A Bus Ride, the Flu and A Hard Day At School
Life Among the Three Dimensionals, Chapter 4
The next morning, I decided to try using Hugo Nash's terra-rover.
I opened the door, sat at the "wheel" and ignited the motor by turning the "key," as I had learned to do in my cocooning. The motor made grinding sounds, but it didn't ignite. I could tell that the ignition battery was tired, so I loaned it some electrical energy. The battery said thank you and tried again, weakly. The motor ignited and started to cough just like Lena Normandy who had called me from the elementary school the day before.
The car was also probably sick with the flu. The terra-rover motor continued to hack and shudder while a lot of blue smoke came out of the back. It clearly was not doing well. I would be uncomfortable forcing a sick machine to do work. It needed to stay home and get better.
Me, too, I thought! Me, too!
I turned off the motor and decided, instead, to take the "bus" to school, as Lena Normandy had suggested.
There was a "bus stop" near my house where others waited with me. But as in the shopping center the day before, no one spoke, let alone even looked at me or at anyone else.
The bus arrived and I let everyone else go in ahead of me. I observed that many who entered the bus had waved their hands, or something like a card or their digital tracking devices in front of a small digital reading device. I approached the device and waved one of my mitten-ed hands. Nothing happened. I waved my wallet. Nothing. The bus driver looked at me and at my mittens. She was obviously getting impatient with me.
I knew that I would have to proffer "money" to ride the bus, so I gave the driver the same ATM card that had worked in the store. The driver looked at me strangely, gave it back and said she only took bus passes, nearfi digital wallets, or dollar bills. Ahhh, I understood. So I took out from my wallet a one hundred dollar bill that the machine had given me the day before in the store and pushed it into a deposit box next to the driver.
The driver raised her eyebrows. "Hey! I don't make change!"
"Oh, I don't want to change anything!" I replied and smiled in a friendly manner.
The driver's eyebrows remained raised and she muttered something under her breath about a type of legume that grows underground. She then gave me a piece of paper that she said would allow me to "transfer" to somewhere else. For just a moment, I thought that transferring to another universe would be very nice, but the buses probably didn't go that far. So I simply thanked her and asked her to tell me when we reached the Lewis & Clark Elementary School. The driver grunted something. Then she stepped on a floor pedal that made the bus accelerate quickly. I stumbled down the aisle trying to keep my balance while holding onto an overhead rail with my red kitchen mittens. I tumbled forward and fell into the lap of a seated woman. I was so embarrassed!
"HELLO!" I said apologetically, "My name is Hugo Nash. What is your name?"
She looked very irritated and pushed me away.
I regained my composure and my balance and walked further down the aisle. There had been people standing in the middle of the aisle hanging from straps, but as I approached, they all moved away from me crowding toward the back of the bus. Nobody said anything.
I found an empty seat on the aisle that someone had vacated as I approached. Instinctively, before easing my body into the seat, I adjusted my 4D life-support podules and my 5D telemetry pack. But as self-conscious as I was about my fourth dimensional podules and my fifth dimensional telemetry pack, they were as light as a vacuum in this uni-slice, completely unobtrusive and, of course, totally invisible to everyone else on the bus.
I sat down "on" the bus seat leaning against the backrest while my 4D and 5D podules slived through the backrest and looked like they were resting on the legs of the passenger sitting behind me. But, of course, my podules were in the fourth and fifth dimensions, not the third, so no one noticed them.
I was seated next to a man reading another one of these small LCD tracking and communication devices. I saw that he looked sideways at my mittens folded in my lap. He pretended not to have seen them.
“Hello,” I said and smiled broadly. "Do you know what time it is? Would you like to go to the movies? What is your name? Where do you live?"
The man acted like he had not heard me and squeezed himself a little bit closer to the window. He looked again at my red kitchen gloves out of the corner of his eye. A few seconds later, the man abruptly pushed a button that caused a bell to ring. The bus stopped and he literally ran off the bus.
The seat next to me stayed vacant. I noticed that the people on the other side of the aisle across from me had also exited the bus. Everywhere else, the seats were full. My row of seats, however, stayed empty.
