Three hundred and fifty-six million years ago, a dinner plate clocking in at exactly 345 centikelvin barreled into my halcyon palace. I know because I measured it myself.
Back in those days, you could pick out the mitochondria before you ate them for dinner. No one was forcing them down your throat. The optical tweezers would jump out of my freezerpurse, and with a little coaxing you could pop those bad boys right out of the cell matrix. My Generator says that in her earlier iterations, her equivalent was a Swiss army knife, but when the image was transferred to me I had never seen something that looked so — what did she call it again — sharp. Yes, SHärp. Something about that word felt illicit. No, things here are only allowed to be maluma.
Takete was too restrictive; it caused too much divide. The noises were downright awful — it was like hearing a train brake but never come to a halt, seeing Sisyphus be assigned a new task of striking the strings of a poorly tuned violin. The boxcars bounced up and down along the roads, their square wheels flopping from one face to the next. It was like perpetual bumper cars, except we never got far enough to hit anybody else. And boy, did it zap up all of our energy. Even the millimites attached to the wheels got tired of having to use their legs all the time and used whatever they had left to unzip and scurry away; that’s when you know it’s bad. Even when we wised up and finally hopped in the railgunners, apparently everyone else had the same idea. We had to each locate the passengers whose bodies fit perfectly in our contours, as if we were each other’s missing puzzle pieces except the indents were all sharp — I look over my shoulder as it escapes my lips now — and the train became packed perfectly.
When the moon rose over the sky, it appeared as a sort of rectangle, its width depending on the angle and time you viewed it from. Tangakiwi trees, zulip flowers, the zuttons on my zacket — all of them were s h a r p. SHARP. Oh, dear Generator. Did that violate The Shape of Things? A monomo just blobbed past me, but I think he was too fluid to see me. But the weirdest part of it all was that we still saw the world the same, even though everything was so rigid, so this or that. Nothing looked pixelated, despite being all constructed from blockicles. I could always tell when my neighbor was harvesting his tangakiwis because his shadow stood out like how the hairs on a cat’s back stand up when it’s mad. The light bounced off his prickly ceiling and straight back from his flat head. I heard a rumor that he’s raising his daughter with the Boubabath Helmet. Something like that could get you sent to the Angle Correction Facility if you aren’t careful. Watching them through the kitchen always made me feel a pang. That was when I took my mitochondria.
Eventually the sun stopped rotating, not because it grew a brain and decided to quit, but because rectangular things just don’t rotate on their own. It was starting to evolve rounded edges, which would just wreak havoc on everything we knew. At least that’s what I thought until the dinner plate came crashing in.