After the Council announced it’d decided to order a reduction in dimensionality, all creatures and objects were made two-dimensional in one fell swoop.
Initially it helped quite a bit; hunger was eliminated and so was violence. Soon environmental pollution followed in the achievements column. There were a number of losers, hundreds of them, the funniest being bulging bellies, big butts, sagging tits, beefcakes. Of course, most of those had been expected.
Individuals became less competitive as the coveted prizes themselves were also two-dimensional. Still people could tell each other’s social status based on the colors of their clothing and makeup. The rich could afford vivid paints and a greater variety of them, while the poor had to make do with drab and faded.
Since there were too many primary colors, seven to be exact, the Council decided to turn the world into black-and-white. (“Heterogeneity is the root of all evil” had been the motto of the Council from the get-go.)
Down to black and white seemed a sweeping victory: color variety had been eliminated but the necessary details would remain intact.
Initially it was working as planned but one night black and white had an affair and soon gray was born.
The Council shrugged it off; who cares, the additional color is only the gray, a most boring if ever there was one. Not a perilous threat to the new world order by any stretch of the imagination.
However after additional couplings had taken place about a thousand shades of gray were cropping up all over the place. Mathematicians quickly assigned numbers to the various hues, from 0 to 1000. Zero was reserved for white and 1000 for black; in between were the shades of gray, the low numbers for lighter, the high numbers for darker.
The problem started when even the most compliant people began identifying themselves with their favorite shade.
Worse, the craze spread to animals too. Lionesses for example showed their preference for males with dark manes, and bragged whenever a 922 or 987 had mounted them sixty-seventy times the previous day. Zebras, famous for their unique stripe patterns, kept introducing different grays which caused confusion between herds. Pintano, better known as sergeant major - a notoriously self-involved saltwater fish - grabbed all the thousand shades and then had the audacity to demand more.
Gray coloring was becoming a major industry as the craze gradually permeated the entire living world.
The Council was justifiably alarmed that individuality was making a comeback. What if a crafty troublemaker comes up with a technology that increases dimensionality from 2.0 to 2.1? Once the world converts to 2.1, the subversives will not rest until they can bring it up to 2.2. Within a thousand years it’ll all be back to the troublesome three-dimensional. Then some ambitious rabble rousers may decide they want a bunch of novel primary colors in remembrance of the grays who took the first step back toward anarchy.
At that point the Council decided that another reduction in dimensionality, to one, was unavoidable. Everybody is going to be a line, the same ten inches in length.
A councilman, renowned futurologist, still saw a potential danger down the road. What if lines combine, can they go back to two dimensional?
The solution was so obvious that later everybody was scratching their heads, why didn’t I think of that, too? The only existence allowed shall be the point, and fixed in a permanent place forever. That way they cannot combine, they cannot stir up trouble, they cannot threaten the greater good ever again.
📐 ⭕️
Published in AntipodeanSF on May 1, 2025
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