7 Fourth Dimension (1/2)
”I had to make some tight twists and turns in hyperspace, so the frame of the ship is warped and most of the hull is damaged,” Mazur sighed in annoyance.
Ivan also had a sense of defeat, ”How long will it take to fix it?”
”By myself, if I was to salvage metal from other parts of the ship, about a year. And that's just to make us capable of long-distance flight in hyperspace, we are still lost in deep space outside of the galaxy with no indication which direction is the way home.”
The two of them felt depressed over the situation. Just as Ivan was looking outside the bridge, he noticed something in space off to the side.
”Mazur, what's that?” Ivan pointed out into space where a form could be seen. It was black, just like the vast emptiness of space, but there was a distinct texture to it that was partially reflective.
Mazur double checked the radars and operated the other sensors to scan, ”Hold on, thermoscopy and ultraviolet are blind. None of the radars are showing anything, but an old short-ranged sonar is responding that there is an object over there. It's strange, the shape seems to be shifting.”
Ivan was also curious, he activated the impulse thrusters and gradually moved over to the object hidden within the depth of space. The ship had bright floodlights on and finally lit up the object. It was an exotic fish half the size of the Poseidon, with shimmering black scales that slightly altered shape depending on the angle you looked at them. This fish was just floating here, stagnant within deep space.
”What is it?”
Mazur gazed outside the glass in consternation and answered, ”I don't know. Bring the ship closer so I can get a sample of it.”
Ivan activated the impulse thrusters on minimum power and crawled towards the fish. He pulled the ship close enough that it was only a hundred feet away from the base of the ship.
Both Ivan and Mazur equipped their space suits again and moved to the cargo hold. They activated an energy shield to prevent the cargo flying out into space before opening the base hatch of the cargo.
Floodlights lit up the corpse, so they could see the entirety of the creature. With a rope tying each of them to the inside of the cargo hold, the two launched themselves toward the fish.
As the two of them were floating through the vast nothingness between the ship and the fish, Ivan couldn't help commenting, ”It's strange.”
Mazur heard this across the internal communication frequency of the suits and replied, ”Indeed, I have never seen or heard of anything like it.”
”No, what I mean by strange, is where is it's head. If it's a living creature, surely it must be able to eat, see, hear, or any number of senses.”
Mazur looked around after Ivan's words and agreed. It was something so simple he had overlooked it, but this comment did give the researcher a few ideas as to what kind of creature this fish corpse was.
Mazur had a medical toolkit attached to his waist full of tools for dissecting and taking samples. He first withdrew an ultrasonic bone-saw, which uses a diamond blade vibrating at an extremely high frequency to cut through bones and carapaces.
He lowered the bone-saw against one of the scales and produced a shower of sparks. Despite this, the scale was cut open with relative ease and revealed a white meat inside. There was also pieces of blood but what surprised Ivan was that despite being in a vacuum, it didn't have any sign of freezing or damage from the low pressure.
Mazur collected pieces of scales, flesh, and blood for samples. He had Ivan continue to cut out samples as he went back to the ship to bring some large containers to store it in. The two of them drifted back and forth between the Poseidon and the fish corpse for several hours before Mazur was happy with the amount of samples collected.
Ivan followed an excited Mazur back to his laboratory where he put a few slides of fish flesh and blood under some microscopes and peered into their mysteries. All the equipment in this large room was prepared by Mazur himself and it had become a state-of-the-art facility capable of most experimental procedures.
Unable to stand Mazur's growing enthusiasm, Ivan couldn't help but dryly ask, ”So what is it that has you so excited?”
Mazur turned his head ferociously and almost shouted. ”You have no idea what this is! It's era defining! This is the corpse of a four-dimensional creature!”
”What do you mean, four-dimensional creature? No matter how I look at it, it's very three-dimensional, just really strange.”
”Idiot, that is because we are only looking at a single surface of it. We, as three-dimensional beings, are unable to perceive the fourth-dimension. It is only natural that we can't see this creature in it's true appearance.”
Ivan scratched his head in confusion. ”You're going to have to explain it better, I still don't understand.”
”Fine, let me explain it from the beginning,” Mazur spoke with a little irritation but was still thorough. He even brought out a thought projector, a unique necklace used to train willpower as it could reproduce thoughts as a mental image.
”First picture a one-dimensional being, this would be a line of unspecified length that can only exist on the X-axis. It has no height, nor does it have the concept of height, therefore no matter how it much it tries, it can never truly understand a two-dimension being.”
”A two-dimensional being is the same. It would be a shape of unspecified size and number of sides but would be completely bound to the X and Y-axis. It could only perceive another shape by it's sides and size, and it could only go around. It can't pass over another object as it has no perception of the Z-axis, therefore the whole concept of two shapes occupying the same X and Y-axis is a mathematical impossibility to them. It can be understood in such a way that they would be unable to understand the existence of a three-dimensional being.”