Spaceland by Rudy Rucker

Egyptian hieroglyphs. Their heads had an eye on either side and the slit of a mouth on top. The eyes were flat gleaming triangles, and the fronts of their eyes bulged. Their flat skins wrapped around their edges like rinds on slices of salami. Their clothes were stringy wrappers outside their skins, like threads of icing on the rims of gingerbread men and women.

    Though these Flatlanders were as tall as me, they were no thicker than their film of space. Seeing a flat man on his own in an underground room, I flew down next to him. I said a few words to him, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Would it hurt his space if I reached into it? I thought of an ocean’s surface or a soap film. Maybe the surface would give way and stay tight around my fingers. I went ahead and stuck my two hands into the room with him. Just as I’d hoped, the space harmlessly gave way.
    The flat man saw the cross sections of my fingers in his room; he darted around in terror. I cornered him against the eastern wall. From my viewpoint in the third dimension, I could see his insides: his muscles, his bones, his brain and his desperately pounding heart. Curious to get a really good look at how he was made, I grabbed hold of his skin on either side and lifted him up.

    What a disaster. He fell apart like a hot slice of pizza with too many toppings. As his skin came up out of his plane, his innards spilled out and scattered. Some pieces drifted off into space, some fell back into the plane. I tried to put the man back together, but it was hopeless. There was nothing more to do for him. Sadly I stirred his remains with my hands, trying to get a feel for this flat world’s matter. It was like the objects in this world were scraps of cellophane embedded in a soap film. They had a weak kind of solidity to them, but mostly they depended on the upper and lower sides of their space to keep them together. The flat man had been like a mosaic held together by the pressure of his space.
    A Flatland woman appeared outside the room’s door, which was hinged on the ceiling like a pet door. The door was like a line
instead of a rectangle—a fat line that bulged out to a ball at the top end, the ball held by a socket on the ceiling. The vibrations of the woman’s knocking and of her voice traveled up my arms and into my ears. “Hey Custer, it’s me, Mindy!” she cheerfully called.
    The door swung open and her greetings changed to screams. I pulled my guilty hands up out of the room, but not before she glimpsed their pink cross sections. She ran up the carved-out stairs and onto the main street of Flat Matthewsboro, shrieking out the news.
    I offered dead Custer a silent apology, and moved along next to the main street of Flat Matthewsboro myself, heading the opposite way from Mindy. Flat Matthewsboro’s street ran East/West, punctuated by the town’s buildings. It was more like a series of courtyards than a street. The buildings had staircase outlines, big on the bottom and small on top, with basements and sub-basements as well. I could see inside everything.
    The citizens of Matthewsboro moved along the streets by walking upon their weirdly jointed legs and occasionally leaping into the air. They were nimble as fleas. The gravity of their world was so weak that they usually chose to clamber over a building rather than finding their way through its passages. And when two of them encountered each other going opposite ways, one would somersault over the other. It seemed customary for the westbound one to hop over the eastbound one.
    The building’s doors were sturdy affairs, with leaf springs to hold them closed. It occurred to me that if anyone ever left a one-room building’s eastern and western doors open at the same time, the building could collapse. To make this less likely, the buildings with more than one door had more than one room as well, so that there were a series of doors. There even seemed to be some kind of