2015…

“So, have you decided on a topic?” Owen asked, as he pulled the bag of ice from the freezer.

“Topic?” Jacob replied, turning his head from the television to see Owen in the kitchen area of the apartment.

Owen furrowed his brow, and spoke slowly. “A topic. For your PhD. The reason you’re at university. Remember?” He piled the ice into the pint glass he had liberated from the cabinet. Owen was studying the same course as Jacob, and, being Owen, probably had his entire dissertation planned already.

“The reason I’m at Abswyth is because it’s close. Well, close enough that I don’t have to learn a new dialect of slang, but far enough that commuting would take too long. And no, not really,” He looked away, ashamed, “but I’ve had some ideas and theories.”

Owen poured a hearty amount of cola into the glass, tutting and sighing as the froth flowed over the rim of the glass and dripped down. “Theories? What about?” He enquired, while dabbing half-heartedly at the mess with tissue paper. A knock at the door indicated an arrival. Owen interrupted his lackadaisical cleaning and sauntered towards the door.

“Oh, nothing too concrete… I was just hypothesising out loud,” Jacob half-muttered, refusing to make eye contact with Owen, who noticed the evasion and stopped midway to the door, turning back to face Jacob.

“You do have an idea, right? It’s been five weeks, you’ve got to at least have some sort of inkling of what you’re going to be writing about,” he chuckled, “they don’t just hand PhDs out, you know.”

Jacob saw the smug grin beginning to form on Owen’s face; a grin worn only by people who thought things like you are so, so screwed, and I’m going to enjoy stepping on your fingers on the way up the ladder while you attempt to scrabble up behind me. Owen raised his eyebrows to Jacob, imploring him to respond to this question. “I… Had an idea while reading some literature on the nature of dimensions. Just a hunch, really. No real basis behind it, I’ll admit, but I’ve just got a feeling that there’s something to it.”

“The nature of dimensions? What kind of dimensions?” Owen’s face softened with the realisation that Jacob may be on to something. Something that, however mad, may lead somewhere else…

“Physical dimensions. You know how the first three are length, width and height?” Said Jacob, standing to look Owen more squarely in the eyes, his shyness evaporating as he saw the interest in his friend’s eyes. Another knock sounded at the door.

“Just a second,” Owen shouted towards the door, and turned back to face Jacob, exasperated, “and the fourth is time. Yeah, everyone knows that, that’s secondary-school-level thinking. Where are you going with this?” Owen’s interest seemed to wane a little.

Jacob’s eyes lit up in the knowledge that he was about to blow Owen’s mind. “Yeah, but think about this… What if dimensions didn’t just go up in number?” Jacob dropped the bomb. Or at least thought he had. Owen’s face still held the look of stoic cynicism.

“I’m… Not sure where you’re going with this.” Owen admitted, and turned towards the door.

“A dimension zero. No space. No time. A dimension of complete… Nothing.” Jacob’s excitement could barely be contained. He felt that this news should have blown Owen off his feet, but Owen’s feet continued their course to the door, “a dimension,” Jacob continued, raising his voice to catch Owen’s attention. Owen turned to look at him with the look a parent gives a child who has just solved the credit crisis with the explanation of printing more money, and nodded at Jacob to continue, “that is the complete antithesis of the singularity, the fourth dimension. Where in the singularity you witness and experience all time and as such exist everywhere – in sub-time you would exist nowhere, and no-when.” Jacob explained, with various gesticulations and facial expressions to convey the general lust for knowledge he was experiencing.

Owen turned his eyes to the side, considering this. “What gives you this thought?” He asked, eventually.

“What do you mean?” Jacob replied, apparently crestfallen by Owen’s cynicism.

“Well… The idea’s just a little… Out there.”

“Physics often is, Owen.”

“I just can’t imagine this kind of concept, to be honest. It just sounds like the kind of thing a madman thinks up to explain why birds fly south and why the sun is yellow rather than red. Like TimeCube.”

“Well to be fair, black holes also sound fairly crazy. And have you ever seen one?”

“A TimeCube?” Owen smirked, and finally opened the door to an impatient-looking, short, and similarly bespectacled woman.

“Took you long enough, O,” she grumbled, and headed inside, unslung her bag from her shoulder, and dropped it nonchalantly on one of the two sofas arranged in a vague V shape in the living room area of the apartment, facing the television. Owen closed the door, and turned back to face Jacob.

“I meant a black hole, Owen.” Jacob remarked, “and hi, Sam.”

“Hey, Jake,” she smiled, and flicked through the available entertainment on the television.

