
Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. Have you skipped so many chapters that you don't know where we are?
Has your own life skipped so many chapters that you don't know where you are? To catch up on the past click HERE.
In the preceding Chapter 16, Szofia got tattooed while Hugo paid a visit to the studio of Madame Fabula diFalooza, Psychic. The psychic, Merlin the cat, and Robespierre the one-eyed parrot discover that their 'client,' Hugo Nash, is the most wanted man in the world. But as Madame Fabula diFalooza considers her own past and the true state of the world, she decides to forgo the $100 million reward and set Hugo free. The saga continues with Chapter 17 of "Life Among the Three Dimensionals"- California Scheming.
I WAS IN a state of near mental collapse. I barely noticed where Szofia was leading me or how we got there.
My batteries were running low. I felt like I was slowly transforming from a gas to a solid.
The short stellar orbits of this 3D planet were debilitating. I badly needed to rest and recuperate. I doubted that I even had the strength to thinkput or expulsifor anymore. When Szofia asked me to 'liberate' some money from a supermarket cash machine, all I could manage was a few tens of dollars and several hundred dimes, quarters and pennies from a Coinstar machine. Even the humans' digital machines could barely understand my weak bio-electric pulses.
Stupefied by exhaustion, I can only recall that Szofia led us somewhere by cab and by bus and by light rail. Then we started to walk up into the foothills. Szofia still carried her skateboard. She was talking non-stop, as usual, but I remember little of what she said.
More bees than ever were buzzing in and around the flowers growing in her ears.
I looked around me. We were walking through a very ordinary suburban neighborhood in the outskirts of Los Angeles. It was very hot and we were the only people walking. Everyone else drove sealed up inside air conditioned cars with dark privacy windows. I smelled heavy metals like lead and arsenic and mercury in the underground water pipes. I sensed traces of radioactive thorium, cesium, iodine and strontium in the ocean several dozen miles away and in the groundwater.
As we walked, I was bathed in the electromagnetic waves of millions and millions of wireless devices.
I noticed the alpha particles emitted by the americium in the ionizing ceiling smoke detectors in the homes we passed. Americium was a radioactive by-product of nuclear power generation and the production of weapons grade plutonium. Why would humans put radioactive americium into their homes? Supposedly, americium was 'safe' so long as it remained sealed inside the smoke detectors.
But what happens when there are brush fires and the peoples' houses... and their americium-containing smoke detectors... burned up and spewed radioactive particles into the air? What happens when ionizing smoke detectors are discarded in landfills or when they are incinerated? Whose crazy idea was this to 'spread around' the radioactive waste products inside people's homes in an ostensibly 'useful' application? Putting americium into residential smoke detectors must have been one of the early projects that the five dimensional ersatz politicians had undertaken to create an Earth more hospitable for them and less so for the quasi-intelligent humans.
As we walked, I also sensed the dense atmospheric inversion the locals called 'smog.' The stagnant air was rich with carbon monoxide, diesel particulates and nitrogen dioxide. This also must have been due to the five dimensional engineers who were recreating planet Earth as a paradise - for themselves. The whole environment along the West Coast seemed to be a plasmoidic paradise in the making. Obviously, the quasi-intelligent leaders of California had been replaced by five dimensional gasbags intent on re-creating the State as a resort for non-terrestrial five dimensional life.
As my mind slowly cleared, the nagging, almost existential questions in the back of my mind resurfaced:
Where were we?
Where were we going?
Why were we going there?
Through my mental fog, some of what Szofia was saying became more clear.
“So, you remember, Huey, that I got here by hitching a ride with an intergalactic pollen cloud that rides through this solar system every 80,000 or 100,000 earth years or so? And you remember that when I got near to this dump of a planet I jumped off the freight train, so to speak, along with some other primordial life forms that were also hitching a ride?
"Whaaaaale, it looks like another big pollen cloud will be passing this way. Mucho hay fever for the locals, of course, but maybe my ticket out’a here! With all the Branchers trying to find me and cull me out, Hughbie, and with you carrying around your 4D butt pack that stands out like a flaming GPS carrot for all 4D bounty hunters to see, it might be time for little Szofia to thumb a ride, you savvy?
"I mean, I can smell their spores getting closer every day. I can even feel the little seismic waves as the knot-heads start to close in on us. The local news stations call them minor earthquakes, but I know better: its the Branch posse pounding the pavement as they track me by tracking you, Hughie!
