Lineworld
One moment, you’re sipping coffee, anchored in the familiar chaos of three spatial dimensions and one sluggish arrow of time. The next, there’s a snap—like reality’s vertebrae breaking—and you are elsewhere.
At first, you think you’re blind. But no—there’s something stranger: you can only see forward and backward. No left. No right. No up. No down. You are in a universe that is a single, infinitely thin line.
You look “ahead” and see a point—one point—that is not you. You look “behind” and see another. That’s it. Two neighbors. No horizon, no sky, no floor. Just the unbroken thread of existence.
Your body? Gone. Or maybe it’s been crushed into a single coordinate. You can feel yourself as a position, a solitary number on an infinite ruler. You are defined entirely by where you are, and nothing else. No shape, no volume, no width—just “here.”
You try to move sideways—your instincts scream for it—but there is no “side.” You can only move along the line. Your thoughts spiral: if I move toward one neighbor, am I approaching them, or are they approaching me? In 1D, motion and perspective are the same thing.
Time still exists, but it’s no longer a vast ocean you drift through—it’s a bead rolling along the same string as you. Events here are either before you or after you. And if something is “before” you in both time and space, there’s no way to go around it. You must collide with it.
Communication is limited to the single neighbor you can reach. And they can only pass messages down the line one point at a time. In a 1D world, news travels like a military supply chain from hell.
Soon, a realization gnaws at you: there’s no way to turn around. Turning is a 2D privilege. All you can do is reverse your direction, which feels like reversing who you are. Every choice becomes binary—forward or backward, yes or no.
And yet, stranger still, you begin to notice something alien: patterns. The points ahead of you don’t just “exist.” They repeat. The 1D world seems to be made of vibrating pulses—dense here, sparse there—like a waveform you are trapped inside. You suspect this isn’t a line in the Euclidean sense. It’s more like a string, humming in some higher-dimensional space you can no longer access.
Somewhere far “behind” you, in a place you can never revisit, your coffee mug still exists. But it’s infinitely far away in a dimension you can’t even imagine anymore. You wonder if you have been flattened into the notation of a universe, nothing more than a single tick mark in the ledger of some hyper-being’s experiment.
Eventually, you stop asking “Where am I?” because here, that’s the same as asking “Who am I?” And in 1D, those are not just similar questions—they are the same question.