Everything is possible. Absolutely everything is absolutely possible. The Universe is infinite, it begins at every point within itself and never ends, never, not in space or time or any other dimension, and there are lots of them, infinite probably. Because the Universe is infinite absolutely everything must be possible. Why then, wondered Jonah, can I not get a date with Morgan Hunter?

Jonah Wolf laid staring at his bedroom ceiling, trying to be asleep, trying to absorb the last few vital minutes of the night before his alarm heralded a new day. The numbers projected from his clock told him that it was 05:42, forty eight minutes until he needed to be awake. Forty eight minutes that he should have been depositing into the sleep bank, not squandering on the frivolous contemplation of a girl that didn’t know he existed. But he couldn’t take his mind off her; she filled his thoughts with a presence that couldn’t be ignored. Jonah was 15, an age that does not lend itself well to the ignorance of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Even though his thoughts were usually turned readily to philosophical matters and he was used to lying awake at night, contemplating the fundamental questions of existence, on that morning his mind was reserved only for her. He closed his eyes to imagine a future where they are together, comfortable in each other’s company and living as one.

The alarm clock screamed a piercing, repetitive beep; Jonah sat up and flicked his bedside lamp on. He dragged himself to his feet, stood to his full height of five feet and ten inches and shuffled towards the chest of drawers from where his clock yelled at him. He flicked his hair out of his face, hair that his mother kept telling him to get cut, but he enjoyed the floppy mass hanging over his eyes and it gave him a certain anonymity that he liked. He reached the clock and switched off the irritating noise, turned back to look at his bed and considered climbing back into it. Then again, the reason he kept the clock on the other side of his room was to make it too difficult to hit the snooze button. Jonah rarely had the time to enjoy the luxury of lying in bed late in the morning, it was 6:30 on a school day and he hadn’t done the previous night’s homework.

It’s not that Jonah was lazy, it’s just that he had too many other things on his mind too much of the time, and the run-of-the-mill stuff they were so keen on making him study at school just didn’t mean much to him. He knew that he wouldn’t get a ‘proper job to pay a proper mortgage’ without the right qualifications, but he was so much more interested in the big picture, standing back and seeing what the world was really all about. His parents and his teachers called him a dreamer, they said that he spent too much time staring into space and not enough time studying; Jonah thought that they were all so tied up in their own lives that they couldn’t see the wood for the trees. He had his own ideas, his own theories about everything and he knew that it didn’t matter what he did in the world, unless he did something so massively life changing for everyone on the planet, nobody would even remember that he existed a few seconds after he didn’t. If the Universe was one day old, had existed for only 24 hours, then man would only have been walking the Earth for about 0.0096 of a second, Jesus preached to his follows, in person, about 1/5000th of a second ago and Hitler went missing in his bunker a fraction of a heartbeat ago. If people who have had such influence on the world have been and gone in less than the blink of an eye, then what possible significance could Jonah’s life have to anyone? The clock read 06:38 and Jonah headed for the shower.

***

He took a shower, cleaned his teeth, dressed and ate breakfast, and then he rushed through yesterday’s homework. By 07:15 Jonah had his schoolbag on his back and was pedalling his BMX away from the garage. He had a paper round until the previous morning and he hadn’t told his parents that he had lost the job after turning up late too many times, losing too many newspapers and delivering the wrong papers to the wrong house too many times. Rather than give them another reason to be disappointed with him, he decided to leave home at the same time as he had done every morning for the previous few months and to go and find something else to do.

