The Big Burp Alters the Cosmos and the Universities Shut Down
Life Among the Three Dimensionals - Chapter 12
I asked Szofia repeatedly why we had to fly... and where we were going!!
She marched me through the airport lobby. Thanks to Szophia's ubiquitous social media campaign, the airport was full of people - nearly half of them, by my estimate! - wearing over-sized oven mittens and electrostatically charged hair, just like mine. Of that half, nearly half again had green hair and hooded sweatshirts like Szofia's. I could hear that people were listening to Spotify on their cellphones and most of them were listening to "my daughter," Jenny Nash, singing "Do the Pudge!"
We strode through the airport lobby and, immersed in the camouflage of fashionable kitchen mittens and green dyed hair, no one seemed to notice us at all.
Still. I didn't know why we were flying off somewhere.
She finally gave me an answer.
Sort of.
“Hugh," Szofia said, "we're going to fly because it's too far to walk. And besides, it's safer to hide in plain view among the big herds of these three dimensional herbivores than it is to travel on our own. The real problem is your 4D backpack bobbing around like a flag. You're, like, you know, a big Goodyear blimp with a huge sign that reads "Here I Am," Mr. Hugh! So you are veritable bait for all the Branchers to pick out, like, you know, a giant inflatable pink neon carrot. So, the faster we get to where we are going, the faster I will be able to escape the Branch bounty hunters."
“But why can't you just leave this planet the same way you got here?” I asked Szofia as we walked through the long lines of travelers.
She looked irritated. “Yeah? Yeah? You want me to just get up and leave, huh? Well, why don't you, Hugh?”
I explained again how because I had lost my location buttons, I could not be extracted because I could not be, well, properly located. So if Pioneer Central tried to pull me back without my Drůkk' ąou buttons, then instead of me, they might withdraw into my 5D universe slice someone else... like Szofia, or a dog... or a whole baseball team... or an entire city like Washington D.C... As I explained to Szophia, accidentally sending a whole American city into the 5th dimension could be more than slightly embarrassing - even if nobody noticed that it was missing!
Nor, without road signs and a map, could I just walk out of this three dimensional slice of the Multiverse the same way I had walked in. With all the zeta-dillions of universes being laid down all around us by the mezosecond, I would not even know where to look for the path that led me here. So I could end up walking aimlessly around and around forever from one adjoining uni-slice of the Multiverse to another one. Any nearby universe would be so close as to be virtually identical but for the few missing socks or a piece of toast that fell upside down here and right-side-up there... with the exception that there could be two of me in that particular slice of universe, or even three or four... or a huge crowd of 'mes,' or possibly 'mes' of different ages, depending on where I was when I walked in on myself.
Although two "me's" encountering one another is nothing disastrous in itself (it happens now and again), it could lead to even more complications trying to sort out 'me from me' in deciding which 'me' to extract. It would be as complicated as pulling a thread through the eye of a quantum needle. One false step and I might fall into an entropy trap and I'd never come out. Or, if I made a wrong turn, I could accidentally walk into the mucilage that holds all the many universes together. Stepping into multiversal mucilage is like stepping into an enormous wad of cosmic chewing gum. That could lead to me dragging the goopy stuff along with me causing uni-slices to get completely and forever entangled. What a mess that is, Szofia, cleaning up entangled universes that ought to have been parallel and now intersect!
And what was worse, I explained, what if Pioneer Central had finally got around to sending me my Trippy Pippy and it arrived after I had left? I so miss my Trippy Pippy, I told Szofia. “So that's why it was imperative to have my Drůkk' ąou location buttons so Pioneer Central can pull the right 'me' out at the right time without wreaking temporal havoc.”
“Whatever,” said Szofia with obvious disinterest. She slowed to light a cigarette and blow smoke rings at the airport surveillance cameras.
Szofia then explained that her predicament was similar to mine.
“It's no easier for me than for you, Hughniper.” She flicked a cigarette butt onto the floor and lit another one. “See, I got here hitching a ride with one of those intergalactic clouds of pollen that periodically roll this way. It's like tramping with a freight train, you know what I mean? I jumped off Earthside along with a load of cosmic dust and a bunch of primordial life forms. Me and the hay fever pollen that came to afflict these Homo-Saps arrived around the same time.”
