A Demonstration of the Abyssal Principle at the 11th Annual Frontiers in High Energy Physics Conference at the Hotel Grande Reynard—Dixon March

Dancella Viel arrived at the conference hotel, breathing heavily. (She wasn’t late, but she felt like she was. This was on account of her crippling impostor syndrome.) With her she carried only one piece of baggage: a 1950s Samsonite Silhouette in robin’s egg blue.

Checking in, Viel was the only person there with a robin’s egg blue Samsonite Silhouette. It had been purchased at a thrift store two days prior, in excellent condition. A rare find. Really, you’d think someone could’ve sold it online for much more money than Viel paid. If you haven’t seen one, the Silhouette was a hard shell suitcase with one handle and chrome latches, boxy and distinctly mid-century modern. It was the sort of suitcase that spies handcuffed to their wrist as they transported cash and microfiche and small thermonuclear weapons. 

Viel had bought the Samsonite Silhouette to boost her confidence, to look stylish, as these events always made her sweat profusely. It worked, to a degree. When Viel reached the counter, she sat the suitcase gently on the floor and smiled boldly. Her large forehead shone but no droplets of perspiration dripped down her turtleneck. The clerk greeted her without seeing her. He wore a brocade vest pattern that matched the interior of the hotel Grande Reynard. (The decor was a chaos of Rococo swirls and orbs, in orange, deep purple, and gold, like gaudy Halloween camouflage on a backdrop of luxury violence.) He gave her a key for number 389. She’d arranged to share a room at the conference with Terese Gabon, another employee of the university physics department who was closer to receiving a full appointment. Gabon would not arrive for several hours.

Dancella Viel used the elevator to get to the third floor. She brought her suitcase up on her own. In it she transported not a suitcase nuke but a sheaf of papers and notes, support for her talk, “Hierarchical Misinformation and the Illusion of Scale in Kantenberg’s Multiverse Theory,” as well as a backup turtleneck sweater and several pairs of underwear. The underwear she never used, it was always just in case. These items, except the papers, were similarly coffee and cinnamon brown to match the clothes she currently wore. If you watch the security footage from the hotel, she could be easily mistaken for a Carl Sagan. Thin, black hair swept over a broad, white forehead. A large overbite and small chin. Propensity to smile and romanticize particle physics. 

Viel exited the elevator after a duration of seven minutes and fifteen seconds. On the way to her room, she tripped once. Just a little skip, then she righted herself. The carpet at the Grande Reynard, particularly the third floor, had been coming unglued for some time, so there were little wrinkles and pitfalls among the gold and orange rococo paisley.

The light fixtures in the hall flickered. At the end of the corridor, a double-paned window looked out into the storm above the city. A weather advisory that day warned of potential extreme lightning and damaging winds, but at that time, the storm hadn’t let loose its fury just yet. For the moment, things were quiet. 

Viel straightened herself after the stumble and smoothed her corduroy blazer before stepping quickly, not embarrassed at all, between the rows of identical doors. Then she found her room. Number 389.

She touched the electronic lock with her keycard. 

The door creaked open three centimeters. It was unlocked.

Gingerly, Viel entered the room, peeking in first and then stepping over the threshold only after it seemed safe. The room’s furnishings were gaudy. There was one Queen-sized bed covered in a comforter with the hotel’s signature pattern, like baroque pumpkins wildly overgrown in a bruise-purple field. A dresser/TV stand combo loomed in the corner, looking madly French. Altogether the air smelled intensely of Jasmin carpet cleaner and old sweat. Viel crinkled her nose, briefly, then shut the door behind her and sought a place to put her suitcase. Not the bed. 

Many experts suggest to never place a piece of luggage on the bed in a North American hotel room. The dresser is also forbidden, as this area too is subject to several parasites and clingers-on that frequently follow a traveler back to their home to invade and infest. You’d think the suitcase stand is a good idea but really, it’s not. The bathroom, actually, is one of the best places to stash luggage to avoid any unexpected travel companions. If you’ve ever wrestled with such an infestation, it can be seriously damaging. They slip into the cracks of things and wait to come out and bite. They are always present. They have always been here.

