Sword Game

A topologist manages to create a time-smeared tesseract whose interior moves extremely slowly through time (from our perspective) while the exterior moves at the normal pace. He uses the tesseract to demonstrate how living animals with seemingly mortal wounds can recover when trapped inside the tesseract and then snapped out. The mathematician falls in love with a young student and gives up his day job at the university to become part of a traveling circus, entertaining people by stabbing his girlfriend in the tesseract with a short sword and having her recover miraculously when released from the contraption. Over time, he tires of the girlfriend and one day, does not release the girl from the tesseract but goes back to his old life of a university professor. The end of the story shows a very young topologist — hinted to be a younger version of himself but with no explanation — turning the tables on him (when he is 60, close to retirement) by combining a Mobius strip with a tesseract, releasing the girl and trapping the old topologist inside.

Explanations related to topology and Mobius strip figure in appropriate places, though the girl ends up calling a tesseract “a cube with a cube on each of the faces”, missing the extra cube.