“No. But you haven’t seen ‘sub-time’ either, Jacob,” Owen replied shortly, and returned to filling his stricken glass with the cola.

“What’s ‘sub-time’?” The new arrival added, turning to face them inquisitively.

“Oh, it’s just something Jake’s thought up,” Owen answered as he put away the bottle of cola and picked up his glass.

“It could very well exist, Owen, you just don’t want to admit that you might be wrong about something,” Owen shot him a glance as he walked past, towards the unoccupied sofa. One with raised eyebrows and a self-assured grin. One that Jacob was sadly familiar with. “For once,” he added knowingly.

Owen sat and placed his glass on a coaster. “Sure, it might exist. But, the thing is, even if it did exist, what would be the point of us even knowing about it? As you said, it’s literally nothing. No space, no time. A human couldn’t even exist there. They’d die instantly – or rather, they’d never even exist at all, if there’s no space or time for them to occupy or even function.” He took a victory sip, assured that the argument was over, and began to shuffle the playing cards in front of him.

“The point, Owen, is simple.” Jacob moved from the space in the middle of the room where he’d been rooted for the past two minutes, and sat next to Owen. He looked into his eyes with furious passion, and Owen felt it emanating from Jacob’s core. This isn’t just some hunch, he thought, He’s serious. And what’s worse, he might actually be right. Samantha could feel it too, and she leaned forward, enraptured in Jacob’s theoretical musings.

“The point is, if this dimension exists, and if we could find a possible way to reach it,” he paused for dramatic effect, “we could, theoretically, use it to travel through time.” The penny dropped. Owen saw it in Jacob’s eyes, and vice versa. The crux to Jacob’s point was right there in front of his nose, and he’d been too blind to see it all along.

“Because… In sub-time, all of time is observable…” Owen added, a finger raised in the stereotypical fashion of a scientist experiencing an ‘a-ha!’ moment, and placed the deck of cards back on the table, next to a stack of graph paper and ten-sided dice.

“Because sub-time is always. No time passes, for no time exists. It’s essentially the bus station of time, with buses going everywhere all the time, or rather, every-when.” Jacob was glowing with anticipation. Samantha, an outsider to this moment, refused to get sucked in.

“You’re talking about this thing like it really exists,” she remarked. Jacob and Owen, their spell broken, turned to face her like two dogs who had been caught ‘in the moment’.

“Well, of course, it’s only a theory,” Jacob conceded.

“Einstein had a theory, too. It was called ‘special relativity’, and it states that time travel is only possible forwards, and even then, only—“

“At speeds approaching the speed of light, yes, that’s true.” Owen admitted and, not wanting to be the subject of the approaching rebuttal, turned to Jacob, passing the metaphorical parcel of shame.

“That was a long time ago, though,” said Jacob, “and we have made massive leaps in physics since then. The LHC, for example, is revealing some pretty startling things about the nature of the universe. The Higgs Boson would have sounded absurd to Einstein, but since 2013, particle physicists at CERN have-“

“You’re telling me,” began Sam, with the expression of one in the presence of obscene stupidity, “that you plan to disprove Einstein?” Her bewildered face spoke volumes.

Jacob looked hesitant. “Not disprove,” he added carefully, “perhaps… Amend.” His nervous face betrayed the image of the fracturing foundations of his mental walls being broken down by Samantha’s rock solid logic. Einstein wrote the book on theoretical physics, and here was some 21-year-old nobody trying to rewrite it as he saw fit. The cheek of it, the sheer audacity of someone, someone so lowly and insignificant, trying to improve upon physics, when they couldn’t even figure out how to order a large latte at Starbucks. Jacob gulped, with perfect comic timing and timbre.

Samantha didn’t even respond. When someone’s stubbornness was so innate, it’s best to ignore it and move on. She sighed, and changed the subject. “Where’s Lewis?” She asked, and all the tension seemed to melt away after a couple of seconds. Jacob and Owen looked at each other.

“I… dunno,” Jacob replied, looking forlornly at Sam, “I thought he was with you.”

“Oh. I last saw him outside the lecture hall,” she answered, “he said he was meeting you,” she added, slowly.

“So,” Owen began, “where the hell is he?” Both Jacob and Sam turned to look at him, and all three looked in unison as, with excellent comic timing but little to no musical rhythm, a knock rattled the door.

Jacob rose, marched towards it, and wrenched it open with extreme prejudice. “What time do you call this?” He asked Lewis.

