I have every confidence that you are the one for our Great Work. That clever machine of yours; itâs what attracted me.â
âThe 3Set? I didnât build it. Spazz. Grotty did. Heâs the one you should be talking with.â
âBut youâre the project manager. The dog that wags the tail. The spoon that stirs the coffee. The brains behind the brawn. The engineer in the locomotive. The quarterback.â
I recognized the empty, parroted phrases; they were expressions Iâd used in a self-evaluation Iâd been working on for Ken Wong. Sheer horse manure. Momo must have read the copy in my briefcase. It was ironic to have my words come back at me this way.
âSpazz is the guy you want,â I repeated. âI donât even know what
the fourth dimension is. And I donât want to know, either. I think weâre done here.â I turned to walk away.
A sharp pain down inside my stomach brought me up short.
âStop it,â I said. Momo was standing right behind me, one arm pointing at me, with the end tapering off to nothing as it had before when sheâd put her finger into my mouth.
âI will augment you now,â she said.
âI donât want to get augmented! Whatever the hell that means. If you augment me Iâll die.â
âFear not. As far as Spaceland goes, youâll be the same as beforeâbut stronger and able to see through walls. The augmenting occurs outside of Spaceland. Iâll stimulate your body to a four dimensional burst of growth. Your pineal gland will send an eye-tipped stalk vout into the All, while your muscles and skin will grow to cover your vinner and vouter sides. My family passed down the secrets for initiating the process. Iâve studied well, and Iâm confident of our success. Youâll be a complete four-dimensional being, albeit of very modest hyperthickness along your vinn/vout axis. Ready to help with the Great Work.â
âVinn and vout?â I challenged blindly. âThose arenât words.â
âIf you were a two-dimensional gingerbread man and your planet a flat disk upon whose rim you walked, youâd know of only two dimensions. Youâd have an up and down, and youâd have a left and right,â said Momo calmly. âYou wouldnât be aware that your body had a front side and a back side. There would be a whole other direction beyond your imagining. The third dimension. The fourth dimension is like that for you, Joe Cube of Spaceland. You know about up and down, left and right, front and back. But thereâs another direction of your body that you canât imagine. The fourth dimension. Your vinn and vout. As I said, Iâm going to give you skin to cover your vinner and vouter sides.â
I wanted to run away, but I could feel Momoâs hand like a rock
nside my stomach. I had the feeling that if I took another step sheâd tear a hole in me.
âShow me vout,â I said. If nothing else, this might get her hand out from inside me.
The pain in my stomach went away. Momo held out her arm with a wobbly hand pointing at me. And then she moved her shoulder and her arm disappeared, first the hand, then the forearm, and then the rest of it. âThis is vout,â she said. âNow Iâll point vinn.â Her arm grew back: biceps, elbow, wrist and fingers, and then it disappeared again, much as it had before. I shivered. I never had managed to get my jacket, and I was getting cold.
âAll you did was make your arm invisible,â I said. âTwo times.â I could hear the whizz of the cars on the highway. The wind had risen a little and was tossing around the trees. I shivered again. I wanted to think this was a bad dream. But there were too many details for a dream. How long was it going to continue?
âHow do you imagine that I carried you through the wall of your dwelling?â asked Momo.
âYou dematerialized the wall. Used a
Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor