“No, don’t make me go!” Lucos cried as his father stuffed him into the purple cylindrical transporter and then stood in it himself. Lucos had always hated to go to the eye doctor, and he wasn’t going to change his mind now. The current scientists of 2400 had recently invented a new eye instrument, called the deudiometer, designed for an easy and painless eye examination, but Lucos still wasn’t convinced.

The transporters were soundproof, in order to maximize travel speed, the only way to communicate was by uovboards. If Lucos’s dad wished to talk to him, he would put on a headdress with wires sticking out of the top. The wires would transmit his thoughts onto Lucos’s uovboard. After a moment, Lucos’s special yellow framed uovboard lit up.

“The deudiometer,” –or the , as Lucos called it– “is a little cube designed for accurate testing in all parts of the test. It attaches to the patient’s forehead with suctions and sends a shockwave of different frequen-cies…”

“Victim, not patient” Lucos thought, but then realized that he had his headdress on too, and that his thoughts would appear on his dad’s constant dull gray board, which very much reflected his dad’s personality. But his dad didn’t notice; he was far too busy thinking about– and transmitting – the advantages of using the ‘death – o – meter’. His dad’s notes seemed farther and farther away as he began to think about what would happen if the ‘death – o – meter’ really did kill him or suck him into another world. Although not fully convinced, Lucos gained a little more confidence as he re-ceived more and more mental notes from his father, Marvin Gamari, in the almost-vacuumed tube.

Lucos and his dad arrived to the doctor’s office promptly. They looked around at the big room from inside of the blue-green transparent transporter tube. Almost every-thing they saw was an eerie green with a hint of fuchsia; the walls, floors, ceilings. All green. A couple of non-green things stood out, though. Lucos spotted many other blue-green transporters distributed evenly around them. The door to the transporter opened, and they stepped out. Far away, at the other side of the huge office, a few patches of pur-ple showed the way into a long hallway with invisible argon walls. Lucos spun around his father’s sudden flinch; he had apparently been looking for the front desk. About two hun-dred feet away sat a small roan-colored desk with a TA&A holodish on top of it. A guard sat stiff on top of a chair, reading a piece of paper but not moving. Above his Smokey Bear Hat was a large, rusted arch displaying:

“Funny. It was the year 2471, so how on earth did they know they would close in 2000 years?” thought Lucos. Subtraction wasn’t Lucos’s strong point, and neither was English. Actually, he hated every school subject except for topology, the study of “those properties of geometric forms that remain invariant under certain transformation such as bending or stretching”, which was not taught in his 5th grade class. He found topology fascinating. His teacher, Dr. Fruxiore, a pediatrician and a professor of topology taught Lucos through virtual programming. Whenever Lucos had a lesson, he wore a pair of earphones and the lesson was programmed into his brain for lifelong remembrance. Lucos was more of an adventurous person than a teacher’s pet. Of course, that didn’t really matter as much in eye examinations, except for the part where he had to read increasingly smaller photon sentences in the eye test; Lucos’s failure to recognize the difference between the x-photon and traditional ?-rays might affect the eye exam result.

Mr. Gamari looked around at the huge room, and then at the desk. He held a straight face and slowly walked to the far corner. Lucos followed his dad to the desk. The emptiness – and especially the stillness of the guard, although Lucos knew that military school required strict discipline – was bothering him. He desperately wanted something to move. Mr. Gamari motioned for Lucos to first stick his finger on the indigo patch, and then place his nose on the squishy, purplish aerogel – a gel lighter than air – showing, “MALE PERSONELLES UNDER 9.”

Lucos was skeptical about that sign: one, although Lucos was not a verbal genius, he was sure that ‘personelles’ was not a word, and two, Lucos was ten instead of under nine, but all of the other patches were labeled ‘female, something’ and Lucos definitely didn’t want to be classified as ‘female’.

Suddenly, a Caucasian female’s hologram appeared between the two satellite dishes which said,

“To which eye professional do you wish to see, Lucos Gamari?”

“Wow. The eye people are way too formal,” thought Lucos, as he spied a robotic hand reaching toward him, tweezing a complete list of the eye doctors and their specialties between its thumb and forefinger. Mr. Gamari snatched the list and be-gan reading the names on the list.

