange people turned and walked out of the room. It appeared to walk straight through what Joe perceived to be a solid wall.
"How...? He...? What...?" Joe was astounded and at a loss for words. He became immersed in confusion almost to the point of drowning.
"Welcome monkey man, we are mathematicians."
"What?" Joe, almost forgetting about his hangover, considered going into full-blown panic now. It would, he began to philosophise, be the correct and proper thing to do but for the moment he decided on a more benign and innocuous course of action.
"Do you have any tea?"
"I take it that you mean you require re-hydration, monkey man?"
"Re - what? No, I'm just very thirsty... and I am a man, not a monkey. What the hell are you anyway?"
"We are mathematicians, and my advice to you, and after all I am easily a thousand times more intelligent than you are, is to re-hydrate, monkey man. It appears that some organic molecule has entered many of your cells and displaced the more accustomed water molecules."
"What?" The odd person seemed to be at a loss momentarily. He had already shut down ninety eight percent of his mind in order that he may communicate with this monkey man and still he wasn't getting through. He read something from his scanner and interpreted it in another way.
“You have absorbed too much alcohol and caused damage to your system.”
"Ahh, yes, you're telling me, boy did I hang one on last night, at least I think that I did, I canft quite recall it at the moment."
"Yes, well monkey man, you need to replace your losses and repair your damaged systems."
A moment later a bright green liquid was pushed at him and he was told to drink it for the repair of his systems. Joe drank down the pleasant fluid and almost immediately he began to feel better, which was a good thing he thought, After all, it doesn't do to go into full-scale hysterics when you are feeling rough.
"Where am I?" Joe asked, handing back the glass and watching it vanish before his eyes.
"Ah, that is quite difficult to explain. You are nowhere, that is nowhere in time or space. You see you don't really exist, that is in this dimension."
"What?"
"Really monkey man, you must try and keep up."
"Must I?"
"You see we built and designed your part of the galaxy, well in fact, we did all the maths for it, but... well... in fact there was a problem."
"Really." said Joe feigning interest "What do you mean, don't exist?"
"The universe you see is as good as infinite, so to locate your minuscule planet in infinity is most difficult. I mean compared with infinity, the mass of your planet is so small that mathematicians would ignore such a tiny number. Ergo, monkey man, your planet does not exist and therefore neither do you. "
"Errrm, actually I think that I do, you know."
"How can you be sure? Perhaps you are a figment of someone's imagination? Perhaps you are only dreaming? Who knows?"
"So there is something that you don't know, Mr big brain." Joe had seen his chance to stamp his personality on this bizarre, surreal Machiavellian place and to hit back the only way he knew how. Revenge, and it did feel sweet, a minor victory like one small step for mankind.
"Well monkey man, I am aware of my lack of knowledge in many areas, but it does give me head pains just thinking down to your level." The expressionless face somehow managed to take on a smug look. Although Joe had difficulty understanding all that had happened since he came to this place, he did feel it somewhat unjust at being called monkey man. Then Joe remembered a snippet of conversation from earlier.
"What was this problem that you mentioned then?"
"Ah." The smug look evaporated from the expressionless face and developed into a look of consternation.
"Well time, it is infinite, a physical law, it's hardly worth putting into any equation where neoquasi inter-dimensional spatial calculus is used. Is it?
"Isn't it?" Asked Joe as if he had followed the logic of the conversation.
"No, and who was to know that some semi-intelligent sentient fish would evolve and take over the planet?"
"Fish?"
"Yes, some aquatic mammal evolved to dominate the earth.1
"No1
"Yes"
"No, it's us, we dominate the planet."
"No monkey man, you are sadly deluded. Dolphins, I believe they are called." "What?"
"Are you having difficulty with your audio perception? Perhaps your tiny brain is becoming overloaded. Dolphins are, and remain, the only sentient beings we have encountered and once they came into being, due to universal law, damn lawyers; we were unable to erase our creation, which led to the development of the Time Dissociation Machine, or TDM as we like to call it." "Oh yes?"
