Chapter 5: The Execution

As soon as he heard the crunching sound, Mickey leapt into action. He rushed to the cow's head and tried desperately to pry its mouth open. The animal mostly ignored him. The damage was done, and the masterpiece was gone. Mickey collapsed to his knees, overwhelmed by the weight of the tragedy that had befallen them. All of that work, all of that sacrifice, gone in an instant.

"I'm so sorry," said Mickey, tears in his eyes, "I… I distracted you. I hadn't-"

"Mickey," said Minnie softly.

"It's all my fault, I should never have-"

"Mickey."

Mickey looked up. Minnie wore a strange expression. "It's okay."

"What?"

Minnie tapped her forehead. "It's in here. It's not the paper, it's the music. I memorized it."

Mickey emitted a noise that was somewhere between laughter and tears. They embraced again. When the collective emotions of the couple had died down, they prepared themselves for the next step.

"Are you ready?" asked Minnie.

"Definitely," answered Mickey.

"I need to warn you though," said Minnie, "It's an incredibly intense experience. It's kind of like being born into a new world."

"Is it safe?" asked Mickey.

"I think so," said Minnie. "At least as safe as any exploration can ever be. But don't be afraid, I'll be here with you the whole time as your guide."

Mickey smiled. A brisk wind bit at their cheeks.

"Take my hands," said Minnie.

She began to hum a melody unlike anything Mickey had ever heard. Although much of the tune was familiar, it all felt deeply foreign. The rises and falls swept through him and charged him with an exciting and mysterious energy. It was a song of adventure. Of loss, and of triumph. After twice through, Mickey began to get a sense for the changes. He instinctually started humming along with Minnie as they leaned in close.

Then it struck him. Everything went white all at once. Mickey gasped, and Minnie squeezed his hands tighter, but he barely felt it. Mickey started to squirm, looking left and right to try to get any sort of bearings, but it was as if he had been thrown into a great body of water. Unfamiliar sensations assaulted him on all sides, and it was no longer clear which direction was up or down.

"Don't worry," said Minnie, "I'm here."

"What's happening?" asked Mickey, relieved to hear her voice.

"You're experiencing information of a type you've never had access to before," said Minnie. "Your brain is trying to figure out what to do with it. Most of it is being interpreted as visual information."

"Why is it all white?" said Mickey, a hint of panic in his voice.

"You're seeing thousands of colors right now and your brain is overlaying all of them on top of each other. It's not going to make sense for a little while. Here, let me see if I can help."

Mickey felt a sudden rushing sensation, and then his vision returned to some semblance of normal. He could see the steamboat around him, the animals and the crates, and the waters around them, but there were new objects too. Faint apparitions of all shapes and sizes that seemed to cling to everything that could be clung to and everything that couldn't.

"Thanks," said Mickey. "Are those… ghosts?"

Minnie giggled. "No, they're real things, but you're only seeing a little bit of them."

"What did you do just now? I can see much better, but everything is still a bit… weird," said Mickey, eying the swimming colors at the edge of his vision.

"I rotated you in the fourth dimension."

"Ok," said Mickey, flatly. It was clear he didn't know what this meant, so Minnie elaborated.

"You know how a cube is made up of an infinite number of squares, all lined up?"

"Sure," said Mickey.

"Well a hypercube is made up of an infinite number of cubes, all lined up in a direction you can't normally look."

"Hyper… cube?"

"The terminology isn't important," said Minnie. "What's important is that you understand that all of the 3D objects you know are actually 4D objects. What you're seeing is only ever a three dimensional slice?"

"What's a slice?"

"You know when you cut an apple into paper thin slices? It's all one apple, but if a worm chewed threw it you'd see a bunch of circles in different places on every slice. Your normal vision is a three dimensional slice. Now you can see the whole apple."

Mickey stared anxiously at what looked like a patch of undulating grass that had taken root on top of the cow's head.

"I'm still not sure I get it"

"Hold on," said Minnie. "I'm gonna rotate you again. But this time I'm going to rotate you just a little bit away from what you can normally see."

Mickey felt something grab his shoulders, which was strange not only because both of Minnie's hands were firmly clenched around his, but because they felt like different shoulders than the ones he normally had. Mickey was about to comment on this strange sensation when the world exploded into color and movement. Mickey let out a gasp. This time he felt like he could see what was going on.

"Can you… go back and forth?"