“Dr. Karen, laser tech., no, Dr. Zirchovich, ? specialist, no…. Aha! Dr. Xefrulior, 3-D and deudiometer specialist.” Dr. Xefrulior had been Mr. Gamari’s eye doctor for the past ten years. Mr. Gamari, turned to his son and began to say some-thing, but was interrupted by a cough from the slim figure in the TA&A holodish. Mr. Gamari turned around, shocked, and one of his arms accidentally flew through the women’s stomach, or the air that was pretending to be the women’s stomach. Then he quickly apologized and said, “Xefrulior, please” and led Lucos into the gaseous hallway, guided by the woman’s directions.

They arrived at Dr. Xefrulior’s room in good shape only because of the hologram guide; if a random person walked in without pressing his finger to one of the four gels, his eyes would be even more damaged than they originally were by walking into thou-sands of multiple gas-and-solid argon walls, probably explaining the ‘NO WALK-INS, PLEASE’ sign. Lucos carefully pressed his finger to the purple patch above the door that he thought was right. Indents on the brass rectangle appeared in a flash. The words that the indents made alternated back and forth between ‘Dr. Canedian’ and ‘Currently free’.

Mr. Gamari and Lucos checked every single door within a 50-door radius until Lucos finally found the door they were looking for: Dr. Xefrulior’s Office, please call 1-324-324-884-439-5328 for an appointment. Lucos called his dad over to the door, and then placed his finger on the purple squish to prove that he found the right door. This time the tag read,

“Dr. Xefrulior, available in 15 minutes”.

They stood a hard and long 15 minutes in the empty hallway. Finally, the green door opened up. Lucos came face to face with a sullen and wrinkled eye specialist, with not even a trace of a grin—actually closer to a dark frown—on his sunken face. Unlike his favorite Dr. Fruxiore, who always had a benign countenance and was never conde-scending.

As Dr. Xefrulior began to play around with the buttons on the deudiometer with his knobby fingers, Lucos realized that it was indeed an easy and painless way in most parts of the test, as was nationally advertised, and worked exactly the way his father had described it. But when Dr. Xefrulior began testing Lucos with 3-D bubbles, Xefrulior’s specialty, Doc held his chin up high, inflated his chest, and slowly cranked the dial to ‘ul-tra high’. Show-off, thought Lucos. When Dr. Xefrulior asked, “Which bubble does the 3-D ? ray hit?” suddenly, Lucos felt dizzy. He felt as though a slimy hand was reaching toward him from the dark side of the room, pulling him away from familiar objects and people…. Lucos disappeared under Dr. Xefrulior and Mr. Gamari’s noses! Dr. Xefrulior ran out of the room, screaming like a girl and bumping into the in-visible walls and other eye doctors. Marvin Gamari, on the other hand, was as passive as a volcano and as cool as lava. He blew up.

“WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE HAS MY SON GONE? W – WHAT DID YOU DO?”, he raged. The doctors, however, ignored him.

Mr. Gamari called the police and became a nuisance trying to broadcast what happened. However, nobody thought that empty chairs and pulsing “death-o-meters” were good enough evidence for a disappearing child. They began to think that he was insane. After all, humans are so complex that it takes millions of electron-volts of energy to vaporize them, let alone make them disappear completely.

Meanwhile, Lucos had been sucked up in a whirlwind into one of the deudiome-ter’s many chambers, in what appeared to be a link-up system with other deudiometers. Shock waves and pressures were crushing his body all over. His brain was frying like eggs on a burning, oily pan; it sent hallucinations of other three children close to him to his eyes. Yeah, like that was probable. His body was shrinking as fast as a snowman on a hot summer day. Just as he felt as though his internal organs would melt (if they weren’t already), Lucos was carried into a neon-adenine expanse. As the pain subsided, Lucos realized three children he hallucinated were actually real.

The new world they were in was like regular life compared to what they had pre-viously experienced, although that wasn’t saying anything. The air was a light pink, but very thin. To Lucos it felt as if the gravity force there was at least ten times of the earth’s g. Numerous fluffy clouds lined the floor, ceiling, and walls – or were there any?

The four people began to get to know each other as they began their long pilgrim-age through the sinister world. The other three children turned out to be named Terra, Caton, and Vani. They were all ten year olds and came from the same eye doctor’s office. Terra was a stubborn girl with long hair down to her knees. She was very perky and light and seemed delicate. But Caton, Lucos, and Vani had to watch out when she whipped her long and heavy air; she often got excited.

