#section 20

Kim & Michael “maintaining their cover.” 💋

Strike Back ep 4x05 

[Table of Contents]

I didn’t have much time to think, but I instinctively knew I couldn’t tell my Wife what had happened.

It wasn’t that I thought in the moment that she would tell anyone, but I knew that to an uneducated Woman in Flatland, my adventure would be nothing more than absolute gibberish.

So I tried to reassure her by telling her a story I made up on the spot about accidentally falling through the trap-door and into the cellar, and lying there the whole night, stunned from the fall.

The Southward pull in our country was so weak that even to a Woman, my story was ridiculous and almost impossible to believe.

But my Wife had more sense than average for her Sex, and she saw that I was more anxious and keyed up than usual. So she didn’t argue with my story, she just told me that I seemed ill, and should try to get some sleep.

I was glad for the excuse to go to my room so I could think over what had happened.

Once I was alone in my room, a wave of tiredness fell over me, but before I closed my eye, I tried to picture the Third Dimension again, and specifically the process that turned a Square into a Cube.

I couldn’t remember it as clearly as I wanted to, but I did remember that it had to be “Upward, but not Northward”.

I decided that I would memorize these words, and use them as a reminder about the solution.

So I repeated the words “Upward, but not Northward” to myself like a mantra until I fell into a deep, and refreshing sleep.

And while I slept, I had a dream.

I dreampt that I was at the Sphere’s side again, and his bright glow told me that he was no longer angry – he had forgiven me completely.

We were moving together towards a bright, but immeasurably small Point, which my Teacher directed my attention to.

As we got closer, I started to hear what I thought was a slight humming noise, so quiet a fly’s wings would be louder, and so quiet, even in the perfect silence of the Vacuum we flew through, that I didn’t hear it until we stopped a very short distance away.

((Note from the second editor: The original measurement is written as “something under twenty human diagonals”. Unfortunately I have no idea what he is talking about. End of editor’s note.))

“Look there,” said my Teacher. “This will be your final lesson in the Dimensions. You’ve spent your life in Flatland, you’ve received a vision of Lineland, and you flew with me to the heights of Spaceland. Now I have brought you down to the lowest depths of reality, to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of Zero Dimensions.

“Look at the pathetic creature. That Point is a Being like us, but trapped in this Zero-Dimensional Abyss. He is the whole of his entire World, his whole Universe. He can’t even imagine anything existing except himself.

“He doesn’t have a concept of Length, or Width, or Height, because he cannot experience them. He doesn’t even know the number Two, or even the idea of ‘more than one’, because he is, himself, the only thing that exists here, and what exists here is Nothing.

“But look at his perfect self-contentedness, and learn the final lesson: it is always better to strive for knowledge than it is to be happy in ignorance. Now, listen!”

He stopped talking, and the tiny buzzing creature said, in a quiet monotone similar to one of your Spaceland text-to-speech programs:

“Infinity beauty of existence! It is, and there is nothing else besides It!”

I asked, “What does this puny creature mean by ‘it’?”

“He means himself,” said the Sphere, “Haven’t you noticed that babies, and baby-like people who cannot tell themselves apart from the world refer to themselves in the Third Person? But shush!”

“It fills all Space,” the little Creature said to himself, “And what It fills, It is. What It thinks, It says, and what It says, It hears, and It is Thinker, Sayer, Hearer, Thought, Word, and Sound; It is the One and yet the All! Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!”

I asked the Sphere, “Can’t you startle this little thing out of its complacency? Tell it what it really is, like you told me? Reveal the narrow limits of Pointland, and lead it up to the higher Dimensions?”

“That’s not an easy task,” my Teacher said, “You try.”

So I raised my voice to its loudest, and addressed the Point like this:

“Silence, silence you miserable Creature! You call yourself the All in All, but you’re really just Nothing! Your so-called Universe is a mere speck in a Line, and a Line is a pale shadow when compared with—”

“Okay, okay, you said enough,” The Sphere interrupted, “Now listen, and see how effective your insults were on the Monarch of Pointland.”

The brilliance of the Monarch glowed even brighter than before, showing it hadn’t been upset at all, quite the contrary. The Sphere had barely stopped talking before the Point took up its voice again:

“Ah, the joy! Ah, the joy of Thought! What can’t It achieve by thinking? Its own Thought comes to Itself, seeming to insult It, which only makes It happier! Sweet rebellion that results in triumph! Ah, the divine creative power of the All in One! Ah, the joy, the joy of Being!”

“You see,” my Teacher said, “How little effect your words had. As far as the Monarch understood you at all, he accepted your words as his own – because he can’t conceive of the idea that anyone besides himself exists. Now he praises himself on the novelty of “Its Thought” as a moment of creative Power.

“Now let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant celebration of his supposed all-knowingness. There is nothing either of us can do to rescue him from his prison of self-satisfaction.”

After this, we floated gently back up to Flatland, and I could hear the gentle voice of my Companion and Teacher repeating the final lesson again: That I should always aspire for more, and inspire others to do the same.

He confessed to me that he had been angry with me at first for my ambitions to soar beyond the Third Dimension, but since then he had received his own lessons, and he wasn’t too proud to admit to his Student when he was wrong.

Then he began to teach me about the Dimensions higher than the ones I had been allowed to witness, showing me how to construct Four-Dimensional Extra-Solids by moving Solids, and then Fifth-Dimensional Double-Extra-Solids by moving Extra-Solids, and all of it “strictly according to Analogy”, and all so simple, so easy, that the method would have been obvious even to the Female Sex.

Sergeant Damien Scott, disgraced US Soldier, found his peace with his past when he joined Section 20 (took him a while, but in the end the only thing he couldn’t forgive himself for was his last job for the CIA)

It’s Taiga, right?

Yes, she did.

He’s going to kiss her.