Into the Third Dimension
Life Among the 3Ds - Chapter 1
[Life Among the 3Ds (a sci-fi novel serialized) - Introduction and previous narrative click here.]
Call me Hugo Nash.
I emerged in 5D as Ugoñaschßtenätraξo.
Now, I am not sure who I am.
I am one or the other; or neither.
Or both.
I emerged from my cocoon on 401-9/67☼Ψ.2 in the Spΐntz-'há epicycle. I was posted, fully informed, trained and shaped, to a Pioneer assignment with the Demographic Services to the topical habitation of a 3D spheroid world colloquially known as "Earth." I was among the first 5D intelligent to be posted here
I was assigned to an urban center in the western quadrant of a moderately "advanced" (by 3D standards, that is) cluster of partially managed humans. My assignment was to conduct research. Upon my evacuation (may it ever prove feasible!) the Pioneers seriously ought to consider isolation containment of this segment of this thin slice of this particularly dangerous 3D universe!
The stellar cycle of this Earth's central star is a mere 17/34,557th of the length of the stellar cycle of The Home System. This “Earth,” unlike our own gently rolling planet, rotates almost as fast as its stellar orbit is slow! It spins so fast on its axis that it is a miracle that the natives are not flung off into space!
"Time," as we know it, moves very rapidly in this slice. The quasi-intelligents, just like the rest of the fauna, live fast and die even faster, almost before they have any meaningful opportunity to learn. A quasi-intelligent might live, at a maximum, one hundred of their short stellar cycles; and then he or she fizzles out. Yes, instead of becoming more active and aware as they age, the 3Ds tend to peak in their middle “years” and then begin a regression back into infancy, at which point they die babbling and as ignorant as they began!
They should be born old and fully formed, like us, and grow younger with each passing year. And they barely rest at all, "napping," as it were, for barely a third of the period of one of the planet's "days." With so much of their time spent wide awake, one wonders how they learn anything at all let alone learn to deal with the stress of living a life as short as a fruit fly in our own slice in the multiverse.
My task, as I was informed during my pre-emergent cocooning, was to "blend in" with the local dominant species of fauna in order to learn more about 3D quasi-intelligent customs and behavior. However, "blending in" was difficult from the moment of my insertion.
My trainers - careless and inadequately experienced in the physical modalities of this particular location matrix - erred in the attachment of the species' gripping devices known as "hands," providing for their alignment facing upward with the "opposing thumbs" also reversed from their customary position of opposition. Idiots! Szofia would have called them. Idiots!
The schematic calls for a "left" hand and a "right" hand, you say? Opposing "thumbs," okay, but opposing exactly what? Opposing each other? Opposing the nose, the feet, or something else? If we put them on the outermost side of the hands, then the thumbs have the greatest opposition, yes? Palms "up?" Palms "down?"
Whatever.
Or, so I imagine, the engineers conversed before I was de-cocooned. I appreciate that there were no precise drawings, so they must have ad libbed it. They just attached the body parts as they thought they should work and they would fix any "bugs" later after I had been assembled.
But they could not go back and upload a "patch" like the 3Ds patch their software after it has been installed. Or like their aircraft engineers do when they forget to install a door properly and it pops out in mid-flight.
Ship it fast - fix it later, seems to be a 3D motto.
But anatomy is not software or aircraft engineering. Now I am what I am – a 3D mutant. What I would give to be fully five dimensional again!
My handlers also misplaced the distinctive mark known as a "bellybutton" on my low backside rather than the front of the torso. It was a minor error, but it added to my dismay. I showed it once to the girl, Szofia. She laughed so hard that she almost asphyxiated. I am utterly humiliated.
But I was placed here to learn, not to complain. My problem was how to observe the local fauna without alarming them by my otherness.
In this world, as I found out, otherness can be fatal.
The occipital location of my "bellybutton" was a peculiarity which could be camouflaged with "clothing," as such items are known. My upside-down hands with inverted thumbs, however, presented a more difficult challenge. In this many-handed world of tactility, upside-down and inverted digits made me peculiarly clumsy and marked as an outsider. If I waved “hello” or “good-bye,” for example, I would have to be careful to turn my palm backwards. I had to learn to handle their strange "eating" utensils called forks, knives and spoons by grasping them twisty-like between my fifth and fourth fingers rather than between thumb and forefinger as the 3Ds do. This was hazardous because a misuse of either device could have caused a catastrophic rupture of my outer bag (what the natives call their “skin”) and immediate deflation.