Caton was mellow compared to Terra, but he had always wanted to play virtual video games and would do anything to get one of them. However, they were too expen-sive for his parents and Caton was too young to get a job. He couldn’t wait until he grew older and could get a part-time job.

Vani was very capable of accepting new information and converting it into ac-tions; she would hear something that everybody else thought was absurd and could actu-ally maker use out of it. Lucos often was baffled by her capability – how did she do that?

“Where are we?” asked Vani to the other three. An obvious ques-tion.

“I don’t know,” Of course. “let’s find out. Should we split up?” asked Caton. Others nodded in agreement and started to assign teams, until Lucos interrupted.

“But how will we communicate? I mean, if one of us finds the way out of this mess, how on earth – although we’re probably not on earth – will we tell the other team about our discovery? Nobody has photon transmitters or uovboards, do we?”

After a while of profound thinking, Terra said “Together it is then.”

No sooner had they walked three steps when they saw Caton get taller and taller within seconds. Lucos reasoned that Caton was now older – in fact, he looked like he was 21! They were really confused now. But then Lucos’ eyes flickered and explained to them:

“Well, pertaining to the natures of Nicotinamide Adenine Dineucleotide and the Krebs cycle, if this were a regular world, - well, it couldn’t be. The DNA struc-ture and the electronegativity of oxygen show that this definitely isn’t like home,” That was obvious, thought Lucos. “However, with my studies with technology, these distinguishing states – temperature, humidity, and etc. – matches up with a four di-mensional world, so we must be in the fourth dimension.” Terra’s face was pinched up. What is he saying, she thought.

Vani, unlike Terra, had a comprehensive look on her face. Her head seemed to spark with ideas. After a while deep in thought, Vani giggled and walked over to Lucos and whispered something into his ear. Lucos nodded. Suddenly, Lucos and Vani fell down onto the biggest, densest cloud below them.

Terra turned head around to gaze at the two of them. Terra called to Lucos, who was standing directly below her feet. “Wha—how did you get down there?”

Vani answered for him. “Just move through time.” Right then, Terra and Caton fell in the same manner as Lucos and Vani did. The fell on top of the cloud, but they went right through it! Lucos and Vani watched helplessly as Terra and Caton were falling down, down, down… on top of their heads? Lucos reasoned the cir-cumstance carefully.

“You shouldn’t be surprised; after all, this is a different world.”

A few inches later, Vani yelled with excitement.

“Look! A dinosaur tooth is floating around in the manganese magenta mist!”

She saw a white triangle in her mind, and wondered what it was. Others saw it too, but not Caton, who was older than the others. He just simply saw air, air, and clouds. He felt he simply was too old for pretend-and-see.

After a while of endless walking and mumbling about homes, Lucos saw some-thing in the distance: a 3-foot otter riding on a 15-wheeler flatbed! Two of the others, Caton and Vani, turned around and gazed into the mist, and saw nothing. But when Terra turned around, she accidentally knocked Lucos down with her long hair. Lucos tumbled down and down into the depths. Traveling through time couldn’t stop him.

Lucos tumbled down for what seemed like years through the mist. The fluffy ma-genta mist was turning a deep crimson, and the air was condensing from cool and thin to sultry. The clouds were vaporizing into steam. Lucos’s thermometer read 200°F. The in-tense red was hurting his eyes, it was a wonder he was still alive….

Bam! Lucos felt an impact so great that he thought he broke a bone. He opened his eyes to look around – or were his eyes already open? Everything was pitch-black. He steadied himself in what he thought was right-side-up; there was no apparent gravity here. It was quieter here than in the eye place; nothing other than himself moved, and even he found it difficult to move. A heavy voice broke the silence – and after the voice spoke its one-syllable word, Lucos wished it had not broke the silence, but rather main-tained it.

“SPEAK!”

Lucos opened his eyes and saw two dim lights that seemed infinitely far away, but also infinitely bright, kind of like stars, except more extreme in distance and intensity. ‘Who are you,’ thought Lucos and, to his surprise, got an answer.

“I AM THE GREAT THEATROBUG, POWERFUL INDEED AS I AM.” Not the best English, even compared to Lucos, and that was saying some-thing—indeed as I am? ‘The theatrobug’s voice sounds familiar,’ thought Lucos, ‘but I can’t specifically tell.’