Viel checked the bathroom and found it closed. A cloud of steam rose up from under the door. She scowled, tilted her ear and heard soft humming. A familiar tune she couldn’t place. Her scowl deepened. She circled around again, her robin’s egg blue Samsonite Silhouette held with both hands at her waist. She checked the closet where she might find the suitcase stand. When she quietly wrenched open the accordion doors, she found the stand, but it was already occupied by a strange piece of luggage. 

The luggage didn’t belong to Terese Gabon. Gabon carried a red roller suitcase, brand-new, with a distinct plastic casing and hyacinth stickers on it for easy identification at the airport baggage carousel. Dancella Viel knew Gabon’s suitcase at a glance, as this wasn’t the first time they’d shared a room for a conference.

No. This was another suitcase on the stand.

A vintage item. A Samsonite Silhouette. 

In robin’s egg blue.

The same as Viel’s in all ways except condition. The impostor suitcase was dented and cracked and filthy, covered in a sheen of yellowish smudges like sulfuric dust. Over the top of it, certain larger fissures were sealed with black industrial tape, but not so well as to completely mask the contents. 

Small lights blinked inside.

She examined it with a soft glower.

Then she set her suitcase down. Glanced once at the bathroom door. Still closed. She made a decision, and the thought scuttled over the surface of her eyes like a tiny insect of feeling, a dark turn in the sweet Carl Sagan-ness of her face. Possessed by this purpose, Viel moved to the impostor suitcase and bent over with a straight back. Then she pressed her thumbs to the latches and forced them open.

She gazed at what lay inside. The suitcase contained no single article of clothing nor any paper or stack of notecards. Instead it held a jangle of motherboards and other computer components in strange configurations. LEDs blinked in lazy red patterns. Tiers of copper tubing spiraled over and around the digital parts like a tiny, insane transit system. In the center was an oscillator with green lines moving across it in murmurations. Everything together buzzed with a sinister undertone, a noise that grated at the backs of her eyes. She didn’t know what it was, other than a device charged with a dark, incomprehensible purpose. 

Viel shook her head and murmured a few indistinct syllables, directed entirely at herself. Could she recognize a suitcase nuke from a mad science movie prop? She had only spent one semester studying particle colliders her first year in graduate school, and even then those had been simulations, digital ephemera. 

Eventually, when Viel left room 389 she took her own suitcase with her, back down the hotel hallway with the wrinkled carpet and flickering light fixtures. In any normal situation, she’d have left her articles in the hotel room before her talk but now she was concerned of the implications of two somewhat identical Samsonite Silhouettes, of which one could be carrying a dangerous piece of equipment. It would do no good to have the two mixed up. 

As Viel fled down the hall, the lightning from the window cast her in a strange gold glare. Either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care that she’d left the impostor suitcase open. In those milliseconds of flash she turned into a shadowed space, a figure of a person without features, all detail swallowed in carbon black. Thunder rumbled one second later. The storm was near. Viel heard this and elected to take the stairs.

As she vanished down the service hallway, the elevator opened behind her.

During Viel’s lightning round the electricity went out.

This was in Goya Ballroom D. Viel fidgeted stiffly at the podium, in the middle of her talk. A sparse after-lunch audience was in attendance, rustling uncomfortably in the theater-arranged chairs. Far more empty seats than people. Four other speakers took up the table at the front of the room, like a bored high council. They shuffled notecards and sipped plastic water bottles as they waited grumpily for their turn. 

Viel’s voice quavered terribly as she spoke. “…a-and Kantenberg asserts scale symmetry this way with the nonlinear Poisson–Boltzmann–Emden equation, which…which provides the most suitable solution to this ‘nasty impasse’ within the field to explain—” 

All at once, the overheads flared and thunder rang out, so loud and close it might have been a bolt that directly hit the hotel roof. Several overhead fluorescents popped in an obscene crackle, like bad knuckles, and a distant generator gave a whining death knell before the room sank into darkness.

No one made a sound. In the windowless interior room, the dark was absolute. 

After a tense breath or two, the emergency lights kicked on in the adjacent room but not in Ballroom D. Only a dim red glow leaked under the divider. Visibility was quite bad. You could almost mistake the awkward rows of empty chairs for people, standing there, waiting patiently, perfectly still. 

You’d almost think the podium had been vacated. It stood alone with no one behind it.

