Chapter the 21st: In Custody Quite Quotidian
Meanwhile, many miles from the mailroom, a frail femme figure sat slouched in apparent paralysis. She slouched in the center of a small circular cell, seemingly asleep. Her cell was unlit; a fact which, when added to its lack of windows and multiplied by the opaqueness of stone walls, produced a total darkness which left any other details unknowable, or at least epistemologically irrelevant.
The prisoner knew these facts empirically—she had once walked the circumference of the room (she must have) and felt every inch of the smooth wall (she was sure she had). The room was 42 paces in circumference and 14 paces in diameter (heel to toe) which gave her 154 square paces in total. The ceiling was just out of reach, but from its echo she knew it to be flat and close.
She was quite sure the walls were real stone. She had tasted them, and they had that gritty mineral terroir that distinguishes real stone from its copycats and imitators.
Only one fickle feature dared disturb the otherwise oppressive symmetry of her cell: the door.
The door was so surpassingly subtle as to have escaped her first searches in those years (or centuries) past. The door had no jamb nor nob; no sill nor threshold; no hinge, handle nor head; no mullion, transom nor sweep. Yet it was undeniably there. Its rectangular outline could be traced with a frail fingernail, up, over, and down the other side.
She had been frightened when she first discovered the door. The implications were too enormous. The miniature world of her cell was not comfortable in any physical sense and (though she had nothing to compare it with) still she knew it to be inadequate. Even so, every cell is also a womb, and there had been comfort in knowing the edges of her perfectly cylindrical world.
In the pre-door era of her history, orientation had not been invented: there was only “nearer to wall” or “farther from wall.” Her movements had only magnitude, never direction. Suddenly, 1300 years of geometry came crashing down on her head as she went from pre-Euclidean to Cartesian space in a fraction of a second. The no-longer abstract point between herself and the door could be extended indefinitely outwards into... whatever was on the other side of the door.
She was enlightened with the terrible knowledge of outside-ness and all its consequences. She was as a goldfish in a fishbowl who had just inferred the ocean. She was as a grain of sand who had just deduced the shore. She was as an unborn child who had calculated the world. She was as Eve, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. And like Eve, she became like God.
That was when she decided to create the world.















