Chapter 11: Pocket Queens, Infiltration of Nth dimensional space.
To say that every Aaron and Erin knew what the structure that they had just entered into was, would in fact be a bold-faced lie. Having said that, It was already announced by one of them as being a casino and the Aaron's and Erin's who did not know, did not waste time asking questions as to what a casino actually was. They had momentarily stopped the dim-prints from chasing them down and making them disappear, but did not want to waste any time before finding someone in this place that they knew (and not just another Aaron, Erin or interdimensional being that put them in their cells). It didn't take them long before Aaron-1984 (who was identical to Aaron-Prime in many ways except that Aaron did not develop a hearing loss as a baby in this world) heard the voices of dozens of people that he knew back home. Some very well, some only from television or on social networks. But he knew them, and lead the charge into the room. Hugs were attempted by their friends, but most of the Aarons and Erins backed away, scared out of their minds at the very possibility of being touched. The friends of the Aaronverse were understanding, saying nothing of the matter as they knew that pretty much every Aaron and Erin were not people people.
"Holy shit. Aarons, Aarons everywhere. And Erins everywhere too" exclaimed Lindsay.
"And many more of us are elsewhere working on our way home." replied Aaron-1984. The other Aarons and Erins remained silent for the moment, content to let this Aaron be their voice. Some of them waved at friends, others were distracting their social anxieties and fears by being in awe of the building itself, having never seen anything so extravagant.
"Do you think that getting home without any help from those interdimensional guys will even be possible?" asked Harley.
"Whenever Mr. Pirate...wow, that just got a lot easier for me to say. Anyways, whenever Mr. Pirate puts his mind to something and doesn't get side-tracked by his own mind, his success rate is much better than average. With at least 50 or 60 Aarons left, this should be a walk in the park for us." replied Heather.
"Except if those interdimension guys get wind of this. They may or may not know that you're all free from that prison that Lindsay's been seeing in those epileptic seizure visions of hers." stated Aaron L. Coldly.
"I'm so sorry, Mom that is not quite my mom on the dimensional. I guess that you're close enough to us from a genetic point of view that seeing all of us in captivity may not have been avoidable." said Aaron-1984 apologetically as he put a hand on her shoulder in sympathy, and more than a few people in the losers lounge knew how hard that was for him.
"We have been thinking that we may be killed or even erased from all of existence once the mixed poker game is over." offered Karl.
"That was 1 of the conclusions that we reached in prison as well." responded Aaron-1984.
"And with David Flannagan being eliminated from the mixed poker tournament in third place not too long ago, we estimate that we have maybe 30 minutes before our executions begin." said Justin, relieved that Lindsay's seizures seemed to be gone for the time being.
"So why haven't you guys confronted our captors?" asked Aaron-1984.
"Because none of us have any idea as to how to fight a being that exists completely outside of the multidimensional space-time continuum, dumbass. Not even Isaac the almighty genre-savvy one has any fucking ideas." answered Phoenix.
"Yes Aaron that is not my Aaron, we were hoping that you had a solution for us to beat him." added Chiara.
"Or maybe 1 of the Aarons or Erins knows a way that you specifically don't know yet." offered Laura B.
"A fair point, Laura. I'll ask 'Do any of us know any weaknesses of the interdimensional beings?'" asked Aaron-1984, unofficially hoping for some kind of a small miracle. 1 Aaron walked forward to be in the line of sight of Aaron-1984 and softly answered "Sound. They seem to really hate sound. But we're talking about a lot of sound at once from multiple pitches and frequencies. Helped me last 20 or 30 minutes before he finally captured me."
"Well that sounds simple enough." replied Solveig.
"A pity that I don't have any of my clums with me. Then all of this would be pretty easy." added Gregg.
"Percussion is much too low in frequency to make much of a difference. I think we'll need something higher in frequency, and it needs to be faster. Buckethead, from what I know of your music and style I think we'll need you to show our captors what you learned from the temple of deadly sonic arts." ranted David F.