The bus ride was as strangely unsociable as the store. No one looked at or talked to anyone else. Instead, they seemed to communicate through ear buds or tiny devices for listening to "music" or playing some kind of games or watching short videos of people doing peculiar things or watching "newscasts" that appeared to be coordinated to repeat the same educational themes over and over and over again. Many bus riders were constantly thumbing up and down, up and down. The pulsing of their devices tickled me badly and, once again, I started to giggle. I could tell that many on the bus were looking at me discretely from the side. But their pulsating devices continued to tickle me and I giggled louder. More people looked at me side-ways.
Almost everyone on the bus seemed to be ill like administrative assistant Lena Normandy and Hugh Nash's wheezing terra-rover. Some coughed loudly just like the terra-rover had done. Others "sniffled" or "zsupped" or blew their noses into paper squares, or they "sneezed" or made raspy sounds from their chests. Some wore masks over their faces. I made a mind-sketch showing how they were arranged on the bus:
DRIVER (DOOR)
Sniffle, Snort COUGH, mask
zsupp zsupp wheeze
Tissue, snort COUGH, sniffle
Tissue, mask Tissue, SNEEZE
(empty),(empty) (Me), (empty)
zsupp, sniffle cough, wheeze
Sniffle, COUGH (MIDDLE DOOR)
cough, Tissue Standing man
mask, Tissue snort, COUGH
sniffle, zsupp zsupp, sniffle
COUGH, mask, tissue, zsupp, SNORT
Everyone on the bus seemed to have the "flu bug." But I did not see any "bugs." What kind of "bugs" were these that had flown into their noses and throats and that made them so raspy? Of course, I had seen the dark crawly bugs in Hugo Nash's house - had these insects crawled into people's noses and made them sick? I kept a sharp look out so that "bugs" would not crawl into my nose and clog my cooling manifold.
Time passed. Veritable minutes. Many many minutes. This form of locomotion seemed to be excruciatingly slow.
People got on and off the bus, all of them coughing, sniffling and sneezing. But no one sat next to me or in my row, even though I was the only one on the bus whose respiration systems were not clogged with "bugs;" even though I was the only one who smiled at everyone nearby. Self-consciously, I sat on my inverted hands in their heavy mittens so no one could see them. I sensed that others were "looking at me."
We Five Dimensionals, when we "look" at something, we look right at it. If we "look" at you, you know you are being "looked at," and there is no question about it.
But the quasi-intelligents here seemed to have a type of peripheral vision, an ability to see out of the sides of their "eyes" without actually looking at what they are looking at. It was very deceptive and disconcerting. They seemed to be looking elsewhere, but my mindfulness knew that they were sideways-looking at me!
As the time passed, I studied the small instructional signs that bordered the inside roof of the bus. They seemed to be similar to the often repeated educational messages I had seen on the television the day before:
Earn $20 an hour working from home! Interested? Call Now!!
Injured? Auto Accident Attorney - $$$Millions and $$$Millions Recovered for Clients!!!
Kiester University - Enroll today for your new tomorrow!
Unhappy? Assisted Suicide Clinic Open Now! VISA and MasterCard Accepted... or Pay on the Installment Plan!
We Buy Any House, Any Condition! Call Phillip's House-Flip Services!
1000s of Slots and Mega Prizes - Let the Fun Begin at Crooked Cove Casino!
Enjoy Chicken Liver Burgers and Garlic Milk Shakes at SmaltzShack
Creamy, Steamy Coffee at Bikini Barristas and Recreational Drug Emporium! 100 Yards On Right!
Spine hurt? Call Whack-a-Back Chiropractic and Feel Better Fast!
As the bus drove down the road, it passed large signs known as billboards. Like the instructional messages that bordered the roof of the bus, the billboards also sought to educate people:
Buy One Super Whooper Burger & Get Nothing Free!
Vote for Joe and for America's Future!
Vote for Don and for America's Past!
Great Taste Without the Waist? Eat Ozempic Frosted Cream Doughnuts Today!
