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watch them. YouTube is a space-time system where
you can watch a video taken at a give place, such as a corner near
the World Trade Center, which is the spatial dimension, and at a
particular time, nine o'clock on September 11, 2001, the time
dimension."
    "I understand about YouTube," I said, "and I
guess it is a space-time system."
    "That is the way reality works!" Uriel said.
"Think of what you call reality as something like YouTube. Lets
call it R-Tube. Everything that someone thought was important is in
the, let us say, R-cloud."
    I said to myself, 'I must be logical and
scientific about this. I had a patent case involving the Internet
one time.
    The videos on YouTube exist physically. They
are data bits on servers distributed around the world in data
centers.'
    "Uriel." I said, "Where is the R-cloud in
physical reality?"
    "This is where the metaphor breaks down. Time does not really exist: it is only a
coordinate in space-time. The physical things
happening are not stored, they are all happening as what you would
call 'at once.' For example, at the space coordinates you know on
your planet as 40° 42' 45" N / 74° 0' 54" W, you are at the New
York location of the World Trade Center. At the earth time
coordinate, nine o'clock on September 11, 2001, the building is
being destroyed. Change the earth time coordinate to August 12,
1964, and the World Trade Center is under construction. At those
coordinates, everything is going on according to what you
understand as your four-dimensional scientific laws of physics–what
you are taught in your universities.
    " Reality as you know
it exists is an eight-dimensional space-time. The
first four coordinates pertain to the four-dimensional scientific
laws of physics. 'Information' exists in eight-dimensions. Those
eight-dimensions include the four of physics.
    "Using the YouTube metaphor, one might say that
the physical stuff in the video, as it is taken, obeys the laws of
physics. If the video is of a cat doing something cute, everything
in the scene obeys the laws of physics, for instance gravity,
according to four-dimensional space-time. The video that is
uploaded to the YouTube cloud is information . You can turn the picture
upside–down and have the cat fall upward in that video. The video
cat doesn't have to obey the laws of physics.
    "We realize this is all very new to you. You
need to find out about eight-dimensional physics, known on your
planet as ' complex eight–dimensional
Minkowski space. '" Uriel's voice trailed off. The
spark of light on the boulder disappeared.
    "Wait!" I said. It was too late. 'Why is he
telling me all this?' I wondered.
    I was confused, bewildered. I went back into
the kitchen and poured myself another brandy. Back out to the
patio, Hesperus had everyone organized in space-time. I
wasn't.
    The first light of dawn was just breaking when
I awoke, still musing about my contact with Uriel, wondering why I
was involved in this, pondering the scientific logic of the whole
contact. I made a cup of coffee, put on my parka, and started a
walk out into the desert to clear my head.
    It had been cold during the night, and all the
cacti and sagebrush were covered by a fine coat of silvery frost,
glittering in the first rays of the dawn sunlight. I scared up a
long–eared rabbit that dashed away in jagged hops. The sun came up
suddenly, and I felt the heat on my face. Frost evaporated. The new
day was here. My head cleared as I viewed the hundred miles of
desert to the North. Sunlight on the dark buttes and distant
mountains spread down from the peaks to the valleys.
    California City is eighty miles to the North,
at the southern foot of the Sierras. In land area it is the third
largest city in California, a dream of a developer in the 1960s,
and boom years for Southern California. During that time,
developers were buying worthless tracks of desert land, subdividing
them, grading grids of roads, advertising, and selling lots on the
promised it was the site of