"I mean, it's harder for a grove of Branchers to sneak up on you in Southern California because of the general treeless-ness and all, but it does make a girl antsy every time I see some tall palm trees bending toward me. How's that line go, Hughie? Szofia shall not vanquished be until Great Brancher Wood to California remove against her...”
This pulled me out of my stupor. “Szofia, are you quoting - or rather, mis-quoting - Shakespeare? Isn't that line from MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 3... '...Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane.' Is that what you mean?" I asked.
“Shakespeare?! You are so uneducated, Hughie. That line is from MacSpinach, which is a famous play written by me. Ditto Yamlet and King Weird, and the Eggplant of Venice. I told you that already, Hugh, in an earlier chapter. Obviously, you haven't been reading this book too carefully, have you? I mean, who do you think wrote all those silly Elizabethan plays, Hughbert? Billy Shakespeare didn't have the brain cells to write a menu for a McDonald's without having me to tell him what to say. I mean, really, Hugh!"
I did not know. Maybe Szofia was right: Had she written all of Shakespeare's plays? Or was it a million monkeys over a million years randomly hitting the letters of a million computer keyboards, kind of like an Elizabethan era AI Chat Chimpanzee? I did not know anything anymore.
What I did know was that Szofia still had not told me where we were going or why? She was always changing the subject when I asked. But now I insisted. I demanded to know!
Szofia stopped and looked at me rather oddly. “Well, Hugh, all your questions are about to be answered because, well, we're here.
"I mean, we've arrived. Or, rather, you've arrived.”
We were standing at the front door of one of the ordinary hominid ranch houses in this ordinary suburban tract in the hills outside Los Angeles.
I didn't understand. I looked around. “Szofia! We have arrived where? What are we doing here? There are just endless rows of more or less identical houses. What are we doing here?”
Szofia started pawing the sidewalk with her feet, looking down as she spoke.
“Whaaaaale, Hugh, you see, you need to be in a safe place where someone will look out for you while I exit stage right on the next intergalactic pollen cloud. So let me just ring this doorbell here and.... whaaaaale, you'll see what I mean, Hughie. It's been cool. Well, kinda cool some of the time, but I've gotta go now, sooooo....”
The door opened and Szofia shoved me toward it.
A little brown-haired girl about Szofia's size stood there and stared at me in wide-eyed astonishment. I turned around, but Szofia was already gone, rolling away on her skateboard.
As Szofia rolled down the sidewalk she turned and waved just once at me and I thought there was a glint of something wet and sparkling in the corner of her eye.
Panicked, I turned back to the open door. The little brown-haired girl stared at me with enormous eyes. She was grinning.
"Who is it, honey?" asked a woman's voice inside the house.
“IT'S DADDY!”
screamed the little girl and threw her kitchen-mittened hands around me pinioning my arms and my own kitchen mittens to my side.
“DAD! OH, DAD!”
I was utterly speechless! Who was this miniature person? What was happening? Why did she attack me and was she trying to squeeze all the living gas out of me? Was she trying to arrest me! My pressures were skyrocketing! 834 kµ units/3M! I would literally burst! What had Szofia done to me???!!!
“IT'S DADDY!”
screamed the little girl again and held me tighter in her arms.
“DAD! OH, DAD!”
"Who is it??" asked the woman inside the house. "Who's there?" she asked as she approached the front door with the little white dog that ran ahead of her - that dog... that dog... I knew it from somewhere, somewhere, someplace.... FLUFFY?? Oiyoyoyei!!! Szofia, what have you done???!!!!
"Who's there, Jenny?" asked the woman inside the house who finally saw me and said "Who's... who... ?????
“Who? HUGH? HUGO!!!
“Aaaaggggghhhhh, HUGO!!!!”
I was so weak from prolonged leaks of psziproots fluting from my body bag fissures and from Jenny Nash squeezing me so hard that I was as confused as everyone else. Who's there? Who's there? I wondered to myself trying to turn around to see WHO WERE THEY LOOKING AT?
It took quite a while for me to realize that the WHO was HUGH and the HUGH was ME!
It was a scene that will forever remain etched in my plasticizers so long as I remain pressurized: there I was crushed in the embrace of my own "daughter," Jenny Nash, ecstatic over the return of her "father" (who was the true 'Hugo Nash' hibernating in the mezzanine between unislices) while Carol Twuinbargh - the former Mrs. Nash who had divorced the original Hugo Nash - the same Carol Twuinbargh aka Carol Nash who I had seen interviewed on the TV- was definitely NOT so overjoyed about seeing me.