Everyone turned their attention to Buckethead, who was staring at the fretboard of his guitar only looking up to nod, he knew what to do. And was impressed that someone on another world knew about his dreams of...Bucketheadland.
"Hey cool, the Aaronworld numbers are showing up on all of your foreheads too." said Trevor in observation.
"I guess that means those stupid ghosts of us are out of a job." said Julie in response.
Jessica quickly scanned the Aarons and Erins "No original Aaron here, that I can see anyway. Wonder if the original is an Aaron or an Erin."
Jen L. Shrugged at Jessica's speculation and asked the Aarons and Erins "You guys said that you have another group of you elsewhere, could Aaron-prime or Erin-prime be there?"
The Aarons and Erins nodded. Silently, unamiously.
"I wonder how far the other group of you got." thought Fabio out loud.
Meanwhile back in the hallway of infinite doors (as some of the Aarons and Erins had named it), they were still opening doors 1 at a time and in small groups until 1 of them known as Aaron-1982 (his parents had stayed in Illinois instead of moving to either Colorado or California, leading him to spend his entire life in the suburbs of Chicago) screamed "This door just has a machine inside of it."
The Aarons and Erins simultaneously stopped dead in their tracks and ran over to it. It was so big that it took up a small warehouse, had many switches and control panels scattered about the place that were completely alien to them...individually. And whatever it was, it actually scared off all of the dimprints that were chasing them.
"Well, I guess that's 1 less thing to worry about. I vote that we all stay in here, split up again and figure out what the hell this thing is." offered Aaron-1982. It was agreed upon by everyone without a single word spoken. 1 Aaron was enchanted by a large chamber, consisting of multiple layers of glass with a sort of liquid polymer set between each layer.
"I've seen something like this before. Back when I was a doctoral candidate at M.I.T. You put someone or a small group of people in it and you teleport them to a fixed point on earth by destroying them at the sub-atomic level and then re-assembling them molecule by molecule on the other end. A sort of way to fax yourself, for those of you that live on Aaronworlds not capable of using Quantum Computers. This however is much more elaborate, which I guess is necessary if...
An Erin smiled and finished his sentence "...you needed to send someone not just to a different 3 dimensional location but needed to add a 4th dimensional co-ordinate for time and a 5th dimensional co-ordinate for specific worlds across a multiverse. Brilliant deductive reasoning Aaron, but why are there 11 layers of glass?"
The Aaron who had found the machine somehow had an answer "Because it would refine the teleportation process and reduce the number of transcription errors in the copies that are re-assembled. Which I find a relief as I want my veins and organs to not be in pieces inside of me. In fact, as all 11 layers are free of cracks and such, the transcription errors would in fact, be zero. Ladies and gentlemen, this is our way home."
The Aarons and Erins cheered in joy, but only briefly as the 1 who discovered the machine added "I just need to figure out how to turn it on, calibrate it for each specific Aaronworld that we need to send people back to, calibrate it for the times each of us were kidnapped and calibrate the machine for the locations on all of the Aaronworlds that we vanished from." He surveyed the room, counting 28 Aarons and 6 Erins left (but not counting himself), then started picking at them by order of size and apparent strength. "Ok, you 14 Aarons and 3 Erins stand guard in case the dimprints...or something else that's worse like a pissed off interdimensional coming into the room. The rest of you, please help me get this machine working to get us home as something tells me that they didn't leave a manual behind or anything."
The poker players had the lead in the group as they (at least thought they) knew how to get back to the poker room (and the Aarons and Erins were perfectly content to stay in the background). The conversation was pretty much all business:
"Let Buckethead get up front, we may only have 1 shot at this." suggested Laurie.
The crowd changed positions to accomodate Buckethead's large frame.
"Man, that guy is a giant." said Adam. Buckethead giggled slightly.
"Does anyone have any ideas what to do after the big guy plays his big solo?" asked Dan.
"I have nothing, but I'm sure we'll think of something." replied Tamara.
