Hugo Nash Loses His Buttons and Himself in the Third Dimension

Life Among the Three Dimensionals - Chapter 3

When I got back to "my" home - that is, Hugo Nash's home - I discovered a new message taped to the front door.

Pay or vacate: 20 Day Notice

I read the notice. It appeared that Hugo Nash had many "money" types of problems and they were accumulating. Apparently, he had not paid his "mortgage" payments to a bank - plus something called "interest," “late fees” and "attorneys fees" - and they were preparing to "foreclose" on his house.

The total of the ancillary costs seemed to be much greater than the missed mortgage payment! Actually, the total of the interest, late fees, penalties and attorneys fees seemed to be much greater the entire value of the house! How could this be? As incredible as it appears, it seems like "banks" made arrangements that inflate the estimated value of the underlying asset, and they seem to have the authority to enforce their fulfillment in “money”

None of this made a lot of sense to me.

If it was Hugo Nash's house, then how could some "bank" take it away from him?

Who was this "bank?"

Was this some type of extortion racket?

Was this why I had seen people sleeping on the sidewalks in what looked like small and portable homes? Why didn't Hugo Nash just go to the shopping center as I had done and get cash to pay his bills from one of the machines?

I pondered the mysteries of life on Earth. Everything seemed so irrational.

Still, I saw a silver lining (as the 3D humans say!) in this foreclosure. I could just skip the payments and let the "bank" take the house! It was a very dirty house, in any event... they could have it! Besides, if "Hugo Nash" lost his house in "foreclosure," it might give my controllers good reason to terminate my assignment so that I could go back to my own 5D world! Yes!!

Maybe all the people I saw living on the sidewalks were also looking to escape this world for another one? To look at them, many appeared to have already escaped into a different slice of the Multiverse!

I must say I was shocked at these thoughts that I was having. Gaseous intelligents don't usually engage in subterfuges to achieve an objective. Was something on this planet causing me to think only in three dimensions, like the local quasi-intelligents? I considered all this as I turned the key and opened the door.

Something was "ringing" inside the house. Inside the central room, on the "sofa" next to all the loose papers (to which I added the newest "pay or vacate" notice), lay a small tracking device that also permitted one-to-one communications, just like the tracking devices I had seen miniatures using in the shopping center. The device rang and vibrated and flashed. Obviously, the tracking device was trying to get my attention. It pulsed wildly and tickled me as it rang. I stared at the strange device until it stopped ringing.

What was I supposed to do?

Half a minute later the tracking device started to ring again. The pattern repeated itself many times, but I froze in indecision. Finally, I picked the device up. I shook it - nothing. It rang and vibrated. I squeezed it. Nothing. I rubbed it with my upside-down thumbs. Oh ho! Someone spoke!

“Hello, hello,” said the voice.

Hesitatingly, I whispered:

“.......Yes, hello....?”

“..…..???...... Is this Mr. Nash, Mr. Hugo Nash? I can barely hear you!”

I had to stop a moment. Yes, I thought. Hugo Nash, that's me, of course. “Yes, uhhh, yes, of course, this is Hugo Nash. Hello. How are you? Where is the train station? Would you like something to drink? How old are you? The weather is very nice today. Should we go to see a movie? The dog is very nice. Do you have the time?”

“Uhh, ...excuse me, Mr. Nash... ?? This is the Lewis & Clark Elementary School administrative assistant, Lena Normandy. We've been trying to reach you all weekend to confirm your substitute teaching assignment for tomorrow morning at Lewis & Clark Elementary School, 6th Grade math and science.

Cough!

“Everybody's out with the flu bug that's going around, so we really need you.” Sneeze. Sneeze. SNEEZE!! “Excuse me! Can we put you down? We're really short-handed. Cough! You are certified for teaching math and science Mr. Nash?”

I answered, “Uh, of course, I do know math and science... but... what? You said "certified"... ?? On Monday, you said?"

“Yes, tomorrow, Mr. Nash. Is everything alright?”

Sneeze!

I answered as bravely as I could, even though I doubted that anything was 'alright': “Yes. Yes. Of course. Everything is wonderful.”

“Oh, good. So we'll see you Monday, tomorrow morning, at 6.30 am, Lewis & Clark Elementary School. Cough. Cough. Excuse me! It's at 6505 65th Avenue. You can take the No. 55 bus, it'll be easier than driving and finding a place to park. Bye, Sneeze, bye.”

Oh no, what had I done?! I exclaimed, “But wait, Lena Normandy! I meant only that everything was alright, but as for the teaching...

Hello...? Hello... ? Are you there Lena Normandy? Hello... ?”

Oiyoyoyei!

Now what, I thought to myself? I was supposed to be at an "elementary school" to substitute teach math and science? Praise the Dissolution!

Teach??? Of course, I knew that these creatures "teach" things after they are already born. But how incredibly inefficient and incomprehensible! Their lives are already so short. Why should they have to spend so much of their days "learning" what they could have absorbed in utero before they were born?

