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We arrived at the bottom of a lecture hall with tiered seating that could sit about 300 students or audience members. We were next to one of four doorways into the room. One was across from us on the other side of the instruction area. The other two doors were up at the top of the hall, behind the last row of seats. There were three stairways that led up through the seating, one on each side and one directly up the middle of the room. Many of the seats in the room were already filled. More people were coming into the room through each of the doorways. Morrison led me to the front row, just to the left of the stairs in the middle of the room. He gestured for me to sit in the spot right by the stairs, and he sat to my left. There were two wheelchair accessible spots in the space to the right of the stairs, and someone was just backing their chair into one of those spots as Morrison and I sat down.
Morrison leaned forward to see around me and said, “Good morning, Milo. How are things going?”
Milo was rooting around in a bookbag for something but looked up to see who was speaking. “Oh, hi Morrison! You slumming with the undergrads today?”
“How else am I going to find the good parties?” Morrison teased back.
“I’m pretty sure that your idea of a party involves tea cups and extended pinky fingers, my man,” Another student in the row behind us retorted.
“Ouch! I resemble that remark!” Morrison grabbed his chest and feigned dire injury. The students in earshot laughed.
The instructor for the class walked in through the door on our side of the room and put her bag on the table in front of the massive whiteboard. As she turned toward the class, she saw Morrison and me sitting at the front and came over to us. She shook Morrison’s hand first and said good morning.
As he shook her hand, Morrison said, “Miri, have you met Uriel Pardo yet?”
“I have not!” She turned to me and we shook hands. “Welcome! I’m Miri Yazdi. It’s good to meet you. Morrison said you’d probably be here today. If there’s anything that you would like clarification about after class,” she raised her volume for the next words so that everyone would hear her, “I have office hours posted on the department bulletin board that none of my students seem to show up for,” and then she returned to her previous volume to speak just to me, “or we can just grab some coffee and chat when you have some free time.”
“Thank you, Professor Yazdi,” I said with a nod.
She looked at Morrison and said, “I like him already,” and then walked behind the table and began to write something on the whiteboard.
Morrison reached under the armrest between our chairs and lifted my desk up into place. Then he handed me a notebook and a pen that I had not seen previously. He leaned in to whisper in my ear then remembered he didn’t have to. **You’re going to want to take notes,** his voice said in my head.
I took the proffered supplies and gave him a nod of thanks. Opening the book to the first page I was about to write the date at the top of the page, but then I realized that I wasn’t sure of the local date or day for that matter. I looked up at the board and was glad to see that Professor Yazdi had just written the date and the name of the class in the top right corner of the whiteboard. Turned out, it was the same day here as it was for me back home. June 23, 2022.
The center of the whiteboard had the words, “Interdimensional Rifts and the Extinction Cycle” in large block letters.
The professor started her lecture. “Today we are going to be talking about what we know about the causes of interdimensional rifts and how they relate to cycles of global disaster and periods of both political instability and mass extinctions. Before we get started, I’m going to give a quick review of how we define dimensions and ‘verses, and the framework we use in this class for understanding the relationships between these places for the sake of our visitor and for anyone who has been snoozing through previous lessons.” The class laughed.
Yazdi drew a line across the whiteboard and then went back and drew branches coming off that line. Some of the branches returned quickly to the main line. Some continued to the end of the whiteboard. Some had branches that came off of them, as well. She turned back around toward the class and spoke, “This is the classic visualization of the timeline and the splits that create a tree of ‘verses where different decisions were made or a random event happened one way or another to create a new branch. It is theorized that if we go back far enough, to the Big Bang, that all ‘verses and all dimensions fit somewhere on this tree. But, there is a problem with that theory. What is the problem with that theory, class?”
“Time is not consistent between the branches.” A chorus of voices replied.
“That’s right. The very act of crossing between branches involves stepping outside of time itself, and then back into time. As a result, you cannot assume that when you cross from one branch to another that you will arrive at the same time as you left or even a reasonable approximation of the same time that might account for travel. And why is that?”
“Time is Wibbly Wobbly!” The class responded with giggles.
