Welcome to LA: Betrayed and Abandoned
Chapter 14 - Life Among the Three Dimensionals
Life Among the Three Dimensionals is a serialized sci-fi novel. Have you forgotten how we got here and who these characters are? Have you forgotten where and who you are? Have you been living a sci-fi novel your entire life? Are you looking for something to distract you from 'work' you'd rather not be doing? Did you stumble on this Substack site by accident and can't get out? For earlier chapters click HERE.
In the preceding Chapter 13, our traveling duo encountered the Branch face-to-face on their flight to Los Angeles. The bounty hunters seeking to weed Szofia were on board. They gagged and tied Hugo Nash into an economy class seat while they set forth to espalier Szophia, the ‘juvenile delinquent’ 4 dimensional intelligent vegetable. Szophia, meanwhile, was zonked out in 1st Class while composting hot dogs and absorbing multiple alcoholic beverages through her fingers. The Branchers set a series of turbulent events in motion that sucked themselves out of the fuselage and nearly crashed the jet. Arriving in Los Angeles, Chapter 14 of "Life Among the Three Dimensionals"...
We landed at Los Angeles International Airport.
The Department of Homeland Security had concluded that the two trench-coated, fedora and sunglass-wearing passengers who had been vacuumed out of the airplane must have been... the nefarious terror-duo Hugo and Szofia. More than likely, they hadn't been "sucked out" of the plane at all, the Department's spokesperson declared, but, rather, like the fabled D.B. Cooper, Hugo and Szofia had staged their mid-air exit and used concealed parachutes to make their getaway. This was a complete fantasy, of course, but the news media swallowed and regurgitated it as the whole truth!
As we walked into the airport terminal through a frenetic mob of television reporters, the story of Hugo's and Szofia's sensational mid-air escape was broadcast as a scrolling "breaking news" headline at the bottom of every overhead television screen in the airport. My picture - the notorious Cubano Sino-Russo Palestinian Terrorist Hugo Nash - flashed repeatedly on every screen along with a "computer-generated" simulation of green-haired Szofia, (my supposed criminal collaborator and/or child abductee), wearing a black and white keffiyeh. The images were accompanied by the latest breath-taking rewards offered for our capture dead or alive!
The 'experts' authoritatively concluded that yet another terrorist attack on Heartland America had barely been averted. Their frothy, completely fabricated commentary, prompted immediate and vociferous calls from every quarter of business and government (which, of course, is redundant), in the name of protecting Free Market Democracy and the American Way, to further constrain individual rights and liberties and to incarcerate and/or deport anyone who did not subscribe to the authorized narrative about the malevolent Hugo & Szofia.
In between the "breaking news" story, the news channels played excerpts from a recent re-interview of my ex-wife -- that is the original Hugo Nash's ex-wife -- Carol Nash. She had, within 48 hours of publishing her first runaway best seller (soon to be a full length made-for-TV movie starring several prominent Hollywood actors and actresses), released a sequel "kiss and tell" book: Even More Lurid and Excruciating Details About My Marriage to an Islamo-Slasher-KiddiePorn-Terrorist.
The sequel, just like her first book, had also been ghost-written overnight by an artificially intelligent LLM ("large lying machine") computer program that wrote, proof-read, edited and published in twenty different languages the entire 1,000 page autobiographical hallucination, including several dozen Photo-Shopped and digitally created inauthentic 'photographs' (borrowed and concatenated without any attribution whatsoever to the many millions of other books and images that the AI program had liberally plagiarized).
Meanwhile, "my daughter" Jenny was also on camera again! She had 'invented' yet another new dance step (that looked, more or less, just like "Everybody Does the Pudge," her first dance creation, except that in the 'new' dance the steps were performed backwards). Jenny had now dropped out of school at the age of twelve to become a full-time professional "influencer." She had released yet another song ("I Want You") with the following lyrics (also ghost-written by an artificially intelligent LLM program plagiarizing without any attribution whatsoever to millions of other songs and lyrics):
My Daddy's a wanted man. Wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. I want to be wanted, too! Too, too, too, too, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah! Do wacka do wacka do! Cha cha cha!
Szophia cringed and muttered “Oh Gawd, what a loser!!!” as she strode through the concourse with her hands covering her (now blossoming) ears.
Strangely, even though we walked undisguised right through the terminal with our pictures broadcast everywhere, nobody spotted us. The quasi-intelligents seem never to look at one another, at least not directly. Consequently, no one recognized us even though we were passing among them in plain sight.
Or, if they did recognize us, they pretended not to.