What did it all mean? What was the purpose of this endlessly repetitive catechism of educational slogans? It seems that the only purpose of this incessant messaging was to persuade people to buy things they didn't want or need and to do what was clearly not in their best interests. The "educational" programs seemed to encourage a growing number of gradually less affluent people to become less healthy and increasingly indebted to a small number of increasingly affluent people. Why was this desirable? It was the same riddle that had puzzled me when I had down-loaded all their television shows, and visited all their web-sites, and read all their books and magazines and wondered what the object was. It was all so harmful to themselves personally and to their local societies. The "education" system was similar to their incessant deposit of pollutants, micro-plastics and radiation into their environment all of which made this planet less hospitable for bio-organic three dimensional beings and more hospitable for gaseous intelligent five dimensional beings. There must be some sense in all of this, but it escaped me completely.
As I pondered these mysteries, the bus driver called out “Lewis & Clark Elementary.” I got out. I waved to the bus driver to thank her. But she slammed the bus doors behind me and quickly drove away. I saw that everyone remaining on the bus was staring at me through the windows.
I saw a large, nondescript building a short distance away. It had only one floor and was made of red-brown brick. The building was encompassed by an asphalted two dimensional plane with "playground" types of structures on it. A piece of striped cloth hung from a tall white pole near the entrance of the building. Was this pole a communication antenna for receiving educational data to infuse into the miniature 3D specimens? What was the function of the striped cloth attached to the antenna?
I knew that this building was a "school." This was where the local quasi-intelligents "taught" and "learned" knowledge, or so I had learned during my own pre-emergence. In buildings like these, the dominant species of this globule in this particular 3D uni-slice spent nearly a quarter of their short lives "learning" very rudimentary knowledge and skills that any one of them could have absorbed during their own days "in utero."
If the rudimentary things were learned pre-birth the way gaseous intelligents do it - things such as arithmetic; how to tie one's shoe-laces; how to drive a terra-rover; on what dates which important things had occurred; how to walk and run and swim - if all of these rudimentary things were already imprinted into one's mind before birth, then people would have a significant head-start. They could then better use their lives to investigate, appreciate and understand more investigative science; wiser political systems; more insightful art; more equitable economics; and more of everything that they seem never to have enough time for.
Of course, even pre-birth education had its limits. I had been de-cocooned just days before. But even in my own case, for example, my controllers had lazily prepared my internal maps based on the wrong millenniums, so my internal "maps" displayed large inland seas where the States of California and Utah are now located. I was also discovering, much to my dismay, that my pre-birth brain-ware for this mission was extremely "buggy" and current only up to the Earth-year 1957! As far as I knew, Eisenhower was President of the United States, Sputnik 1 had just been sent into space and Fortran was the latest computer programming language.
I pondered these conundrums as I was swept along with the in-flowing surge of variegated, demi-miniatures. Most of them wore what looked like very large and heavy 3D life support backpacks of their own.
I entered into "school" with full mindfulness and my valves tightly schnarpled.
* * *
“What happened to your hands?” Lena Normandy asked as she escorted me to my classroom assignment. COUGH! COUGH!
I told her a lie. I admit it. Yes, I was already learning the techniques of deception that these quasi-intelligents seem to excel at, but it made me feel bad because all 5D Intelligents are inclined to tell the truth at all times. But how could I always tell the truth when I was myself living a lie inside the skin of my host, Hugo Nash?
So I lied and explained that I had burned my hands cooking dinner and had to cover them up for a while.
Lena Normandy's eyes looked very red and watery and I thought her face was puffy. She looked unwell, even by the standards of this species, but she was quite willing to accept any story about my hands that did not require any extra consideration.
She ushered me into the front of the classroom while handing me two "textbooks" and a "lesson plan." There was a desk and chair at the front of the room, also a green chalkboard and a white drawing board with some type of marking devices.
She told me to remember to ask what everyone's preferred pronouns were just in case he, she, it or they had changed his, her, its or their gender preferences over the weekend. I didn't know what she (he, it, they???) was/were talking about!
The room was filled with many demi-miniatures, male and female (at least to outward appearances!), in various colors and sizes, in various skin tones, with assortments of hair styles seated in identical wood-and-metal structures that combined a chair and a desk in one unit. Their attire was almost identical. Each wore similar trousers, sneakers style shoes, T-shirts or hooded sweatshirts. Some of them apparently had small radio antennas implanted in the sides of their noses or in their earlobes or eyebrows or cheeks. Some had illustrations on their arms or their necks which were evidently some type of identification system. All of them wore ear buds. They were hunched over their tracking devices or scrolling around on small computers. I turned back to ask Lena Normandy what I was supposed to do now... but she had already slived leftwise and with a loud sneeze - AHHHH-CHOOO!!! - she scuttled out and closed the door behind her. I trembled slightly.