“Ah, thank you Doctor Who. We love you!” Professor Yazdi put her hand over her heart and looked up to the sky as if praising an ancestor or a deity. Turns out, Doctor Who is a character in fiction for this reality just like in my own reality, but I didn’t learn that until later.
The professor turned back to the board and drew a series of circles in the shape of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Then inside some of those circles she drew more circles in the same pattern. “Another way to think of the relationship between planes of existence is by using the Sefirot, the emanations of the Divine that bring us from the unstructured everythingness of The One That Is All down to the physical reality of flesh and bone and wooden table tops.” She knocked on the table in front of her. “But we aren’t going to focus on this pattern because it, too, has a complicated trick to it. Each sefirah contains its own Tree of Life with all the emanations inside of it. And each of those emanations contains another Tree of Life, ad infinitum. The place of Formation for one ‘verse is the Crown of another ‘verse. How that all fits together is an entire semester-long graduate seminar, so that’s obviously too complex for our practical use right now.”
She picked up a rag and wiped the Tree of Life off the board and then picked up several pens and began to draw a series of different colored circles in a random assortment all over the board. Some circles stood out on their own. Others touched one or more circles. A few circles overlapped with another circle, and a couple of the circles were entirely enveloped by another circle of a different color. Some weren’t exactly circles, but rounded shapes that stretched around nearby circles.
“Think of this as a cross section view of the entire Universe. The Whole Enchilada, with all its different timelines and Trees of Life, with all its Emanations of the Divine, with all the stories that could possibly be told. Each one of these circles is one plane of existence, one self contained infinite reality. Some of these circles could be visualized as branches off another one of these circles, however to do that you would miss the fact that each of these planes of existence contains everything before the split as well as everything after the split. As I said before. Each of these circles is entirely self contained. Some of these circles are the creations of other circles, like the sefirot inside of other sefirot. But in this view, that does not matter either. In this view, we only contemplate each ‘verse as its own, fully self contained space of Being. One might also say that each of them is their own Entity.
“We can call them universes, but that gets confusing when you consider the whole bundle of universes is also a capital-U Universe unto itself. The Multiverse, as it were, is All One. So, we sometimes use the shortened word ‘verse to describe these circles and sometimes we call them dimensions. But dimension is a problematic word here, too because each of these ‘verses have their own physical dimensions.
“Most, but not all, ‘verses have four percievable dimensions and six, seven, or possibly eight imperceptable dimensions. There’s height, width, depth, and time. And then there’s,” she waved her hands, “other dimensions we’re not gonna get into today because they are even weirder than time, all folded in on themselves and conceptually mind bending.
“Each of these ‘verses also have the four worlds of Inception, Design, Formation, and Action.”
A hand went up somewhere behind me, and the professor nodded her head at the person. “So, does that mean that each of the ‘verses also has their whole own Tree of Life inside it?”
Professor Yazdi responded, “Indeed, they do!”
I said, “Fractals, all the way down.” and then felt bad for speaking out of turn.
Professor Yazdi didn’t seem to mind, though, as she smiled and said, “Exactly. It’s fractals all the way up and all the way down.”
She continued her lecture. “We call each of these circles a Dimension or a universe or even a ‘verse, not because any of those is an entirely accurate label but because they are each used in the common parlance and sometimes it makes sense to use words that everyone is familiar with in order to make the information usable. As scientists, we strive for precision in describing everything in the most exact way possible, however sometimes that precision replicates the complexity so thoroughly that the human mind can’t actually work with the information effectively. So, we use approximations that work, knowing full well that they are not precise. Mind you that this can lead to apparent paradoxes.
“As mystics we are comfortable with paradox, because we understand that paradox comes from the collision of two approximations that each work for their own purposes but do not describe the Whole precisely.
“We will meet some paradoxes and I will often hand wave them away during a lecture. This is not because I am ignoring the problem. It is because following the tangent of that paradox will take us off the important usable lesson in front of us. Note the paradoxes. Explore them later. Luckily most of you are quite young, but chasing every paradox is a project of many lifetimes.” A nervous laugh rippled across the classroom.
“OK, so ignoring the fact that the full precision of Everything That Exists In Every Dimension and Permutation is the textbook definition of ‘ineffable’,” the professor waved her hands back and forth dramatically, “Let’s move on.”