Minnie nodded. As Minnie glided him back and forth between the reality he knew and the one he was just discovering, Mickey started to get a sense of what was happening. Each object had a different three dimensional shape when rotated. The ship's floor morphed into obsidian colored spikes, the cow exploded into a hovering spherical bush made of turquoise grass, and the boxes separated into a swarm of melty triangles. Rotating back and forth between the two slices, Mickey could see that there was a continuous blend of slices, including ones where the cow was only half made of grass, or the melty triangles still hadn't separated from their box-like cluster. It was all a lot to take in.

Minnie now left him in a single slice and encouraged him to play around.

"Is it safe to touch anything here?" asked Mickey.

"Umm, that's a hard question to answer," said Minnie.

"Why?"

"Because the word touch doesn't make as much sense any more. Try to touch something."

Mickey reached out his arm and then had a jolt of panic. There was no arm in front of him. He looked down further, hoping to find his body, but there was nothing.

"Where's my arm? Where's my… everything?"

Minnie giggled. "Keep looking."

Mickey spun and craned his neck. The only part of himself he could make out was what looked like a cross between a dust mote and the sun. Its fiery tendrils waved and wiggled as if blown by some unfelt breeze. It wasn't much bigger than an apple. Mickey again tried instinctively to reach out and touch it, before remembering that his arms were absent in this slice. Mickey laughed audibly at the absurdity of the question before he could bring himself to ask it.

"Minnie, dear, would you put me in a place where I have appendages of some kind?"

His wife shared his laughter and started to rotate him again.

"I'll have to look," she said. "I'm still getting used to this myself."

The world blurred and spun by. Mountains became caverns. Stars became trees. Lakes expanded into clouds. Mickey tried not to lose track of the cow as it shifted and morphed into a hundred different forms.

"Oh, here's one," called out Minnie, settling on a slice of the world where Mickey was some kind of prism with a handful of arms. To his disappointment, the arms were less like human arms and more like stalks of broccoli made of glittering gemstones.

"This'll have to do," said Mickey. He tried to wave one of his broccoli arms. It didn't budge.

"Why can't I move?"

"You can," said Minnie, "but it's really hard. I only managed to wiggle around a little bit. See? This is all I've got."

Mickey looked around the deck of the ship, which was now an expanse of bluish sand, for any trace of Minnie. He caught sight of another broccoli prism in the distance.

"Why are you all the way over there?"

"I'm not," said Minnie. "I'm still holding your hands."

With enough concentration, Mickey was able to feel the sensation of her warm hands clutching his. He double checked that the other broccoli prism was still in the distance.

"Then how are you-"

"Space isn't flat. That has some interesting consequences."

"Like what?"

"Like objects that are close together in our three dimensional plane being far apart in others. It's like if you drew two people on opposite ends of a piece of paper and then folded it so they're on top of each other. They're far away in one direction and right on top of each other in another."

"This is making my head hurt," said Mickey.

"I know, right?" said Minnie, her voice bursting with excitement.

Mickey gritted the teeth he left back in what he considered the real world and tried to wiggle a broccoli arm. The best he could do was cause the tiny stones on the end to shiver.

"Why is this so hard? It's like trying to move in a pool full of molasses."

"It's understandable," said Minnie. "You've always had these limbs, but you've never used them before. You weren't born knowing how to walk."

Mickey gave up trying. "I guess when you put it like that…"

"If you just want to know what happens when things touch in the fourth dimension you don't need to move. I can just find us a slice where we're already touching something."

Minnie said this as if it were obvious, and then began to rotate through the many worlds again. Mickey was awe struck. In some ways it was relaxing, like watching a sunset shift the sky into a dozen new colors. In other ways it made him want to throw up.

Minnie settled on a slice where Mickey was what appeared to be a desert bush made of lightning. Every now and again the bright twigs rapidly shifted, striking different angles. Mickey looked around, and found that the cow looked quite similar. The lightning bolts of its branches were smaller and a bit pinkish, but otherwise much the same. Just as Minnie had suggested, Mickey and the cow were overlapping. Where his branches touched those of the cow, tiny sparks flew in all directions, and both branches pulsed with light dozens of times a second.

"See?" said Minnie. "Things can collide here too. I haven't figured out the effects of any of the collisions yet, but the theory is pretty exciting."

Mickey studied the lightning bolts and the sparks the way a small child would observe a beetle.

"There's something else I want you to see," said Minnie, her voice barely containing her anticipation.

Mickey again felt a sensation like hands on his shoulders, only instead of turning him, they gave him a push.

"If you perform a translation and then you rotate to face the nominal slice, you can see our world from another perspective."

