Tumbolia: A City on the Imaginary Axis
The Black Void - Episode 241
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"What is this place?" I ask James.
"Why, it's the Tumbolia Public Library, of course." "No. Not that. This city. Tumbolia. I had only heard of it in a book somewhere. What exactly is it?" "Oh." James is silent for a few seconds. "You're new here, aren't you?" "Yes." "Well, then this is the best way I can explain it. You've heard of the imaginary axis?" Have I heard of the imaginary axis? I've been trying to understand it for a while and have only recently been able to start to comprehend its mysticism. "It seems that this place is situated along the imaginary axis. Sort of a perpendicular universe of sorts. We live exactly like we used to live on the real axis, of course, but we don't necessarily exist. We're more like characters in a dream; things that only exist as ideas now." "So we're just stuck here forever." "No, not necessarily. You probably came here by some axis-rotating wormhole; you can probably go back by one. But, on the imaginary axis, they're much harder to find." "I don't get it." James continues to explain things to me. "You've heard of transformations, right? Mathematically speaking, of course." "Yes. That's when you take each point on a graph and move it to a new location, so that each original point corresponds to a distinct new one." "Not necessarily. There are transformations from one set of points to another in which every point in the new set comes from something in the old set, but not every point in the old set goes to a distinct point in the new set. They're onto, but not one-to-one." I nod. The theory is just about at the upper limit of what I can understand. "Think of the wormhole as a transformation that rotates you ninety degrees in the complex plane, from the real to the imaginary axis. But, several wormholes in the real world converge into one wormhole here. So, even if you did find a wormhole and go back, you might end up in a completely different place." "Wow. How'd you learn all that?" I ask. "From Professor Hoffman at Tumbolia College up the road. He's been researching that kind of stuff for years now, ever since he traveled through one of those wormholes to get here." Professor Hoffman sounds interesting to talk to. However, I also have this book in my hand that I haven't checked out or started to read, and I could probably learn some more from James.
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unknown adventurer
12/2/2004 3:51:18 PM
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