She stepped to the side of the whiteboard and pointed at it with one hand, “We live in one of these little circles. It’s a nice little bubble of reality. And like a soap bubble, it has a membrane that separates it from all the rest of, well, everything. There is an entire field of research devoted to trying to understand the nature of that membrane, but what we need to know here and now is that this membrane is, 1. Very resilient 2. Not easy to cut 3. Self heals under most conditions.
“Often one bubble will bump into another bubble and no damage will happen to either bubble’s protective membrane. There will be effects that occur inside each bubble because of the bump, and information may pass through the membrane without any disruption to its integrity. This is extremely common. Normal, even.
“But sometimes, two bubbles meet and a tear occurs in both bubble’s protective membranes. When that happens, there is a localized disturbance at the point of the tear, and physical matter may pass between the bubbles. This can be as simple as a splash of water falling out of nowhere and then stopping once the rip has self healed, or it can be as extreme as a planet from one bubble falling into a sun in the other bubble. It all depends on the size and severity of the tear.
“So, what causes the tears? We don’t know. There are a number of theories but we cannot safely conduct experiments to test these theories. We can only continue to observe over long stretches of time and hope that our data is not lost before there is enough of it to make new discoveries. Many, many such collections of data have been lost throughout history, through accident or intentional destruction. If that were not the case, we might well have better answers already.
“Now! I want to address some misinformation that I have seen floating around on the Internet. There are some people who say that the tears are caused by magic users who move between dimensions using traditional techniques. We have some pretty solid evidence that is not the case. For one thing, there is no correlation whatsoever between the historical patterns of dimensional travel and dimensional membrane tears. And there is a very strong and easily traceable pattern to the dimensional membrane tears.”
Professor Yazdi noticed another hand up in the back and called on him, “Yes, Matt?”
“What about the fact that we had the dragon incursion on the exact same day that Uriel showed up?’
The tension in the room was suddenly thick enough to cut with a knife. All eyes were on me and Morrison sitting at the front of the room.
Morrison stood up. “So, do you know where Uriel arrived in our dimension that day?” he directed his question at Matt.
Matt just shook his head.
“Uriel arrived in Memphis, Tennessee. Twice in one day, actually. There were no rips anywhere near Memphis that day, nor have there been since. Furthermore, Uriel doesn’t cross dimensions the way some of you may have learned to do, nor using the technique that I generally use. He uses a technique that leaves his original physical body behind and creates a completely new body here. So, in fact, unlike the techniques that anyone in this room has used before, he never transferred any physical matter across the dimensional membranes.
“However, if you’d like a good reason to be afraid of Uriel, I’ll give you one. Due to the specific relationship between his dimension and ours, he has narrative power in our reality. If he wanted to turn you into a toad, he could literally just say, ‘And then Matthew turned into a toad,’ and poof! There you would be. Ree-deep!” The class laughed and so did I. As Morrison sat down, I punched him in the shoulder playfully.
**Great, now they’re gonna really hate me.** I worried.
**Nah, they’ll think I was joking.** Morrison assured me. **And by the time they figure out that I wasn’t joking, they’ll be damned glad you are on their team.**
I scowled, and then turned my attention back to the front of the room.
Professor Yazdi looked at me and said with a big grin, “So, Uriel, you think you could give me a hand turning a good frog into a prince? I haven’t had much luck on the dating sites.”
I played along. “Absolutely, Professor Yazdi. I’ll come visit you during office hours to discuss it.”
The class was now amused and the tension was fully released. The professor returned to her lecture.
“Alright. So, remember, the title of this lecture is ‘Interdimensional Rifts and the Extinction Cycle’ but so far we’ve only discussed the rifts. What about the Extinction Cycle? And what do they have to do with each other?”
