A Singular Transport
Working knowledge of arithmetic may save you some day.
I have this feeling now that each step I take is distancing me further and further from my world. The machine I am forced to use to travel among realities is a metal room with double sliding doors on one side and a set of ivory buttons protruding into a charcoal panel within a frame of golden alloy.
This encloses nine by nine numerals and, beneath them, four larger ruby nobs marked Open, Close, Actuate and Minus.
Besides the controls is a tall, person-sized mirror which dims during the seconds-long trips and presents intricate patterns of dancing multihued dots against a background of grey web-like structures.
The small buttons are, rather peculiarly, stencilled from 2 to 82, and when I touch the frame, female voices whisper ever-changing sequences of them.
All of these, I soon found out, contain “1”, and since I have no way to choose its numeral, I tended to exchange it for one of the others, which turned out to be a grave mistake.
The automatic door kept opening to increasingly uncanny landscapes, streets and interiors, with the gravity wrong, the atmosphere odourus, and the light miscoloured.
And the beings!
Only once did I decide to try out a sequence of my design and almost failed in punching the button Close in time, as amid the sudden chill the air rushed out into a blackness filled with distant constellations, the pain in my ears unbearable, my lungs burning.
I stare at the looking glass and the huddled form in the corner with bloodshot eyes and a week’s worth of facial stubble and wearily raise a fist to myself.
The anachronistic LED display above the ebony selection panel continues to proclaim cryptically, as it has done throughout my ordeal — “Choose the numbers wisely. Deduction is the mother of singularity. This device is property of the Elevator Community.”
And yet.
The figure in the mirror suddenly smiles and slowly stands up, exclaiming, “Woohoo!”
The transporter’s creators have hidden the instructions for typing the number one in plain sight.
One is, indeed, Three Minus Two.
The above texts were first published on Twitter and are © 2023 by David Pahor.
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