There were a few possible ways they could potentially figure out if this was a different dimension, but proving it wasn't a different dimension would be an entirely different matter. If the two dimensions were almost identical, then...
Well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. While Samantha was occupied exploring her new guest room, Emilia and Greg set to work testing their dimension. While they didn't have their laptops - they were likely still at the campus if they had survived the explosion - they did have a home desktop computer. They didn't use it much, but they had both agreed that it was good to have one at least as a backup in case one or both of their laptops went on the fritz. Emilia's job was to log into her email account and check for anything out of the ordinary before searching online news about the explosion or anything else related to the university. Meanwhile, Greg was going to go channel surfing on the living room television set, especially focusing on newscasts, but also looking for other potential discrepancies.
"We've time-traveled or we're in a dimension that runs slower than ours," Emilia said, from the already booted computer.
"Why?" Greg stopped, turning to look at Emilia.
"Look at the date and time."
"We're THREE days before the explosion!" He exploded, looking to Emilia for more physics-based answers.
Emilia got a horrified look on her face. "What if this is our dimension and we run into our past selves?"
Greg looked equally horrified.
Another terrible thought occurred to Emilia. "What if we took our dimensional analogues' places in this dimension?" She whispered lowly, "What if every jump we made swapped our places for our analogues'?" A long pause happened as Emilia tried to formulate the horror if this happened. "We've jumped four times. What if we are four infinite dimensions away from our home dimension? How will we get home?"
Greg was silent.
"Greg," Emilia began again after she paused to compose herself, "what do we tell Samantha?"
About that time, there was a rustling sound outside the front door.
"Em, are you going to be at the lab again tomorrow?" Greg's voice drifted through the door accompanied by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
Greg and Emilia looked at each other.
This was bad.
"Turn off the computer. I'll put the remote back..." Greg whisper-shouted at Emilia as the two rushed to beat the opening of the door.
"Yes," Emilia's voice drifted through the solid wood, and the door creaked open. "I have to run some more tests on the monkeys."
Wait.
Monkeys?
Greg looked at Emilia. Emilia looked at Greg. Neither one of them had ever done research on monkeys.
Not having the time to deal with this now, Emilia and Greg rushed to put everything back in order.
"Samantha!" Greg whisper-shouted as they finished "She's still in the guest room!"
The two dashed for the guest room, hoping that it still was a guest room, and barely closed the door as they heard the front door creak open. Greg clapped a hand on a startled Samantha's mouth.
YOU ARE READING
Round Robin October 2020
خيال علميThis story began with the words "Don't push the button." It devolved from there. This is a round-robin story written for the month of October in the year 2020 by three writers who get hopelessly inspired to write multiple things at once. This is the...
