The Arean Bilogy
1.
Harvin and Deena were sliding, pseudopodium in pseudopodium, in a romantic communion. Despite this fact, Deena was very agitated. Her contour, otherwise so nicely curved, was undulating nervously.
"How can you be so calm? The ghost passed through us twice! Not once, but twice! And it went away to the north! Now if that's not an evil omen..."
Harvin touched her membrane comfortingly. "Please darling, don't disturb your pretty shape so. I'm not afraid of ghosts and do you know why? I have a theory about them."
Deena emitted something indistinct.
Harvin looked north thoughtfully for a few moments. "I got this idea while looking at the shadow that I cast on a line. And I hope I'm making at least a little sense here, darling..." He looked at her, she scowled at him and he continued. "If our bodies project a unidimensional shadow, then maybe, just maybe, a tridimensional being -if such a thing existed, of course- would cast a bidimensional shadow? And... this is getting crazy, I know, but... it may be that ghosts are the shadows of this kind of beings?"
"Oh, cut it off! There is no third dimension, all the scientists said so! We've been walking around in xOy coordinates since we were born! And I don't for the life of me see why we'd need a new dimension - how could we possibly move more freely than we already do?"
"Darling..."
"How can you always imagine all this weird stuff? You have too much free time for those 'science-fiction' stories!"
"Oh darling, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to upset you. You know my sick imagination..." and Harvin engulfed her in a loving hug.
But the romantic scene did not last for long.
"Eek! Harv! UFOs! And there's six of them, oh Forces!"
Harvin barely had the time to look at the six unidentified objects that surrounded them before they disappeared. He gazed to the horizon dreamingly. "You know, Deena, I have a theory about these too. Could they be..."
"Keep your stupid theories to yourself! Can't you see I'm undulating! Float me home!"
And the two Areans departed.
The water mosquito flew to and fro, projecting its shadow over the film of sticky foam, also known as Areal, that floated on the surface of the big lake. When it finally landed on it with all six of its feet, it found nothing of interest and flew away, leaving behind another unsolved mystery for the Arean bidimensional scientific world.
2.
It was another usual Arean afternoon.
Harvin floated leisurely in the reading surface of the apartment and Deena was preparing his favorite green sauce in the feeding surface. Now and then her voice reached her husband through two contours.
"Haven't you finished that sports segment already?"
But she got no answer. While leafing through the segments of the newsline, Harvin's attention had been caught by a huge headline.
"Government Authorized Void Experiment to Take Place Today"
He was perusing the article with interest. It seemed that Orwos Bruen, the renowned scientist, had found a way to expand their living area. It was necessary because of the four baby booms that had occurred during the last two days. Bruen had reached the conclusion that rarefied substances occupy a larger surface than dense ones. This experiment sought to obtain a very rarefied liquid ("void", as all the scientific world now called it) under supervised lab conditions.
"This stuff gives me the creeps", muttered Harvin. "And Forces crush me if I know why..."
Even if he thought of himself as an open-minded person, he had always shared the Arean faith in the all-powerful Forces that balanced each other to keep their world whole. And the fact that this belief was mocked by most scientists didn't keep him from thinking, we shouldn't upset the balance and angry the Forces.
Deena's impatient voice rang from the feeding surface.
"I'm waiting for you to finish that line! You have to fix the balcony contour! All the energy is leaking out through it!"
Harvin floated reluctantly away, but was stopped dead in his tracks by a terrible thought.
What if the contour of Bruen's generator gives way and the void leaks outside...?
"HARVIN!!"
He hastened to obey.
***
Bruen's pseudopodium was near the ON switch of his void generator. He had checked and triple-checked. All conditions were fulfilled.
"It's a small stroke for an Arean, but a huge slide for the Areankind!"
He prayed to the Forces.
He made the move.
One...
Two...
Three microseconds...
The multicolored gauges showed a continuous deepening of the void.
"It's working!! It's..."
It was at that moment that the generator broke.
The "void" spread outside through the cracks in the lab's contour and discontinued the uniform pelicular foam in which the Areans lived. The huge superficial forces widened the holes apart immediately, turning the bidimensional world into many tiny liquid drops. In each of them drifted fragments of former Arean bodies.
While the superficial forces crushed him to atoms, Harvin understood what the third dimension was.
