Is the Complex basically a bridge between our reality and the 4th dimension?
Long post…
So I’ve been thinking about what the Complex ‘actually’ is, and I have a bit of an out-there theory.
What if Async didn’t actually discover another place, but accidentally punched a hole into the 4th dimension? Not time travel or anything like that, but an actual fourth spatial dimension. Something that exists as its own reality, but that we literally aren’t equipped to understand because we’re 3D creatures.
Like the classic bug crawling around on a sheet of paper analogy, but that paper is its own “bridge” world. Now imagine that the paper happens to intersect a 3D object. The bug can crawl around on the part it can access, but it has absolutely no idea what the rest of that object looks like. It could spend its entire life exploring that little patch of paper and never figure out what it’s actually crawling on.
What if the Complex is basically our sheet of paper?
We can walk around in it, touch the walls, trip over the carpet, and get horribly lost looking for an exit. But what we’re experiencing might just be a 3D slice of something MUCH bigger that we can’t properly perceive. Maybe that’s why the place seems endless, why its layout makes absolutely no sense, and why spaces can feel like they connect in ways they shouldn’t. We’re trying to navigate something that wasn’t really built according to the rules we’re used to, but a mishmash of the rules of two dimensions colliding. It’s like trying to navigate an office space where the architect was a tesseract.
Now, I know the film canon talks about memories being remembered and repeated over and over again, which might seem at odds with my idea. But hear me out: what if that’s actually part of the same thing? We experience time as a straight line. Yesterday happened, today is happening, and tomorrow is coming. What if this higher-dimensional reality doesn’t work that way? What if events are more like loops or circuits than a straight line, with things repeating or existing in relationships we can’t properly understand? Maybe these recurring memories are what happens when that kind of reality intersects with ours. I’m not saying that’s how actual 4D physics works, obviously. I barely understand regular 3D physics. I’m just saying it’s an interesting possibility.
So in this theory, the Complex isn’t the 4th dimension itself. It’s more like a weird transitional space between our reality and whatever the hell is on the other side. Async thinks they’ve found a new place to explore, when they might actually have found a tiny, accessible cross-section of an entirely different reality. And the more they explore it, the more they discover just how little they understand about what they’ve gotten themselves into. And the complex will be never ending because it’s a Schrödinger s Cat effect where the 3D status of the dimension is only made tangible to us when observed.
I don’t know, I’m kind of drunk. Does this make sense?