‘Ow! My eardrums hurt; this theat-o-thingy speaks waaaay too loud’ thought Lu-cos after his recognition moment, and then quickly realized that if the what-ever-it-is could read minds, then the what-ever-it-is would know what he was thinking. Lucos mouthed something to say that to what-ever-it-is to negate his previous thought. No sound came out from his mouth, or else no sound waves vibrated his eardrums. The theatrobug took no notice.

“TELL ME HOW YOU – AND YOUR THREE OTHER HUMANS – CAME UPON THIS EXOTIC LAND.” Did he want all of it? Or just the important stuff?

Lucos thought about how he had come into his state, about how he was forced into the eye place, the deudiometer, everything. Lucos felt himself getting hotter. And more compact. What was this thing doing to me? I didn’t do anything wrong. Clenching his teeth, Locus asked, “Do you know the way to back to the earth?”

The next time the theatrobug spoke, it answered in a prophetic way, and this time much more softly. ‘The solution shall be found at the tail of the seventh hour of the sev-enteenth day of the seventh month, as the pink turn red, as the thin turn humid. Inside my marvelous solution, any place can match up with another.’ The what-ever-it-is made Lu-cos recite what he had just prophesized over and over, for good oracles only prophesize once. Once Lucos had got the prophecy smack in his brain, a trap door opened up beneath him. The air beneath his feet was a shell pink, but the chamber he was in wasn’t affected by the light. It remained pitch-black.

Lucos remained in the chamber as well as the darkness. At first he wondered why he wasn’t moving anywhere. Then he realized that he was in gravity-free chasm. He pro-pelled himself with his breath and tumbled down, once again, into the deep world.

Lucos found himself on a big, fluffy, cloud that looked identical to the ones he stood on with his friends with the same temperature as before—52° F. Lucos deduced that this world was the same one as when the four of them started. Not meaning home, of course. “But if I fell down, and fell down more, how could I be in the same place I started in? But after all, this is a 4-d world…Ugh! This is driving me crazy!” In fact, so crazy that Lucos thought that he saw the exact same otter-on-truck as he did be-fore he took his big fall.

He did. The otter steered the truck—Vroom, Squeeeeeeeak—over to Lucos and stared him in the eye. Lucos flinched and stepped back in fright of the oval red eye gaz-ing upon him, just like the red in back of the otter. Red? But the sky was pink before the otter came. Suddenly, Lucos remembered part of the prophecy.

“When the pink turn red…Hey! I bet that’s what that meant! When the pink sky turns red!” The otter stood erect and spit out some chewed tobacco leaves. Then it asked,

“Are you goin’ som’place?”

Lucos was startled to hear the otter speak to him, but before he could answer, the animal spoke again.

“I betcha you’re lookin’ for those other three human’, aren’ ye?” Lucos nodded in agreement, wondering the otter was colorblind or not, like other canines. When the otter’s lips remained taught, Lucos said, ‘yes.’ The otter still didn’t answer. Deaf too? thought Lucos. It then occurred to him that the otter might only read minds, like the theatrobug before. ‘Yes’, thought Lucos, and the otter’s whiskers twitched...

“I can getcha there.” Lucos felt a gust of wind lift him up onto the otter’s truck. Lucos had a queasy stomach. A colorblind otter driving a 15-wheeler gas truck, carrying him? Oh, well, it was his only hope. Or was it? Locus looked around, it was just as the theatrobug had said; the sky was a deep red, and the air was sultry. ‘I might be able get out of here alone’, Lucos thought, ‘how can I go without my friends?’ He was so deep in thought that he almost fell out of the truck in shock when the slick ot-ter started the old-fashioned engine. The otter reached out his left hand right before Lucos could fall down and down – again. Left hand? This had to be a really old car, thought Lucos. Even before the millennium turned. After a moment, the truck – puff, chug – raced into the crimson clouds. The next time Lucos was aware of himself, after he and the otter had the run-in with the cloud, he looked down to find his clothes drenched. And a little while later, three slim black figures lying motionless on a cloud.

Lucos stared at the dark figures incomprehensively. Were they alive? Were they sleeping—was it possible to sleep here? The figures grew and started to show a lighter color as the talking otter lowered the truck onto the cloud.