In a seizure of light, the overheads came back on. After .89 seconds of painful brightness, the glare sank to a reasonable level. Viel squinted half-blind at the podium. With a cough she thanked everyone for their attention and shuffled to her seat. She hadn’t finished her talk. The next speaker got up to wrestle with the dead laptop, his face a furious purple. Thunder echoed distantly and rain ravaged the hotel roof. Distracted by the sounds of the storm, the audience ignored the new speaker and checked their phones for the most recent weather updates. Cataclysmic rains. Apocalyptic winds. It was then they began to walk out. 

Already, the halls of the hotel The Grande Reynard were filled with ruffled academics, wiping their glasses, buttoning their coats. They streamed en masse to the windowed lobby to assess the damage. 

After a guilty minute spent watching the next speaker grumble over a blank projector screen, Viel stuffed her notecards in her suitcase and walked out with the rest of them.

In the lobby, the light was unearthly and sulfuric, dimmed by the late afternoon storm. Outside the traffic blared their horns and splashed giant waves of murky water up over the curb. Rain filled the gutters and drowned the sidewalks. Above the spectators, the chandeliers in elaborate Rococo style fizzled like the cheapest incandescent bulb. Whispers spread through the crowd: soon, flights would be canceled. Roadways would become impassible.

Viel sensed the human tide was about to turn, to rush to their rooms to pack. She took advantage of her position near the rear of the throng and scuttled backwards to the elevator. 

The second before she pressed the “up” button, lightning struck again, so violently it seemed to have hit the hotel dead-on. This time it killed the lights for good. The crowd of academics cried out, then went silent, like birds realizing they were trapped in a covered cage. There was a panicked moment where Viel couldn’t see anything but the silhouette of her colleagues against the stormy gloom of the window. To her it looked like they’d been switched out with strange featureless shadow beings that stood perfectly still. Silent. Menacing. 

Viel backed away from the elevator and hustled to take the stairs.

Behind her, the elevator opened to pitch-black nothing. 

On the third floor, Viel emerged from the service stairway, chased by echoes of violent thunder. She still carried her mint-condition Samsonite Silhouette. 

The only light in the hallway came from the window at the far end, and that glow was dim and chaotic. Tumultuous waves of rain against the glass cast strange, crawling patterns on the floor, which made the orange and purple patterned carpet seem infested with black eels. No human sound emitted from any of the rooms. 

She hustled to number 389. A wrinkle in the unglued carpet caught her boot and she tripped, sailed forward and smashed her chin on the floor. Her Samsonite Silhouette fell with her, and the impact created an instant dent in the corner. The hardshell casing cracked. One of her back molars cracked, too, a sound of miniature thunder in her skull. 

Pained and shaking, Viel picked herself up with one hand pressed to her mouth. Her tongue searched her insides, probing the now jagged enamel. As she rose, she caught in her peripheral vision a person in the hall, standing behind her, backlit by the window. 

Determined to maintain her composure, she smiled weakly and bent over to retrieve her suitcase. She didn’t say anything to the other academic. Everyone in the conference was on their way to collect their things and escape the hotel so she wouldn’t disturb whoever it was. She wished not to be disturbed herself. She turned her back on them and walked the remaining several feet to her room. 

The person took one step towards her.

Then another.

Viel heard their footsteps, muffled against the carpet. 

Maybe they were eager to network before leaving. Viel, panicked at the thought of having to confront her own failure during a conversation with a colleague, didn’t glance over as she bowed in front of room 389. She focused on her keycard, swiping it through a dead, dark lock.

The door creaked ajar. Slowly. One…two…three centimeters. 

Luckily the door hadn’t been shut all the way so she could still push it open, despite the useless mechanism. She stepped inside and the footsteps behind her quickened. 

Very eager to network, she chuckled to herself.

She shut the door behind her. Under the door crack, a squirm of shadows came to a stop. The dark cast by two feet, standing entirely still. She held her suitcase, robin’s egg blue, in one shuddering hand, and with the other reached for the light switch—

Don’t, someone whispered.

Viel froze. Terese?

In the dark of the room, only muted, abstract shapes could be discerned. Anyone standing there wouldn’t have been able to tell who sat on the bed. The other Samsonite Silhouette  remained on the suitcase stand. It emitted a soft light but did nothing to illuminate the room or any detail. The other person sat with her back to Viel, staring into the suitcase. The lid was open and the mechanisms within pulsed. The oscillator swept from side to side. Something glistened on the stranger’s head, a glimmer of a thick substance like oil, perhaps a stickiness, but it was difficult to tell. The window curtains blocked out all light from the outside. It might as well have been the dead of night. The dark of space. 

