The... Book?

(by CmptrWz)

Dragon looked over at Raptaur as she handed Colin a small book, maybe a hundred pages by how thick it was, titled 'Construction and use of the FamTech™ N-Dimensional Abacus, Volume 1.' After he took a look at the first page or two he flipped back to the beginning and started to digitize each page with his helmet camera.

She glanced across the room where Taylor and Amy were playing Pong on one such abacus. Somehow the various beads and rods of varying shapes, colors, sizes, and dimensional qualities came together to form what amounted to a fairly decent resolution touchscreen. She wasn't at a good angle to see who was winning, though that was at least partially because she was at the wrong angle to see the "screen" at all. It only really worked from the front, though she did spend a minute or two seeing if she could interpret what she could see. She gave that up as a bad job when she realized she couldn't see into the spacial folds enough.

Leaving that trail of thought behind she turned to the other, slightly larger, and much more concerning abacus in the room, currently being worked on by Über and L33t. She wasn't sure what they were doing as they had apparently been at it for hours before Colin was contacted by Raptaur to see if he was interested in seeing some Family computational devices she had brought in from home.

Deciding she didn't want to know right now as they were definitely too far in for her to catch up she instead accessed Colin's digitized pages. He was 150 pages in and she lost herself for a few minutes looking over them. Soon after that she had to take a break as several of her subroutines started to generate constant errors trying to parse the information. She had barely made it 75 pages in, and Colin had digitized another 25 while she was looking over those 75. He seemed to be slowing down for some reason, though.

Shaking her head and glancing over at Metis she wondered what the odd smirk was about. Probably better to not ask, much more likely that she will only find out when whatever it is comes to pass. Maybe. It could be hard to tell around here.

Amy yelling about Taylor cheating somehow by manipulating beyond the third dimension in the Pong game distracted her for a moment as she tried to figure out how that might work. She had to stop as her subroutines went back to generating errors as they tried to use the information she had already looked at from the manual to figure it out.

A quick check showed that Colin was just passing the 200 page mark in his digitizing, though something seemed wrong with him. Perhaps he was paying too much attention to the pages as he worked and having similar issues to her? That might explain why he had slowed down.

Suddenly Über yelled in triumph from across the room. Apparently they had somehow gotten Doom to run on the abacus, and now they were going to work on StarCraft. She wasn't sure if she should be horrified, impressed, or ask to see their work in hopes it could help her understand the devices. After a few moments she made note to ask them later and set different subroutines to be horrified and impressed at the same time. No need to limit herself, after all.

"What in the world?" Colin muttered, something she only noticed because he had left their private channel open. She looked over and after a quick check noted that he had stopped digitizing pages after page 208 and was flipping rapidly forward through the small book. Somehow giving off the impression that the book was now just as interesting as the contents. She wasn't sure what could be that interesting about a 100 page book, though.

Metis snickered over by the computers, a quick check showed that she was watching Colin flip through the book. Raptaur had started poking around in Doom at L33t's urging, and Taylor and Amy had apparently come to an agreement about how many dimensions they were allowed to manipulate in their game of Pong. She wasn't sure how many dimensions that was, though. Or if she wanted to know right now.

All of a sudden one of her Master/Stranger monitoring subroutines threw up an alert. She quickly checked it and found that it had found a discrepancy in her environmental observations. She very carefully brought up the description of the discrepancy, in hopes that whatever was causing it would be less likely to have an impact on the textual description.

Book's apparent dimensions and construction indicate at most 150 thin pages, but over 500 pages have been flipped through in same direction without reaching midpoint.

What?

Sure enough, looking back at her own actions she had noted over 200 pages had been digitized before Colin started flipping rapidly through the book. Somehow the book was bigger on the inside, holding more pages than it appeared to on the outside. Even now Colin was just reaching what looked like it might be the halfway point.

She gave this careful consideration, cross-referenced a number of things from previous interactions with the Family, and decided that it made just as much sense as most of their other abilities. Why shouldn't their books be bigger on the inside when viewed from a three dimensional frame of reference? It would also nicely explain how such a small book could hope to describe the FamTech™ abacus.

She was going to have to re-work that monitoring subroutine, though. Apparently when she corrected for Vista's abilities shortly after their first meeting she hadn't quite gotten the recognition of N-dimensional effects down correctly. Maybe she should ask to borrow one of the Family's desktop architectural models to help her get things right?