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THE ZANNA FUNCTION

to work with. Let’s go back to our friend, that dimensionless
dot. His movement is what made that rst dimension, right?
Because a line is nothing more than a traveling dot. Just like
drawing a line on a piece of paper. e tip of your pencil is the
dot and it leaves a line behind it. But what if we took that line
and moved it? What would that leave behind?”
She swiped the line segment across the plane, and it became
a square. “You ever try writing with one of those markers that
never seems to dry properly? You draw a line, and then your big,
clumsy hand comes back across it, and suddenly, you’ve got this
ugly black smear across your page. at’s what two-dimensional
objects are. Big, ugly, smeared lines.”
With a few more icks of her wrist, she drew line segments
and dragged them out into shapes. Some shrank and turned into
triangles. Others ballooned into hexagons and octagons. “It’s
the same principle as before. A line is a traveling dot. A shape
is a traveling line. You see where I’m going with this.”
She cleared away all the other shapes, leaving only the orig-
inal square hanging in the air. “Now, what happens when that
shape decides to start traveling?”
e intersecting axis of the graph disappeared, and like a
magician pulling a rabbit from her hat, Dr. Fitzie stretched the
square into a cube. “ree dimensions,” she said. “e world
we know and love. A dot traveling into a line traveling into a
shape traveling into an object. at’s quite a bit of movement
for something so simple, isn’t it? And this cube here isn’t even
real.” She plucked the cube from the air and batted it around for
a bit, like a cat playing with a toy. “It’s an idealized construct.
But I’m getting ahead of myself once again, aren’t I?”
With a grin, she tossed the cube to Beatrice, who caught
it with a small yelp of surprise. “It won’t bite; it’s a good little
cube,” Dr. Fitzie said as Beatrice turned it over and then passed

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