When the world finished shifting and changing, Mickey stood before the cow again, but it was nothing like the cow he had seen earlier. In particular, it seemed to lack skin, bones, or muscle of any kind. What floated eerily in front of Mickey was a complete cardiovascular system in the shape of a cow, like some kind of blood-filled wire frame statue.

"Is this real?" said Mickey breathlessly.

"As real as anything else," answered Minnie, who was also a forest of pulsating red wires.

Their clasped hands hovered mere millimeters apart where a layer of invisible skin pressed them together.

A booming voice shattered the atmosphere of awe and wonder.

"Mickey!" shouted Pete. "What the hell is this?"

Minnie returned the world to normal so quickly that Mickey had to fight the urge to vomit.

"Captain," he choked out, trying to get his bearings. Minnie was turning red.

"You snuck a woman aboard?" barked Pete. "Some whore of yours, eh? What's the meaning of this?"

"Captain," said Mickey again, regaining a shred of composure, "I'd like you to meet my wife, Minnie."

"I don't care who she is," snapped Pete, "what's she doing on my damn steamboat?"

"I- Well…" sputtered Mickey, struggling to come up with an answer that would keep him his job.

"It was my fault," said Minnie. "I snuck aboard before he could stop me."

Pete turned towards the young woman, unsure of what approach to take. He settled on his usual gruff aggression.

"What the devil are you doing on my steamboat? I could have you arrested for trespassing! What was so damn important that you couldn't wait a couple of days?"

Mickey's mind spun as he tried to think of an excuse to bail Minnie out. He came up with nothing.

"I'm sorry captain," said Minnie, "but this news couldn't wait."

"Well? Spit it out, woman!"

"I'm pregnant. Mickey's gonna be a father."

Mickey's heart skipped a beat. It was probably a lie, but Minnie was the type to put off more mundane news in favor of things like the discovery of a fundamental law of nature. Pete seemed to buy it. Mickey could almost swear he was blushing.

"Well.. That's still not an acceptable excuse."

"I know, sir, I'm sorry," said Minnie.

"Well as much as it's bad luck to have a woman aboard, we've got a schedule to keep," grunted Pete. "We're not stopping on your account."

"I understand completely, sir"

"As for you," Pete barked, whirling around to face Mickey. "You need to get control of your woman. Spare the rod and all that. You're on kitchen duty until I can think of a better punishment."

With that, Pete turned and stormed off.

Mickey and Minnie exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

"We'll talk later," said Minnie, turning to leave Mickey to his duties.

"Hey, you're not actually-"

Minnie smiled mischievously. "Not in the literal sense."

She left it at that, and Mickey understood. They'd just given birth to something far greater than a single life. It was the beginning of a new era of human existence.

Mickey spent most of the rest of the day peeling and paring potatoes for a stew. Typically the duty was shared, but Mickey was used to doing most of it anyway. Doing Pete and Parson's share would only take another hour or two. For the most part he worked in silence, his mind racing at the possibilities of what the future might look like. Eventually Parson paid him a visit.

"So," began Parson, dragging the word out, "I heard you're going to be a father. Congratulations."

"Thanks," said Mickey, already trying to figure out which ulterior motive Parson might have.

"Shame about you getting fired though. Real shame."

Mickey frowned. "Am I fired?"

"Oh, you haven't heard? Pete's already made up his mind. I'm sure he'll get around to telling you soon."

Underestimating neither the cruelty of Pete nor the untrustworthiness of Parson, there was about a 50/50 chance he was telling the truth.

"Ok," said Mickey flatly.

Parson remained silent for a pause, reconsidering his approach. He was clearly disappointed at the lack of response.

"I know what's really going on between you and your wife," said Parson. "I heard you talking earlier."

Mickey's heart started to pound in his chest. He struggled to keep his face neutral. He said nothing, and ignored the comment.

"She's not really pregnant, is she?"

Mickey pretended the potato he was peeling was the most interesting thing in the world.

"I heard your whole conversation," continued Parson. "All about how you're planning on meeting up with your Whiteglove friends. You said some traitorous things when you thought no one was listening."

Mickey couldn't help but smile. Parson had overplayed his hand. He knew nothing.

"I hope they dissect your brain one day," said Mickey, "so the world can figure out just what on earth makes your mind work the way it does."

"You'd better be careful from now on," taunted Parson. "I'll be watching you like a hawk. And when your darling wife doesn't end up giving birth, I'll know this was all one big Whiteglove conspiracy."

"Oh good," said Mickey. "I'm not fired."

Parson furrowed his brow. "Who said that?"

"You did. How are you going to be watching me like a hawk if I'm fired?"

"I-" Parson stopped and considered this. He grumbled and stormed out of the galley.