Fluffy, the same small white dog whose photograph I had seen in my host's - Hugo Nash's wallet - was running around barking and sniffing me and alternately snarling at or licking me. Indeed, Carol Twuinbargh, formally known as Carol Nash, looked more horrified than happy and she kept her hand over her mouth while making gargling noises that sounded like "gruuuckkggghhhhh" or "ackkkkkkk" or "glluugggg," which is exactly what I might have been gasping, too, because little Jenny Nash was practically squeezing the fumes out of me!
At last, Carol Twuinbargh, "my" ex, came to her senses long enough to holler “OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! THE TERRORIST! THE TERRORIST! HUGO NASH, THE TERRORIST IS HEEEEERRREEEE! AGENTS! MUST CALL AGENTS!! Aggggghhhhhh!”
She darted back inside the house and I realized that she was going to CALL FBI AGENTS and that my cucumbers were about to be very, very pickled, as Szofia would have said!
“Aggggghhhhhh!” I gasped with whatever strength I could muster as 'my daughter' Jenny, nearly squeezed the life out of me! “Carol,” I wheezed with all my might, “please... do not... call... FBI agents!”
But little Jenny, jumping up and down with me in her arms, answered, squeezing me even harder: “DADDY, OH DADDY! She's not calling FBI agents! She's calling her publicist and her literary agents! You're going to be EVEN MORE FAMOUS THAN BEFORE! WE'RE ALL GOING TO BE ON TV! And they want to make a feature length movie about us… maybe two or three of them… starring famous movie stars; and also an animated version with more big time movie star voice-overs!
"And we're going to be rich after we get the reward money for turning you in, Daddy! And Mom's about to publish a third sequel tell-all book that her publisher says will win the No Bells Prize for illiterate literature! Its called Carol's Continuing Story Part 3: I Was Stalked by an Islamo-Commie Drug-Dealing Sex Fiend Terrorist. It was also written overnight by an artificially intelligent large language model plagiarizing machine. Mom will get some selfies with you for the dust jacket!... and then she'll call the FBI.
"And, oh Daddy! We'll do a duet, you and me singing and dancing 'The Pudge' together, for my next hit music video! You know, I can record us dancing and singing as they take you away! Oh, Daddy, the lyrics are coming to me right now...
My Daddy came back to me, Me me me me me! And then they took away Dad-dy Dee dee dee dee dee... Cha cha cha! Olé!
"... Or some catchy lyrics like that so the AI program can write the music for it! Whaddya think Daddy? It'll go double platinum, don't you think?! We're going to win a Grammy Award, don't you think?!!
"OH DADDY, DADDY, DADDY! I knew you'd come back!!! And now we'll get the reward money and I can buy new clothes and lots of jewelry and new designer kitchen mittens with diamonds and gold thread and the latest cell phone and Fluffy can get a new collar with rubies and emeralds and we'll get a big new house with a home theater and a giant swimming pool and a new pink sports car and... and... and... and I'll visit you in jail, Daddy! I promise, I'll visit you in jail every weekend, Daddy!... Or, at least, once every few months, or during the holidays, maybe. Oh, you're the best daddy in the world!! I love you, Daddy!!”
But Fluffy, the little white dog, was growing more and more agitated, especially because these four-legged canine quasi-intelligents can sense things that the dominant two-legged quasi-intelligent specie cannot, namely that I was not who I appeared to be.
So while little Jenny Nash squeezed and squealed, and while Carol Twuinbargh, formally known as Carol Nash, yelled at her publicity and literary agents over the phone to get down there as fast as they could and to bring their photographers, Fluffy was circling me and counter-circling me and counter-counter-circling me, snarling, barking, and sniffing the alien transuranic methane that only a dog's nose could smell.
Until... with a yap and a lunge and snap of his jaws Fluffy made up his mind and bit my ankle!
Now slow leaks are things that intelligent plasmoidics can deal with - a bandage, a tourniquet, just a quick stitch of the bag membrane and the hemorrhage can be stopped. A fissure that develops over time can be sealed. A small tear in the outer fabric can be patched. But a catastrophic, multi-pronged puncture by a rack of sharp canine teeth will cause a sudden escape of high pressure ignoble gases that will issue like a jet stream. Had there been a spark, a fire, any nearby source of ignition, then half of LA County might have gone up like a blow torch, along with me. But, for better or for worse, there was no spark and, instead, the jet stream of gas blasted out of me with enormous force.