Waiting at the landing gate to greet the elderly Trevor and Gale McPfeffer were their son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter waving a crayon inscribed "Welcome Home" sign. All three of them - son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter - were wearing à la mode green-dyed hair like Szofia's and red oven mittens, just like I and a quarter of the young population of Los Angeles were wearing (thanks to Szofia's own social media campaign)!
But there was no sign of grandparents Trevor and Gale McPfeffer. Unbeknownst to the welcoming trio, the elderly Trevor and Gale McPfeffer were still in custody for having tried (apparently) to sneak onto this same flight without identification (because their pockets had been picked by Szofia and because Szofia had also slipped a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol into Mrs. McPfeffer's purse).
The fact that the elderly and as yet unidentified couple left behind in custody at the departure gate insisted that they were Mr. and Mrs. McPfeffor obviously made no sense because - obviously - the 'real' Mr. and Mrs. McPfeffor had checked in and had flown first class on the flight to Los Angeles. Obviously so, because otherwise the authorities would have made an error in detaining the wrong people, and authorities can never admit that they have made a mistake.
As for us... the double-incognito Mr. and Mrs. McPfeffor aka Hugo Nash aka Ugoñaschßtenätraξo the five dimensional gaseous intelligent, and Szofia, the 78,238 year old truant four dimensional intelligent vegetable... we simply walked right past the younger generation McPfeffers because they didn't know who we were and we didn't know who they were.
Appearance-wise, I was a changed man by the time we arrived in Los Angeles International Airport. Many of my chŭpaжthx hair fibers had turned white or fallen out. Due to acute loss of gas pressure, my entire body bladder (and especially my simulacrum human face) had become lined with what appeared to be "age lines." I wore a tourniquet around my arm that Szofia had made for me to staunch a small puncture wound. My wrists were red where the Branchers had tied my hands to the economy class armrests.
When we entered the main terminal, representatives of the airline and the jet manufacturer were holding a joint press conference in which s/he/it repeatedly declared, ipse dixit, that "passenger safety is our Companies' highest priority." S/he/it further announced the "latest (dis)information," i.e. that the plane's fuselage door had not just "popped open" as several obviously intoxicated eyewitness passengers had misunderstood, but that the evil Hugo and Szofia had, apparently, dynamited (or used a powerful and mysterious laser beam) to blast a hole in the otherwise completely safe and thoroughly inspected plane because, s/he/it repeated, "Safety is the Companies' highest priority."
The airline and airplane manufacturer also had brought in hundreds of corporate lawyers to corral the disembarking passengers. We were offered discounted (but not completely free) medical care plus a free mid-week one-time 30 minute pass to Disneyland along with an off-season 10% discount on a one-way economy class airline ticket to Kiev, Ukraine.
In return, the passengers were required to sign an agreement relating to the recent "incident" by which the signors agreed to release the airline and the airplane manufacturer, their successors or assigns, agents, employees, directors, officers and insurers, from any liability for all property damage, emotional and personal injuries, both known and unknown, now and forever; including a confidentiality agreement not to discuss with anyone, alive or dead, including members of the press, investigators from the FAA, TSA, NTSB, family or friends, about what had happened on board their flight, whether real or imagined, because "Safety is the Companies' highest priority;" and any violation of this same release and confidentiality agreement would lead to violators committing suicide out of abject shame, and the airline and/or airplane manufacturer suing the pants off any non-suicided violator and/or violator's estate post-suicide; and, in addition, seeking injunctive relief, actual, liquidated and punitive damages for libel, the forfeiture of one's home, incarceration in a Super Max Prison, and the seizure and sale of one's children; plus an award of highly unreasonable attorneys fees and costs.
Of course, as attractive as the settlement offer was, Szofia and I declined it.
What medical treatment could they possibly provide to a 5D plasmoidic or to a 4D intelligent vegetable? Did they have ignoble gas coils? Nitrogen fixers? Fertilizer? Anaplastic subcutaneous plasma pumps? Gamma pills, antigraviotics, cultivar inoculator and ununseptium stabilizers?
Worse, from what I understood about the humanoid system of medical care, it was primarily designed to generate revenue for the commercial sector, jobs for the service sector and profit for the investor class. The health of the patient was only incidental. Even so, in light of the 3Ds' rudimentary scientific knowledge and commonplace peculation, it appeared to me that many humanoids ended up worse off after receiving medical treatment than before.
I simply could not take the chance. What would have happened if they had tried to draw my "blood" by sticking a needle into my bladder skin? What would have happened if they had tried to vaccinate me? I literally would have "popped," jetting explosive gases as well as experimental mRNA molecular strands into the environment!
