God's Compensation/Get to some practical lessons
“How are you taking all of this?” Mr. Austin asks. “I know it might be a little hard to take in.”
“It’s weird,” you respond. “It’s definitely weird….” You all of a sudden feel like your mind is stuck, as though it has just frozen in place and is refusing to form a complete thought. It is as though the moment you try to start thinking about how you feel about this situation, what the implications may be, you feel as though you are like a little kid lost at an amusement park. Yeah, there is a lot happening everywhere around you, and all of these things are things you think ought to be making you happy, but then you realize that you have lost your parents and you suddenly feel desperately scared and alone.
A shudder suddenly goes up your spine. “Aaaargh!” You growl in frustration. No! You can’t let yourself get lost now. This is a completely fucked up situation, but the best thing you can do now is get a handle on it. “Ok!” You bark out as something of a form of encouragement to yourself. “Uoo!” You grunt. You feel you probably sound a little ridiculous, but making these noises actually is helping you to focus your mind a little bit. “All right, enough with talking about things!” You say, almost tipping over your chair as you stand up. “I want to start seeing how this stuff works, the sooner I can get a handle on it the better.”
“Okay….” Mr. Austin seems to give you a skeptical smile, apparently still a little concerned, but his demeanor seems to tell you he is willing to go along with this as long as you are. “Well, I will get us started right off then. There is something we have to test first though.” With these words, he seems to pick up his feet and move, but instead of walking off in some direction he simply vanishes from your sight. “So, do you see me standing here right now?” He asks.
“Uhhh…. No, I don’t” You respond.
“Hmm… that’s what I thought.” Mr. Austin’s disembodied voice states. “Well, that could be trouble,” he muses as he re-appears in the same spot, his legs seeming to just be settling into place from a step you didn’t see him take. “You really couldn’t see me just now?” He asks, to witch you just bewilderedly shake your head in the negative. “Well,” he says, “that would mean that your eyes can’t see into the fourth dimension at all. I was afraid of this with your reaction to the tesseract.” He gestures over to the cubic block sitting on the counter. “We are going to have to try something else then…. Hmmm…”
Mr. Austin seems to hesitate in a state of thought for a moment, and then he walks around behind you. “Here’s something we could try,” he suggests, and then he seems to start nudging you. You feel strange, he doesn’t actually seem to be pushing you in any actual direction that you can see, but you get the very distinct impression that you are moving. The curious thing though is, while it does not look to your eyes like you have moved from the spot you are standing in, the room around you seems to be moving instead. You look around uncertain as doors and windows seem to be moving their positions on the wall and the charts on the wall seem to be mutating and changing the information they are displaying. An information chart on the wall about broken bones, in addition to moving its position on the wall to accommodate for a window taking up the spot where it used to be, all of a sudden is displaying information about how BMI. Just when you think things couldn’t get any crazier, suddenly the bright light of the sun flashes in your eyes and suddenly you are outside.
“What...” You finally work up the ability to say “...the… fuck?” You stair around the place agape. You turn back to the building you were inside of on the third story just a moment ago, and you are not certain whether or not you should be surprised at the fact that it now looks like a completely different building as well.
“We just took a walk through the fourth dimension,” Mr. Austin tells you. “Did it feel like you were moving?” He asks.
“Ehhh… sort of.” You suddenly feel a little weak in the knees.
“Ok then, try to remember that feeling. Can you describe it?”
“It sort of felt like I was walking, but my feet weren’t moving.”
“Hmmm…. Well that’s interesting.” Mr. Austin responds. “It doesn’t really feel all that different for me when I am walking normally in 4 dimensions or restricting my movement to 3 dimensions. I guess that a lot of your perceptions are still tied down to a 3D world if you experienced it like that. Anyway, do you think you might be able to reproduce that feeling and move like that on your own?”
You are not really certain if you can do that. It all just seemed completely weird to you when Mr. Austin seemed to be making the world move around you. Really though, you guess that really was only you and him doing the moving, it was just that without the ability to see across the fourth dimension for a point of reference or the ability to see what was in front of you, it looked like all the 3D objects around you, or at least the things you perceived as 3D objects, were moving instead. That was such a disorienting experience you really are not sure you could reproduce that effect.