She turned to look me straight in the eye. “You know, Hugh, I'm not a seedling anymore, so it'd be tough for me to hang out with the Pollenesians again for a few thousand years, even if another cloud were to pass by this way. But with Branchers all around, I still have got to make a move or I'm gonna get flushed. You gotta get off the loo and do what you gotta do. You savvy that, Mr. McHugh?”
As I pondered what Szofia had told me about her galactic tramping, I found myself standing in the security line with Szofia pushing me toward the scanning machines.
We did not have tickets. For that matter, I, for one, didn't even know where we were going!
We did not have boarding passes.
We did not have any seat assignments.
We did not have any baggage... well, at least not in three dimensions.
On top of that, we were probably the most sought after pair of terrorists in this forsaken little unislice in some bayou of forgotten time! Tszũm'paáß save my memory, what were we doing here?! And those body scanning machines! The electromagnetic pulses were causing me to flute psziproots through my ventilation orifices and my pressure dials were whirring like crazy! I felt like I would explode, there was so much juicy radiation enveloping everyone. And then I saw that the three dimensional humans were showing some type of identification cards to the security personnel as they entered into the scanners! What was I going to show them: the drivers license of Hugo Nash, the most wanted man in America?! What were they going to see on the scanner screen?! A sackful of transuranic methane and ignoble gases, pipes and conduits that pass into an invisible life support podule and telemetry pack in 4 and 5D? But Szofia kept pushing me forward, forward, forward like this was the most natural thing to do!
Oiyoyoyei! Oiyoyoyei! Oiyoyoyei!
One of the security officers pointed at me and shouted: “Hey, you! Take your shoes off! And take off your stupid gloves!”
Me? I had to take my shoes off? I looked around - everyone was untying their shoes and waddling barefooted toward the scanning machines like ducks. Untying shoelaces was very hard for my upside down inside out hands! I pried off my shoes and held them in my backwards, upside down hands - oh, what was going to happen when they saw my upside down inside out thumbs? We were toast, burnt and butter-side down toast. But Szofia kept pushing me forward, and she did not take her shoes off or even stop smoking, for that matter.
She pushed me into the scanner and I nearly jumped out of my gasbag when they turned it on! The EM radiation surge made my gravitational sheets bounce completely out of alignment! I felt like I was momentarily fuzzed out-of-focus! The security guards stared at my Hugo Nash driver's license thinking, no doubt: What have we here? The world's number one terror suspect flashing his photo ID to airport security!
While they held my driver's license they were looking slack-jawed at the screen in utter disbelief because there was nothing there to be seen, just an empty sack full of gas and tubes and... and... WHAT WAS THAT? A very three dimensional 9mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic police pistol that the security officers could clearly see lying in my fourth dimensional backpack that the security guards couldn't see?? Oiyoyoyei! Oh, what had Szofia done to me!
In that instant, Szofia whispered, “Hey, Hughie!” When I looked across at her, she blew a handful of pepper into the scanner chamber and, Aaaaaacchhhhhoooo, I expulsifored. The security guards bio-electrics instantly were wiped clean, as was all of their electronic gear, while Szofia (an intelligent vegetable unaffected by bio-electric impulses) pushed me out of the scanner and walked through herself. Szofia then dragged into the scanning booth the next two completely frozen passengers, an elderly couple with gray hair.
Szofia brushed off her hands in obvious satisfaction. “Totally cool. You are one bad boy, Hughie baby. Now, before I forget...”
She removed the Hugo Nash driver's license from the guard's hands and gave it back to me. Then she took the pistol out of my jacket pocket and put it in the grandmother's purse.
"What are you doing with that gun, Szofia!" I wailed.
"Yugho, you are such a whiner," she answered. "First, you got all bent out of shape when I borrowed a pistol from the police station that time when you broke us out of jail. Now, you get all bent out of shape when I return the pistol to the police! Yughopio, make up your mind already, okay?"
Szofia then stubbed out her cigarette and flicked the butt with her thumb and forefinger into the security guard's cup of coffee. “Ciao, bella,” she said, blowing him a kiss laced with pepper dust.