The professor turned to the board again and erased everything she had drawn. Then she drew a new black line across the board using a yardstick as a straight line and then marking regular intervals on the line. She then wrote labels above the interval markings. Closest to the right was a mark named “Present”. Then moving leftward were “1k ya”, “2k ya”, “3k ya”, etc. The furthest label to the left was “20k ya”. She then took out a yellow pen and colored in a little bit of the line to the left and right of each of the markings. Then she took out an orange pen and colored around the yellow and out a little farther in each direction for every 5 thousand year mark. At the 20 thousand year mark she used a red pen to color around the orange and even further on each side of the mark. Then she added the orange and red around the area of the “Present”. As she drew, she explained what it was about.
“Every turn of the millennium there is a period of about 50 years before and after in which interdimensional rifts are common. These rifts cause a raft of different disturbances, some of which have long term effects. Sometimes a new species is introduced to our dimension. Sometimes people, animals, and artifacts from this dimension are lost to another dimension forever. Rifts can cause weather disturbances, earthquakes in places with no nearby fault lines, and occasionally high weirdness including a temporary breakdown of basic physical laws within a limited geographic area.
“Every five thousand years, there are even more rifts across a longer span of time – approximately 100 years on either side of the turn of the millennium. These periods of extreme instability are linked to the destruction of entire civilizations and the birth of completely new ones.
“But every twenty thousand years we get something much more catastrophic. The frequency of the dimensional collisions and their consequences can lead to massive changes across the whole ‘verse. On our little blue marble that includes climate change, massive die off of a wide variety of species, changes in the tilt of the planet, swapping of the magnetic poles, a massive increase in mutations leading to new species’ creation. And that’s just a few of the things that happen in a period lasting about 400 years total across the 20th millennial divide.
“The last time this happened was almost exactly 20 thousand years ago now, and it led to the complete destruction of the human cultures that existed up until that point. DNA evidence suggests that the entire human population of the Earth was down to as few as 600 individuals by the end of the calamity! And those 600 people were not all in one place.
“Imagine being one of 20 or 30 survivors of such a great calamity in your geographic region and having no way to communicate with any other survivors outside your area. You probably don’t even know that there are other survivors. You look around at the people who are now, by force, your tribe, and you have to decide if it’s worth continuing to live at all. Your grandparents had stories about the great city they were born in, but you look at a toddler and wonder if they will be the last human alive. And without the support of a city, any kind of infrastructure, a cohesive culture shared by you and the other survivors you are now with, it’s hard to imagine how anyone will survive another generation. But you do. You forge a new culture. You figure out how to eat and shelter yourself and your community. You have babies. Eventually, a new civilization will arise.”
Professor Yazdi paused and looked around at the faces around the class.
“If we don’t do everything we can to protect our little Universe from the harmful effects of this cycle of dimensional rifts, that’s exactly what’s going to happen again.
“But there’s good news! Not every 20k cycle has led to the collapse of civilization or populations. In fact, the events of 20 thousand years ago are the exception, not the rule, since the rise of hominids on this planet. As long as there has been a human species on this planet, we have managed to mitigate the effects of dimensional rifts on our ‘verse, EXCEPT for 20 thousand years ago, 5 thousand years ago, and 1 thousand years ago.” She let that information sink in before continuing.
“What happened 20 thousand years ago? We don’t know every detail, but we do know that there was a massive movement against the use of magic in the years leading up to the great calamity. There are stone carvings that tell a story of a battle between sorcerers and those who believed that the sorcerers were the cause of the disasters. But why, though?
“Why had every other generation known that magic workers were necessary members of the team to mitigate the effects of these dimensional rifts, but 20 thousand years ago suddenly the people believed that magic workers were the enemy? We don’t know precisely what happened, but we have a solid idea of the shape of it.
“Somewhere along the line, magic knowledge became something that was held only by a few. We know that over the last 20 thousand years, that has been the general rule. Every society that has acknowledged the existence of magic in the last 20 thousand years has made magic users into either an elite class of rulers or a reviled class of outlaws. Some societies went so far as to say that magic isn’t even a real thing, and that all this hocus pocus is just superstition or scams to prey on the ignorant. And surely, it is true that many who claim to be magic users are just scammers, and people fall for them because there is an innate need within humans to reach for this knowledge and these skills.
“Now we call magic ‘The Occult’ and say that it’s hidden knowledge, unreachable and unavailable to the masses. But consider for a moment how many of you have a grandmother who does little spells for the wellbeing of her household. How many of you were taught to sweep the floors in a certain direction to keep bad luck out and good things in? The Occult is hidden in plain sight.