"I'm watching you," he called as he left.

Mickey wasn't that afraid of Parson's empty threats, but he was afraid of what he represented. The conversation served as a reminder that even if a new era was dawning, the old one was still a harsh reality. The walls had eyes and ears, and secrecy was paramount. Mickey tried not to say another word to Minnie for the rest of the trip, lest he inadvertently give something away.

When they made port two days later, Pete had finally decided on Mickey's punishment. He seemed positively giddy about it.

"I've been thinking a lot about your situation," said Pete. "You becoming a father and all that."

Mickey stood at attention, waiting for the verdict.

"And you know what I came to? What does a new parent need? They need baby clothes, and milk bottles and a crib. All of these things cost money."

Pete was smiling from ear to ear. Mickey continued to listen with a blank expression.

"That's why I'm ordering you off the steamboat for three weeks. Mandatory leave without pay. When you're trying to buy a fancy new toy for your little brat, you think about what happens when you cross me, why don't you."

Mickey fought as hard as he could to seem dejected at this revelation.

"Please captain, I really need the money."

"Well too bad!" said Pete gleefully. "You wanted to see your wife so badly, now you get to!"

The irony of this was striking. Mickey indeed wanted nothing more than time off with his wife, but there was no way he could have asked for it and had it granted. The only way Pete would allow it was if he thought it was a punishment. The timing of it couldn't have been better. There was work to be done, and a future to plan.

Mickey and Minnie sat across from each other at the dinner table of their apartment. It was the first time they had complete privacy since the discovery of the song.

"Are you still planning on giving it away?" asked Mickey.

"I meant what I said before," answered Minnie. "This belongs to everybody. But I won't have it turned into a weapon."

"Then we're going to have to be very careful," said Mickey. "Our first priority should be anonymity."

"What do you mean?"

Mickey looked Minnie in the eyes with a grave expression. "You're the only one who can create this, and I'm the only one who knows about it. We just became the most important people in the entire country. If we go down, the whole game ends."

"Hmm," mused Minnie. "So however we do this, we have to guarantee that from the outside everything looks normal."

"Our second problem is keeping the song from falling into the hands of the regime. Once they have it, they'll start weaponizing it."

"That's not as much of a problem as you think," said Minnie.

"Why not?"

"The effects are temporary. The spectral layout of the song needs to correspond to the ambient readings, and those are constantly changing. By the forty eight hour mark the song becomes completely out of alignment. It's part of why it took me so long to pull this off. I didn't just write one song, I wrote a formula that can make a new song every time the old one stops working."

"So you're saying even if the regime got one of these songs, they'd only be able to use it for two days?"

"Unless they got the formula, and that's safe in here," said Minnie, tapping her head.

"Well that's comforting," said Mickey. "But it does introduce a new problem. That means we need to get the songs to people fast, before the effects wear off, and if we want them to learn anything useful, we'll need to keep sending new songs. It'll get a bit suspicious if suddenly we're sending dozens of letters each day."

"We'll have to think about that," said Minnie. "Maybe we could use dead-drops? Like a message in a bottle?"

"Still too risky, and no guarantee of them getting there on time. It has to be the mail."

The two thought about the problem for a while in silence, before Mickey leapt from his seat with an idea.

"Maybe we don't have to send the letters. Maybe they could just appear in the mail system."

"How?" asked Minnie.

"The steamboat. We don't just ferry cargo, we also ferry mail. Huge bags of it. No one would notice if a few extras fell in."

"What about postage?"

"We buy it in bulk," said Mickey, "so it doesn't look suspicious that we're constantly buying stamps."

"Won't buying it in bulk also look suspicious?"

Mickey grinned. "Not for you, you're an artist. Make some kind of art piece with hundreds of stamps and if anyone asks, that's our story."

"Great. That takes care of distribution. Now we have to decide on who to address the letters to."

What followed was a long discussion made up in equal parts of ethics and logistics. Minnie initially suggested that the people who should get the first letters should be the people who would benefit the most from them. The downtrodden and disenfranchised. Mickey suggested it should be the people who could do the most good with it. After a couple of hours of talking, they came up with a few rules.

The first and most important rule was that none of the recipients could work for the regime. This would keep the government off their trail for longer and prevent the songs from being weaponized. The next rule was that the recipient needed to be able to read, and preferably play music. This one was a purely pragmatic rule. It would be a waste to send the letters to someone who would never figure out their true purpose. The third rule was that the recipients should be diverse in age, gender, race, and interests. Mickey had suggested sending them exclusively to other accomplished artists or people with a science background, but Minnie theorized that when exploring a new world, people who think differently would cover the most ground.