Sniffling and completely disheveled, I hurriedly put my shoes back on and scurried off in Szofia's tow into the main embarkation terminal. Fifteen minutes later, the expulsifor wore off. Security officers drew their guns, guards started shouting, the security alarms screamed. The poor, unwitting couple were tackled by burly policemen, frisked and handcuffed. The grandmother's handgun, found in her purse, was seized as evidence.
Szofia sniffed the air. “The coast is clear. C'mon, Hughey, let's go grab a hamburger and coffee while we wait for our flight out'a here.”
I also sniffed the air. It was not pepper or hamburger or spores that I smelled. It was something else.
* * *
The airport concourse was lined with television screens that all played the same program everywhere you looked. My "ex-wife" was giving another interview, this time about her upcoming kiss-and-tell memoir, Carol's Story: I Was Married to an Islamo-Slasher-KiddiePorn-Terrorist, ghost-authored overnight by an artificially intelligent LLM ("large lying model") book-writing computer program that totally confabulated, proof-read, edited and published in twenty languages the entire 500 page autobiographical hallucination (plagiarized and concatenated from several thousand previously published books) and that instantly made the top of every newspaper’s bestseller list based solely on pre-orders by bookstores owned by the same people who published the newspapers.
During the commercial breaks, the many television screens flashed pictures of... ME! But I was hardly recognizable. They were showing photos of me that clearly had been altered. I now appeared to be, what... Chinese? Palestinian? Russian? They showed me holding an AK47 and wearing a black and white keffiyeh scarf??? And it was breathlessly reported that my true name was not Hugo Nash, but Vladimir Hassan Hu-Mao Putinov!
Then they flashed pictures that they said were computer generated images of Szofia based on purported witnesses who allegedly trained with her in one terrorist training camp or another... but the computer generated pictures made her look like she was a leather-jacketed twenty-something Ulrike Meinhof type with black eyes and dark hair, carrying several sticks of dynamite in one hand and a large knife in the other, and wearing a green and red hijab instead of a hooded sweatshirt! This was complete nonsense!
"Szofia," I exclaimed, "they're never going to find us with pictures like those!"
Szofia yawned and wriggled her tattooed fingers in her cup of overpriced coffee. "Huno," you really don't get it, do you? They want to chase us. But they absolutely don't want to catch us. At least, not yet. They just want to keep everybody scared and worried. We're much more scary on the run than in captivity, and we're much more useful alive than dead."
The coffee in her cup diminished as she swirled her fingers.
"Eventually, Snugorino, they'll get around to apprehending us." She licked her fingers. "And after that, Snugho, they'll make a major Hollywood movie starring big time actors and glamorous actresses, depicting their heroic pursuit, their death-defying adventures and our ignominious demise, all of which, of course, will be 100% twaddle; but which will immediately be deemed the indisputable truth as verified by various truthfulness-certifying entities that are themselves 100% twaddle.
I was totally baffled. None of this made any sense to me, an intelligent, gaseous five-dimensional scholar. My head was literally spinning.
“How do we get out of this madness? And where are we going?” I pleaded with Szofia to tell me as she sat stirring her fingers inside a cup of hot coffee.
“Los Angeles, Hughie. We're going to the City of Angels.”
“Los Angeles! Why Los Angeles? And how are we going to get there without any tickets?” Based on what I had seen so far, I didn't really want an answer to my question. I could feel my gases begin to ee'ălify.
Szofia smiled impishly. “Who has no tickets, dude?” She removed her fingers out of the now empty coffee cup, wiped her nails clean and pulled out of her sweatshirt two airline boarding passes, destination LAX airport. She waved them in front of my eyes. “First class, Hugh; we only fly first class.”
I was astounded. “What? What? How did we get airplane tickets?” My gravitational fields began to wobble.
Szophia grinned. “Well, we didn't, exactly, but, uhhh ... " she held up the boarding passes to the light... "but, Trevor and Gale McPfeffer did have tickets! The McPfeffers, you know, the older couple who were arrested with the, uhh, missing, semi-automatic police-issue pistol a short time ago. So 'Trevor,'” she said looking me in the eye, “while we were standing in line at security, a little light leafy touch allowed us to, uh, borrow, these humble first-class tickets… along with their driver’s licenses, of course.
I could barely speak, I was so outraged. “Szofia, you are going to get us into big trouble! They are going to report their stolen tickets to the authorities!” My schrΰmp'schtǻck was going to burst my seams!