"You see, the Earth's time field was randomly created and of course it tends to, occasionally, errmm, sort of step out of line with the rest of the universe, and that cannot be."
"No, I could see that would be a problem." said Joe oblivious to the concept.
"You would fall into a time dilation effect if you where not too careful, if time steps too far out of line, you could, in theory, create a time black hole. Very bad."
"Very bad?"
"Very, very badl The department would be in deep trouble. Heads would roll."
"Rightly so." "Yes quite."
"So., .ermm..." Joe was trying to appear to be hanging in there this time and he added a small knowing nod for effect.
"Of course with the TDM in place a modicum of stability was achieved, but at what cost to the Dolphins?"
"What cost?"
" Well, it works on a psychological aberration. You see there are periods when we need to move time forward, to steal some time as it were. Then when there is a deficit, sometimes we need to add time, to give time back, but for some reason the periods are happening more and more. Anyway, we take time and add time in order to produce stability. You see?"
"Mmrnrnm." replied Joe.
"It works well. They don't seem to realise that it is happening, which is due to the psychological aberration of course. When the sentient beings are having a good time, we are able to pick up some time from them without them realising it. Time literally flies for them and of course equally, when they are having a really bad time, we give them a bit back. They have grown to expect it. Itfs all automatic now anyway."
Something happened inside Joe's head. Something clicked and he began to understand what had been said. At first it was with a quiet creeping excitement that he finally understood something that he had been told. A smile played across his face. After a short time the smile realised that it didn't belong there and went off to play somewhere else.
"Wait a minute, wait...are you telling me, that when I'm, whenever I am having a really good time, you pop up and steal a bit of my time?" There was real menace in Joe's voice.
"Well monkey man, not your time no, the sentient beings, the dolphins."
"No. Wrong again Mr smarty-pants, we are the dominant species not the bloody dolphins."
"Ah delusional, quite delusional."
"...And when I am having a really bad time, you just come along and prolong it. . .you complete and utter..." The odd man moved away nervously.
"I will just go and see how the calculations are going for the rescue, errm I mean removal of the sentient, ermm dolphins, " He backed out through the solid grey wall and Joe, distracted by his anger, tried to follow with disastrous consequences. He was brought up sharp by the impact with the wall.
"Come back! I haven't finished with you yet, I'll, I'll, well I don't know what I will do, but I'll do it and it won't be pleasant either/ you. . .you. . . ." Joe paced the room while he ranted on. The word rescue spun around inside his head searching for somewhere to settle and call home. When it did eventually discover a niche it nestled in there quite contentedly.
"Rescue. ..rescue, what do you men by rescue, rescue from what?" The word rescue now regretted settling in that tiny brain. So much sudden use exhausted it and it had to go and have a lie down somewhere.
"Is there something that you feel you should be telling me?"
For all his bluster and gruff nature, Joe did enjoy the subtle beauty of the world. The autumn colours that nature painted on her broad canvass, the song of a bird, the cool breeze on a lazy summer's day, the taste of fresh air after a particularly heavy night drinking, wait just one minute, DRINK! ! !
"Oh my god wait, come back, whatever you are, I forgive you, but what in Gods name do you mean rescue?"
Two
The wall seemed solid to Joe. He checked it over thoroughly several times and was actually giving it another once-over for good measure when a tall, bald, thin grey man walked back through the obstinate solid wall. A second equally bizarre being followed him.
'This must be a set from a Speilberg movie.' Joe thought to himself.
"Is this your pet monkey?"
"No, good grief no, he as been picked up by one of the techs, in error probably, but you never can tell with those fellows. Maybe they thought it was a joke. Who knows, things have got really intolerable round here since the error. I mean who would have thought such a miniscule slip could cause such a fuss. Totally out of proportion."
" Oh absolutely, who can fathom it, not I. Well, what are you going to do with your monkey then?"
"Send it back of course."
"That will slow us up a bit won't it? I mean, you know, with the rescue and all." Joefs brain pricked up at the word rescue.
