The scent of ozone stung Rizal's nose, mingling with the smell of burning cables and hot metal. The machine before him, Prototype 01, was still humming, though sparks occasionally flew from some of its components. Rizal's face paled behind his lab glasses. This experiment was supposed to run smoothly.
"Rizal! What happened?"
A middle-aged woman with neatly tied hair rushed into the lab. It was Professor Indri, Rizal's mentor and close friend in their ambitious project: creating a portal to the fourth dimension.
"I don't know, Professor. Everything was following protocol, but suddenly..." Rizal pointed to the monitor, which was filled with random data waves. "Energy surge, gravity anomaly... and these waves."
Amid the data chaos, a regular wave pattern caught their attention. Perfect sinusoidal waves, yet foreign. It seemed to originate from a place far beyond human comprehension.
"Those waves... their frequency..." Professor Indri frowned. "It resembles the Kaluza-Klein hypothesis about extra dimensions."
The Kaluza-Klein theory is a physics theory that attempts to unify gravity with electromagnetism by introducing an additional spatial dimension. This theory assumes the existence of a fourth dimension that 'circles' around every point in our three-dimensional space-time.
"But that's just a theory, Professor," Rizal still doubted.
"Maybe not anymore," Professor Indri stared intensely at Prototype 01. "This machine might have opened a gap, a portal."
Tension filled the room. Their dream of proving the existence of the fourth dimension, of peeking into the universe's secrets, seemed within reach.
"What should we do, Professor?" asked Rizal.
"We investigate," Professor Indri answered without hesitation. "We send a probe."
A small drone, modified with advanced sensors, hovered in front of Prototype 01. Carefully, Rizal activated the machine once more. The strange waves reappeared, stronger than before, shaking the drone almost to the point of destruction. Then, in a flash, the drone vanished.
A tense silence fell. Rizal and Professor Indri stared at each other, not daring to breathe.
Suddenly, the monitor that had been filled with random data now displayed an impossible image. A surreal world with undefined colors, baffling geometry, and objects moving in an incomprehensible dimension.
The drone had sent back images from the fourth dimension.