It was July 20. It resembled a day like any other; in places on Earth like this, the birds were singing, bees were buzzing, trees were a gorgeous emerald shade of green and the summer heat mixed with the wind produced a handsome climate. Due to the addictive weather, people made the most of the day outside; some were walking their dogs, some people savoured some ice cream outside the nearby store and some people went to the park, tossing frizbee disks while being cautious of the mesh-covered concrete tunnels in the field and, more importantly, whatever they were doing disturbing the residents of the houses whose backyards had gates leading into the wide expanse of park.
But this was no ordinary day.
All the way back in 2103, multiple physicists (theoretical and quantum physicists in particular) as well as mathematicians, rocket scientists and engineers began research on the Fourth-Dimensional Train, officially known as the ChopraTrain after the head inventor, Parvati Chopra. The main idea was this; a “train”, which was more like something you would find in Star Wars, would “launch” itself using maglev technology and a rocket-style engine through a portal into a space embodying the fourth dimension, where it would use the properties of said space to break the laws of physics, “warp” our third dimensional reality by performing an action roughly allegorical to drawing two points on opposite corners of a paper and sticking a pencil through, and speedily arrive at a counterpart portal in ten seconds to back in our universe. This, of course, took multiple centuries to achieve; colonies on Luna and Titan had already become independent nations fifty years before that day.
Eventually, all that came to the world-shattering final test that would take place later that day: the train would do its function, riding into the portal in the Toronto facility, going to the other portal in the London facility. The train, if the test was successful, would come out the other end, and the people inside would be unharmed.
Twenty people were placed inside the train; two were in charge of conductor business, there were five engineers, electricians and other people who would fix any damages done to the train, and the passengers who were the guinea pigs of this operation. At once they got inside, and each person was told to buckle up.
A few moments later, the train started to thrust forwards: not like a normal train should, not even a maglev. The rocket blasting in the background and the train’s maglev technology violently copulated, giving birth to an illusion that a cross between an aeroplane and a rocket was rising higher into the sky, making everyone on board violently sick. Everyone was nauseous, some vomited and some even hallucinated. Then, just like that, it all came to a close, violently relieving everyone’s symptoms like a doctor curing an illness by forcing you to cough up blood. Of course that didn’t make sense, but it happened anyways.
A few minutes later, the passengers noticed that it had not been ten seconds from here to there, but most people shrugged it off. After all, ten seconds was ungodly short. That little bit of apologetics drowned the doubts of all of the people on board for the next twelve hours.
However, the ark of concern and confusion landed on dry land again when one of the passengers looked out the window. According to the physicists, it would just be jet black, like space in the third dimension. What the passenger saw instead was static. When he was close to the window, he could hear a sound that was only one eighth the signature white noise, mostly akin to a deep, continuous throbbing that was half felt and half heard, like a sound making the emptiness of the void ever more obvious. It could cure the most devastating case of insomnia, but kept the passenger from as much as closing his eyes. This was supposed to be an empty vacuum: only space and time. The sensors didn’t recieve a single signal of any wavelength. But there the static was, making its strange sound-thing, or whatever it was making.
It had been a few hours. The passenger in B13 checked the hologram chip in his arm, and his expression seemlessly changed to a face of wide-eyed concern.
“Hey, when did we leave again?” He asked with a feeling of worry.
“I don’t goddamn know.” replied the girl next to him, with dark circles under her eyes. “5:40 in the fucking morning. It’s been a couple hours since.”. She then dozed back off.
“That’s exactly what I’m reading.”
Immediately her slumber was broken, and her eyes widened. She remembered being here for four hours: how was it still 5:40 AM? “Holy shit.” flowed out of her mouth before she stood there, paralysed, staring at the ceiling.
Four days passed. Another man, this time from B9, opened his hologram and came to a realisation: Hologram chips were powered by electricity: unhooking it from the contraption in your hand and pulling it out of your flesh to charge it was normal. Since the man had no charger, the battery would be completely depleted by now. How was he opening his hologram? Then, the bigger fish swallowed that one: it had been four days of continuous flight, and no one had complained about energy depletion. No one had reported anything running low. No one had reported anyone getting hungry. They had stayed awake for twelve hours, not catching a wink of sleep, and there was not one complaint among the crew. Sleeping only worked on the girl in B14 with dark circles, who was fine the next day. “How the hell is this all possible?”, he was thinking, with a look on his face like he had seen a ghost.
Just then, someone screamed in the most unworldly way, running full speed away from somewhere on the second floor. The very moment someone seated asked what was wrong with him, he screamed at the top of his lungs , “PLEASE JUST FUCKING KILL ME!!!”.
Seeing a nearby wall with a laugh of relief, he jolted over there, threw his head back, slamming his face into the wall over and over again. Blood flew everywhere as some people could see that his skin was now eroded away, exposing the facial muscles to the motionless air. He kept on slamming his face, giggling like a drunk schizophrenic as his face eroded into a fleshy skeleton, chunks of his flesh flying everywhere. It continued on, like some snuff film from a place even worse than hell, until his eyes exploded, until his skull was fractured, until its front wall came off, until the brain fell out, while the torture victim kept on cackling and cackling and cackling. He then tore the mass of bloody ground pork into shreds, flinging it everywhere.
Then, the bloody mass of ground pork reappeared in the head cavity. His frontal bone came back to cover it, like a perfect, yellow-white seal. His flesh was returned to him, and muscles, skin and facial feature reconstructed themselves by some ungodly force. Soon, the man realised that his face looked like that violent self-mutilation never happened. Upon realising that even the destruction of his brain couldn’t kill him, he screamed like he was burning in hell. Cries of “OH GOD WHY!” emanated from him, and he immediately ran back to section A. Everyone agreed not to go over there and find out, not even those who were morbidly curious as to what he saw.
The following days were the same-old same-old; sometimes the man returned and did his mind-numbingly horrifying acts of self mutilation while laughing, then regenerated, then went back to section A. This went on for decades: no one got a second older, no one got any closer to death, and no one got any closer to the destination. In fact, whenever the man from section A put on “his little show”, as they called it, they didn’t even flinch in reaction to the gory spectacle. Some even joined the show, mutilating themselves for the pleasure of not only the audience of three, who delighted in the show, but also themselves. Agony and pain were just codewords for the most extreme pleasure. That was the only thing that had changed.
Now, billions of years passed. Things had been getting quite boring, even on the show itself. Things so agonising that even the most twisted and deranged human mind could think of, if only it was a hundred times worse, had become stale. They even stared into the static void and saw the unimaginable horrors in there for hours on end, progressively getting worse and worse, but that didn’t work. So they did so for longer.
Dudecillions upon duodecillions of years passed. No one was scared yet.
Ten to the power of a hundred years passed. Some people were a bit uneasy, but no one was scared yet.
Ten to the power of THAT years passed. One more person got uneasy, but no one was scared.
One quadrillion to the power of ten to the power of a hundred years passed. Everyone was very, very frightened.
They simply couldn’t be entertained anymore. They had do something.
In a desperate attempt to feel something again, they ripped the door open and jumped out. There, at the last moment of their lives, they got their wish. They finally got so afraid that they dissolved into nothing.
-–
Ten seconds after the train went into the portal, it passed through the portal at the London Laboratory. Miraculously, not a single thing happened to the ship: no particle decay from the physics of that dimension, not even a single nanoangstrom was unintact. However, when they went inside, everyone on board was laying there, lifeless. However, no cause of death could be identified.