Today was... Sunday? Then tomorrow will be.... MONDAY!!!

Oiyoyoyei!

Substitute teaching, this is one of the things that Hugo Nash did... does... for "a living," right? Oiyoyoyei! Then I had to be there. I had no other choice, lest my project would be over even before the "bank" could foreclose the house and my controllers could bring me home!

The "silver lining," as they say, was that I would teach math and science, not anything having to do with the locals' strange practices. Math and science, at least, should be the same in all dimensions, in all time sectors and in every slice of the Multiverse.

Of course, history, too, as a universal constant, should be easy to teach…. if you knew where the seams are. If you knew where the seams were, you could just walk over into the prior slices of time and see what had unfolded as it happens in real time. Even if you meet yourself, it only means that in that particular slice of time and space, you met yourself - there's nothing particularly unusual in that and (so I learned during my cocooning) it sometimes happens. But here, in three dimensions and in their uni-directional time, they seem to believe that nothing truly has happened except for how they tell themselves it has happened… even if what they believe has happened is absolutely false!

No, I can teach math and science to the local quasi-intelligents, but to teach anything else would not be possible.

I decided to devote the rest of the day learning all I could about this world so as not to embarrass myself while "substitute teaching." I had less than 12 hours of their time and there was so much to learn. Or was there?

The woman at the shopping center had made a small hole in my outer surface when she kicked me. I patched that hole with a sticky repair kit patch I found in a mirrored cabinet in Hugo Nash's bathroom. I folded myself up in the living room of the house and turned on the television. I expulsifored every .001th of a yoctosecond thus rapidly changing all 200 channels to watch them all simultaneously.

While absorbing the television (there really wasn’t that much to “absorb!”), I started leafing through my magazines. It took veritable picoseconds, ages really, to thoroughly read each page of this peculiar communication medium printed on paper. The hardest part was turning the pages with my inverted thumbs, but I eventually got the hang of it. It was easier, however, just to use my tongue to lick the pages over one at a time. But, unfortunately, I had to stop this because the magazine pages did not taste very good. Neither did their content. Indeed, the magazines seemed to echo the repetitive themes of the 200 channel television.

I quickly finished reading the magazines. I reached back into the fourth dimension to my support pod and fed the magazines into the input chute for shrinksizing onto a zippledisk. The magazines were literally reduced to a quantum sized filament that were pouched into the zippledisk along with the rest of my correspondence. Hah, I was just going to call it "mail!" Only one "day" here and I was already acclimating! But was this a good thing? I was not sure.

I finished shrinksizing my magazines, put them on the zippledisk and put the zippledisk on stand-by.

I then turned to Hugo Nash's computer in his study. I expulsifored and thinkput it back to where it was when I first arrived.

This computer, like the portable tracking devices I saw everyone connected to, seemed to be linked to the locals' main education, tracking and communication facilities at some larger computer facility. It was strange, but the local dominant specie seemed to always be tracking and recording what everyone was doing and where everyone was going and what everyone was saying.

I looked for and found the repositories where all of their "knowledge" seemed to be stored. The knowledge repositories were clearly redacted and of dubious authenticity, but they would do for now. I thinkput to the computer to access all of this data. Many access sites appeared. Apparently they needed "passwords" to read them. This is the same issue I experienced with the automatic cash machine in the store - I still did not know Hugo Nash's PIN number or his password or any other secret handshakes he used to get information or money.

So I "cheated" again - I twaggled my local gravitational sheets and I submitted every possible sequence of digits and letters up to ∞ -1. The computers instantly connected. I began to access data. Apparently, there was information stored in various places “in the cloud” and that information concerned everyone everywhere on the planet. How could that possibly be worth archiving? Who wanted to archive all this information on everyone everywhere? Someone must be feeling very insecure!

Next, I accessed all of the so-called libraries and bookstores I could find. I began to download "books" from many different sites - places called "Google" and from the Amazon and from someone named ABE and from a Library of Congress.

The books had been published in different languages, but that was no impediment because I had been imbued with a trans-linguistic large language model during my cocooning... although, to be honest, I only needed a small language model to learn what there was to learn on this little planet!

I quickly metabolized what I downloaded at sub quintel-zark speed - Gibbons, Tacitus, Lawrence, Mann, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Joyce, Plato, Thackeray, Quigley, Dumas, Kant, Voltaire, Zbignew Zingh, Kafka, Canetti, Cervantes, Newton (apparently a teller of children's stories and fables), Seuss, Marx, Dickens, Dőblin, Caesar, Tacitus, Proust, Hemingway, Richard Leigh, Greene, Steinbeck, Dumas, Twain, Spinoza, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Camus... &tc. and &tc. and &tc. It took no more than .37 quintel-zarks to assimilate the entire extant human library, or about 41.056825 minutes earth-time. When I was done absorbing all of the human print literature, I spent a few moments watching, in high compression, all of their film media and listening to all of their “music” worldwide. It was like a small brain-squirt, hardly more than that.