"I say we just go Empire State on his ass." suggested Mike as he punched his own open hand.
"I'm with the hustler on this one." added Kate.
"I was hoping for another fight after that Mafiya brawl back in Khabarovsk." said Allan.
"I wasn't but I think that It's time to take a stand." replied Krystal.
"Wish we had an Iron Maiden to put him in." finished Jason.
They turned left once they passed the baccarat table, and changed topic:
"I can't wait to get home." thought Cindy out loud.
"Me too, mom who isn't quite my mom. I'll never be used to temporal permutations" replied Tara.
"I miss the French Republic so much." added Holly.
"Oh...right...the clockpunk story is actually real. I forgot about that. I cringed at some of the stories regarding those amputations of yours" replied Angie.
"I really need to get home and invent what you guys call books. Scrolls that Aaron publishes have to be made by special order where I come from." lamented John.
"Oh I have all of my Aaron's books at home. I even got a signed copy of the detective novel as a birthday present last year. My friend Brandon said that he and his dad found it in a storage locker. Wow factor indeed." added Ivy.
"I should probably help my Aaron publish some of his more creative ideas." said Thom.
"I actually buried my copies a few of his stories in a forest to protect them from being burned by heretics." said David K.
"Good for you David. Preservation of Literature is a very noble thing to do. Oh god, I sound like such a curator." babbled Courtney.
They turned right when they passed the roulette tables, and the topic changed again:
"Has anyone noticed that the Casino has changed shape since we began playing poker? Some of the rooms are drastically different...or gone." asked Damon.
"Yeah it's like the pocket universe was altered to suit 1 of those interdimensional beings needs." responded Laura X.
"And done in quite a hurry too, there's no logistical order to the casino now." said Sherry in a way that suggested she knew that some other versions of her were experts regarding casinos.
"And I thought that my church back home was unorganized." said Megan with a tone of dread.
"At least the hotel in Toronto made more sense than this." added Ricky.
"I wonder how much strain these changes would put on a pocket universe like this one." thought James out loud.
"I was just thinking the same thing. It's not as if someone can change the shape of a fish bowl without a lot of help." offered Candy, who herself was a bit stunned that she made an analogy for Quantum Physics that actually fit with everyone's current predicament.
"They could've at least changed the climate of the rooms to be a bit warmer." finished Elizabeth.
They reached the poker room doors. The doors themselves were thick enough to cancel out most of the noise inside but they distinctly heard 1 of the interdimensional beings congratulating 1 of the only 2 players left in the tournament. Andrey quickly did a head count of the people with him outside of the door, added the 4 missing people and announced "Either Joe won or Leila won."
"Either way. It's time to confront our kidnapper." replied Jenny G.
Isaac smiled, patted Buckethead on the back and said "Time to sonic frag, Big B!"
Melinda got a very brief, but very sharp vision in her mind "That Leila girl won with a Royal Flush over Joe in 7 card stud high-low 8 or better, and the interdimensional being is looking to kill us early."
They opened the door and walked inside to find Joe looking slightly defeated, Leila smiling nervously (also looking like she had been crying recently) and 1 of the interdimensional beings, with their eyes turned red.
"Nice to see a lot of Aaron's...and Erin's are ok. But a few of the players are missing." said Leila.
Joe did a quick head count "4 are missing: Rob, Marcel, Susan and Tina."
The interdimensional being began cackling in horrific, inhuman laughter. "Oh they're not missing, they're dead in my control room upstairs. They went snooping around and found the place, and began to figure out that my plans are to destroy the Aaronverse and everyone in it once and for all. Go upstairs and see for yourself, know that I'm not lying."
The entire group were stunned, and in disbelief that their kidnapper was being so honest and non-chalant about killing 4 of their comrades. All except for Isaac who only stated "He's right. 4 small piles of ashes are all that is left of them upstairs. And his 2 partners are gone too if my genre savviness serves me correctly."