I was alone with dozens and dozens and dozens of demi-miniatures of an alien life form. I felt very afraid. I must have looked as frightened as I felt.
I stared at the demi-miniatures. What was I supposed to teach them? ‘Math and science,’ Lena Normandy had said the day before. Holding the two text-books in my mittens, I skimmed quickly through their pages. I absorbed them too quickly, however, because I started fluting psziproots through my ventilation orifices. That sounded like a sometimes embarrassing human phenomenon, I suspect, because the noise of my fluting psziproots caused some of the demi-miniatures to laugh!
Still, the text-books I had quickly skimmed gave me instant indigestion! They contained so much nonsense it was truly embarrassing. How could I "teach" what was so basic and obviously incomplete? The periodic table of elements? Prime numbers? "Newtonian" physics? Chemistry? I thought this was a math and science class, not a nursery school!
Perhaps, just perhaps, I could teach real math and science. Teaching the truth couldn't be harmful! Seeking the truth, after all, was the whole point of education, wasn't it? Somewhere back in time, I knew that this planetoid had experienced an Enlightenment, a period when all learning and knowledge was to be available to all. Surely, I could teach something to an enlightened civilization that sought to elevate one and all!
For the moment, however, I couldn't teach anything because the demi-miniatures paid no attention to me at all. They were engrossed in their thumbing and ear-buds and little tracking devices.
I straightened my figer pipes in my 4D back pack and summoned courage.
“Hello,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.
There was no response. Everyone continued thumbing and ear-budding and scrolling.
“HELLO!”
I said more assertively. “I am Hugo Nash. I am your substitute teacher today for math and science.”
There was no reaction.
Thumb thumb thumb. Ear-bud music. Scroll, scroll scroll. Thumb thumb thumb. Ear-bud music. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
I did not know what else to do.
“Ahem!” I expulsifored, juuuust a large enough impulse to get their attention.
The overhead florescent lights waggled slightly (in the whole school, actually) while every digital device in the classroom flared blue and then extinguished itself with a little tune. Of course, like in the shopping center, the brains of these demi-miniature humans also went as blank as their screens; and though it was a harmless and transitory brain scrub, I honestly could see no more change on their faces than when I had first walked into the room.
“Ahem,” I said again. “I am your substitute teacher, Hugo Nash. Who can tell me what area of math and science you were last 'studying' and where are you in your course work?”
Many still looked at their tracking and communication devices that by now, of course, were totally disabled.
Some continued to thumb thumb thumb reflexively.
Others, however, were rapidly reorienting themselves to the present. Most began to look up, to look at me rather than at their digital devices. Some were getting an appearance of sentience in their eyes. This was getting somewhat hopeful.
"We're doing plane geometry," said one male demi-miniature.
"... and physics," offered a female demi-miniature. "We are learning about atoms and nuclear theory."
"Good," I said, although I had no idea what this 'plane geometry' was. Certainly, however, I knew a thing or five about geometry generally - any well-cocooned 5D would! And, of course, the rudiments of nuclear sheet and trough theory were quite simple. So this would be a "piece of cake" teaching assignment, as the locals say!
“Alright, then... you, please....” I pointed to the first demi-miniature who had spoken. “.... Come to the board and draw the boundaries of a quintangle intersecting a dollyloop.”
"............... ?"
“A what?” asked another young demi-miniature in the classroom.
“A quintangle intersecting a dollyloop,” I reiterated, tapping one of my kitchen-gloved hands on the board.
I motioned to the first male demi-miniature with one of my mittens. He came up to the board uncertainly, looking back at his now grinning colleagues.
“A quintangle???”
“A quintangle intersecting a dollyloop,” I said for the third time.
He took an analog writing device and cautiously sketched on the white board a crude two dimensional drawing with five sides.
“So, if it's a... what did you say, a quintangle? Is it, like, a pentagon?”
He drew a pentagon, capped and replaced the analog writing device, and sat down. Others started laughing in the room.