It was then nightfall. I thinkput off the television, extinguished the computer and reflected on what I had learned. It was all very confusing - there was a lot of "activity" on this 3D sphere, but very little movement. The dominant specie was like a fast vibrating particle that really wasn’t going anywhere.

Perhaps these 3D quasi-intelligents were not intelligent beings at all, but just emanated the aura of intelligence? Was their intelligence a hologram of another sentient life form? Or was their apparent lack of insight itself a guise, a crafty mask of intelligence to hide their true nature, just like their clothing masked their bodies?

I unfolded myself and began to compose a missive to Pioneer Command Central:

Report 2

First full day interesting, but confusing.

Item: request reevaluation of intelligence ratings for dominant specie of planetoid in local uni-slice where I am located.

Item: Locals hostile and exceedingly strange. Obsessed with "appearances."

Item: Local atmosphere very rich, almost intoxicating due to high radiation emissions, micro-particles in the water and atmospheric emissions. This is curious because radiation, micro-plastics and atmospheric emissions are definitely harmful to the local quasi-intelligents even though they are good and useful for gaseous intelligents. It is as though the quasi-intelligents are deliberately re-making their world to suit themselves worse and to suit us better. This is very strange behavior.

Item: Dominant human specie seems obsessed with following: sex, violence, money, food, drink, deception, physical appearances, something or someone who "saves souls," leather airbags, cult of “law,” and dominance.

Item: Dominant species seems to be very self-conscious with socialization capabilities nearly non-existent. They practice self-and-social deception at all levels and generally lack analytical faculties. Lives short and brutish. All behavior might be explained by interactions of the preceding fixations amplified by shortness and brutality of life.

Progress quotient: Unable to determine based on limited data. Likelihood of further evolution unclear. Pioneer project continues "Monday" with experiment in "substitute teaching."

Signed/Ugoñaschßtenätraξo aka H. Nash.

PS - if possible, please send my triploid!

PPS - I really miss my triploid, thank you!

PPPS - A "bank" is preparing to "repossess" house I occupy. Please consider whether, in light of this development, I should be immediately evacuated and project temporarily paused for several millennia until another 5D Pioneer could take over. In which case, do NOT send triploid!

PPPPS - Please hurry!!!

I decided not to mention my various party invitations – I would wait until afterward to report on this life-form's socialization habits. I also decided not to say anything about my little incidents at the shopping center. They were probably meaningless, I thought.

At least, I hoped they were meaningless!

I pouched the memo onto the zippeldisk along with the shrinksized magazines. I then loaded the zippeldisk into the telemetry modulator, cranked the tandytripper --- and... and… right then, yes, right then it happened!

As I prepared to release my tandytripper to skip the zippeldisk, two of my Drůkk' ąou location buttons snagged on the crank and just sheared right off. I knew that this could happen, but it had never before happened to me!

They clearly did not make Drůkk' ąou location buttons like they used to make them!

Had I overloaded the transmission? Was the rich bath of radiation and micro-particles in this local atmosphere destabilizing my sense of balance? I wasn't sure why or how, but for whatever the reason, the location buttons had sheared off! As they did, the Drůkk' ąou location buttons bounced from the fourth dimension into the third dimension where, of course, they were completely invisible, just like the 4D podules strapped to my back were invisible in a three dimensional world!

Of course, I knew what had happened and I immediately unfolded myself. I got down on my ersatz knees and started to "feel" for the location buttons on the floor. But with my inverted, upside-down hands, it was a difficult job.

Worse, I could not even be sure which uni-slice the buttons had landed in: this one, or an adjacent one... or one thousands or even (by now) zeta-dillions of uni-slices away!

Without a complete set of location buttons I couldn't even locate my lost buttons! Of course, I could transmit data, but my precise orientation in the 3D matrix where I was located could not be determined. I knew at the time that this was serious, but not critical. All the control agency needed to do was to send me a new set of buttons to sew on to the telemetry podule and everything would be alright.

Yes, everything would be alright. My messages would be read. My controllers would read that my location buttons had been lost. I would be extracted quickly and easily. Yes, everything would be alright.

So I quickly unwound the zippel-disk transmission by cranking telemetry in reverse, composed another post-post-post-script explaining that I had popped off my location buttons and they had landed in an unknown and invisible 3D space. I asked in the post-post-post-script if they would please, send me a replacement set with a podule sewing kit, thank you, over and out.

The disk skipped out at an angle, rotating quickly as it skipped through time and space toward home and rescue. I relaxed, sucked in some of the atmospheric micro-particles, curled up into a ruminative posture on the living room floor and resolved to "substitute teach" at Lewis & Clark Elementary School.

I meditated to myself that I could see five ways at once - even though I couldn't see my lost location buttons!

I was calm, pure calm.

For the most part...

* * *

[Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. For earlier chapters click HERE.