Lewis was, as there exists in all social groups, the ever-present but rarely-mentioned, perennial butt of the joke. If ever there was a scapegoat to end all scapegoats, Lewis would be the most likely candidate. Any possible opportunity to blame someone for something was expended upon poor Lewis’ head. If all the chocolates in the cupboard were eaten, Lewis got the blame. If the milk had all been used, Lewis took the fall. If the toilet paper had ran out, it was Lewis who took the heat. If aliens appeared and began vaporising all humans, somehow, someone somewhere would find a way to blame Lewis. It was hard to tell if anyone in the group actually liked Lewis, but it was clear enough that they tolerated him and put up with his antics, and that was enough for him to cling on like a hermit crab, desperately clinging on to its home.

“Well, it’s about 11, right?” Lewis, ever the optimist, smiled at Jacob, who returned, in kind, a look of tortured and tried patience. He stepped aside, rolled his eyes and sighed in unison, and motioned for Lewis to come in, which he did with reckless abandon. “Decks and Dragons again, eh?” He remarked delightedly, pointing at the graph paper and deck of cards on the table.

“If you’d be as kind as to DM again,” Owen replied, pointing towards the assortment of graph paper, lined paper, pens, crayons and other bits of stationery at the television end of the coffee table, where a stool was positioned right beneath the TV.

The reason the group tolerated him so was because Lewis, despite his many irritating qualities, had the imagination of a small child and the creativity to bring it to life in an extraordinary fashion. He was also currently studying a BA in English Language, specialising in creative writing. His love of literature and inherent creativity had spurred him to write several short stories, and he had recently begun writing a full-length fantasy novel. This mixture of traits led to his permanent position as Dungeon Master in any tabletop RPG played by the group, with Dungeons and Dragons or any variant thereof, such as Decks and Dragons, being the favourites. The concept of Decks and Dragons is simple; The DM (Lewis) draws a top-down view of the game world on the graph paper, sticking, where appropriate, to the grid. The DM will then populate the world with creatures for the player to encounter, and assign to them their attributes which will make them easier of harder to slay, depending on the players’ weapons. This is where it gets unique.

The players will design their characters by hand or by chance, the ‘by chance’ variant going the same way as in traditional D&D. After the game world and player characters are ready, the players will then be dealt ten cards each by the DM, from a deck of standard playing cards. The story progresses as standard in D&D, though combat is determined by the cards. A player is allowed to play one card per turn as an attack, the suit designating the type of attack, and the face value plus a dice roll determining the damage caused. Clubs represent melee attacks with whatever weapon the PC is holding, hearts represent a fire spell, and diamonds represent ice spells. Spades, however, represent speech – a player can attempt to talk their way out of conflict, and the value of the card plus a dice roll represents the level of persuasion being used. After all the players’ turns, the monsters are then allowed their own turn, their attacks being determined by species and class, and the damage is determined by the sum of their base attack and the resulting number of, again, a dice roll.

Decks and Dragons was a favourite among the geekier and less financially-endowed students of Abswyth University, and the popularity was spreading fast.

“I’d love to DM. Just give me the graph paper and crayons,” Lewis replied. The gleam in his eye was unmistakable, he loved being included in the group activities. He strutted around the table and took his seat at the DM stool. A large birthday card was propped up in front of him, in order to shield his graph paper. He furiously scribbled on the paper, stopping only to switch between pen, crayon and pencil. After a few minutes of relative silence, he appeared to be finished. Decks and Dragons maps didn’t take long to complete and, indeed, a Decks and Dragons game is rather quick to play. It would only take up to an hour at maximum to finish such a game, as the maps are small and the lore is sparse, and the adventures to be had with such limitations are, well… Limited.

Lewis looked up from the table, and appeared to be satisfied. He picked up the deck of cards and, despite Owen’s assurance that they had already been adequately shuffled, shuffled them again before proceeding to deal them out.

“Do we have to play this again?” Sam ventured, but accepted the cards when offered.

“It’s a good way to kill an hour and, in my opinion, this hour needs a good and violent death,” said Jacob, accepting the cards and arranging his hand by suit and value as the cards arrived. He looked up at her irritated, bored expression, “or is there something else you’d rather be doing?”

“To be honest, after this morning, I’d rather be in that ‘sub-time’ place,” she answered, with no trace of irony.

“You do recall that a human body couldn’t possibly survive in a dimension without time and space, right?” Owen ventured uncertainly, eyeing and arranging the cards in his hand. Lewis didn’t comment. He was too busy making last-minute adjustments to the map, adding extra mace-wielding goblins and frost giants.

Sam looked back at Owen over her cards. “Marvellous,” she murmured dryly, and sorted her cards disinterestedly.