Furthermore, using the keyboard input device of one of this civilization's hand-held communication devices presented me with almost insuperable inputting obstacles. Apparently, they cannot talk directly for any great length with their electronic devices and they cannot communicate with electrical pulses. Rather, they use mechanical interfaces, tiny fingerboards that are practically impossible to use if your thumbs, like mine, face out rather than in.
I took to wearing mittens over my hands in order to mask their deformity. I discovered that humans, being especially gullible - particularly when surprised - accepted without question my "explanation" that my hands had been re-attached kattywompus due to an injury and a surgeon's malpractice. This same gullibility seems to control people's willingness to accept some of the otherwise incredible statements made by their leadership class, their moral leaders and their economic advisors.
Why do they seem contented to remain in a single slice of the multiverse? As every 5D fledgling knows, it is trivial to move from one multiverse layer to another. The problem is not moving between the infinitely expanding, closely packed and occasionally glued together universes that are layered like a growing 5D stack of unlimited width pancakes - no, anyone can do that, if you know where the seams are.
It happens all the time even among the 3Ds, mostly by inadvertence, as every day someone slips in and out of nearly identical adjoining universe slices, barely aware of the differences. You think you saw something or someone out of the corner of your eye. Indeed, you did see something, but it was just a knot in the warp of the fabric where a few threads momentarily tangled, a place where some random multiverse mucilage glued things together. Until you look... and then the Separateness has been restored. Or, rather, the appearance of Separateness has been restored, because once knotted, the adjacent uni-slices are entangled forever, even if the local 3Ds will not understand this.
It is not uncommon even for 3Ds to slip across dozens of uni-slices at a time and end up so many worlds removed from where they started with barely a clue what has happened. Even among the 3Ds, they often have a sense that their world has radically changed, seemingly overnight, and they hardly recognize where they are anymore.
Two adjacent universe slices, indeed, thousands and millions of nearby slices, differ from the other only in that you or someone else has lost a sock or someone dropped the toast jelly side up or jelly side down; or here a bird flew east a few wingspans and there it flew west, or in this uni-slice a radium atom emitted a neutron and in all the other uni-slices it did not. Here a cat is dead; there the cat is alive.
You may not even notice the fact that you have slid sideways into a different universe smeared out over an infinite number of uni-slices merely a few nano-millimeters distant from where you began... except for the vague sense that your world seems inexplicably different. What the 3Ds don't know, what they would never accept because of their dimensional blindness, is that their worlds have, indeed, become different, and it happens all the time, every moment of every day, day after day. They will not accept the obvious truth: their world really has changed overnight, and no matter where they once were, they now live in an entirely different slice of the continuously expanding Metaverse.
No, the problem isn't how to slide in and out of parallel worlds. The problem is how to get out of one and go back to where you started. The problem is how to maintain your coordinates in an infinitely and rapidly expanding location matrix. I am "here" now, but as I am inserted "here," "here" is someplace different relative to an infinite number of new "theres" that are instantly layered on top, beside and below that "here" such that precision insertion and removal is a monumental challenge... particularly, as in my case, when your Drůkk' ąou location buttons have been sheared off and no one at Central Control seems to be paying attention.
Sure, the 5D disaster tourists and juvenile delinquents can drop in for their quick visits and drop out again after getting their thrills, but when you stay in a foreign matrix for multiple stellar cycles as I have done, the task of re-coordination becomes monumental. You can skip along from one universe to another like a flat rock skimming across the water. But, Praise the Dissolution! Every moment, every nanosecond that passes, I am an infinite number of uni-slices further away from where I started!
Of course, the mass of the uni-slices holds them all locked together, gravitationally speaking, in a single five dimensional space-time continuum. Gravity holds it altogether along with the occasional spots of multiversal goop that sometimes oozes out between the slices. But if a Controller does not pay close attention, the coordinates can be totally obliterated in the infinite dump of new uni-slices piled up where once I was, the warp of the interstitial gravity and the sticky glop of multiversal mucilage. It is not a science, but an art, as the local quasi-intelligents would phrase it.