The interdimensional being touched his nose twice and pointed at Isaac. "1 wanted to spare your lives, the other was just useless."
By now Isaac also knew that he had to stall so that Buckethead could map out exactly what notes he was going to play. Although the other Aarons and Erins saw that the interdimensional beings eyes were changing colour again, from red to black. "I was hoping to wait until the dimprints had narrowed the Aarons and Erins down to the original. But I suppose I can kill a couple of dozen of you at once and if I hit Aaron-prime, the rest of you will be erased from all of existence soon enough."
The interdimensional being fired. Several Aarons and Erins pushed their friends out of the way, altogether 6 Aarons and 2 Erins were hit. All the cinematic depictions of hell or the end of the world that the Aarons, Erins and their friends had ever seen fell far short of the utter chaos in which they found themselves feeling. There was no raging inferno, no stink of brimstone, no seething masses of molten rock about which throngs of damned humanity screamed in eternal torment. This was something far less well defined, yet an agony a thousand times more exquisite than the worst pain any of them had ever felt. The horror of child abuse, rape, torture or the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust would have been a pleasant spring morning compared to...this.
What bombarded the senses of the Aarons and Erin wasn't totally incomprehensible. If it had been, they might have felt nothing at all, since their minds could not have grasped it. No, this was a barrage on all of the senses far worse than the loudest noises, most disgusting scents, brightest lights, most nauseating tastes, and most painful sensations rolled into one. Worse yet, was that whatever this was, was spreading to the other Aaron's, other Erin's, and even their friends. Even if they shut their eyes and plugged their ears, they couldn't stop the sensory barrage. Worst of all, everything about it was somehow familiar, despite the fact that it was so wildly distorted.
Glancing in the direction that they hoped was down, they saw weird, watery shadows that might have once been trees and buildings on each of their Aaronworlds. Only ones depicted through the brush of an artist well past the brink of insanity. The colours and shapes were things they knew they could have recognized under other circumstances. But they were now so terribly wrong it hurt, fresh watercolours caught in a violent storm bent on washing them from existence. The images becoming attenuated and eventually pulled into nothing under the onslaught of a destructive wind. Their minds took it all in but could not begin to make any true sense of it; they jittered closer and closer to the brink of hysteria because of that inability, as if their brains, like the worlds all around them, were being pulled apart thread by thread, slowly...unravelling.
Despite their combined state of confusion, which grew worse with each passing second, the instant that comparison flickered inside 1 of the Aaron's minds, he suddenly understood what they had to do. This wasn't hell or some hideous surreality; it was the Aaronworlds they knew rushing headlong to the brink of dissolution, collapsing in upon themselves like a black hole as time and space tore themselves in the final death throes brought on by some lethal paradox.
Terrified that they had somehow caused this by their repeated travels between Aaronworlds, 1 Aaron knew that he had to get a message to everyone else as fast as he could. It took a herculean effort of will and concentration to remember the words and actually speak them, but somehow he managed it. He articulated instructions that he prayed sounded nothing like what he actually heard. Or the entire Aaronverse would very likely find itself trapped in some space-time limbo from which there would be no escape.
"Think your way out, I'm beating it. All of you can too."
No one in their lifetimes would ever be able to describe how they were able to hear Aaron clearly over their own sensory bombardment, but they did. Starting with the man called Buckethead, who began playing music to the trauma his mind was subjected to. Somehow, that music helped. And the sounds from Buckethead combined with the Aaronverse finding it in themselves to reverse the damage being done to them sent a shockwave large to knock down the interdimensional being that put them through all of this in the first place.
2-3 minutes were needed for the mental states of each of the people in the poker room to return to something that they could understand, and the first thing that each of them saw was multiple miniature bolts of lightning inside the interdimensional beings eyes. Some of them (who knew how electricity worked) saw this like a faulty wire sparking during a thunderstorm at night.