“And what happened 5000 years ago? It appears that we had another period in which magic was hoarded for power instead of being shared freely for the common good. The few who had the knowledge and skills during the period of the rifts were not enough to stop the ill effects of the interdimensional incursions.
“Then, we see most clearly how important magical workers are to our survival just 1000 years ago. In the Americas there were many magic users, and the knowledge was shared widely up and down the span of the continents. No one tried to control all use of magic, and instead they were guided by a broadly shared ethos of reciprocity in their interactions with both the human and non-human world. They were able to mitigate the rifts that happened in their regions. Australia and most of the Pacific Island cultures came out of those years relatively unscathed for the same reason.
“But Europe? They were burning witches and murdering anyone who they thought had magic power in the streets. In most of Asia magic was tightly controlled by governments, and dealing with rifts was not even in the top 10 concerns of the professional magic using class. In Africa, there were literal wars between magic users at exactly the moment they should have been working together. The results were so deadly that nearly half the human population of the planet was gone by the end of the cycle of rifts.
“Our calendar may say that we are in the 2020s right now, but that’s not the important date to look at. We are in the thick of the 20 thousand year yellow zone now.” She pointed to the zone around the previous 20k ya mark, and then the current one.
“What makes this cycle even more worrisome is how our modern society has used destructive technologies without conscience. We pollute the air, the water, the land. We mine more than we need. We drill the blood of the earth to fuel our cars. We don’t effectively recycle, reuse, or reduce even though we LOVE to print those words on t-shirts and on product packaging. So, in addition to the dangers of dimensional rifts, we also have the existential threat of human-caused climate change and maybe even a little nuclear annihilation, as a treat.
“In our next class we’re going to talk about what we know so far about how those factors are interacting with the effects of dimensional rifts during this cycle.
“Any questions before we go?”
No one raised a hand or spoke up. Students were already packing their assorted notebooks, tablets, and laptops back in their bags. I could hear desks getting folded away and people getting out of their seats.
“Alright then. Don’t forget to turn in assignment 6 from the syllabus by 6pm tonight. If you need any last minute consultation before turning it in, you know where to find me between 3 and 5 today, right?”
A few people responded unenthusiastically, “Office hours.”
“That’s right. I’d love to see some of your shining faces. I get so lonely in there just staring at the wall with no one coming to visit and ask about the great dimensional rift disaster of 1035 C.E. An entire city just disappeared from France. Poof! Gone.”
Most of the students filed out of the room, but a clutch of about ten or so came down to where Morrison and I were sitting and then stood a polite distance away waiting for some sign or something. They all clutched their bags and watched us.
Professor Yazdi looked at Morrison and said, “The youth these days. I’m tellin’ ya.”
“I know. Back in your day you walked upstairs to your professors’ office hours. Both ways!” Morrison joked.
“That’s right. And it was snowing. Inside the building. In the summer! Because of a dimensional rift.”
“Oh, shoot. I actually remember that.” Morrison covered his mouth and the two of them laughed really hard. I was going to have to ask later if that last bit was a real thing that happened or if they were still just joking around.
One of the students stepped forward from the group and asked, “Excuse me, um, Uriel? Sir? Can I ask you a question?’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was a novelty around the place, and the rumor mill was clearly churning, but I hadn’t expected anyone to come to me at the end of a class that I hadn’t taught. “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
“Why did you go to Memphis?”
I think I blushed. I definitely grinned the grin I get when I’m too embarrassed to put my thoughts together. I recovered quickly, though. “Well, I had this misguided notion that it would be a good idea to ask Mica Johnson for archery lessons. It did not go well.” The student looked completely bewildered by my response. I paused and then added, “I mean, obviously, it worked out in the end. I didn’t get killed, which is lucky in hindsight. And I’ve gotten some better educational and occupational guidance since then.”
I could feel Morrison’s amusement as he sat next to me through this exchange. He was obviously projecting for me to know that he was there for me and I was not alone. I was grateful to have this way to communicate without having to physically touch or say anything out loud.