* * *
They slid me into the location matrix where there was a small wood frame house in an outer neighborhood of a city.
They slid out the man who lived there. I was "Hugo Nash," identical (to outward appearances, at least)... except for my hands, my thumbs and my bellybutton! They extracted the original Hugo with sterile decoherence tweasers and then they placed him in the Mezzanine freezer between two adjacent dimensions. There he would cool for as long as my research project lasted, and they would reinsert him in my stead when they pulled me out.
Or that was the plan. For if I am stuck here, then the original Hugo Nash is stuck, too!
Plop! The original Hugo was gone and the new Hugo was here. I was naked as the day he was born. The shock of the substitution left me disoriented. I lived in a house, Hugo Nash's house. A 3D house!
I looked around.
There was a simple one-way communication device - a television I now know – making excited noises in one room. It was very loud and new images flashed by every few seconds. The 3Ds watch this device, but I find it annoying because of its constant pulsation.
When he had been extracted, the original Hugo Nash must have been observing some unique 3D rite and it remained “on” even as he was being warehoused. I watched the screen. Very large and heavily disguised humans pushed each other around to possess a leather gasbag in a kind of oblong temple. I could understand why they would want to possess a bag of gas, for I am one myself. But then, to my astonishment, they would beat one another. They would kick and throw the bag of gas around and jump on it and throw it into the ground!
The people bayed and leaped to their feet and drank fizzy golden libations that made them very animated. On the periphery of the inner circle, minimally disguised females of the species danced and called rhythmic incantations. The people drinking the golden libations responded by repeating the incantations, jumping up, then sitting, yelling, standing, then sitting, becoming increasingly agitated. Some of them poured the golden libations on the heads of others and then they began to wrestle and punch one another. They all wore similarly colored clothing with slogans and numbers emblazoned on their chests or their rounded bellies. They were apparently a dramatic chorus of some sort. I did not understand the meaning of the rite, but the leather gasbag must have been very central to the ceremony.
Frequently, the routine was interrupted – often for very long intervals – while a series of educational lectures instructed viewers to try certain things, wear them, buy them, drive them, eat them, or drink them. The 3Ds apparently use these televised educational programs to train themselves like we do in uteri. The intensity and repetitiveness are obviously central to the specie's culture. But it all gave me an aching jellywash of Schu'ũmm right behind my ersatz eyes.
I turned away from the one-way communication device and looked about me. There was furniture in the room: an "overstuffed chair," a cabinet with plates and drinking glasses in it. There were many unwashed socks and pizza boxes and empty potato chip bags and empty cans and a ring with "keys" and envelopes that contained "bills" on the sitting thing called a "sofa." I looked at the bills - some people were clearly very, very angry with Hugo Nash. They were warning and threatening him about something. Were the bills sent by extortionists? Was Hugo Nash... was I... in some sort of trouble with local crime syndicates?
An odd digital device they call a "remote control" lay on the sofa. They use this, I later came to understand, to "change channels" on the television communicator because they do not know how to speak Field Impulse, either to one another or to their electronic devices. If they could ex- and impulsifor like ordinary intelligents, then they would be able to “change channels” without using the device. I saw that there were several hundred "channels" available on the television, but in my studies I discerned only four or five or six basic "themes" that differentiated them: physical activities like kicking or throwing gasbags, shopping relationship instruction, moral relationship instruction, sex relationship instruction, violence relationship instruction, and sometimes sex and shopping and violence relationships all mixed together.
I am convinced that this television was a learning reinforcement tool – one would study a lesson on one channel of the television. Then "changing the channel," the lesson was repeated, and so on, until the lesson you were supposed to absorb finally became second nature to the human. It seemed to be an effective educational tool for them, although I never quite understood what the end goal was or why they needed to educate themselves in such a time-consuming manner.
To me, all of the quasi-intelligent instructors on these channels looked pretty much the same: two ears; one nose; a single mouth; two eyes of roughly the same size and appearance; some of them without hair and some with hair all over. Their voices were also all the same.
I explored my 3D house. In the food preparation area, a room called a "kitchen," I saw empty bottles of a substance labeled "peanut butter" and a lot of "bread crumbs."
