Spatially Close by…
but in a different universe entirely
If only Side Carr hadn’t taken the Stick, this would never have happened
Art
Art is a man who has spent his whole life being the wrong thing in the wrong place, too artistic for science, too scientific for art, too imaginative for his family, not bold enough to commit to his own talent.
His "big farewell" has gone disastrously wrong, every escape route is closed, and the only door left open leads to a different universe entirely.
Eva
She'd first seen him in the library, sitting alone at a desk, a sketchbook open alongside a book on game theory. She introduced herself. He was surprised anyone had noticed him.
And now he was on the run. If he were to leave the college, something irreplaceable would go with him. If only there were somewhere else where they could meet.
Side Carr
In another universe entirely but unexpectedly close by, Side Carr, a six-legged mutant who used to be a butler, was trying to leaf through a very large book, named ‘Detail of All that Abounds’, that acted as a sort of user manual for the whole universe, when he was surprised by a very large dog dragging a nightwatchman on a long chain. Desperate to make his escape, he grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on; an innocent-looking stick that turned out to be an artificial intelligence. Now, if he’d only left it where it was, Art would still be with Eva, and his brother would still be in the International Space Station.
Jack
Jack is everything Art is not: the physicist, the NASA astronaut, the apple of their father’s eye. It’s hard for Art to ignore his brother’s success; even the college science block has been named after him.
But, thanks to Side Carr’s ineptitude with the stick, a cosmic event causes Jack to step out of the airlock on the Space Station and disappear, experiencing three universes in the blink of an eye, and leaving a man-sized hole over each one he passes through. Jack may be a bit-part character in this story, but without his disappearance, Majesty would never have thought of removing Art to the Second State, and using him to plug the hole that Jack has left.
Majesty
The fact that Majesty found it so easy to infiltrate Barnaby College, impersonate a professor, and kidnap Art back to his own universe is more a failure of higher education than an accomplished move by some interdimensional warrior. He’s a rogue intellectual, morally unreliable and only there because of his ability to slip between States, and his reckless grab-it-all mentality. He detests Art, but gives in to the blindingly obvious fact that without him, his whole expedition will fail. Then there’s the green box and the foam; he wishes he’d never brought it. Jinx keeps contacting him through it and ordering him back home. Apparently, some delinquent has stolen the stick, and they can’t interrogate the manual. So what do they want him to do about it?
Jinx
As acting head of Throughverse and Slippage, he’s got plenty on his plate; the loss of contact with the Stick, and the man-sized hole over the Divide, to name but two, but he still hustles on the side as CEO of Cybereal. It shouldn’t interfere with his day job, but it does, and when he messes up, he blames Majesty or Medioca or anyone who happens to be standing in front of him. But if thinks it can’t get any worse, he must be deluded, because putting faith in Kydd was a big mistake.
Kydd
He was not an imposing figure; had you seen him in a crowd, you might have thought he was on the lookout for watches to steal. Yet he was a dark horse, a creator of worlds. To him, digital code was like a train set spread out for his amusement. So when the Stick was stolen, he was confident that everything was under control and calm would be restored with just a few clicks on his Datacet.
After all, he’d instructed Surveillance HQ to monitor the area with HiEyes. He’d deployed upgraded models for enhanced clarity, and their reports were coming in every few cycles, so apart from Jinx discovering that he and Medioca were an item, contrary to the 49th Stipulation, what could possibly go wrong?
Medioca
What little confidence she clung to was skin deep.
She’d wanted to be a baker and work with her hands, but her father had encouraged her to join the elite. He’d insisted on it. “I won’t rest until ‘Medioca’ has become a watchword for excellence,” he would say, unaware of the irony.
Surprisingly, her progress through the ranks had been swift. She attributed it to her father’s friendship with Jinx, but she was a loner, untouched by the infighting and factions, and sailed through every interview as someone who wouldn’t make waves.
Supervisor (Throughverse and Slippage) was written on her office door, but she felt unworthy of the title. Under her authority, or lack of it, incursions from the Third State had become commonplace, and her department a laughing stock.
Wimper
Wimper couldn’t understand why he was constantly overlooked. He was working through his probation, just as his father had encouraged him to do, but his heart wasn’t in it. His spirits had revived when Majesty chose him for a secret mission to abduct an artist from the First State, but because it was secret, the contents of his CV remained very thin. Even being left in charge of Art hadn’t turned out well, and now he sat in Jinx’s office being threatened with the sack.
It was only when he realised that true loyalty is to flesh and blood, not an ideal, that his life took a turn for the better, and he found himself in the right hemisphere with Art, amongst people he previously treated as the enemy.
Eva
She'd first seen him in the library, sitting alone at a desk, a sketchbook open alongside a book on game theory. She introduced herself. He was surprised anyone had noticed him.
And now he was on the run. If he were to leave the college, something irreplaceable would go with him. If only there were somewhere else where they could meet.
Side Carr
In another universe entirely but unexpectedly close by, Side Carr, a six-legged mutant who used to be a butler, was trying to leaf through a very large book, named ‘Detail of All that Abounds’, that acted as a sort of user manual for the whole universe, when he was surprised by a very large dog dragging a nightwatchman on a long chain. Desperate to make his escape, he grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on; an innocent-looking stick that turned out to be an artificial intelligence. Now, if he’d only left it where it was, Art would still be with Eva, and his brother would still be in the International Space Station.
Jack
Jack is everything Art is not: the physicist, the NASA astronaut, the apple of their father’s eye. It’s hard for Art to ignore his brother’s success; even the college science block has been named after him.
But, thanks to Side Carr’s ineptitude with the stick, a cosmic event causes Jack to step out of the airlock on the Space Station and disappear, experiencing three universes in the blink of an eye, and leaving a man-sized hole over each one he passes through. Jack may be a bit-part character in this story, but without his disappearance, Majesty would never have thought of removing Art to the Second State, and using him to plug the hole that Jack has left.
Carrington
The college porter was an anomaly.
Side Carr
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