"Err, rescue, what err are you rescuing then exactly? I mean, I only ask because I do live there you know?"
"Rescue! Rescue is as rescue does I always find." answered a new voice in his head. Joe instinctively disliked this new being.
"What?"
"We are transferring the whole population of the seas and oceans to a new location with the main emphasis on the dominant species of the planet, the dolphins."
"Why?"
"So that we can then demolish the planet and re-build it with time as part of the equation, monkey man. Nothing for you to worry about," said the disliked being. Joe spluttered in disbelief at the two beings.
"What? Demolish my whole planet, nothing to worry about? Are you deranged? Are you completely off your trolley? What about us the people, the land dwellers?"
"Land? Land? Oh I see your mistake monkey man. You see mathematically it doesn't exist."
"What?”
"Well, it is only a small fraction of the planet, isn't it? It's not worth worrying over really."
The stranger raised its non-existent eyebrows and walked back out through the solid wall.
"What are you?" asked Joe contemptuously.
"We are mathematicians. We do all the calculations for the universe, we are. . ."
"Stupid, is what you are. No wonder the universe is in such a bloody mess with you nerds running it."
"Nerds?"
"Yes NERDS! I111 bet that the rest of the faculty avoids you lot like the plague. Tell me, are you ever invited to any of the parties, eh? Ever ask yourself why? Well, it's because you are the biggest bunch of nerdiest nerds that has ever walked on...whatever it is you walk on. You are the kings of nerdom. Never has there been a bigger bunch of nerdie nerds than you lot. You take nerdiness to new heights; in fact nerd isn't a big enough word to describe what you are, I can't think of one at the moment. But you are one, and a total, total one at that."
"Do I detect a hint of something amiss with you monkey man?"
"Amiss, amiss, nooo, what could be amiss? I mean, you only intend to blow my entire planet up and everyone along with it, that's all. I mean sure, go ahead, why not send me back first then blow it up? Why not blow up a few other well populated worlds while you are at it?" Joe paused for breath and he began to pace.
"I know," he continued, "Why not blow up the odd galaxy or two while you are
at it. I'm sure you can prove that they don't really exist either, I mean what else is mathematics for if you can't blow up the odd galaxy or two."
"Well quite. You really are getting the hang of things monkey man, I am very pleased at your progress."
"No, no, no, haven't you ever heard of sarcasm you damned calculating dim wit?"
"I fear your understanding is not as fully developed as I had hoped. Perhaps something is still troubling you?"
"Errmmmm let's see, I can't think what, oh yes, I know... perhaps it's the fact that you intend to blow the hell out of my home planet with everyone on it! "
"Does that bother you monkey man?"
"Well to be quite honest, YES!" Yelled Joe in frustration. The grey being shrugged without moving, which if you have never experienced such a thing can be awfully disconcerting.
"We will do all that we can to ensure the survival of the most important life forms. You see the Earth has become somewhat inconvenient."
"Inconvenient? You are willing to kill billions of people because of inconvenience?
" Billions, did you say.. .billions? Are we talking a thousand million or a million million?"
"Ermm does it matter It's still an awful lot of people, isn't it?"
"It matters to a mathematician, but I do feel, monkey man, that you must be wrong. "
"No, no I'm not wrong. Why don't you check your numbers, check your facts before you go disposing of lovely little blue-green planets."
Joe had hit a nerve. He was talking numbers, something that the mathematician understood.
"I will check." The being turned and walked through the wall, which began to irritate Joe immensely.
"AND STOP WALKING THROUGH WALLS!"
"I don't," came a disembodied voice "I just use it as a focus for inter-dimensional travel. I can take advantage of the curvature and warping of space-time and enter other dimensions. That way I can calculate a problem in say the tenth dimension whilst stood in the sixth dimension, in, in fact, zero time. The upshot is that I can solve problems instantaneously and if I have many calculations to solve then by splitting my brain amongst several dimensions at once I can instantly gain an answer. Very useful really.