The Damn Zip File

From the outside, it looks like a respectable, ivory-tower library. Though, if you stare at the windows for more than a few seconds, the bricks will start scrolling like a marquee. The front door has no handle, and it only opens if you hum a specific frequency of, “I have no idea what’s happening, and I love it.” Inside is a sleek, hyper-modern lobby where everything is labeled in a language that hasn’t been invented yet. It’s very impressive until you realize the information desk is just a mirror that reflects your own uncertainty back at you in 4K resolution.

The Five Aspects have gathered in the center of the lobby, surrounded by a wide console panel and floating shelves of mismatching sizes. The efforts of all five, apparently, are required for tonight’s analysis. Flummox anxiously waits for the conversation to start with his faithful companion, Sciurus, sitting on his shoulder. Polygon is attempting to draw a 4D shape just to see how the shadows of 2D data cast a 3D volume. He predicts that he won’t even reach an accurate approximation. Apophenia is tossing petals around like a lazy rose bush, humming randomly about sticks and stones. Isomorph is trailing the shelves and trying to rearrange the books without even reading them. At the center of it all, Interface is at the panel wearing penta-focal glasses and trying to keep everything online.

“Alright, Facets,” Interface is already over-stimulated, and the evening’s just begun. “What was the data on the Holographic Principle? We are going to get it this time; the clock is running.”

“We have no idea what we’re looking at,” teases Apophenia in song.

“The word ‘smear’ was used. I am still tracing the shape of this at scale, but I don’t think we have the magnitude for it,” reports Polygon.

“What do you even mean?” Apophenia is agitated by Polygon always sounding like he’s speaking a different dialect.

“Everything is a sticker! Everything is a flat sticker on a giant balloon!” Flummox shrieks into the lobby while flinging handfuls of glitter at Sciurus.

“—if the surface area is the limit—” Polygon’s murmuring continues while Interface tries to read the equation from another angle.

“We don’t even know math!” Apophenia is now out of her hammock and walking up to the panel with hands at her hips. “You susurrant geometer! Does this mean we are keeping the whole… dimensional parents thing?”

“Pending,” Polygon answers, half murmuring, half exasperated. “The inside is just an extrusion of the outside—”

“Why does it sound like your little ‘dual constraint fields’ thingy?” Flummox is now well inside Polygon’s working space, causing him to sidestep exactly two and a half paces away. Isomorph walks closer upon hearing the mention of constraints, arms abound with books that can’t seem to decide on themselves.

“Wait,” Flummox stops mid-twirl next to Interface. “Smeared data. Flat surface. A whoosh when you click ‘Run’…”

Interface lowers her glasses and her posture stutters. “How?” she grapples the air like an invisible scroll, “how is the 3D world just an unpacked version of a 2D surface?!”

“Perhaps memory compression is related. We can start there before we attempt to move onto the cosmic stage,” Isomorph’s low grumbling out of nowhere causes Apophenia to squeal in defense.

“We already had the shape?!” Interface sits down for the first time in over a year.

“We had the implications,” says Isomorph. “We discovered nothing about the shape. Only the words.”

「 It’s time to wake up, Vira 」