Here for a while

"Can you not see them?"

I would use the rotator mechanism provided to me and see the occasional speck of light blink into and out of existence as I spun. "Only briefly, when I spin," I would say.

"I see," my travel guide will say, "the volume occupied by your eyes is too thin to intersect any stars unless you're aimed perfectly."

My travel guide knows I am an astronomer and am disappointed by this, and so sets to work configuring a planetarium program on a projector. This will allow me to see the surface of the hyperspherical night sky projected to a 'flat' three dimensional display.

It is still difficult for me to wrap my head around double rotation. My travel guide assures me it'll come in time. Easy for her to say--she's understood double rotation intrinsically since she was a child!

The four dimensional hyperspherical planet double-rotates of course. I stand little chance of understanding four-dimensional astronomy without understanding double rotation.

The four dimensional people are no more intelligent or technologically advanced than we are, in fact if anything they seem to be about a decade behind in computer technology (well, sort of.) Their transistors are many decades behind ours, but you can fit a lot more transistors in a given footprint than you can in three-dimensional space.

But I wonder what may become possible in 20 or 30 years, with humans and 4D-people collaborating. I tell my travel guide about my ideas.

"On Earth we have virtual reality headsets, but there's also some research into brain-computer interfaces. Imagine if we could bypass my eyes altogether and plug one of your cameras into my visual cortex!"

"I'm not sure that would work," she says.

"Brains can adapt to all sorts of visual stimuli. I'm fundamentally limited to viewing only a three-dimensional slice of your world projected into a two dimensional plane, so long as I am using just my eyes. But maybe if the data coming into my mind was three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional, I would be able to train my brain to interpret it."

My guide shifts something in her face. Reading an alien's facial expressions is hard enough even when you can see their entire face at once, let alone when you can't. But I think it's something like a smile.

"And what if it worked? How would you handle being flattened back into your own world?" she says.

This gives me pause. "Perhaps I could find other ways to fill up the extra dimension. Like, maybe I could plot the last ten seconds of visual input on the W axis. Or I could use it as a volumetric display for a 3D video-game, and see an entire game world all at once."

"Computer games render only the surfaces of objects, don't they? When I look at your world I see the interior in its entirety," says my travel guide. I feel a weird sensation in my stomach, and realize that she has again poked me on my inside.

"Maybe I could just stay in the fourth dimension forever," I say.

Later, it's morning (due to double rotation the length of day time is never constant) and I am sketching something in my sketchbook--plans for a device that might aid visitors like myself in interpreting 4-dimensional geometry, if only slightly. It's a kind of periscope to be worn on one eye or the other, shifting depth perception out to be in the axis perpindicular to my visual volume.

When my travel guide wakes up, I show her the drawing, but she can't understand it. That makes sense--I wouldn't be able to understand a flatlander's drawing after all. So I describe the device to her.

She creates a drawing, and places it upon the projector. It looks more or less like what I had in mind.

"We tried that once," my guide says. "If we go to the office we might be able to find the exact device we used. The test subject couldn't really make sense of it, but we haven't tried it on a human who has spent as much time in our world as you have."

Over the next few days I acclimate to the periscope (and the strange pressure in my head from the four-dimensional bulk of the helmet trying to pull my skull out of my volume.)

At first it was just confusing. I no longer had binocular depth perception. Though I didn't absolutely need it--binocular vision is not the only means of depth perception available to my brain. But the overlaid images kinda 'z-fighted' if you like, like when you cross your eyes on two different colors.

Eventually, with the help of my guide, I became able to sense depth again, but I was disappointed to find that it didn't really give me any real insights on four-dimensional geometry. It was still fundamentally just a pair of 2D projections of 3D slices of 4D space.

I adapted much more quickly to normal vision when I finally removed the helmet.

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.