Lucos jumped off of the truck and landed on the cloud, with a sigh of relief– he was afraid he would fall again, just like Terra and Caton had when he and Vani discov-ered moving through time. He stalked over to the where the three bodies lay. Lucos was about to kneel down to check for a pulse when…,

“BOO!” a voice rang in Lucos’s ears. He jumped a parsec in the air and landed up-side down. Where did it come from? he thought. None of the other three had budged yet, and the otter and its truck were far away. Was it another one of his mind games? The next time he opened his eyes, Lucos saw all of the others erect and ag-ile. Soon, they – including Lucos – were talking a mile a minute.

“Where did you go?” asked Terra.

“What happened?” inquired Vani.

“How was that possible that you just disappeared like….” Caton snapped his finger, “that, and then reappeared?”

Lucos had a question of his own for the others, in response to Caton’s question. “How long was I gone?” he asked.

“About two minutes,” answered Caton. Lucos was confused. He felt as though he had been gone for a few hours. Maybe this 4-D world had preserved time for him. Lucos was so happy he was with Terra, Caton and Terra that he almost had forgotten about the prophecy he had received. After he had remembered about it, he shouted over the others’ voices.

“Oh yeah, um, OH YEAH.” All voices cut off. “Thank you. During my absence, I accidentally came upon an oracle’s prophecy.” Why am I talking like this? Lucos thought. Totally not me. “The oracle said, ‘we will find the answer,’ let me see… ‘As the pink turns red, as the thin turns humid, at the tail of the seventh hour of the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the year,’ and I forget all the rest.”

“Well, the pink sky is turning red, and the once-before-thin atmosphere is now humid.” Terra pointed to the sky.

“Plus, my watch says it is 7:32, and the ‘tail of the seventh hour’ means at the end of the seventh hour,” added Vani.

“Also, it is July 17th – the seventeenth day of the seventh month,” said Terra, looking at her wristwatch.

Lucos strode on top of the clouds to the reddest and densest part of the sky. He was marching along when suddenly he tripped over a—something. After he had jumped back in fright, he saw a wide, blue cylinder passing through its own side with a loop without seeming to have any gaps or to touch itself. The other three were amazed by this. They had witnessed an intersection of tubes appear right before them. Caton, Vani, and Terra all took some good guesses at what it was, but in the end, it was really Lucos’s love for topology that saved them all.

“I know! This is a Klein bottle – I read about it in topology class.” All of the others stared at him blankly. “A Klein bottle is a cylinder – 3-D, for the most part – that is twisted around one hundred and eighty degrees and then passes through itself and then connects to the other end, where any two places can connect. When it passes through itself, it neither touches itself nor leaves a gap. At that moment, it passes through a 4-D world.”

Terra and Caton were baffled. Only Vani, who was a quick learner, understood.

She asked, “So you think this is the way back home? Transporting us from 4-D to 3-D?”

Lucos answered, “Yep, of course. ‘Inside my marvelous solution, any place can match up with another,’” he remembered what the what-ever-it-is had said to him.

At that moment, the four of them each spotted a maroon diamond gel floating be-tween them and the Klein bottle. Instinctively, they placed a finger on each one of the rhombuses. As the fingerprints on the gel started to recede, a part of the intersecting tubes popped up and sealed one of them inside. After a few minutes, the four 4-D shuttles were lined up and ready to go. At last, they were going home.

Lucos felt straps fasten about his chest. He heard a prominent voice speak memo-rable words as they were about to depart: “CODE SEQUENCE 01101010110000101. READY TO DEPART.” Was it the theatrobug? Did he count in binary? Lucos wondered as the tubes started to spin violently and move for-ward….

Lucos opened his eyes at the impact between the green floor and his back. Green? At this, Lucos remembered his chemistry teacher’s words: green is a characteristic color of our three dimensional Earth and still, a restricted number of elements can produce such color. The most commercialized one today is argon, namely for gas-wall use. Lucos =-breathed a sigh of relief; he was back in what appeared to be the same doctor office. Through the blue-green transparent transporter tube, he spotted his friends were in the similar tubes distributed evenly around him.

Lucos’s mouth gaped open when he saw his favorite Doctor, Dr. Fruxiore, and his dad standing right in front of him, in stead of Dr. Xefrulior.

“Welcome home, Lucos!” Dr. Fruxiore spoke with a deep, mag-netic voice and a pleasant smile on his face.

Hearing Dr. Fruxiore’s voice, Lucos finally realized why the theatrobug’s voice was so familiar: it was Dr. Fruxiore’s!

The End