Der Implex

»innen größer als außen«, wie die blaue Police Box in Dr. Who, der auffällig langlebigen (von 1963 bis heute) Science-fiction-Serie der BBC, die den Namen TARDIS trägt: Time and Relative Dimension in Space, oder, denn der Topos ist auffallend weit verbreitet in Fantastika, auch die »siebte Kammer« in einem aus der Zukunft in die Erdumlaufbahn geschleuderten Asteroidenartefakt in Greg Bears Science-fiction-Roman Eon von 1985, oder das verwunschene Haus in Mark Z. Danielewskis Horror-Roman House of Leaves aus dem Jahr 2000, oder schließlich das All als solches in John Crowleys Fantasy-Roman Little, Big von 1981.
     
    Greg Bear, in einer Szene, die der Heldin, einer Physikerin, die Geometrie des Artefakts bewußt macht:
    »Look straight ahead.«
    She looked. The air was clear. Visibility was at least thirty kilometers. The northern cap seemed to be obscured, not nearly as obvious as the looming gray presence in the other chambers. She looked up and squinted, trying to make out the end of the plasma tube. It didn’t end. It went on, certainly more than thirty kilometers, getting dimmer and thinner until it almost merged with the horizon. Of course, on a non-curved surface – as the cylinders were, viewed parallel from the axis – the horizon was much higher. Given unlimited distance, the horizon would begin at a true vanishing point in the perspective … (…). The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside.
    The seventh chamber went on forever.« 130
     
    Mark Z. Danielewski, in einer Szene, die das Filmteam des Regisseurs Navidson mit der unbegreiflichen Räumlichkeit des Hauses, in dem sie arbeiten, konfrontiert:
    »In one continuous shot, Navidson, whom we never actually see, momentarily focuses on a doorway on the north wall of his living tomb before climbing outside of the house through a window to the east of that door, where he trips slightly in the flower bed, redirects the camera from the ground to the exterior white clapboard, then moves right, crawling back inside the house through a second window, this time to the west of that door, where we hear him grunt slightly as he knocks his head on the sill, eliciting light laughter from those in the room, presumably Karin, his brother Tom, and his friend Billy Reston – though like Navidson, they too never appear on camera – before finally returning us to the starting point, thus completely circling the doorway and so proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that insulation or siding is the only possible thing this doorway could lead to, which is when all laughter stops, as Navidson’s hand appears in frame and pulls open the door, revealing a narrow black hallway at least ten feet long, prompting Navidson to re-investigate, once again leading us on another circumambulation of this strange passageway, climbing in and out of the windows, pointing the camera to where the hallway should extend but finding nothing more than his own backyard (…).« 131
     
    John Crowley, in einer Szene, in welcher der Gelehrte Dr. Bramble seinem Publikum die für die Welt des Buches zentrale Idee »The further in you go, the bigger it gets« erläutert, weil sie wissen wollen, woher die Wesen – die »Vermöglichkeiten« – kommen, die nicht sind wie wir:
    »›The explanation is that the world inhabited by these beings is not the world we inhabit. It is another world entirely, and it enclosed within this one; it is in a sense a universal retreating mirror image of this one, with a peculiar geography I can only describe as infundibular. ‹ He paused for effect. ›I mean by this that the other world is composed of a series of concentric rings, which as one penetrates deeper into the other world, grow larger. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite. Or at least very very large.‹ He drank water again. As always when he began to explain it all, it began to leak away from him; the perfect clarity of it, the just-seizable perfect paradox of it, which sometimes rang like a bell within him, was so difficult – maybe, oh Lord, impossible – to express. The unmoved faces before him waited. ›We men, you see, inhabit what is in fact the vastest outermost circle of the converse infundibulum which is the other world. Paracelsus is right: our every movement is accompanied by these beings, but we fail to perceive them not because