“Cool it, Hugh.” she laughed heartily. “We're Szofie and Hughie, the most wanted terrorists of all earth-time -- not to mention that I am also pursued by Vegimatic bounty hunters from the fourth dimension, in case you've forgotten. You're worried that I'm going to get us in trouble? Don't be such a bitter herb, Hugh. We're already a couple of pickled dill cucumbers.” She spun her fingers in my now half-empty cup of coffee.
“And besides," she continued, "who is this couple? They're obviously just a couple of loco, armed terrorists, if you ask me. I mean, Mister Trevor McPfeffer, give me a break! Is that cheeky, suspicious-looking older couple trying to impersonate you and me? Who knows? They might even be the evil Szofie and Hughie incarnate! That's right, Szofie and Hughie traveling in disguise, hmm? Or, more than like, they are our evil confederates! I mean, who's to say? They can say they are whoever they like, but who's going to believe them?
She licked the coffee off her finger tips. “And besides, by the time everything gets sorted out, we'll have drunk our first class Cabernets and Orange Juice Screwdrivers and we'll be on the ground in Tinseltown. Comprendé amigo?”
I had nightmarish visions of sharp little copper slugs piercing my gas bladders! But before I could exhaust the balloon of Schu'ũmm that was welling up inside my flutes and equiliberators, Zsophia gripped my arm with one of her small, powerful hands and said sotto voce,
“Now don't get too excited and don't turn around right now, Hugh, but there are two guys over there who have been staring at us for the past ten minutes, and I don't like the look of them.”
Of course, having been warned not to turn around and look, I instantly turned around to look, and, indeed, there were two male humanoids, both of them holding what looked like stuffed animals. They were laughing and grinning and pointing at us.
They pointed right at us and they waved!
Were they friends or relatives of the real Hugo Nash?
Then, oh Praise the Dissolution, they got up and started to walk right toward us!
This was it! We were a couple of pickled dill cucumbers, alright, just like Szofia said! She tightened up and drew her concealed pump-spray bottle of Roundup from her pocket and held it nervously at her side, tattooed finger on the activator. “Sneeze, Hugh!" she commanded me, and she blew a cupful of latte cinnamon froth at my face.
I sneezed and expulsifored.
Aaaachooooo!
The lights went out and people everywhere froze in place... except those two who kept walking straight at us, laughing, smiling with their hands outstretched! No reaction! They kept coming and grinning and coming and grinning! And those stuffed animals, those were no stuffed dogs or teddy bears... what was it they were carrying?
Szofia jumped out of her seat, knocking over a table. Her hand shaking, Szofia held the pump bottle of Roundup menacingly in front of her.
“Stop!” she commanded. “Twigs in the air and leaves on the ground! Now! One more step and you're uprooted!”
They ignored Szofia and went straight for me!
“Vr#Str¥oµ*gere' ~æ^ΐted!” Said the one on the right, giggling.
Szofia sprayed them! But they just... inhaled!
“Aaarwk!” gulped Szofia, which, I imagine, is vegespeak for something like 'oh shit' in terrestrial AmeriEnglish.
“Wowser!” said the man on the left in a heavily accented auricular vernacular. “Hmmhmm, 'ßustuřgoőchç!” He frizzed his decay signature, which in Field Impulse language meant something like, 'Cool! Do it again!' Because, indeed, they were communicating in Field Impulse because they were 5D gas bags, just like me, wearing human skins and clothes! And they were carrying their triploids with them, disguised like teddy bears, carrying them underarm like every self-respecting 5D. Except me!
“Hey, bro,” said the left one in AmeriEnglish, as all around us the expulsifor was beginning to wear off. “Where'd you get the antique 4 and 5D backpacks? And who's the grass-colored chick with the bottle of intoxicants? She's kinda missing a dimension, eh?”
He turned to Szofia: “Hey, how's tricks, sister? I'm Zerpăstchosptizhd and this is Clºpstr'apµo - you look a little bit green around the gills, kid, you know what I mean?”
I tried to explain. “Szofia! Szofia! Do not spray them! They are not from the Branch! They are Five Dimensionals from my universe! We are saved, Szofia! We are saved!”
Szofia looked disgusted. “We are saved, Hugh?” Szofia was annoyed as she cocked, locked and holstered her bottle of Roundup.