Living in Northern California had certain benefits, one of which was the glorious sunshine early in the morning. Even in April, the Spring skies were a brilliant, cloudless blue. Jonah wasn’t a big fan of the hour, but once he was underway he felt the cobwebs of the night being gently blown away. He cycled out of town and headed for the woods, found a familiar track and followed it for half a mile or so. When he was deep enough into the woods he leant his bike against a tree and left the track on foot, started walking through the trees and taking-in the ambience of the waking day. As he wandered aimlessly he breathed deeply, filled his lungs with the cool, fresh air, he looked up at the towering trees and followed the early birds with his eyes. He walked until he found a likely looking tree to rest against, took of his backpack, removed a notepad and pencil from it, and then used the bag as a pillow so he could relax for a few moments. ‘This looks like a nice place to hang out until school starts’, he thought, a large tree to rest against, a small clearing that animals might traverse and a huge rock sticking out of the ground, a dramatic foreground for the greens, browns and blues of the nature behind it. Jonah took his pencil and paper, let his mind to drift and started writing.

Everything is possible. Everything has to be possible, because the Universe is infinite, in all dimensions. How can we comprehend infinity? We think of infinity as something that starts here and heads on forever. But infinity does not start or stop anywhere. It starts at all points and leads in all directions, and never comes to an end. Infinity in the Universe describes the 3 basic dimensions that are easy to measure, up and down, left and right and in and out, but it also applies to time, forwards and backwards. So time also starts at all points, heads in all directions and never ends. But then there are all the other dimensions, the ones that are harder to measure, the dimensions where each of the other dimensions fold in on themselves. Take velocity, a vector, the description of an object moving in 3 dimensions; a given direction at a given speed, travelling forwards in time. Accelerate the object. It now has a rate of change of speed. It is possible to alter the rate of acceleration, and the rate of the rate of acceleration, etc, etc. Now we are getting into deeper dimensions of velocity. Could the Universe be similar in its other dimensions?

Our Universe, which is infinite in time, space and everything else, offers infinite possibilities. If the possibilities are infinite, then everything is possible. Why then, are we tied to certain laws of physics here and now?

A new beeping sound, quieter than his alarm clock, but just as irritating, snapped Jonah out of his thoughts. It was his watch alarm, set to remind him when he had to get going, get off to school.

***

Peddling his BMX towards school allowed Jonah a few more minutes of contemplation, he looked around and concentrated on experiencing the physical laws at work. He tried to make himself actually feel the forces, not just exist in them, he felt the wind in his face, sped up, slowed down, tried to feel and understand the friction at work in the wheel bearings, between the tires and the road, felt the bike accelerate downhill, slow down uphill, thought about the work of gravity, he felt himself get hotter as he pedalled faster and noticed how he had to lean the bike over to go around corners. The few miles from the woods to school flew past in deep thought and Jonah was parking his bike in the racks outside school before he realized. As he walked through the school doors he saw that nobody else was around, the corridors were empty and quiet. The bell had gone and he had only a minute or two before he would be collecting yet another tardy from the office.

It was Jonah’s favourite day of school, Tuesday, with double maths to start off with. The class was difficult for him, not because the maths were complicated, but because it was hard to appear as ignorant as his classmates. Everybody thought that he was stupid because he daydreamed and Jonah was happy with that assumption. He let his true colours show once, a few years before, when he had spent a couple of weeks acing every subject. He found that the better he did, the more his parents and teachers had expected of him and he had no time to himself. For every A he pulled he was expected to get another and it didn’t take long before his grades were being taken for granted. He got a B for one pop quiz and was chastised for it. That was when he realised that it was better to get straight Cs and be taken for granted. Making the occasional B received praise, so why bother overachieving? Besides, everyone in school already thought he was a loser, being a nerd as well would be too much. The class was revisiting algebraic variations of the powers of numbers and square roots, stuff that Jonah could do in his sleep.

The teacher droned on in his usual monotone, just the somnambulistic lilt that sent Jonah off into one of his daydreams. He looked out of the window and allowed his thoughts to drift.

If everything is possible, then how come I can’t just levitate right now? It can’t be right, not everything is possible right here and now. We are tied to a whole bunch of laws and rules, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Boyle’s Law, Brownian Motion, Bernoulli, Galileo, Pythagoras, everybody has something to say about the constraints of this world.