I saw a few small, dark, creatures with antenna creeping around the edges of the kitchen sink. We 5Ds keep tschůųpis, which are larger, substantially more intelligent, but similar looking. We keep them as house pets and guard animals, of course. Is there an evolutionary link between these small dark earth-insects that live in the humans' kitchens and our own intelligent, affectionate and well-trained tschůųpis?
A "refrigerator" stood against the wall of the kitchen. It was supposed to keep things "cool." Inside the refrigerator there were bottles labeled "beer" and "Coca-Cola" and "ketchup." I now understand that "beer" and "Coca-Cola" and "ketchup" are what the quasi-intelligents consume to sustain themselves. The "freezer" compartment was empty except for a box of ice cream. There were no healthful radioactives in the refrigerator and nothing plastic that was good to melt into my sockets, except the packaging.
Next to the refrigerator there was a thermal heater. They use this, I now know, to prepare chopped up pieces of other life forms so that they can ingest them. First they kill animals and then they cook them. Then they refrigerate what's left over and then they cook it again. It is all very energy-wasting and very confusing. On a counter-top I saw a microwave thermal heater. I felt the urge to deflate myself, slide inside and excite my gaseous molecules with radiation, but I did not. I knew that giving in to the urge to self-deflate leads to personal degradation and addiction. I know there are a lot of things like that on this particular spheroid, and that is what, later on, started to attract the delinquents.
I looked around the kitchen. I saw a machine I recognized as a "dishwasher." It was full of dirty dishes and cups and glasses and silverware, and more of those small, dark, insect things with antenna. They looked friendly enough, but they ran when I tried to pet them.
I explored “my house” further. There was a "bathroom." They do things in bathrooms that all highly inefficient corporeal life forms need to do on a regular basis in order to regulate their internal systems and to purge themselves of under-utilized energy resources. The reason there was a kitchen and a bathroom was because of their inherent organic inefficiency.
This bathroom had a "bathtub" in which, so I now understand, Hugo Nash would "wash" himself. The tub looked yellow and dirty. I was glad I do not have to wash. I refused to ever step into his dirty bath tub. It, too, was inhabited by a few of the skittish crawly things with antenna.
Another room had a "bed" which looked like someone never got out of it. The original Hugo Nash "slept" there. Sleeping is a kind of hibernation, but extremely brief and fitful. It is no wonder their lives are so short. Sleeping appears to be a form of purgative for their subconscious minds, which is curious in light of how little this species' minds contain. Was I supposed to lie in that disgusting bed, too? No way, Tszũm'paáß save my memory!
There was another room (I think it is called a "study" or perhaps an "office," according to my training) where there were "books" and "magazines" and "bills" scattered around the floor, and also one of those rudimentary digital computers connected to a simple communication network. The display screen was on and showed a shopping site, apparently somewhere on a river in South America.
There was an icon that indicates he -- I - - Hugo Nash - - had "mail." What was I supposed to do with "mail?" My training informed me that "mail" is a message directed to me with important information. I thinkput the computer to read to me my mail. Nothing happened. I thinkput it again with no success. I tried pushing random buttons on the keyboard with my elbow (it would take me awhile to adjust to using my inside-out upside-down thumbs). The buttons "do things" though I have no idea what. I gave up; but as I moved my elbow aside, something rolled over something else on the screen and a box opened up on the screen.
I had 478 "messages:"
From Tabatha "Add inches to your manhood..."
From Henry G "Buy Viagra now at special prices..."
From Mana Johnson "Please help me move inheritance from..."
From Lands Start "Hurry! Special Offer ends on..."
From Joe "Stand with Ukr..."
From Sam "Stand with Isra..."
From Justin "Stand with Taiwa... "
From Jessica "I lost 50 lbs...
From Sabatha "Add inches to your manhood..."
From Yabatha "Add at least five inches to your..."
From Crystal "Best prices on body..."
From Cynthia "Satisfy your girlfriend by..."
From Samantha "Add inches to your..."
From Kobe Tanakana "Can you help me to... "
From Administrator "Your accounts are about to be... "
From Bank of Kabul "Urgent. Your wire transfer was..."
From Fourth National Bank of Kobe "You have inherited 100 million..."
