Films

It was raining. He got a phone call, so during his absence I spoke with his daughter, who reminds me a bit of Judy Garland. We seemed to be the only people in the entire park.

She asked me, "You know about Francis Galton? He had this idea that people could be divided up into groups by what they looked like, that if you had sad eyes you were in one group and if you had a chicken neck—like my dad—you were in another group. And each group had the same personality and that sort of stuff."

"What group is mine?"

"Maybe the always-sit-in-back-and-watch-everyone-else group?"

"Go on."

"He would take a bunch of pictures of people and stack them up and make one picture and that was the average."

He caught up and we talked about other things. But now I had an idea for a new way of thinking about life.

Maybe there are beings that you can think of as two-dimensional films. They come into existence as one-dimensional points only to expand as they age. But they only grow in two dimensions. They could be the size and outline of, for instance, Galicia, and a few measures of time later they're Italy. And they exist as a society by meeting along lines. One film being can intersect vast numbers of others, and as they age they tend to intersect more and more.

In times of crisis, fields of disturbance behave like the legs of a water skimmer on the surface of a pond, dimpling a given film in countless places, wrenching it into three dimensions.

These films are a way of existing that defies much agency because they do not control their surfaces, but they are sentient, and they communicate at points of intersection. The form of the communication is light.

I expect that the films would have many of the same kinds of experiences we would, that a book could be written about them that would look very much like one of our novels. But there would be some differences.