What if they had tried to X-ray my non-existent bones? Or what if they had tried to hydrate me intravenously? The fluids would immediately have squirted right out of my nostrils!
What if they had tried to put a blood pressure cuff on my arm? With each pump of the rubber bulb my internal pressures would have readjusted like a balloon and caused my nose, eyes, earlobes or my tongue to instantly bulge out like a squeeze toy!
Szofia, too, was looking a little washed-out. But I noticed that those tiny red blossoms inside her ear canals were now larger.
Worse than being tired, Szofia was stressed out. She kept looking behind, around and above her for Branchers. She fidgeted with her spray-bottle of herbicide. She repeatedly sniffed the air for spores.
And speaking of sniffing, there was that unmistakable scent of transuranic methane again! Was it the two five dimensional Unstables we had met before embarking for Los Angeles, Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd?
No, this was a much, much stronger smell.
In fact, it seemed like it was all around us, especially near the baggage carousels. There were huge clouds of ignoble gases! The smell grew stronger outside at the taxi stands. It seemed almost as though there were a large contingent of 5D plamoidics, a whole contingent, a veritable tour bus-full of intelligent Gassies surrounding us!
Then -- I heard Field Impulse babbling all around me, front, back and sideways!
Yes, we were literally surrounded by my compatriots!
Was this one of the vacation tours heading for a radioactive resort, like the two Unstables had told us about?
But they did not look like Intelligent Gassies... they were like... like... they were like me, human simulacrums, all wrapped up inside humanoid bladder skins that made them look like ordinary 3D quasi-intelligents! They were disguised with all those superficial humanoid phenotypes of skin color, sex, age, height, weight, and ethnicity. They were dressed just like all the rest of the 3Ds in two and three-piece suits, jeans, cargo pants, polo shirts, blouses, T-shirts, sport jackets, Bermuda shorts, short dresses, long dresses, baggy pants, tight pants, sweaters, neck ties, bow ties, yoga pants, Gore-Tex jackets, penny loafers, wing tips, sandals and leather boots. In fact, they looked exactly like all the rest of the quasi-intelligents at the airport... including many wearing red oven mittens and green-dyed hair!
And, yes, they all carried their personal triploids inside their shirt and jacket pockets disguised as cell phones, their tiny heads just faintly appearing on the cell phone screens!
Oh my goodness, the smell of the familiar chlorine gas was overwhelming! Oh, the green, green gas of home!
I could barely restrain my excitement! I could join the tour. I could abort this misbegotten study of life among the 3Ds, piggyback onto the tourists' location buttons and, maybe... hopefully... return with them to hibernate for many restful cycles among my gaseous colleagues in my own five dimensional unislice!
I frizzed my decay signature, “'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç! I'm Ugoñaschßtenätraξo! Hugo Nash - the Pioneer Explorer! 'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç!”
But they only looked at me condescendingly and laughed like I was some kind of atavistic hayseed walking around with an antique four dimensional external support podule and five dimensional communication pack.
“'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç! 'ßustuřgoőchç! I'm Ugoñaschßtenätraξo! Hugo Nash - the Pioneer Explorer! 'ßustuřgoőchç,” I repeated despairingly to each and every one of them.
One of the Gassies came up to me. He looked me up and down like I had popped out of a time twizzler.
“Can I help you?” the stranger asked me.1 He was a professorial type in a tweed jacket, deerstalker hat, rimless glasses and held a smoking calabash pipe. He asked again, “Are you all right, old man? You seem a little, shall we say in the local jargon, 'out of it,' no? And what's with all that four and five dimensional baggage you're carrying around with you, eh?”
My confusion was making me incoherent. I stumbled over my own words.“Yes, I'm fine. Uh, no. I mean, I'm Ugoñaschßtenätraξo! I'm a Pioneer doing a study of Life Among the 3Ds! Yes, you certainly can help me. You can help me leave this place and go home!”
The professor looked at me gravely. “A 'Pioneer,' you say? Studying the primitive fauna of this planetoid, eh? Really? Whatever for? And who is this elfin-like street waif who appears to be missing a dimension, eh?” He scrutinized Szofia over the top of his rimless glasses as though he were a lepidopterist studying a new specimen of moth.
Szofia looked exasperated. She whispered to me:
“Hubert, are these some more of your snarky friends from Five-land? I have enough to worry about with Branchers stalking my pollen without having to be bored to death by your blowhard gas bag buddies.”
“But Szophia, this could be my way out of here,” I whispered back to her.