From L&C Elementary School "Confirm Substitute Teaching on Monday..."
From Harry Hugo "Call to confirm your prize..."
From Harriette Huno "Cliatis at the lowest prices..."
From Juno Yugo "Can you help me..."
There were many more, all much the same. I understood none of it. I looked around at Hugo Nash's - no MY study - and the chaos within it.
According to my indoctrination, Hugo Nash was a reclusive person who lived alone after he "divorced" from his opposite sex companion. This is another peculiarity of this species because we 5Ds, except in the name of science as in my case, would never voluntarily separate from our triploids! Still, being "divorced" made my mission slightly easier because I would not have to interact with my human "ex" who might easily detect the artificiality of my 5D self. But perhaps not because I have learned that even the humans who "wed" and "live together" may not know each other very well.
I deeply miss my Trippy Pippy!
Apparently, this Nash fellow almost never went outside the house. He often sent out for food and groceries to be delivered to him and he did nearly everything with his computer. Intermediaries then brought things to him, but Hugo Nash never talked to the intermediaries directly. They just drove up to his house, dropped things by the door, and then they drove off again.
But I am now Hugo Nash. Am I still a recluse? How could I be a Research Pioneer if I do not go outside the house? Why did they pick this person for me to alias for? It must have been more inattention and sloppiness at the Demographic Services, may they instantly be dissolved!
Nash "worked" from home doing something with a telephone selling something to people who he did not know. He was also a part-time "substitute teacher."
What did he teach?
What happened to the other teacher that he substituted for? Did 3Ds put teachers into the Mezzanine?
And what could these 3D quasi-intelligents possibly "teach?" To whom?
I saw pizza crumbs and crumpled paper napkins on the floor. There were little tumbleweeds of hair and dust along the edges of the floor and in the corners. It was a mess. Why did they pick this man for me to alias for? Why couldn't they have picked someone cleaner? This Nash 3D was a slob, I tell you!
I had been trained to first find some clothes because these quasi-intelligents, unlike our own kind, cover themselves up as a form of portable shelter from the elements and, mostly, as a kind of disguise. Cover ups are an important part of their world. They are always covering things up, so it seems. Especially their political and business "leaders," so I later learned.
I was still naked, just as Hugo Nash was when he was born. I was taught that if I walked around, as we 5Ds do, completely natural as Tszũm'paáß meant us to be, then I might be "arrested" and locked up.
I looked for some of Hugo Nash's clean disguises to put on. There was nothing clean. Everything was rumpled and smelly and lying on the floor. I found some clean disguises in what they call a "dryer." They looked like they had been in there for weeks. I put on "pants" - does the zipper face the front or the back? How does one use a zipper? "Socks" go over my "feet." "Shoes" go over the socks. You tie "laces" to keep the shoes on your feet while you "walk." I was working from instinct and the knowledge that had been embedded in me during my cocooning.
I found a sweatshirt with a hood - does the hood pull over the face or behind the head?
In front of the face would make more sense because it would keep the unhairy part of the head warm and also better disguise who you are. Well, if that makes sense, then on this planetoid, it must be the other way around, so the hood must fit behind the head. Szofia, who I met later, wears a sweatshirt with a hood worn behind the head, so my guess was correct.
I put on a shirt. Buttons, oh no! Oiyoyoyei, what a pain in the cheeky bonnets buttons are when your thumbs are wrongly opposed!
I practiced for several hours putting clothes on and taking them off and putting them on again. I found some big red mittens near the heating device in the kitchen. I put them on to cover up my inverted hands. Except for my hands, I worked things out. I looked in a reflecting device: I had become... Hugo Nash... however, Hugo Nash with backwards hands with wrongly opposing thumbs inside red kitchen gloves. And a butt-button! I felt as ridiculous as I was sure I looked.
My indoctrination informed me to find Hugo Nash's "wallet" which was in a "jacket" pocket. It contained the "identification" things that would make me certifiably "human." I found small pieces of paper and plastic. There was a paper called a "Citation" from something called a "Court" with an "appearance date." No one had told me what a "court" was. I found a small business card next to the citation. The business card had the name of a "lawyer" on it. What was that for?
