Mandlebrot
Dr. Poeingk, James, Rachel, and the craft drifted through the space that made up the Mandlebrot set.
"I still don't see how this mathematical concept can exist in reality." James was in disbelief of the fact that he couldn't see out of the viewing screen. He was absolutely certain that there was some kind of matter around them.
"My boy, this is a fractal dimension. The integer dimensions look much the same as one another, but the fractal dimensions go by different rules. All of them contain the Mandlebrot set. It is the region from which nothing diverges outward. In the fractal realms, this is the source of everything here. The fringes of this space produce the Julia spirals, which is why every town on the planet below us has that name. In fact, everything is based off those here."
"How did Rachel suddenly - "
"She wandered off into a Mandlebrot warp and was instantly transferred to a section of the spiral corresponding to the part she entered the warp at. There are different rules here."
"And we're in the central location of this dimension?"
"Actually, we might be in any one of the Mandlebrot regions."
"We're lost!?"
"Not per se. I'm completely certain that we don't know where we are."
James slumped in his seat and rubbed his brow. "You mean there's more than one of these things?"
"There's an infinite number, James!"
The craft drifted slowly through the bizarre void. Dr. Poeingk monitored the instruments as James and Rachel sat, having a wonderfully poignant, touchy conversation.
"Keep your arm off me. I'm going to break it."
"I don't have my arm anywhere near you, Rachel."
"I hate being stuck in this screwed-up excuse for a spacecraft with some little bastard who keeps trying to move on me."
"I'm as far away from you as I can possibly be without jumping ship and being asphyxiated."
"Why'd you take me along, anyway?"
"I wanted to piss you off."
"Well, you're doing a nice job!"
"Thank you."
"James! Get up to the front of the ship!" Dr. Poeingk had discovered something urgent.
"James, this is extremely intriguing! I've discovered that I may not be completely certain of how to fly this ship!"
"That's...wow. So we're lost?"
"No. We're stuck."
The ship was indeed mired in the abyss of solid darkness that was the Mandlebrot center of the dimension. In the mind of Dr. Poeingk, they could be in any of those regions, but they actually were in the center.
Of course, the center is a measure relative to an object or space as a whole, and since the space of a fractal dimension is just as infinitely self-similar as its Mandlebrots, they were actually, by mathematical proof, nowhere at all.
"James, we're stuck in something. It's like a warp that doesn't go anywhere."
"Where are we?"
"Nowhere. Everywhere. Hell, we may be dead."
"Is there any way we can get out of this?"
"There is a way, but it involves some things we don't have. There's another very slim possibility, but you won't like it."
"I doubt very much that I would dislike any possibility right now."
"Excellent! Get out of the spaceship."
"What?"
"Fine, I will." Dr. Poeingk, the sphere-shaped captain of the Disfigured Carrot, as Rachel called it, opened the door and drifted outside. He pushed the door shut behind himself. Somehow, he was able to remain alive outside. He didn't question it, because he had a bigger question on his mind.
"Now what did I do with that wrench?" Dr. Poeingk decided it would be more useful, seeing as he had no tools, to strike his body repeatedly against the side of the ship. Due to his body's shape, the energy of the attack focused directly into one point on the ship, causing it to move. However, the warp continued to place it back in the same place it started at.
"This is indeed a disturbing universe."
The doctor turned sharply to see a wedge floating happily through the continuum. "I'm just like you - a man who sought knowledge through mathematics, and ended up a plastic block floating through this void. There's a way out, but I never bothered with it. It's so peaceful here, just floating, no cares, no worries. I'm surrounded by joy."
"What did you take before you jumped in the vortex?"
"Prozac."
"Ah. Well, I'm a sphere, currently trapped here with a square kid and an obtuse woman. How do I get out of the central flux?"
"That's easy! Just go insane! Remember from chaos theory?"
"That was in chaos theory?"
"Look, it's a quite simple principle. Time and space follow the laws of order and logic, so if you don't follow those laws, you can affect time and space. Quack like a duck at once."
Dr. Poeingk began to quack like a duck, and sure enough, a large mother duck came to their rescue. It picked up the ship in its beak, and, thinking Dr. Poeingk was an egg, settled down over him and began swimming, in a manner of speaking, through the Mandlebrot space.
The triangular wedge continued to float happily through the void.
Rachel and James, inside the ship, felt a strange sense of motion, as if they had somehow dislodged. James didn't know what had happened to Dr. Poeingk, so he attempted to steer the ship. It didn't move, and it seemed to be banging against something. This did not provoke any response at all from Rachel, who was listlessly lost in her thoughts.
What had happened to her to make her day so purely miserable? One minute, she was minding her own business; the next, she was in this strange place. She felt distinctly homesick, and yet somehow, she was upset at the apparent loss of Dr. Poeingk. James was too.
"Rachel, I'm going to see what's going on. If Dr. Poeingk survived, then I can survive too. If he didn't, then I will come back inside the ship."
