jitspoe's Homepage: Writings: D5

D5    A shower of sparks flew as Jacob touched a couple of wires together.
   "Crap," he said as he flipped off the power supply, "Hope I didn't kill the circuits."
   "Time for dinner!" called his mother from downstairs.
   *Ugh* "Just a second!" he responded, trying to control the irritation in his voice.
   Jacob was adding the finishing touches on last year's science fair project. He should have known it was a bit out of his range. There was no way he could have finished the project in time for the science fair deadlines. He wasn't really doing it for the science fair, though. It was a subject that interested him greatly: the fifth dimension. There were four obvious dimensions to the space-time continuum: X, Y, Z, and T (width, height, depth, and time), but he had a hunch there was more to the universe than that. Uncertain of an abbreviation, he just called it "D5."
   He won nothing at the local science fair and received a mediocre grade, while what he considered "kindergarten projects" did significantly better. This didn't bother him though... well, not too much. Nobody understood him, not even his parents. He just accepted it as a fact. Perhaps it was because he wasn't very open about anything. He spent most of his time either on his computer doing research or working on the project. Nobody really knew how much time and effort he was putting into something that might have a permanent impact on the world. He was determined to finish the project before the end of the summer. "Who needs college when you've made millions, or even billions from a revolutionizing invention?" he thought.
   "Dinner time!" came his mother's voice again.
   "Just a second!" he repeated, letting a little more of the irritation slip.
   He secured the wire, switched a jumper, and flipped the switch back on. The only sound was the feint hum of the pump in the liquid cooling tank. His parents found the price of all the equipment ridiculous, and the fact that he was pushing the limits of the technology even further, using liquid cooling to prevent overheating even more ridiculous. Jacob knew that calculations of a four-dimensional matrix were difficult enough, and for five dimensions... That was insane. He needed every bit of processing power he could get.
   A couple LED's lit up. The monitor, however, remained blank.
   "Oh great," he thought and flipped off the switch again. As he turned to inspect the circuitry again, he knocked a couple wires loose.
   "Sh...oot!" slipped out. Fortunately he caught himself before he finished the profanity since his mother was coming up the stairs.
   "Go away," he thought.
   "Dinner's ready," she said.
   "Can you hang on a minute?" he asked, feigning his unannoyedness.
   "Alright," she said and descended the stairs.
   He reattached the wires to where he thought they were originally located and flipped the switch back on. A large burst of contained excitement shot through him as he saw the monitor flicker on.
   "This is it," he thought.
   His assembly coded operating system booted instantly, as it should. It was relatively simple. Its only purpose was to interface with the matter-transfer unit. The matter-transfer unit was something he had been working on for a couple years now. He had intended for it to be completed by the science fair deadline of his senior year, but it wasn't. The concept was relatively simple. A scanner detected each proton, neutron, and electron in an object and fed it to the computer, which would then process the data and keep a real-time prediction of the movement of the particles to prevent the object from disassembling into a large wad of disorganized mass. The data was then transferred from the computer back to the matter-transfer unit, which relocated the particle matrix to specified offset coordinates. Building the thing was a totally different story. It was complete now, though, and Jacob hoped all of his hard work would finally pay off.
   A simple prompt came up. There were only 3 things it asked for: Offset X, Offset Y, Offset Z, Offset T, and Offset D5. Jacob entered "0" for the first three, as his main interest was D5.
   "Jacob, we're waiting!" his mother's voice came again from downstairs.
   He got up from his chair about to type the last value in when he realized he hadn't placed anything on the matter-transfer unit yet. He grabbed the closed convenient object and placed on the matter-transfer unit carefully. It was an orange. He typed in "0.00245" as an arbitrary value for "Offset D5," and rushed downstairs to eat. *    *    *    Meanwhile, in a house identical to Jacob's, an orange materialized in a room upstairs. It floated for a few seconds as if suspended by an invisible string, then fell into a tank of liquid coolant, which someone had apparently abandoned in a hurry and forgotten to place the insulative lid back on. A splash of liquid coolant went flying, which vaporized in the air, and the orange froze in less than a second and vanished into the fog of condensed water due to the liquid coolant vapor.
   Not more than five minutes later, the lid was returned, and the orange went unnoticed. *    *    *    Jacob went back upstairs and found, to his dismay, that nothing had changed. The orange was still there. The cursor flashed at the "Offset X" again. He typed in "0," then "0" for Y and Z as well. When it came to "Offset T," he thought for a moment, then typed in "0.01" and "0" for "Offset D5." The matter-transfer unit began its scan, then there was a long pause. Nothing visibly occurred other than a slight dimming of the lights. The screen returned to "Offset X."
   It seemed hopeless. He couldn't think of anything left undone, or anything he could have done wrong. His eyes began to glaze over with tiredness as he stared blankly at the assembly code. It was almost completely memorized, as long and complex as it was, "...OffX: pusha. mov dx,535. out 61h,al...OffD5: pusha. mov ah,0. add dx,36..."
   He grabbed the orange, as it seemed to be of no use anymore, and began to eat it. He ate as he browsed the code once more, trying to avoid spilling any extraneous orange juice on the keyboard. He managed to throw the peel away before his eyelids turned to lead. He tried to keep his eyes open as he looked over the code again, but failed, and was soon asleep. The lines of code rushed through his head as he dreamed. *    *    *    Jacob awoke around noon the next day, and he had an extremely stiff neck. He looked over and saw the orange on the matter-transfer unit. His vision was a little fuzzy, and his eyes were dry due to the fact that he hadn't taken his contacts out.
   "Man, what a strange dream," he thought as he rubbed his eyes.
His fingers were sticky.
   Suddenly his eyes opened wide as a flood of memories from the night (or technically, morning) before came back. It was the same orange.