Frames Per Second. Part 1

“Its how fast?” David asked, a skeptical tone in his voice.

“Okay, I’ll try to put it in layman’s terms.” Gavin replied, his coffee going unnoticed on the table in front of him, “Let’s say a normal camera runs at something like 24 frames per second. Ours runs much faster than that. Much, much faster. A couple hundred thousand more.”

David took a sip from his cup. “So it’s a really fast camera. I know you’ve been working on this project for a while now. Why call me all of a sudden, like its some kind of huge, crazy deal? I mean, look at yourself,” he gestured towards Gavin, “You’re a mess.”

“Because it is a big deal now,” Gavin said, reaching up, and failing to slick down his messy hair. “It was just supposed to be an experiment. First, to see if we could actually create something like this, and after that, use it to do other experiments. See how light waves work, that kind of thing… But David,” He said, leaning in conspiratorially, “I found something.”

“You found something?” David asked, his eyebrow rising. “Like what? How bugs mate or something?”

“No.” Gavin whispered back, probably not even realizing David’s joke. “Out of all those hundreds of thousands of frames, almost every single one of them were what we expected. A really, really, really slowed down video of our lab. Except for one. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, there was one frame of… something.”

David took another sip from his cup, but let Gavin continue.

“It was pretty much a pitch black frame, and so every one of my colleagues just dismissed it, a glitch, something like that. But, I’m not only an engineer, I’m a photography nerd, and whenever you’re taking very short exposures, you need A LOT of light. And so, I treated each one of these ‘almost pitch black’ frames as a single exposure. Out of all the millions of frames, there would be a ‘black’ frame occasionally. So I merged them, which effectively 'lightened' them up… and I found something.”

Now David was leaning forward, his interest piqued. “And? What was it?

Gavin, took a breath in, preparing himself, and finally said: “It was a picture… of our lab.”

“Your lab?” David sighed, sinking back into his chair, “So what? A picture of your lab, hidden in between other pictures of your lab. Is this all you really called me over here fo-“

“Obviously it wasn’t just a picture of my lab,” Gavin interrupted with a wave of his hand, “I mean, it was the lab, but it was different. Very subtly different, but enough that I could tell.”

Confused, David motioned for Gavin to continue.

“Listen, do you know what parallel universes are?” He asked, his voice a bit shrill, and then continued after David nodded. “Well, I think I stumbled across a parallel universe. Not just peering into some crazy alternate dimension that has nothing to do with us, but taking a glimpse at something that already exists. Here,” he said, motioning with his hand at the small coffee shop around them, “A whole other world, which is here, existing, but just out of phase with us in time, just enough that we can’t interact with it, or even see it, especially when we didn’t know it even existed.”

Gavin paused and collected his thoughts for a moment. “So, I panned the camera around, and wrote a pretty basic script to collect all of these frames and mash them together. It takes a little while, but I can usually get a ‘picture’ of these frames every thirty minutes or so. When I finally got a good panoramic of the room… I saw something else.”

Gavin took a ragged breath in. His clothes were disheveled and wrinkly, his eyes were bloodshot and wet, as if he had been crying earlier.

“There were things in the lab, David.” He said, putting his head into his hands, and speaking quietly into the tablecloth. “They were grotesque, and just absolutely horrible. I saw my colleagues, working in the lab, just like they were on ‘my side’ of the monitor, But they were monstrosities, faces twisted in abject horror, mouths agape and screaming.”

“David,” He said through clenched teeth, his eyes moving up from the table, “If you were to see evil, you would know. Pure evil, which would only want to consume you, entirely. Physically and metaphysically… I saw evil, David, there is no other word for it.”

David reached towards Gavin, his friend of many years, “Listen Gavin, there must be some explanation.”

Gavin squeezed the tablecloth between his fingers, “That’s not all. I panned the whole room, I saw something else. I saw myself… The evil, twisted, other-me. He was holding a camera David.”

He looked back up, locking eyes with David, tears streaming down his face. “They saw me… They know we’re here now."



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Thanks for reading!  There are more parts to read if you're interested in the story!  As always, comments and feedback are always appreciated!