Do I know you? Viel asked. She had a sense of being in multiple places at once, or she was nowhere and muttering only to herself.  Am I in the wrong room?

The stranger stood up slowly. They were humming, the same tune Viel had heard in the bathroom earlier, a song she’d almost forgotten from her undergraduate years. A song she’d once loved. It took her a minute to think up the name. “Particle Man” by They might be Giants. Viel was struck with nostalgia for a moment. She felt the past tug at her from her place in the future. She felt strange. It was strange to have a sense of being in multiple places at once.

After a few breathless refrains, the stranger whispered. Have you seen them yet?

Viel found herself holding her suitcase against her chest, as if it were a shield. Seen who?

 The stranger chuckled. Those who live beyond the hologram. The voice sounded clogged somehow, rattling as if sneaking through a shattered windpipe. They continued to stand. Higher. Higher.

Viel tilted her head back to watch the muddled shadow of the impostor guest float even higher, close to the ceiling. The bottoms of their pant legs grazed the edge of the bed. 

On a slow axis, the figure began to turn and drift towards her.

Viel pressed her back against the hotel door. As the figure hovered closer, she held out her Samsonite Silhouette like it was a holy talisman, a weapon. She raised her arms to lift the suitcase over her head, a posture suitable for a neanderthal threatening to kill a rival with a rock. Viel tried to look brave. She stuttered a few strangled words, no, don’t, as in don’t touch me, but before she finished her face contorted into extreme terror. The figure drifted closer, and Viel could see who the stranger was. 

I like your suitcase, she said.

Terese Gabon walked through the front door and into the lobby of the hotel Grande Reynard late for her talk. She shook rain off her shoulders and rushed to the Goya Ballroom D, with her red roller suitcase covered in hyacinth stickers. The scheduled hour for her session, “The Bulk as the Abyss: Hyperspace and d-Brane Subduality,” began ten minutes prior.

She pushed against the crowd. Her colleagues streamed in the opposite direction, bumping into each other on their way out, knocking about in the dark. A few emergency lights still glowed with feeble tiny red eyes like insects, watching. 

After nearly tripping over the wrinkles and rips in the carpet, Gabon made it to the ballroom door and stood on the threshold, her light brown face flushed with exertion. She nearly announced I’m here! except there was already someone at the podium.

The woman had tangled, thin black hair and a torn coffee colored blazer over her turtleneck. Her face was dry, no shine of sweat at all, and her voice was strong and assured. She spoke to a largely empty room. At her feet behind the podium a suitcase in poor condition hummed with a sound that seemed like an old song Gabon had heard years ago. The suitcase was covered in tape. The woman was covered in blood.

The woman said, “What we have with the Maldacena duality is the most successful demonstration of the holographic principle.” The lights flickered. “Maldacena clearly proves the three dimensional world we experience is, in truth, a hologram. We can throw out the need for multiverses, because in fact we are only one of many layers within a teeming mass of existences. We are a two dimensional projection of reality within a reality. We aren’t trapped in the cave watching the shadows. We are the shadows.”

Gabon interrupted her. “Dancella?” She scowled. “That’s not your paper.”

Viel glared darkly at Gabon and continued. “It’s only through this holographic principle that we can begin to reconcile the conflicts we see in the universe at the particle level. Concepts like distance and time become illusions. We disenfranchise ourselves. We are not three dimensional creatures. We are ghosts on a screen.”

It was at that point Gabon realized the audience was growing. More people had appeared in the seats set up theater style in Goya Ballroom D. She hadn’t seen them come in. They’d appeared in the space of a blink. It was too dark. Gabon breathed raggedly. She was already exhausted from the battle to get there and now her heart raced with a new surge of adrenaline. She blinked again and the ballroom was full. 

Gabon scooted her roller suitcase backwards, starting a slow retreat… 

Viel continued. “When we come to realize the two dimensional nature of our existence, we fold in on ourselves and our doppelgangers gaze back at us from the abyss. This becomes the vehicle by which we can study the true three dimensional reality that surrounds us. The reality that has surrounded us since our feeble projections gained consciousness—”

Gabon had almost entirely ducked out of the room when a wheel on her roller suitcase gave a little squeak.