As explained by the third law of physics postulated by the early plasmoidic physicist, Gas-sack Newton, for every gaseous force there is an equal and opposite reaction. So while my internal life gases shot out of the dog-teeth holes in my ankle, the bag that held the essential "me" - that is, the counterfeit Hugh Nash - shot off with equal force in the opposite direction up and out into the atmosphere like a suddenly released party balloon bilabially flapulating like the exhaust of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
I recall seeing the palm trees and fire hydrants and cars pass quickly before my eyes as I squirted speedily through the air.
I recall a few startled birds wondering what a human-looking quasi-intelligent was doing up there as I erratically flew by ten or twenty feet above ground in their avian element.
I recall, fading away in the distance, Jenny Nash's startled expression of wonder… and disappointment… watching me (and her reward money) fly fly away, jetting gas out of my ruptured ankle.
I recall Fluffy, now fading away in the distance, yapping and jumping happily for having vanquished the alien intruder that Fluffy didn't know was truly an alien.
I recall thinking that this was a funny way for my life to end and for my gases to be recycled.
I began to lose consciousness. As I reached the threshold of sudden Delabrae'th bio-organic degradation syndrome, I might even have hallucinated about the grasp of a large and firm blackberry vine-like branch that reached up in the 4th dimension and caught me by the calf, squeezed off the leak at my ankle and dragged me back down to earth, back down to Szophia who had momentarily siphoned herself back into her normal full-size self, thus breaking cover in the 4th Dimension, immediately disclosing her location to the Brancher bounty-hunters tracking her, placing herself at risk solely in order to rescue me.
And I might have hallucinated that I heard Szophia saying to me as she tended to my wounds, "Well, Hughdoo, I guess that wasn't such a good idea after all, was it? Whaaaaale, everyone makes a mistake every few tens of thousands of years, even little Szophia. Sorry about that, Hughbiedoo."
And I might have hallucinated, too, that Szophia was smiling and crying at the same time.
* * *
It had not been an hallucination.
Szofia never gave a rational explanation why she had broken her 3D cover by siphoning herself into 4D to reach out and rescue me. Even her momentary appearance in the 4th dimension would flag her specific location for the Branch bounty hunters who were determinedly pursuing her.
Szofia told me that she had waited around the corner just to "make sure" that I was properly welcomed home by the only people on this planet she thought might possibly welcome me. And she said that she could not just let my exhausted body bag and my 4D backpack drop on the street like so much litter because "littering is illegal" and being a law-abiding little girl, leaving my empty body bag on the street would have been just too environmentally unfriendly.
“I mean,” said Szofia as she looked away, “you were going to dump me and join your five dimensional circus back at the airport, so don't blame me for trying to figure out a way of dumping you, too, Bozozilla. I got this once in a multi-millennium opportunity to hitch a ride out of this solar system and I had to go for it. Okay, so I made a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake now and then. I mean, if we are keeping track of mistakes, dude, like, your list would be a few miles long, you follow me?
Szofia got really excited. "I mean, you're like blinking a “HEY BRANCHERS! LOOK AT ME!” GPS arrow with your freaking 4D life-support fanny pack! I mean, Hughpoo, I tried to drop you off someplace safe to give myself a chance of escaping. You didn't even do that for me, did you, Hughpoo? I mean, you didn't even ask me when you tried to borrow your stinking 'buttons' from those two 5D douche bags so you could slink back to your Yicky Drippy parasite and back to gas-land, or wherever you come from!
"You're such a ten ton strawberry, Hughpoo. I just don't know what I'm going to do with you! And, without little Szofia, Hughpoo, I think you can't take a step without walking straight into a pile of Zhungx dung. No offense intended, Hughpoo, but you are just such a doofus! And if the Branchers took me away, then there's no telling what kind of trouble you'd get into, seeing as how you're already the most wanted man on Earth!”
She kept up the banter and heckling, but her actions belied her words. She did not abandon me. Szofia laid my limp body bag on her skateboard and tied off my left leg with a rubber band. Using a short length of rope tied to the front axle of her skateboard, she towed my sad sack at night from one safe location to the next.
Sometimes, we stopped at a gas station where Szofia would use a tire pump and the gas from soda bottles to re-inflate me. She "liberated" a few 'smart phone' tracking devices, from whom I do not know, and she would place their warm transducers near my head to stimulate my gas molecules with their electromagnetic radiation. In the evening, using plastic bags fished from dumpsters, she would apply a bisphenol plaster to my ankle.
Eventually, we stopped near the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo where I bathed in the generator's rejuvenating discharge waters and I dipped myself in the plume of radioactive cesium that had begun to migrate around the Pacific gyre from Fukushima in Futaba, Japan - more gifts, I suspect, from my enviro-engineering compatriots in 5D.