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Hughbert Nashtrash,” she snarled through her teeth. “So you want to exit stage left and abandon me here to the bounty hunters? Well, Go rake your own leaves, you fucking fair weather farmer!”
Szofia flipped me an asparagus hand sign and then stormed off leaving me standing with the other gassies from my own galaxy from my own unislice.
“Hmm,” mused the professor aloud as he sucked on his calabash while examining me over the top of his glasses. “Your dimension-challenged elfin friend seems to have evaporated. Mr., ah, Hughbert Nashtrash, did she say? I don't recall your name on our manifest of enviro-engineers.”
“Hugo Nash. Not Nashtrash. Hugo Nash.” I started to frizz with anxiety. “Hugo Nash is my 3D name tag. The original human 'Hugo Nash' was placed in the multiverse mezzanine while I, his double, conducted my research. I am an Explorer, working undercover to do a study, sent here by the Ahr-fǿrt Gassy University, you know, in the the central Looo Nebula.”
“Hmm. An undercover gasbag? The Ahr-fǿrt Gassy University, you don't say? Yes, indeed, I've heard of it. The universities have reopened again, but they don't bother having any students or doing any studies, of course.”
The Professor continued puffing on his pipe while looking at me skeptically. What had happened to the Ahr-fǿrt Gassy University? What was a university without students or learning? The Professor looked at me like he thought I was some sort of lunatic or a gasaholic. What had those two Unstables, Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd, told us? The Pioneer program had closed down! Times had changed in the fifth dimension!
“Look,” I desperately explained, “I was specially cocooned for this project and first emerged in 401-9/67☼Ψ.2 in the Spΐntz-'há epicycle when I was inserted here! I know that it is now 602-15/60097☼Ψ.18 in the Spΐntz-'hŏ epicycle and that time cycles much more slowly in this unislice than in Gaslandia. But I have lost my Drůkk' ąou location buttons! I am marooned here, as part of an earlier anthropological study of the 3D life forms of this planetoid! You have to help me escape from here!”
“602-15/60097☼Ψ.18 in the Spΐntz-'hŏ epicycle, you say?” The professor looked startled and pulled his earlobe. “Why, that was more than 500 million epicycles ago! This is 1403-22/46683☼☼☼ж.73 in the Strpΐntzerock-'hάşŋ epicycle... Mr., uh, Yugo Mash, you say?”
“Oh, my, Praise the Dissolution!” I exclaimed. Of course, another 500 million epicycles had passed - literally decadoodles since we had encountered the Unstables, Clºpstr'apµo and Zerpăstchosptizhd, before we embarked for Los Angeles. Time not only bent far more acutely in this distant unislice (each solar period being just 17/34,557th of the length of the stellar cycle of the Home System), but time seemed to barely advance at all in these slow-moving hinterlands of the Multiverse.
The Professor sucked on his pipe again. "'Praise the Dissolution,' you say? You are a queer fellow, Mr. Mash. What quaint Field Impulse idioms you tend to use! 'Praise the Dissolution,' indeed! Next you will be talking about the universal Omphalus, Tszũm'paáß, and the Complete Immersion, Disintegration and Recycling! Oh ho ho ho! How very antediluvian!”
The professor looked at me amusedly. “Well, I suppose, Mr. Marsh, if you behave yourself, you might tag along with our teams of enviro-engineers (if you promised to stay out of the way).” He stroked his chin in thought. “But, you know, on second thought, they have their work to do and, uh, you would, uh, stick out a little too much, if you know what I mean?” He tapped one of my mis-attached hands with the bowl of his calabash.
I dreaded to ask, but did anyway. “Are you not disaster and eco-tourists on a tour of all the polluted and radioactive five dimensional resort hotels on this planetoid? What do you mean by "enviro-engineers," anyway?”
The Professor laughed and pulled his earlobes. “Oh, goodness no, Mr. Mash! Resorts and vacations are just so, you know, last megastellar cycle! Oh ho, oh no, Mr. Mash! We do not do small scale local resorts and hotels anymore! How quaint! We do the whole shebang now! The whole planetary system. The whole galaxy. That is why I am here chaperoning the latest group of enviro-engineers until they become acclimated to their positions.”
The Professor chuckled and winked at me. “Long, long, long ago, 5D's Homeland Leadership Counsel decided that it was easier to just give these little quasi-intelligent three dimensionals an extra push along the path they were heading anyway. They were well on the way and we just have given them a little assist in turning their whole planetary system into a delightfully junked up, radioactive, climatically hot, electromagnetically supercharged, chemically complex heavy-metal and genetically modified anorganic spa suitable for wholesale R&R for all of us intelligent gas-bags.