At once, the audience jerked their heads at the source of the sound, their attention now laser-focused on her. Gabon saw their faces. They were made of nothing. People-shaped but filled with a deep malicious absence. An unwholesome antimatter. Even Viel had stopped speaking and now stared at Gabon. 

One of the nothings stood up from their chair.

Then, from the lobby, the screaming started.

Earlier, in room 389, Dancella Viel hovered over the body that was crumpled like a crushed bug at the foot of the bed. The cadaver’s details were lost in the dark, but Viel made out a misshapen lump where a skull should have been. A puddle blooming darkly on the carpet. A jagged angle of neck. 

She dropped her Samsonite Silhouette, its mid-century modern stylings now splattered black and dented. It landed with a wet thump. The latches let loose their grip when the suitcase hit the floor and the lid splayed open. Her backup turtleneck and spare underwear spilled out, although, in this light, they weren’t chocolate and coffee but deep purple black. Her notecards flew up and sank to the floor like pale confetti.

The suitcase on the stand beeped once. 

From the foot of the bed, she heard a small chuckle.

Years ago, the cadaver said, I attended the 11th Annual Frontiers in High Energy Physics Conference. As soon as I’d arrived, I found a piece of luggage in my room, on the suitcase stand, left by the person with whom I was sharing the space. Or so I assumed. This luggage made a strange noise, which was a concern. I worried it was a suitcase nuke or something similar, so I investigated. Eventually I took it home. It was a tabletop collider, as Maldacena proposed.

Viel slumped on her feet, weaving softly back and forth, hypnotized. She gazed into the open lid of the Samsonite Silhouette with its myriad of off putting components, glittering copper and pulsating green. Its deep hum nestled into her bones.

The cadaver said, The device was quite an accomplishment. It fires protons at a certain interval and then converts the proton field to a corresponding frequency that causes the veil to wrinkle. To fold in on itself, an origami of light.

Viel thought she heard footsteps outside, in the hall.

If the device works slowly, you can catch a glimpse of the eternal. You think the veil separates us from this world and the next, but in truth we are the veil. When we collapse, we can see. The eternal contains such unspeakable, abyssal dimensions it will drive the living mad, so it’s best to take it a little at a time. Not to mention, the entities that live within it don’t care for us two dimensional creatures. Not one bit.

Footsteps in the hall outside the room. So many.

But the collider only works safely, the cadaver said, if some idiot doesn’t come along and leave it sitting open.

The storm quieted late that evening. A low, dying sun burned vivid orange outside the windows of the hotel Grande Reynard, and the color seeped through the lobby like radioactive fog. 

Dancella Viel emerged from the service stairway and paused in the center of the lobby. She walked with a high chin and ease of step of someone who had never, and would never, feel like she didn’t belong. Like she was the impostor. She gazed analytically at the overturned sitting chairs, the check-in counter covered in debris and shattered computer components, the splayed body of the clerk in his orange, deep purple, and now black splattered brocade vest. Her academic colleagues were strewn about, underneath the broken furniture, lying on beds of broken glass. Among them was a red roller suitcase with a hyacinth sticker, crushed under the fallen Rococo chandelier. 

Beyond the jagged remains of the windows, the nothings floated away, having finished with their extermination. Their toes hovered above the sidewalk outside the hotel Grande Reynard. Hundreds, thousands of them. Uncountable numbers. Their forms stretched and elongated as if seeping from their confines, towards a city skyline in advanced decay. They dissipated into the streets of rubble beneath an atmosphere teeming with abyssal life, a Precambrian soup of things too large to comprehend, the undersides of leviathans larger than the moon, all eyes and veins and flesh in a fractal chaos. Beings that blocked out the stars.

Viel took this all in. In her left hand, she carried the robin’s egg blue Samsonite Silhouette. It was in poor condition. Dented, taped shut. Small red lights glimmered within the cracks. You’d have thought no one would use such an abused piece of luggage, something that had clearly been battered and beaten, maybe slammed repeatedly against a hard surface or a person’s skull, much in the way an otter might crush an oyster with a rock to gain access to its secrets. 

Viel stared, perfectly still, at the ruined hotel for several minutes. 

Then she punched the elevator’s “up” button with her knuckle.

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open into an all-consuming black space, a starless nothing. 

Dancella Viel stepped inside. The dead watched her leave.

photo by Heather Green (via unsplash)