The final rule was that the recipients couldn't be Whitegloves. Both of them were sympathetic to the Whitegloves' goals, but they knew it would be war. If the Whitegloves figured out about it, things would be almost as bad as if the regime did. Who knows how long the violence and bloodshed would last, or who would survive. It was too risky. Minnie was adamant that before any grandiose ideas of revolution cross their minds, humanity should be given a trial run with this new power. Mickey agreed.

When it came time to select the actual recipients, they realized a major problem.

"It can't be people we know," said Mickey. "They'll easily track that back to us. And it can't even be people in our geographic area. It has to be people scattered across enough territory that we can't be tied to it."

"How are we supposed to vet them for the rules we've set if we can't even be anywhere near them?"

Mickey was stumped. "We'll figure that out. In the meantime, let's just learn everything we can about what this can even do."

That ultimately ended up being the right move. The couple had nothing but free time for the first time in years, and for once, they spent it together. From dawn to dusk they worked, training and studying, and over the next two weeks, Mickey was surprised to find himself falling even deeper in love. Minnie was a machine, cataloging and measuring different effects and abilities with systematic precision. At the same time, she was insightful and creative, always coming up with new ideas.

"Look at this," said Minnie one day as they practiced navigating fourth dimensional space. She handed him a piece of paper with six numbers on it. Three were ordinary rotation coordinates and three were fourth dimensional rotations. By now, Mickey had gotten used to navigating this vast space on his own. He rotated to face the direction Minnie had written on the paper.

"This is amazing," said Minnie. "Here's a little girl who's thousands of miles away, but by random chance happens to have an identical spectral signature to me in this slice."

Mickey saw two tree sized dandelions with icy white needles, and was surprised to find he couldn't tell which one was which.

"We may never meet each other, but right now it's like we're two peas in a pod."

Mickey stopped suddenly. "How do you know who or where she is?"

"That's what I've been working on today. I've been comparing signatures across slices. If you rotate and translate right, you can find an object that's close in one slice and keep track of it even when it's far away in another."

"But how do you know where she is in the regular world?"

Minnie wordlessly scribbled six more numbers. Mickey followed her. This slice looked like an endless sea of glowing yarn. Mixed in with all of the yarn were various shapes, spikey stars, cubes, spheres, and blobs. There was almost no motion in this slice, as if the yarn was holding everything fixed in place. The colors and brightness shifted very gradually, like hot coals.

"I think this is the most useful slice I've ever discovered," said Minnie. "Remember this one. These lines connect every object to every other object. The brightness corresponds directly to how close the objects are."

"Are you saying this could locate any object in the world?"

"Anything," said Minnie. "As long as you know what you're looking for."

"Then that's how we'll do it. That's how we'll pick who gets a letter. Find slices that correspond to the criteria we set and then use this one as a locator."

"That might work!" said Minnie.

After two weeks of constant practice, Mickey and Minnie spent the final week of Mickey's vacation selecting their candidates. The first one they settled on was an old man who played the saxophone in his spare time. He was a retired chemist and liked animals. He was still within the city, so his comings and goings would be easier to keep track of, but he lived all the way on the other side of it. Minnie devised the method for finding his address. By staring intently at the cord of yarn that tied them together, she could tell if she was moving closer or further away as she walked. By walking in different directions and measuring the change in intensity, she was able to figure out the exact direction he was in relation to her. Then she used her distance from a known object to calculate exactly how far away he was. They had his address within an hour.

Eventually, all ten candidates were selected. Ten was about as many letters as Mickey felt he could stealthily insert into the mail, and it seemed they were ready to go.

"I've been thinking," said Minnie, as they prepared the sheets of music. "I want to add an eleventh candidate."

"Who?"

"His name is George Goofenberg, he's a poet."

"We said we were only going to do ten. What's so special about this guy?"

"He's been blind his whole life."

Mickey stopped and frowned. "How will he read the music?"

"He can get someone to read it for him. He's quite a good pianist."

Seeing the skeptical look on her husband's face, Minnie continued to explain. "Think of it like an experiment. When we look into the fourth dimension, we see visual information. If he looked, would he be able to see for the first time? Or would he interpret the information in some other way, like smell, taste, or sound?"

"I see what you mean," said Mickey. "That could be pretty interesting."

"It's possible he won't even be able to use it, but I doubt that," said Minnie. "It's a little bit of a risk, but I can't wait to see what he does with it."

"It's decided then," said Mickey. "This one's for you, Goofenberg. Let's see what you got."