Another Cock Tale

A tale which is best avoided, but documented here for completeness. It is an utterly tasteless, juvenile story designed to evoke titterings amongst teenagers. One could laugh if it were a funny dirty joke but it isn’t. It is also the most bizarre story one might come across involving a tesseract.

Harry Immelman was a young mathematics instructor at City University, circa 1967. One night, he woke up to a very strange, very grizzly scene best left un-described except to say that he got attacked by a disembodied penis, one which Harry defeated in a sanguinary manner. Seven years passed by, Harry became an accomplished mathematician and Sara, his wife, became a highly regarded gynecologist heading up R&D at a leading firm pioneering new birth-control measures.

Now, at some point, Harry had explained some higher-dimensional geometry to Sara (which description is quite garbled and incorrect, as you can read below). As she recollected:

“Remember one night you told me about the Mobius strip, how it converts a one dimensional continuum into a two dimensional one? And how a Klein bottle makes two dimensions into three? And how, theoretically, there would be a means of applying the same principle to a three dimensional solid, transforming it into a four dimensional form called a tess …”

Well, Sara and her team decided to use that idea to create an intra-uterine device - dubbed “Plastic Tess” - for birth-control. Sara explained:

“Max got one of his topologists to apply the principle of the Mobius strip and Klein bottle to a three dimensional form, making it four dimensional, then miniaturized it to fit inside a vagina…
“A tesseract!” hissed Harry. “A Plastic Tess is a miniaturized tesseract!”
“Right. And when the semen passes through the Plastic Tess, it moves from a three to a four dimensional continuum and vanishes. As I said, we don’t fully understand where it goes yet, but since the fourth dimension is.. .”
“Time!” cried Harry Immelman.”

The reader can guess what had happened from the future to the past.

There are other stories which do mention using a higher spatial dimension to store or dump things. e.g. here is a reference from another story (not mathematical fiction) called “Mouthpiece” by Edward Wellen (“Fantasy & Science Fiction, Feb 1974):

“Paul looked ahead through the plane window. Somewhere there should be a nice clean universe. It would be true of all the inhabitants thereof that their guts take a Moebius twist or their large intestine is a Klein bottle - ein klein nachtgeschi” - so that they deposit the results of digestion in this our own less nice universe. Somewhere and sometime in infinity there had to be a nice clean universe. The laws of chance said they couldn’t all crap out.”