“Yo, uh... Hugh?” said Zerpăstchosptizhd pumping one of my upside down hands. “That's a funny name for a gaseous intelligent from the fifth dimension. So, uh, what're we saved from, anyhoo?”
I was incredulous. “You do not know me? I'm Ugoñaschßtenätraξo! I'm Hugo Nash, the Pioneer Explorer on an important anthropological study mission. Surely you have heard of me?”
“Yeah? Well, whatever,” said Clºpstr'apµo. “There haven't been any Pioneers in, oh, I dunno when. Are you, like, heh heh, lost in space? Hey, Zerpăstchosptizhd, when did they close down all that exploration and Pioneer study crap?”
Zerpăstchosptizhd scratched his head. “Beats me. Maybe several hundred million epicycles. Around the time of the Big Burp. You know, they closed down all the universities because all the students were protesting about the terrible things going on and the genocide that the State was funding or allowing to happen in Gasa. Or wherever. Your name's 'Hugh' you say?”
Szofia looked annoyed and put up her hood showing only her glowing green eyes.
Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd looked goofy. They did not know who I was! The Pioneer programs shut down? What was happening in Gasa that the authorities didn't want anyone to know about? Of course, hundreds of thousands, even millions of epicycles could have passed back home while I had only been on this little planetoid in this peculiar uni-slice a few months. But how could it be that the universities and the Pioneer programs had been shut down to censor students and suppress debate? Free speech and dissent were part of our enduring culture and gassy value system. Pioneering, the pursuit of knowledge and polyuniversal understanding were the essence of five dimensional civilization! The universities and the Pioneer Institute shut down? The end of freedom of speech? How could that be?
“How could that be?” Zerpăstchosptizhd echoed the question I finally put to him. “The Ahr-fǿrt Gassy University in the the central Looo Nebula? Doh. Beats me Mr. Hugh. I didn't fledge very well so, whatever. They kinda, you know, got the education inserts screwed up after they closed the schools and beat up so many students. After that, I didn't have much to do with academic types, you know. We were told to just drop out, shut up and get lost. So here we are.”
Clºpstr'apµo added: “We're just bopping around, you know, kicking back, stomping around the outer expansion slices of the Multiverse, sucking up the airborne plastic and gamma particles in this outpost, hanging with the natives before the tourists ruin the place and they start building all those Five Dimensional resort-hotels. We just flew back from that Fukushima place. Totally cool. To-tal-ly! Lots of hot rays; lots and lots of hot, radioactivity, you know what I mean? We've gone swimming in oil spills. Toxic waste sites. Sucked extra-long non-composting polymer threads. Chomped Styrofoam. Sucked frack juice. PCP. Formaldehyde. Mercury. You can get a real buzz on Earth almost without trying! And now we're off to Three Mile Island and then the Santa Susana Field Lab site and Canada's tar sands in Alberta and Chernobyl and Hanford and anyplace else we can find with dirty, hot juice. It's still real nice here, before they ruin things and start building the tourist spas, that is.”
Clºpstr'apµo turned to Zsophia. “Hey, kid, can you spray me again with some of that sweet jiggle juice you got in the bottle?”
“Who are these clowns?”
whispered Zsophia to me under her hood, glowering at Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd.
I was perplexed myself. I had no idea who they were. They seemed to be unstables or juvenile naifs. Or were unstables and naifs now the "norm" in the world of intelligent five dimensional gas bags?
“If you're Intelligases,” I said to Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd, “then where are your life support podules? Where are your communication gear? How did you get here? Do you have location buttons? And, most importantly... can I borrow your buttons?”
It was Zerpăstchosptizhd's turn to look perplexed.
“Doh, like you are a strange dude, Mr. Hugh. Your hands are a little weird, too, you know? Nobody uses external life support podules anymore. Or location buttons. Today, everything is, like, iPodules - you wear the whole thingy on your outerbladder or inside your sight preceptors, you know, like OoogleGasses. Ditto the location buttons. Who needs location buttons when permanent location transmitters are inserted during cocooning? Ditto the comm-crud. I mean, I haven't even seen an external telecom set since, I dunno, since whenever. How very very! Extreme funnyballs, yup. But that's how we spotted you, dude, walking around the airport with your 4D and 5D things and all. Very very, dude! And how'd we get here? We slived over, just like everyone else. Tripped our triploids out like toy teddy bears, just like the Five Dimensional Hitch-hiker's Guide to the 3D Galaxies suggested, so we didn't look too much out of place. Just followed the yellow brick road of sweet plastic litter and thin plumes of radiation seeping through the planetoid's coordinates. It's almost like the locals made this place for Intelligasses while wrecking their planet for themselves.
