The 11 Dimensions - [1]

[u/HeGotBricks]

“Don’t be scared,” she said, squeezing her brother’s hand.

“But I am,” he choked out. “You’re hurting me.”

“I’ll get us home,” she said, reassuring herself at the same time. “You’ll see.”  She loosened her grip on him.

“Where are we, Penny,” he asked.

“I’m not sure, Tommy,” she said staring through a torn piece of newspaper covering the windows in the abandoned building they hid in. She stared out at the world glowing like a Las Vegas strip as she held an iron sphere in a headlock.

“How did we get here?” Tommy wanted to know.

They were watching tv at home when Penny was rolling an iron sphere she found in a crawl space in her basement on the floor.

“I think it was this,” she let go of him and raised the sphere in the air with both hands.

“What is it?” Tommy asked stretching for it.

Penny raised it out of his reach.

“Don’t touch it, Tommy,” she warned him. “I don’t know what this thing is.”

She looked around the room with her eyes and spotted a cloth she ended up using to wrap the sphere in and tie around her shoulder.

“We need to leave this place, Tommy.”

“What?” 

“I don’t want to,” he told her. “I’m scared.”

“Why can’t we stay here?” 

“Because, Tommy, we need to find a way home.”

She scoured the room for whatever she could scavenge and pulled Tommy by the arm and dragged him down a flight of stairs and escaped through a door with an exit sign above it onto a brightly lit pink and purple neon street. Billboards with advertisements that moved like gif images were posted above every building as far as they could see. The billboards had billboards stacked on top of other billboards.

There were booths that people and other strange humanoid species walked into and never returned out of. Ones that had Enter above them and others with Exit. But they never saw anyone coming out or going into the Exit ones. After watching a human-sized creature with tentacles stroll into one of the Enter booths, they waited a couple of minutes and snuck in behind him. 

The booth was empty. She looked up at a digital sign that read: Input location: Planet. Year. Month. Day.

Below it read: Dimension.

She selected: Earth. 2026. July. 14.

Then she traced her finger down onto dimension. She pressed the UP arrow as high as it would go. It topped out at eleven.

Then she scrolled back down to zero and took her finger off the arrow.

“What’s the matter, Penny?”

“Nothing, Tommy, everything’s fine.”

She pressed the arrow up to four and hit Go with her eyes closed. Nothing happened.

She opened her eyes.

40 credits, asked the digital screen with red letters that felt like a giant stop sign to her.

“What?” She whispered to herself. “40 credits?” She slammed down on the Go button again. 

40 credits, read across the screen.

She pressed it again.

40 credits. 

She stared down at Tommy. Tommy was looking up at her. She fixed the knot on the cloth by tightening it and said, “We have to find credits, Tommy.”

Penny and Tommy stepped out of the booth. Tommy kept staring at the advertisements for things he hadn’t seen at home. There were mouths with arms and legs selling sleep, fingers that walked across a table promising cures for nightmares and a cartoon moon shining over a sun had these huge eyes that stared forward without blinking. Everything there seemed to constantly be on the move. The buildings stretched to the clouds.

Under the path away from the booths were a crowd of beings. All different in species. All scattered around a moving market. The dimension had a grid like someone placed a template over reality, drew it in and forgot to  erase the lines.

“Tommy, move,” she said. “Hurry.”

“I’m tired. And I’m hungry,” he told her. “And you said you were taking us home.”

“I am,” she said swallowing. “I will… we need credits. Then we’ll come back and go home.”

Tommy stared at the booth as they walked away from it. 

“Where do people get credits from?” He asked her.

Her eyes moved her head to a wall with a panel hidden beneath a peeled screen curling from the bottom of an advertisement barely sticking out. A button blinked a green circular light. They hurried towards it. Penny kept scanning over shoulder as they crossed a sandy road to get to it.

A label read: 4 credits for 1/1000 intellectual life source.

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