I found a couple of plastic rectangles in Hugo Nash's wallet. Credit cards they call them. Also, a "social security card." Those without "social security" must be socially insecure, I guess. I was feeling very insecure. Did I need a social insecurity card?
The wallet contained a lot of information whose utility I did not yet fully understand. I found a "library card," a "debit card," a small piece of candy in a wrapper, some greenish rectangular papers with a man's portrait and numbers in the corners, another piece of paper that promised "fifty cents off" if I bought something called "razor blades," a card that had something to do with "health insurance" (how does one "insure" health?), a "bus transfer ticket," another credit card to buy "gasoline," an "automatic cash machine" card for a "bank," a shred of paper with some numbers written on it (a secret code of some sort?), more slips of paper with blocks of numbers - Lotto? Power Ball? I found a paper clip and a card with a store's name on it. I found a picture of what I thought was a dog with white fur.
I had been informed that Nash "owned" a dog. But how does one life form own another life form? Where was this dog and what did he... she... it... mean to Hugo Nash, or to me? They didn't tell me very much about the dog. I put the dog picture back in the wallet.
There was a another picture in the wallet: a miniature girl with brown hair. This was, I learned during my cocooning, my "daughter" and she lived with her "mother," my so-called "ex" wife. It was good that "my daughter" did not live with me because she, too, might recognize that I wasn't what I seemed to be. Or would she? This miniature brown-haired girl seemed to be about the same size as Szofia, who I met later. But unlike Szofia who was tens of thousands of years old, this one, "my daughter," really was "a child," at least by the 3Ds' reckoning.
As I looked around me, I wished that I could have talked to the real Hugo Nash and asked him what all this stuff was. But I did not really want to talk with a real, live quasi-intelligent 3 dimensional at that point, nor was it possible to talk to him because he was chilling in the Mezzanine.
I found a driver's license in his wallet. I looked at Hugo Nash's picture on the driver's license. It was a picture of me. It was a bad picture. He looked startled. It looked like he, that is "I", had blinked just when they took the picture. I later learned that all drivers license photographs in this nation-state are supposed to be taken when you blink so that you can be identified by your startled appearance.
I looked again at the drivers license. The license had information about him, about me: Hugo Louie Nash.
Louie???
Apparently, I had three names, not just two. Do some of the natives have four or more names. Is there a Louie Louie Nash?? I saw that I had an identification number: WANASHHL87738. The drivers license had an expiration date in two years.
What would expire?
Did that mean I would expire in two years?
I had a "sex," according to the license: I was a "male." I am not sure what that means except that it has something to do with how these organisms replicate. I had brown eyes. Brown hair. I looked in the mirror and confirmed that I did, indeed, have brown eyes and brown hair, although my hair was thinner on the top of my head and starting to turn white at the edges. I was 5 foot 9 inches tall. I weighed 183 pounds. I looked "pudgy." I felt fat. In 5D I "weigh" almost nothing because I am pure gas. The trainers incorporated extra mass into my overpressure expansion sacks to give me the appropriate "weight" for this assignment. One hundred eighty-three pounds... no wonder I felt so sluggish.
Hugo Nash-- I -- had a "birth date," according to his drivers license (Bless my jellies, I do not want to even think about that!). I was "born" on March 15, 1988. There was a birth place, too. I was "born" in a location called "New York New York." So what and where was Hugo Nash before he was born? They do not recycle themselves? If not, why not? It was all very peculiar.
What was this New York New York? It sounded redundant - perhaps it is a typographical error, a printing stutter, and there is really only one New York, not two of them. Or maybe there are many New York New Yorks? Maybe there is also a triple, a New York New York New York just like there might be a Louie Louie. I hoped there are not many people from New York New York New York and that I will never run across anyone who wants to talk to me about it because I would not know what to say. I would claim that I have amnesia.
I have claimed amnesia for a lot of things. The amnesia was related to the same incident that caused my hands to be reattached backwards by the surgeons. That was my story: I was traumatized by the medical emergency and I really cannot remember the details. I convinced myself and everyone else that I had amnesia. Except for Szophia who believes nothing and always laughs so hard that she nearly asphyxiates.
I saw a "signature" on the drivers license... it was Hugo Nash's signature. I was trained to understand that this is a validating detail and that I had to learn how to simulate this mark. It would be difficult, especially with my inverted hands and super opposing thumbs. I intuitively knew that I needed to practice my signature.