'This place is almost puuurrrfect -- for us, that is, not for them! It's in the tourist guide books, you know: Three dimensional vacation paradise on thirty squirts a day. EM emissions. Hot gamma and alpha particles everywhere. Plastic and hydrocarbons in the air, in the water, just, mmm mmm everywhere. Very cool. Very yum yum. Very intoxicating. Yessir. Very very. Just like that spray can, kid - say, can you hit me with another whiff, sister?”
Clºpstr'apµo turned to me. “So, did you retire here, Pops, going native, so to speak, to insuck all the goop in your golden epicycles before you, you know, get recycled, ahah hah hah?” He poked his triploid's belly and it bleated "Earrapphh."
This sorry looking triploid sounded as drunk as Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd, but, oh, still it made me nostalgic for my own Trippy Pippy.
Mostly, however, I was confused, stunned. These delinquents were talking to me like I was an old gas bag. I had hardly emerged before being sent to Earth on assignment. And that was only a few Earth months ago! They did not use Drůkk' ąou location buttons? So how could they help me get out of this place? Trembling, I asked Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd: “What... what age is this and what has happened back home?”
Clºpstr'apµo looked at my uncomprehendingly. “What age? Why it's 602-15/60097☼Ψ.18 in the Spΐntz-'hŏ epicycle, of course.”
The Spΐntz-'hŏ epicycle!! Naturally, I thought to myself. It had been just 401-9/67☼Ψ.2 in the Spΐntz-'há epicycle when I first emerged. Time moved differently at different distant points in any universe, let alone universes decadoodles removed from each other. It was completely to be expected that an hour here was epochs there. But only about two hundred million epicycles in 5D time had passed since I left - hardly enough time for such a momentous change to have occurred in my own civilization. It could be that among the three dimensional quasi-intelligents of this planetoid culture change could occur so quickly. But 5D gaseous intelligents are very evolved life forms who do not change capriciously! Two hundred thousand epicycles were a mere two and a half billion earth year equivalents or so... what possibly could have happened in such a short time frame?
“Dunno, Mr. Hugh,” said Zerpăstchosptizhd when I finally asked him. “There was something that happened. We told you, there was the Big Burp, you know, but that was before we emerged. But we know that a lot of gas got passed back then. And whatever.”
Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd looked at me like I was a bit crazy and shied away. “So, uh, yeah, we gotta go now, Mr. Hugh. And you, too, kid,” Zerpăstchosptizhd said to Szofia. “Nice green hair and all. Hope you find your missing dimension, kid. So, see you. Bye bye.”
Their triploids waved small drunk hands at me- "Earrapphh."
And off they galumphed, triploids underarm, leaking psziproots from their ears, waving and giggling, insucking toxic pollutants, trailing molecules of transuranic methane in their wake. Off they went, taking my hopes for an exit off this planet with them.
“We've got a plane to catch, Mister Hugh aka Trevor McPfeffer,” snarled Zsophia who was really very aggravated. “You got any more 'friends of the family' you want to make my acquaintance and scare the buds off me?”
I was lost in disquieting thoughts.
Tourists?
Five dimensional spas and resort hotels on Planet Earth?
Intoxicated triploids? I-podules and OoogleGasses?
Universities shuttered to censure and prevent political debate and dissenting opinions?
The Big Burp!?
The last major evolutionary belch had happened way back in gaseous pre-history, supposedly at the time when our 5D universe bubbled out of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Events seemed to have passed me by. In all honesty, I did not know if this was good news or bad. I was utterly baffled by what had happened to my own universe, just as I was baffled by what was happening in this one.
But I was equally baffled by the question Szofia had not answered: WHY are we flying to Los Angeles???
* * * * *
[Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. Did you start in the middle? Forgotten what came before? Skip a few chapters? To go back in time click HERE.]
