| Contributed by
Vijay Fafat
Humanity, trapped and quarantined by the Xeelee in hyperspace (see "Stephen Baxter - The Eighth Room"), live on a spherical world apparently surrounded by a huge shell. The Shell harbors life and a group of explorers use a balloon to visit it. When they land, they find themselves on a spherical surrounded by a shell...they remain quite non-plussed, for they expected to be on a shell with a spherical world in the sky. What gives?
As Eve, the character which has seen the entire timeline of the universe and one which is recounting "Vacuum Diagrams", explains to Jack Raoul, a disembodied/re-engineered human:
| (quoted from Shell)
"This world of theirs, with the Shell, is a four-dimensional sphere. No wonder they couldn't figure it out."
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Jack Raoul begins to understand:
| (quoted from Shell)
"I thought of three-dimensional analogies. Allel's people were like two-dimensional creatures, constrained to crawl over the surface of a three-dimensional globe. Home and Shell, the twin worlds, were like lines of latitude, above and below, each unbroken, each apparently cupping the other. Just as the diagrams in the City had tried to show them. ..[...] They were trapped. In a prison of folded space-time."
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The identity of Eve is revealed at the end of "Vacuum Diagrams" in a beautifully consistent manner.
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