James took a deep breath and thrust the door open, falling out of the ship into the Mandlebrot space. He shut the door behind himself and looked around quickly.
He saw something that was not black. It was a long, pointed, dark thing that was not completely without color. The ship was attached to it. He ran his eyes down the long, dark object and saw a sight that would panic anyone if it took them by surprise, as it did James.
Eyes. Very large eyes stared outward, and James thought they were looking directly at him.
"MMMmmf!" James muffled his scream to prevent loss of air. He didn't realize that he didn't need to breathe due to dimensionalization, and that air was merely a comfort provided in spaceships such as theirs for the sake of tourists.
However one looked at the air situation, the fact remained that the eyes belonged to a very large mother duck. James floated up a little and saw the creature that was carrying them through the void. Since it was moving, it ran into James.
"Mmp!" James had the wind completely knocked out of him. He struggled to get his lungs functioning again, but strangely, he didn't feel any pain. He felt nothing in his lungs, and didn't feel that they needed to be filled. He tried to take a breath, but nothing came in, and it didn't matter.
James was riding along, plastered on the right cheek of a duck.
Dr. Poeingk was lodged firmly underneath that same duck. He contemplated all his previous excursions into different dimensions. On his first trip ever, he had become a mathematically drawn polar rose, and had been given by an eighth-dimensional dragon to its sweetie poopoo. It had struck him not only as odd that someone should reference their lover with a word like that, but also irking that he was the token of affection. That trip had been terrible in comparison to the only slightly nerve-wracking voyage into the dimension of Eggs. Considering his current condition against the spectrum of possibilities, and realizing that a good trip was out of the question, this one ranked somewhere in the middle.
The duck finally halted over the edge of the horizon and dropped the ship down towards the planet on which the trio had begun their travels. James pushed himself off the duck's face and began to plummet towards the planet, determined to stick with the ship.
The planet had no atmosphere, and nothing restricted James' falling towards it. The ship had the same problem; Rachel found herself pushed against the ceiling, thoroughly unhappy with her life. She attempted to form a certain expletive, but it was pushed back into her throat and sent out elsewhere in its physical state.
James fell no faster or slower than the ship. Plummeting closer and closer to the planet, he decided he was going to die. What the hell, though. He had lived a hard and fast lucid dream, and he didn't really care at the moment what would happen after he hit the ground.
The ship with Rachel inside it hit the ground and drilled partway into it, sending up a flying cloud of fractal dust. An instant later, James fell into the cloud and was saved by its softer resistance to his motion. He landed inside a huge mound of the soil of the planet, then emerged painfully with a bruised back, a broken arm, and his life.
The mother duck, unsatisfied that her ducklings had not learned how to fly, gave a slight sigh of exasperation and returned from whence she came, with Dr. Poeingk still attached.
"What the hell happened!?" Rachel had climbed out of the ship and was speaking to James. James rubbed his forehead with his good arm and sighed. He couldn't deal with Rachel right now.
"Rachel, for the love of anything you care about, please just shut up," he muttered in a whisper through clenched teeth.
"Are you ok?"
Concern? From Rachel Jeuille? Not a chance.
"I said, are you ok?"
"No. My arm is broken and I have a headache. I think I just saw God and I am declaring myself an atheist. Please go away."
"You aren't ok. You need my help? Where's Dr. Poeingk?"
"The duck took him." For some reason this reverberated with ominous undertones. James whirled his head behind himself and saw a pale, decrepit man clad in dirty gray rags.
"I have been following that damn duck everywhere...and you stupid kids run right into it and let it go!"
Rachel laid James down on the ground and went to meet the strange man.
"What is this about what duck?"
James sat up again, then stood up. He moved in front of Rachel and nodded her off.
"Our ship was taken by the duck from the center of this dimension back to here. Then it dropped us. What is the history with you and that duck?"
The old man recounted, from start to finish, his entire history. He spoke of his first encounter with the duck, when he was a farmer in a cornfield. He looked up in consternation and yelled across the field, "Hey Maw! Thar's a h'extra-tar-est-ri-ull up yonder thar!"
His Maw had come out to the cornfield with a broom and started beating the living light of day out of her son. She liked to do this every other Thursday, because she was an extremely bored old woman. It wasn't that she couldn't work in the fields anymore, it was just that she enjoyed complaining and beating the living light of day out of her son.
After she was done and had left, the 'alien' picked up the farmer and carried him off in her beak. She had then dropped him over a strange world.
His life from that point on was a series of warps, duck sightings, and general all-around consternation. Now, he was an old man, and he had taken to prophesying doom while being irritated about the duck, and he was given to the occasional beating of people with a wooden spoon.
"My name is Oshet Ahmen Helle. We must leave immediately. Grab one of these wooden spoons I have in my satchel."
Each member of the tiny group now held a wooden spoon in their left hand. The exact conditions of the ensuing situation involved reciprocals, integrals, topologic distortion, and pi, and cannot be explained at this time.
Chpater 4