There was more: it said on the driver's license that I was an "organ donor." I have organs? Organs - not pipes and pumps and meters? How can a 3D life form donate his organs? Wasn't it necessary for a 3D to keep his organs to stay alive? Donating them could be fatal! I had no organs. I was here as a guest only, as an alias. I looked like Hugo Nash, I sounded like Hugo Nash. But I was Hugo Nash only on the outside, and I had no organs to "donate."
I did have a heartbeat even though it was artificial. Pum pum pum, all very steady, day and night, day after night. I would get used to the noise of my heart beating even though it was so loud and disconcerting. Pum pum pum.
I wished my heart would stop beating for just few hours so that I could think more clearly.
I had the customary "body temperature" for this life form: 6.458 degrees fsså'Œtz. It corresponded to the local gauge of 97.3 in Fahrenheit which, if not exactly the body temperature of the local dominant human species, was close enough to pass for human. But my life function regulators were external to my 3D pseudo-body. The metronome that maintained my "heartbeat," my plasma meters, my pressure gauges, my temperature regulators, my flutes and equiliberators, my sockets and relief valves, the piping for all this and, of course, the Zeltzer Batteries to run it all for the duration of my mission... all of this resided in 4D space attached to the back of my 3D alias. And in 5D, of course, I was also connected to my telemetry boards and broadcast dish.
I knew it was all there clinging to me like a back pack. Or, like the scuba tanks or aqualungs the locals wear when they go diving beneath their seas. I see my external equipment all the time; but the locals do not notice them, and they never will. They are like flatfish who can only see up, but not down. But I was relieved to see that my podules hang on me like my own skin, which is natural because it is all attached to my own skin by the necessary wires and pipes. So long as I was careful to avoid having my support podules cast a shadow into their cramped little 3D world, they would never be the wiser.
Was it awkward having some of my essentials in 4 and 5D while the rest of me resides exclusively in 1, 2 and 3D? In the beginning it was awkward, but I got used to it. Although the 4th and 5th were there, there was nothing to interfere with them, no quantum hooks or entropy wires, nothing at all to snare my podules as I carried them along with me. In fact, there was not even any "drag" because there is nothing here in 4D or 5D to restrict me. It really was like scuba gear and oxygen tanks - out of this uni-slice they are heavy and clumsy, but in the water, you hardly notice them at all. Ordinarily, "I," in my aboriginal existence, would extend through all five dimensions anyway, so I was only fractionally in my natural state with my podules and telemetry pack carried around with me, light as the vacuum, in the Fourth and Fifth.
I replaced the drivers license in the wallet and put the wallet back in the jacket pocket. I looked some more. I found a cotton tissue in another pocket. Some lint and some fuzz. A receipt for something he had bought. Some things called "coins," metal disks with pictures of humans etched on them. There was a "comb." It is a little sticky to the touch and has small pieces of what looks like dead dry skin on it. Nash had hair that grew. And fingernails and toenails.
I have hair that looks like Nash's hair, but it does not grow. My hair is programmed to always look like Hugo Nash's hair in his drivers license photograph. My hair does not grow longer, fall out, turn color, nor can it be "cut" at places called "barber shops." My hair, in fact, cannot be cut at all because it is spun from chŭpaжthx fibers. My fingernails and toenails do not grow. I will always look like Hugo Nash at the moment that I substituted in for him but, praise the Dissolution, I didn't need to use his comb.
There was so much to study and learn about Hugo Nash, so I set myself to it. I thinkput the television to receive and relayed to myself all of its hundreds of channels simultaneously while I unwound a figer communication pipe discretely hidden in my ear and plugged it into one of the desk data ports. I sat quietly while, for a few minutes, the 200 channels of this species' peculiar "intelligence" was poured into me. It was after nightfall, the time when the quasi-intelligents "sleep." I sent an expulsifor and thinkput the television into the "off" mode. I folded myself into a contemplation posture on the floor in front of the sofa in the living room and began to organize all that I had downloaded. I elevated a pole and ingested some stray radiation. I decreased my pressures slightly. I began to frusszulate softly.
I saw five ways at once. I was pure calm.