I looked at the drawing of the pentagon. “Well, alright,” I said, “but where are the other sides of the quintangle? And where is the intersecting dollyloop?”
They were all quiet. Then some of them laughed nervously. I began to question whether they were really studying geometry or not. But I was here to "teach" them so, I suppose, I would teach them.
“Look,” I explained. I removed my mittens and grasped the writing instrument as best I could between my backward thumb and index finger. I proceeded to draw in the rest of the quintangle using 3D short-hand for the 5D dimensions they obviously did not appreciate. “So, quinto-mechanically speaking, if the pentangle, which is represented by ▲5'ℓ* ... and the dollyloop by 0Й4/1ζ³... and they intersect, then you have...” I wrote the equation on the board:
▲5'ℓ*
0Й4/1ζ³
“... or just 1/5 XΨ of the original that now looks like...”
I tapped the board with a wooden pointer. “So there you have a 3D representation of a quintangle intersecting a dollyloop.”
I was pleased with my self for having so deftly rendered a rudimentary 5D geometry lesson into a simple 3D form. But the class looked quite mystified.
“Alright,” I said, “let us move on then.” Pointing to the girl demi-miniature who had noted their study of atomic theory, I said, “Alright, please summarize what you have learned about nuclear sheet and trough theory.”
She stammered, “Nuclear... sheet... and ... trough theory?? We, uh, we haven't gotten that far yet... I think...” She refused to get up from her desk.
“Well, alright.” I went back to the white board and drew the basic equations. “So, if the interior mass of a quarkite is .38999/16645ӝ and the angularity of the adjoining nuclear sheet is 400Ԇ degrees, and a quintratic slice of the crust is 13 then....
.38999/ 16645ӝ x 400Ԇ
13 (N/µ4) = «2'
... or, diagrammatically...”
There was no reaction. A few of them tried to scribble some notes. Others just stared at the board, then at me, then back at the board. It got very quiet.
I began to feel despondent. I had failed again. If I could not even communicate with the younger specimens, how would I ever be able to communicate with the adults? Perhaps I needed to concentrate on learning from them, rather than trying to teach them. After all, I was a Pioneer here to study the quasi-intelligents of this 3D planet. I was not here to lift them out of their technological poverty.
By now, their digital tracking and communication devices had begun to reactivate and the thumbing, ear-budding and scrolling had resumed. I stood there quietly as the demi-miniatures began to ignore me again. As a precaution, I emitted an inverted pulse and absorbed all memories of what I had taught them. I also wiped the white board clean. The wall clock ticked off time fractions, and when fifty minutes had passed, a bell gonged through the public address system. Everyone filed quickly and noisily out of the classroom into the hall.
Except for one, an especially small demi-miniature girl wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. She came up to me from the rear-most part of the classroom and studied me intently through dark green sunglasses in a face framed with green hair.
She looked at me very heatedly, so heatedly I started to feel gases evaporating.
“Can I help you?” I asked, as pleasantly as I could.
She was absolutely silent and just stared and glowered at me.
She stared and glowered.
She stared and glowered ominously, purposely, menacingly.
She craned forward to inspect every inch of my face. I would have started to perspire, if I could have perspired!
She snapped off her green sunglasses revealing two black eyes shrouded in green eyebrows. Her stare was so sharp it nearly pierced my outer wrappers! She stared so intensely it was almost painful!
She hissed through clenched teeth:
“What are you?”
"What am I?" I repeated. "Well, I am Hugo Nash, your substitute teacher, of course."
She hissed again.
"Don't give me that crap. Who are you?"
“Who am I?” I stuttered nervously. “Uhh... wha... wha... what on Earth do you mean?”
She snarled:
“I don't mean 'what on Earth,' dude. I mean, are you an alien from somewhere else?”
My essential gases warmed. My face might even have blushed like humans do when embarrassed. “Of course not,” I answered, starting to giggle. “Where else would I be from?”
The girl stared at me for another minute without a word while I giggled uncontrollably. Then she hissed again:
“If you're not an alien… then why are you plugged into a backpack in the 4th Dimension?”
Oiyoyoyei!!! Praise the Dissolution!
I nearly burst a plasma bag!!!
*****
[Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. For earlier chapters click HERE.]