Once the first student had asked me something, the rest moved in closer. They were polite, letting one person speak at a time, and they didn’t crowd too closely. I noticed after the third person asked me a question, that some of them were still blocking Milo’s exit.
“Hey, Milo, are you waiting for something or do you need these folks to get out of the road?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m good! I was just eavesdropping,” Milo replied.
“OK, cool. Holler if you need anyone turned into a toad.” I joked.
“Wait,” One of the students from the back of the group leaned in, “You can’t really do that, can you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. You want to be my test subject?”
The kid smirked at me.
Another student stepped forward to ask, “I heard that you are going to be teaching some graduate seminars. Will you be allowing upper division undergraduates into your classes?”
“Oof, uh… honestly, I have no idea. We haven’t actually even nailed down what I’m teaching or when, much less how many students per class or whether we’ll be able to include undergrads.” I looked to Morrison.
“I know that Sandy has been talking about Uriel and that there is a lot of excitement for his classes. Unfortunately he does have limited time to teach, so we’ll have to see what the schedule permits,” Morrison explained.
I added, “We haven’t talked about this, so I hope that I’m not speaking out of turn, but potentially, I could do a couple of one off lectures during the semester or even during the break since there’s no homework attached, that could be open to whoever wanted to attend.”
“That’s a fantastic idea,” Morrison agreed.
“I’ve heard Sandy’s glowing reviews, too, and I would like to go to one of those lectures, Professor Pardo,” Professor Yazdi said.
“Oh, I don’t have a PhD. Not even a Masters. I’m just plain ol’ Uriel.”
The professor raised her eyebrows and then said, “Well, you know it’s never too late. There are several excellent potential advisors here, depending on what you want to study. I volunteer myself, but I don’t know if my subject is even one of your research interests.”
“I am actually working on rabbinic ordination back home. It’s a 5 year masters program. I’m in the first year.” I pulled a face to express that it felt like I was at the bottom of mount Everest.
“Oh, wow. How is that working with you being here?” One of the students asked.
“Well, I do stuff in my world all day long. Then at about 9 or 10 at night I get ready for bed. Then I sit on my bed with my dog, go into a meditation, build a portal, and come here. Then I spend a few hours in this timeline before returning home and going to sleep. Theoretically, I should be able to spend as much time as I want here and go back home just a few minutes after I left, but so far I’ve been experiencing time parity while I’m here. I’ve got to work on that, because if I don’t solve that problem sleep deprivation is going to become a problem.”
“Morrison said that you don’t cross over physically. Why is that?” Another student asked.
“A. Because I don’t know how to. B. Because this body has certain advantages.” I made fuzzy gray mouse ears grow on top of my head and turned the bottom half of my face into a cutesy mouse-like muzzle. There were surprised gasps and some giggles. I twitched my nose and reached up to stroke one of my soft ears. Then I turned back to my normal self.
“Wait, are you even human?” The same student asked.
“Oh, yes. I am very human. In real life, I’m a pretty ordinary, run of the mill human, actually. No shape changing skills back home. Nothing like that.”
“But you do use magic there, too, right?” Someone else asked.
“Yes. Of course. I got here, didn’t I? That involved the use of magic. It’s just that the way that magic works on a practical level in my world is a lot different than here. Being here, it’s like everything I can do back home is magnified, and some stuff I couldn’t even dream of doing back home is possible here. It’s not just me, either. Things just work drastically differently there. No one in my ‘verse can do some of the things that are just simple magic to you here.”
“Like what?” Someone asked.
“Like walking through a Shaman’s Door to get to another place on this same planet in this same dimension. That’s not a thing we can do with magic or with technology.”
The students murmured amongst themselves in surprise and disbelief.
Morrison stood up and said, “Uri and I have some work we need to do before we can eat lunch, so we’d better be off. Thank you Miri for letting us sit in on your class today.”
“Absolutely! Any time.” Miri turned to me and shook my hand again. “I look forward to seeing you again soon.”
“Thank you. I won’t make it to office hours today, but I promise that I will make some time to come and see you very soon.”
I followed Morrison over to an empty spot with no huddling students. He opened a portal for us back to his living room, and we walked through.