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Saturday, September 20

Gates of Delirium: Part 6 – Hypercube

They moved quickly from room to room, the gradual encroachment of the shimmering wall giving chase. They finally cleared four more rooms, for a total of ten. Fielding dutifully marked them down with his watch.

Jim-Bean looked up. “I don’t remember that being here before.”

There were drawings of a tesseract on each of the panels of the walls, ceiling, and floor that didn’t contain a door.

Fielding started laughing. “A tesseract! Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, it’s been staring at us in the face the whole time!”

“Uh…what?” asked Hammer, concerned that the man had finally lost his mind.

“Look, a tesseract, it’s another name for a hypercube, a four-dimensional cube,” said Fielding with exasperation. “All the elements are there: rooms repeating, rooms folding in on themselves, teleportation, it could all very well add up. Look here, let’s call one dimension length.” He scratched a line in the wall. “And represent that with a simple line.” He scratched another line, outlining a square. “Two dimensions are length and width, which can be represented by a simple square.” He scratched a three-dimensional representation of a cube. “Now if we extend that square one more dimension we get a cube, which has three dimensions: length, width, and depth. Here’s the really funky part. If you take this cube and extend it one more dimension we get a tesseract.”

“I always thought time was considered the fourth dimension,” said McNab.

“Sure that’s just one idea, but what if you have a fourth spatial dimension?” asked Fielding. “A hypercube isn’t supposed to be real, it’s just a theoretical construct.”

Hammer rubbed his forehead. “This place gives me a headache.” [MORE]

Labels: d20 modern

posted by talien at 5:48 PM

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