"He's temporarily powerless. He can't try that shit on us again for the time being." said the Aaron who figured out how to reverse the black energy fired. He then turned his attention back to the poker room door, and he noticed that all of the dimprints had returned. Only they did not resume tagging the non-original Aaron's and Erin's. Instead they returned to the physical bodies of their owners, as if they were as sick of being used for multidimensional genocide as the non-spirit versions of themselves were. The dimprints of Susan, Tina, Rob and Marcel realized that they were dead, silently accepted it, then chased off the dealers (who somehow had not left the room by then). When they were finished, they vanished. As best as anyone could guess, they had gone wherever people go when they die, to be re-united with...something of themselves.
The interdimensional being stood up, with a look on his face where the word anger would not even begin to do it justice. The Aaron who broke up the trauma addressed his dimensional counterparts with 2 sentences that would change their lives forever:
"Head back to that long hallway. They will need help with whatever they just found to get us home."
They all listened to him without question, quickly making their exit. Joe was the first to notice that he was the only Aaron who was wearing a hat. A long, black, wide-brimmed fedora (similar to the ones that the interdimensional beings wear when they're on an earth somewhere. And he knew the significance of that hat...
...it was worn to hide his forehead. Joe knew when to trust someone else who had more knowledge of the surroundings at hand than everyone else in the room (including the recently departed other Aarons and Erins) combined. And he was only to happy to let his friend (a couple of decades his junior and from a different universe than he lived in) take the lead, despite the fact that he was a legend in many Aaronworlds.
"Call it...Aaron-Prime."
Aaron-prime took off his hat (knowing that hiding his identity was moot by now). The word "prime" was on his forehead, clear as day. The rest of the Aaronverse was shocked to finally be seeing the original Aaron, but they all smiled as he began formulating a plan:
"Ok, I have no idea when his eyes will turn back on or if we are able to stop what just happened to us from happening again. So until we defeat the interdimensional being, our priority is vengeance. We attack him individually or in small groups to start because if his eyes turn back on, he won't be able to hit as many of us as he did a few minutes ago. Given that I see no weapons of any kind around here, we have no choice but to engage him in hand-to hand combat. We should also vary our position as I believe that if he hits multiple people from the same Aaronworld at the same time that his destruction of said world will be that much more likely to succeed. That may not be a big issue for some of you who have unique Aaronworld numbers on your head but the people from the detective novel, clockpunk and vodka western novellas will be much more vulnerable."
The interdimensional being began that cackling laugh again "Silly boy. Even without my eyes I am much beyond your comprehension. It took 7 of you in Derry, Maine just to mortally wound my pet spider (and you couldn't even finish him off properly). It took 13 of my insiane doctors just to stop the double genocide I set in motion on Galifrey and I'm the reason that none of the Sliders or Sam Beckett ever made it back home after they bent the physics that I invented to keep people like you from discovering how to become like me. Do you seriously think that you 51 people will ever put me out to pasture?"
Aaron-prime turned to Isaac and asked, "I suppose this is the part where the power of friendship trope would come into play if 1 of us was writing this."
Isaac nodded.
Sherry interjected, ever the pacifist "He's not worth dying for, Aaron. We love you for writing us all into existence, let's just go home."
Aaron-prime took a moment to consider that, eventually agreeing with her. "Yeah Sherry, you're right."
They turned and headed for the door (the interdimensional being didn't even make any effort to stop them) "Guy's too damn good." added Heather.
"Well, yeah he's good. You don't just kidnap us and put us outside of the multidimensional space-time continuum without being at least a demigod." said Courtney.
"But how the hell can he just erase what I wrote? He nearly ended the entire Aaronverse by shooting something out of his eyes. Come on, how did he do that?" asked Aaron-prime.
The rest of the group knew what was coming, and said nothing. Even Sherry knew that this wasn't over yet.
"Yeah...ok, let's go ask him." answered Trevor.
Aaron-prime then asked everyone "I suppose this is the part where the power of friendship trope would come into play if 1 of us was writing this."
Everyone nodded. They changed direction, began to circle the interdimensional being and were ready for the fight of their dimensions.