Over time, I revived a little, but it would take a long time to fully recover. My left "leg" became stiff below the knee and I walked unsteadily. My energy, too, was gone. Szofia was her usual chatty self, but I could hardly muster the strength to interrupt her monologues.
We kept moving, moving, moving, however because, as she repeatedly warned me, she could "feel them," the posse of Branchers closing in on us, that is to say, closing in on me because they were tracking my four dimensional back pack. The seismic vibrations were increasing around Southern California and marching nearer every day as the relentless grove of 4D bounty hunters closed in on us. The hominid universities' geology departments recorded the daily 2.7, 2.8, 3.0 tremors on the Richter Scale and pronounced that they were shallow earthquakes.
They weren't earthquakes. They were the footfalls of the Branch coming nearer and nearer.
Szofia had already missed her chance to hitch a ride with the intergalactic pollen cloud. It had come and gone while Szofia chose to tend to me. “No big deal,” she said with false bravado when I asked her about her missed opportunity to get away. “The pollen cloud will be back in another 80,000 years or so, and I'll be ready for it when it does.”
Szofia had, however, burst her seed pods while I was convalescing and, in the midst of planet Earth's worst recorded hay fever season ever, billions of her spores had issued from her ears into the vortex of the intergalactic pollen cloud to sprout who knew where.
“The fucking Branchers have already lost,” Szofia chortled. “Imagine! Seeding planets all over the universe with shit-loads of little Szofias! If they can just stay away from the event horizon of a black hole, there will be so many Szofia-clones on Earth and out there that not even the Branch can weed them all! Wheeeehoooo! Imagine a billion identical Szofia-clones all over the fucking universe!!”
I could not imagine a billion Szofia-clones, but I did feel a responsibility for the preservation of the original one.
After all, despite her raillery, I understood that she had siphoned herself into the 4th dimension at great peril to herself solely to save me from the fate of a punctured party balloon. So long as Szofia remained a faux 12 year old in three dimensions, it would be hard for the 4D bounty hunters to track her down. However, I also understood that so long as she stayed with me and so long as I carried my life support podule in 4D, then I was the trail that the Branchers could track.
The problem had only one solution, and I was it.
While still in my cocoon, long before my emergence into the 5D world, I learned that pressure makes gases hotter and that an inert gas is not dynamic. Well, I was now under pressure. It was time for me to think hot, time to be dynamic. It was time for me to think outside of my inert elements.
As the ominous rumblings of the approaching grove of Branchers came ever nearer I devised a plan, a last-ditch, audacious plan to solve all our problems at once. For me, the choice was simple: my Pioneer mission had been a disaster and there was no way that I could get back to the five dimensional universe from whence I had come.
Indeed, it appeared that even if I could return home, I would not want to. I simply would not fit in any longer with a five dimensional unislice of the Multiverse that resembled the three dimensional Earth where I was now stuck. I no longer could see Five Ways at once. I couldn't even see five ways sequentially! I had no Drůkk' ąou location buttons. I no longer even missed my triploid! Life back home, as I once knew it, had irreversibly changed.
I was stuck on planet Earth.
It was truly time for me to move on. It was time for my Complete Dissolution and Recycling. As in the plasma-classic novel A Tale of Two Plasti-cities, it was a far, far better thing that I would do, than I had ever done before. For Szofia, it was an equally simple choice: she could continue to run with me, until, inevitably, I ran out of gas and she was caught and weeded; or she could help me execute my plan, the only plan that offered even a hope of relief.
In concept, the plan was simple. In its details, it was daring, sublime and fraught with danger. Szofia and I plotted and prepared, schemed and organized. Then, when all was in order, we arranged to split up and prepare our separate tasks. Szofia trained me as best she could how to ride her skateboard kneeling my bad leg on the deck and pushing with my good leg. I went out into the desert, taking the grove of Branchers with me tracking my 4D life support podule, while Szofia hot-wired what she described as a "neglected" Lamborghini near the Hollywood Strip and drove north by northwest to go "shopping."
As Madame Fabula diFalooza had told me... the palm of my right hand had a very short life line.
This probably would be my last entry in my memorial. It has been entered on a message zippledisk and inserted in my telecommunication podule in 5D, preprogrammed to transmit when the deed is done, to skip out into the never-collapsing wave functions of parallel universes, like a message in a bottle, the complete unfolding of my Life Among the 3Ds.
Goodbye. Pass gas in peace. May you see five ways at once.
* * *
SPOILER ALERT: Noooo, put away your handkerchiefs! This is NOT the end of Life Among the Three Dimensionals!