Chapter 7

Seven

The first time an inter-dimensional rip had appeared on Earth hardly anyone had seriously considered the idea it might be an actual tear in the actual barrier that separated actual dimensions.

Why would they?

If you'd taken a poll of a hundred people back then, at least a couple wouldn't have even known what a dimension was. A few might have thought it was something to do with Star Trek or Stargate—both of which could usually be found playing in Theo's basement flat on a loop given they were his comfort shows. Being generous at least half would have been aware of the concept of dimensions but probably didn't agree that other dimensions even existed. And those that remained might have agreed that they did, but there was no chance at all of humans ever having anything to do with them.

So, instead, when that first rip appeared and went viral over every social media platform and then every traditional media channel, quite a few people assumed it was simply a hoax. After all there were all sorts of things like that on the internet these days, deep fakes and AI generated lies, and who knew what could and couldn't be trusted. A few people thought it might be a publicity stunt for some brand or another and therefore ignored it on principle. A few were convinced that it was nothing more than liberal propaganda dreamed up to influence the upcoming elections. And the usual bunch thought it was a sign of their preferred religion. A very small group blamed the Large Hadron Collider and insisted they had expected this ever since the thing had been turned on. This was mostly the same group that believed the Large Hadron Collider was responsible for shifting the world into another dimension around about 2018, and whilst they were not correct about that, they might well have been correct about it causing the rips.

No one knew.

Three years of inter-dimensional rip after rip across Europe and its surrounding islands and no one knew what was causing them.

The first recorded rip had happened in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome. The exact place was on the main boulevard opposite a pharmacy and a police station, though the police station looked like an office complex, perhaps in an effort to fool passing criminals. There was a lovely pizzeria somewhere in the middle of all that and the rip started right there, in the middle of table eleven, right next to the olive oil. Thankfully, the table had been unoccupied at the time, as it was a slow summer evening. The staff of the pizzeria only became aware of the disturbance when it rapidly spread to table twelve where a young couple were sharing both longing looks and an aubergine pizza.

Quite a bit of panic followed as the pizza was swallowed into the rip, with the boyfriend almost following a similar fate. He was saved at the last minute by his girlfriend who pulled him free and congratulated herself on her diligence at the gym where she was regularly deadlifting almost two hundred pounds and had since increased it to two-fifty.

Everyone was quickly calmed down by a police officer who also had an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics. He'd immediately realised something was amiss given the rip was about the size of an extra-large pizza at that point and there was a lush forest on the other side. He was also very religious and so he did not discount the possibility that it was a doorway to the garden of Eden, though doubts emerged when something flew past and ate the slice of aubergine pizza that had slipped through.

That rip had grown hour after hour, day after day, until it made it all the way to the other side of the boulevard. By the time the adhesive was invented it had long since reached its final size, which was never more than a dozen or so meters but anything over a couple of meters was simply too big to patch up. The Italian authorities had initiated a twenty-four-seven guard to stop the Trastevere monsters filling Rome with their egg sacs and stripping the capital of all its flora to fuel their never-ending breeding cycles.

Hardly any monsters came through that rip anymore, likely because they were shot on sight, and there had recently been a discussion about reducing the watch or even asking the police in the station to add it to their other duties, but that debate was far from resolved, as the police insisted it was not their job and they were far too busy catching actual criminals, and over-sexed the Trastevere monsters might be, but they were at least generally law abiding.

The first time Theo had heard about the inter-dimensional rips he had been working his way through a complex excel spreadsheet, one of his own invention, filled with macros and a multitude of pivot tables which he was quite proud of. He was deeply invested in the whole thing because he was convinced that it was going to automate at least half of his work for him, freeing him up to do far more interesting things. This had been about the time that the AI bots had started to fill the internet, and everyone had been obsessed with automation.

They would soon have other things to obsess over.

Theo generally listened to music while he worked and he had one of his favourite playlists on, so he hadn't become aware of the shouts outside until there was a pause in the song, and only then because the headphones which had been marketed as noise cancelling were not noise cancelling at all. He'd taken them off and walked over to the window of his office, which was also the spare bedroom.

Theo lived in a basement flat, so the window showed a view of the wrought iron gates surrounding the property and the very bottom of the road. People were running past, ankle after ankle flashing in his vision. It all seemed a bit frantic out there, so Theo quickly turned on the television to BBC news and that was the first time he ever saw the words inter-dimensional rip running across the screen.

Theo had abandoned his spreadsheet, made himself an espresso, and sat down to listen to the presenter. Pale faced, she showed them the Trastevere rip, and then an hour later one in Bourdeaux, then in Basel, and then in Hackney. It had all felt a bit like Theo was in the opening scenes of a science fiction movie and he'd felt both suspicious and nervous as he nipped to the local shop, gathered much needed supplies, and then locked his door up behind him.

His parents and sister had called later that evening, insisting they were not at all shocked, because this was surely a result of climate change and hadn't they been warning about this for years? There was a reason he had been dressed in second-hand clothes growing up and been made to clean his teeth with a bamboo toothbrush! Theo's father insisted he had no regrets now about being arrested during a recent protest—clearly forgetting that it had taken the emergency services the better part of three hours to unglue him from the road and his hands still hadn't fully recovered.

Not long after the call and reassured that his family were all well, Theo settled in for a longer stint with BBC news and the increasingly agitated presenter. Theo still remembered the exact moment the camera had shown the London skyline, a rip right there next to a very posh high-rise apartment block. The first of the spitting monsters came through that rip, so called because they didn't seem to do anything but spit huge globules of orange mucus over the buildings of the capital. Big Ben had been covered intermittently for the better part of three years now. That apartment block, once highly sought after, was now abandoned.

Reports soon came in of other monsters slipping through those rips and suddenly it was the end of times, and the world was going to fall apart, and it was an apocalypse and...and…and…

Only, it wasn't. Life went on as normal. People got up and had their breakfast tea and toast as shimmering octo-monsters began to fill the seas and mate with the earth born octopi. Children still demanded to be entertained even as dozens of pecking monsters started to swoop the playgrounds and peck at them until the children slapped them aside. Civil servants still had to help the country function even if they did have orange slime in their hair. And since the munching monsters had arrived, anyone under the age of fifty knew that they could be called up at any moment to help contain them.

The world had somehow accepted all of this.

They'd accepted that monsters from the other dimension were part of their lives now. Theo too had accepted it but when he opened his eyes in a new dimension, his acceptance levels plunged to the abyss.

Three years.

So much had happened in that time but honestly Theo had been half suspicious and half hopeful that the whole thing would disappear one day as fast as it had come. He'd be sat on a spreadsheet—because monster invasion or not, people still needed their data analysed—hear some kind of cheering, and when he looked out of his basement window, he'd see that the rip in the sky thirty-seven miles from his street had closed itself. That there were no guns trained on it any more to shoot down what had once been an influx of rainbow-eyed beetle monsters.

How quickly things could change.

How quickly they could start accepting things that would have been fantastic just a few months before.

But then…Theo had wondered more than once during the last three years whether everyone would have been quite so accepting of everything that had happened if the monsters had looked more like them. If they walked on two legs instead of three or seven or eleven. If they had faces with eyes and mouths and expressions. If they'd had hands that could reach out and touch you.

He knew the answer to that now.

Knew it as he looked up at the monster who had abducted him into another dimension.

A monster who was shaped remarkably and worrying like a human.