“We've even convinced them to start more wars and build nuclear power reactors again, as though it was a ‘green’ technology. Can you believe that? Yes, indeed, Mr. Crash. So we have been pulling out the native 'leaders' for about the last 70 earth-years on a selective basis. Then, as fast as we can stick the originals in the mezzanine, we train up and insert our own simulacrum politicians, television news broadcasters, business CEOs, scientists, book and newspaper publishers, celebrity chefs, army generals, judges, entrepreneurs, professors, engineers, artists, actors, bishops, mullahs, ministers, rabbis, journalists and movie producers - you know, the whole economic, social and leadership class in all of their so-called 'nations,' religions and political parties.
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Quatsch. For decades now, the presidents and prime ministers and senators and governors of some of the biggest three dimensional states, along with many of their cabinet members, many of their plutocrats and most of their preeminent academics have actually been five dimensional doppelgangers. Yes, indeed, Mr. Clash. Many of Earth's most influential politicians and its wealthiest people and giants of technology are actually Five Dimensional Intelligent Gas Bags who only appear to be human beings. By skillfully making these substitutions we have been able to keep these feckless quasies firmly on the path to creating a really, really nice environment everywhere... not for them, but for all of us five dimensional Intelli-gassies to enjoy, of course.
"And here you see our latest recruits ready to begin work at their stations,” the Professor said, waving his calabash at the nattering horde of diversely attired 'human' simulacrum five dimensional gas bags gathered at the LAX airport terminal with their different phenotypes of skin color, sex, height, weight, hair type and eye color. “From here, they will disperse all around this little globular wasteland and plug themselves in, joining with all the other 5D simulacrums we have inserted over the decades. They will be a seamless fit, do you not think so, Mr. Mashed? Our 5D substitutes have kept their hands on the tiller, so to speak, and they have worked out splendidly for well over half a century of earth-time, eh?”
I looked. He was correct. I could not tell the difference at all between the five dimensional gas-bags and the humanoid politicians, generals, entrepreneurs, businessmen and spiritual leaders they will replace.
“But, but, but...” I was flabbergasted! Shaken! I felt a sudden surge of Delabrae'th bio-organic degradation. “But what about the Pioneering Code of Ethics: Study; don't muddy!? Pioneer; don't interfere!?' What about our 5D honor code prohibiting exploitation and meddling? What about our noble gases, our Intelligents' commitment to let all life forms live and evolve naturally on their own?”
The professor smiled broadly and tapped his calabash lightly on my head. “Oh, Mr. Match, you are such a comedian, eh? Noble gases? Ethics? Honor? How absolutely antediluvian you are!”
He poked his pipe in my belly. “Times are different, Mr. Math. We are now in an age of eternally expanding gases. Progress depends on perpetual expansion until hot gas permeates every corner of the Multiverse.”
He suddenly stopped and looked at me with alarm. “You know, Mr. Match, the way you talk... your vocabulary... you almost sound like... you almost sound like one of those Conspiratorial Dissenters that we read about in our dusty annals of gaseous history."
He looked askance at me. “You aren't a Conspiratorial Dissenter are you now, Mr. Mach?” The Professor pulled back a few feet and looked at me over the top of his spectacles like I was some kind of semi-congealed solid.
“Hmm. Well, Mr. Mash, I can see that it really would not be a good idea for you to tag along. I am really, really sorry that we cannot help you. So, you see, it is time that you and the rest of us go our own ways. You do understand, of course. You must excuse me!”
The Professor turned away and engaged with his group of gas-bags in-training. There was a bit of Field Impulse garble, some final instructions, some long and short goodbyes. Then they split up, some in pairs, some singularly, moving off into Southern California by taxi and bus and airplane and train and thence to different parts of the earth-globule where they would take on their 3D assumed identities and missions on behalf of 5D civilization, as it had apparently evolved.
And so they left me by myself, still stuck in my human camouflage, still stuck in my old values and my old way of thinking, all alone, at the Los Angeles International Airport Taxi Stand.
I stood there by the taxi stand.
I had no triploid.
I had no relatives, no colleagues, no friends.
I had no way home.
I had even driven away Szofia, my one-time four-dimensional friend and companion. For in reaction to my selfish desire to save my own gases, she had left me in disgust to fend for myself.
* * *
Editor's Note: this and the following conversation took place and was recorded by Ugoñaschßtenätraξo in the original Field Impulse. As a language exercise for our graduate students of auricular tongues of 3D culture, the editor has translated the dialog into rudimentary "speech" of the type spoken by many of the local quasi-intelligents inhabiting the environs of that particular locality.