But I shouldn’t be thinking about just here and now. Here and now we are tied to the laws of physics as they apply to us, there are ambient rules that apply to the space and time we are in. But, somewhere else, somewhen else, in a different part of the infinite Universe, it is possible for me to float up to the ceiling just by thinking about it. But it’s not possible for me to get to that place. So, everything is possible, but it’s not all possible in all places at the same time.

Something whizzed past Jonah’s left ear. He was interrupted from his thoughts by a dry marker hurled by the teacher. “Wolf!” he shouted, “Perhaps you can come to the front of the class and show everybody how to find the square root of 7921?”

“It’s 89,” said Jonah, getting to his feet.

“I beg your pardon boy, what was that?”

“I said ‘The dog ate mine’ sir; I thought you were asking for my homework.”

Jonah spent a few minutes bumbling around at the whiteboard before providing the incorrect answer of 407.

“What utter nonsense boy, go and sit down.” The teacher signalled Jonah to return to his seat. “You know, if you spent as much time paying attention to me as you do staring out of the window then you just might be able to drag your grade point average up to a B minus.”

His head down and trying his best to look ashamed of himself, Jonah walked between the neatly ordered desks, heckles and giggles emanating from the teenagers serenading his walk of shame. He didn’t see the foot tactically placed in the walkway and tripped over it, bowled headlong onto the floor and landed sprawled-out like a dropped water bomb. As he turned over and started getting back to his feet he saw the owner of the foot, Brad Bertman. His humiliation was complete when he looked away from Brad and into the eyes of Morgan Hunter, the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes on, and also the girlfriend of Brad Bertman. She smiled sympathetically at him while the rest of the class burst into laughter. Dragging himself to his own desk, he tried to stop his hands from shaking, concentrated on reducing his heart rate. He flopped himself back onto his chair and buried his crimson face in his hands.

***

School could not finish quickly enough, it may have been his favourite day of the week but the incident in maths was just the start of a day of torment. Brad made a point of harassing Jonah at every turn, and every time the bully was in Jonah’s face, the lovely Morgan was at his side. She did try to stop the boy from threatening Jonah once, but the look she received in reply put her back in her place and she was subservient for every encounter to follow.

When the final bell sounded Jonah hurried out to his bike and cycled away, keen to put distance between him and his class or, more accurately, his classmates. But, rather than head for home, Jonah decided to go to the woods and spend some time by himself, in the clearing he had found that morning.

After hiding his bike in the bushes by the path he walked to the clearing and dropped his rucksack by the tree, choosing to take a look around rather than sit down straight away. He was drawn to the huge rock that dominated the area, ten feet tall and six feet wide, set at an angle it stood like an ancient monolith, aged and weathered. Jonah walked slowly around the stone, studied the patches of lichen clinging to the surface and trailed a hand over the surface. He walked around it twice, mesmerized by the patterns of the organisms growing on it, captivated by the path of the occasional ant. Suddenly he stopped walking and his eyes bulged, he leant forwards for a closer look. There was a tiny gemstone buried in the stone, a dark blue crystal the colour of a moonlit midnight, it was beautiful but oddly out of place. Jonah got as close to the gem as he could, scrutinized it, tried to figure why it looked wrong. It was flat on the surface, cut like a sapphire mounted on a ring, the edges angled with many sides. It was tiny and exquisite, and that, he realized was what was wrong. A gemstone or crystal still encased in stone should be rough and raw, not cut and polished, so how did it get to be there? If it was put in there, he thought, then it can be removed from there. He walked to his rucksack and rummaged for his pencil case, dug out his set of compasses. The instrument had two small legs, a point on the end of one, a pencil attached to the other, and was usually used for drawing circles, but the point could be suitable for digging the gem out of the rock. He started to scrape at the stone surrounding the gem, but the metal point hardly made a mark, the stone was very hard. He tried to dig the point under the gem, but he couldn’t get a hold, he pressed the point against the rock to the side of the gem but the metal started to bend. Frustrated, he poked the metal point into the blue stone. The rush of air as the rock began to move made Jonah jump backwards and stumble, landing on his backside he stared agog at the sight before him; a door had opened.