by David Smith
IT HAD NO NAME when the two girls arrived there with David and Chip, at least, nobody had given it one. Sally and Diane decided to call it, “New California,” because they liked the sound of it.
At this point I have a difficulty: this world – New California – was a time-constrained reality – such as the one in which you live, and yet, it was very different. It was not a planet orbiting a sun, and so there was no day and night, nor were there seasons. It was always light there; it was always day, and it was always the same day. And yet, as I will describe, time did pass there, in a sense. Events took place, and there was a sense of past, present, and future. But to the extent that time passed in New California, it passed much more slowly than on Earth.
Another difference was that this place was for all intents non-spatially constrained. In your world, if you travel in one direction, you will eventually travel around your Earth and come once again to the place where you started. But New California was not a planet. If you were to set off in any given direction – including up – you could go on in that direction forever – the reality would simply expand accordingly.
And indeed, since beings there do not need to eat, drink, or breathe, you literally could head off in a direction and keep going for a very long time, after your manner of reckoning of time. In that sense, this reality could not ever become over-populated; its resources could never be exhausted. The world was infinite, in the sense that your minds can understand that word.
Having said that, it was many days, after your manner of reckoning of time, before either of these two girls even noticed that the day in which they arrived had not ended. It was many more days before it occurred to either of them that it had been a very long “time” since they had first come to that place.
