In the short time since J.R. "Bob" Dobbs publicly revealed himself to the
world, much has been written about the man, his family, and his personal life.
Little has been witheld and much revealed to his close followers. But one
object of great mystery has remained an enigma for years: the True Pipe. Even
the voluminous Book of the SubGenius devotes only one
page to it. Here at the RatCave Media Center, the True Pipe (among other
things) has been the subject of intense study for almost a year. We are happy
to report that thanks to a miraculous breakthrough, the nature of the True Pipe
can now be revealed in great detail.
The Revelation
(as revealed to Dr. T. M. Oscar)
The first several months of our research were mostly unproductive, as we had little to go on. Then one night, after a particularly slackless day of working on the problem of the Pipe, I finally gave up and went to bed. After a while I noticed that the walls of the room were becoming transparent, as if made of rice paper. My bed disappeared, yet I continued to float in the same position, very relaxed (the first slack I'd had all day). I was surrounded by stars; there was the whole universe around me. Slowly, I began to move in toward the center, gathering speed until galaxies were whizzing by. I could faintly see a distant object, growing larger and larger as I approached the very center of the universe. Then suddenly I came to a grinding halt, with the object still some distance away. When my brain stopped reeling, I focused my blurry eyes and saw in front of me the True Pipe; it was without "Bob"! I felt my feet growing warm as intense slack began moving down my legs. The nips of my toes began to tingle, as they slowly came to life. It was as if five pairs of eyes opened at once. The entire universe wrenched and twisted, stars winked out, white holes appeared, mutrons whizzed by, and whole new dimensions of "space" were now visible to me! And the Pipe, my "God," it was transformed into an foot-numbing array of complex but neatly ordered, interconnecting, hyper-three-dimensional parts. There were vertices with a dozen right angles, 8-dimensional sections with only one continious surface, and a "ring" (I can only use the term loosely) of appendages that resembled ordinary 3-D pipes but each having a different dimensional order. These appeared to "stretch off" into infinity.
I began to explore the Pipe, the true form of The Pipe, moving "around" it, examing every facet. For what seemed like hours I was child again, my Original Slack restored. I skipped "up" and "down" a 16-D skein of quarternion theorems and laughed at their simplicity. Would you like a toke? "Bob"'s voice came like a thunderclap inside my head the morning after a SubGenius beach party. I was too terrified to reply, but he knew my answer even before he asked. His hand (strange - it looked clenched, like a fist) held it up to my trembling lips, and I could smell the sweet scent of the burning 'frop rising from the "bowl". I could only manage a slight puff. As the smoke entered my lungs, my feet began to burn and my Third Nostril drained, becoming clearer than ever before. I could read pstenches for lightyears around, clearly. And The Pipe! It was as a thing alive in my teeth, with a divine intelligence all Its own! We art the "stem" and "bowl", which have existed without time... We who art separate but always mated... We who were given from the Fist of Wotan!!! We say to thee, son of Yeti, repent! For the fate of those Black Ones is itself now shadowed! Go forth and speak our message, as another of thy kind has already commanded thee!
As I let smoke drain from my lungs, The Pipe began folding "in" on itself, like some stupid contraption in a saturday morning cartoon. The universe was rushing back in on itself, like an explosion in reverse only completely different. The walls of my room reappeared, but couldn't feel my bed under me because of the waves of slack now rushing over me. I slept.
When I awoke late the next day, my first thought was that it had all been just a dream, some pseudo-Experience brought on by eating too much Con-processed junk food. When I looked in the mirror, however, I discovered a small growth on my lip - right where the "stem" had touched! Clearly, it had all been very real - a revalation from the True Pipe itself!!! I was still dazed as I entered the Media Center's computer room, sat down at my Mac', and started to work. There was a lot to remember. I didn"t know where to begin...
The True Nature of the True Pipe
Most people are already familiar with the basic concept of time being a fourth dimension. But in dealing with the True Pipe we have to restrict things to physical dimensions. Now, here's a concept most people probably aren't familiar with. This is a cube, right?
[picture of cube]
Wrong. It's a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional wire-frame cube printed on a flat piece of paper. You might say it's the shadow of a wire-frame cube. In fact, if you held such a cube up on a sunny day it would cast such a shadow on the ground. The exact appearance of the shadow would depend on the relative positions of the sun and the cube.
Let's carry this a step further. Lines are 1-D, squares 2-D, and cubes 3-D. All of these consist of straight edges and those with more than one have all their edges at right angles to each other. The next step in this progression would be 4-D and would have all of its edges at right angles to each other. Obviously this would be impossible in our physical world. But "Bob" has shown that there are dimensions beyond those conceivable to man.
Now, if a 3-D cube can cast a 2-D shadow, then a 4-D hypercube can cast a 3-D shadow. The shadow of a wire-frame hypercube looks like this:
[tesseract]
This is, of course, the 2-D shadow of the 3-D shadow of a 4-D hypercube. If that's too much to follow, then imagine this picture as a 3-D object and you're on the right track. If you want to what this looks like in four dimensions, then imagine that all the lines are at right angles to each other. If you can picture that, please let us know right away because you have a lot more slack than any of us except "Bob" , or you're doing some serious wool-pulling.
Now, what the hell does all this have to do with the True Pipe, anyway? Well, it seems that the True Pipe not only has more than three dimensions, it has an infinite number of dimensions. This is, of course, impossible. After exhasutive searching, we have been unable to discover another object in intersection with our universe that has an infinite number of dimensions, with the possible exception of "Bob"'s brain. [Late note: "Bob" has told us that although the order is exceedingly high, his brain does have a finite number of dimensions. An elegant proof of this will be revealed sometime before X-day. All we know for now is that it has something to do with fallibility.]
All this brings us to the problem of the shadow of the True Pipe. Because it has an infinite dimensional order, it is impossible to calculate the shadow mathematically. Simply using an arbitrarily high order would result in wild inaccuracy and would in any case be computationally prohibitive, i.e., it would take longer than the universe is going to exist. All we can provide is a crude image that has been stuck in my mind since my meeting with "Bob" and the True Pipe.
[hyperpipe]
We don't know how accurate this or exactly where it came from. Use your own "Bob"-given senses and knowledge to judge it for yourself.
This leads us to another important concept. Imagine a 3-D sphere (a ball, if you require familiarity) passing through a 2-D plane. It would appear as a tiny circle (a slice of ball), growing larger and larger, then growing smaller and smaller, and finally disappearing.
By the same token, a 4-D hypersphere passing through a 3-D space would appear as a tiny sphere, growing larger and then smaller and finally disappearing altogether.
Note that hyperspheres and hypercubes are very simple hyperobjects. The True Pipe is something else again. Different parts of it which intersect with our uiverse have an infinity of radically different shapes and sizes. Because of the infinite nature of the True Pipe, it can exist in our physical universe as virtually any object! In a sense, "Bob" holds in his teeth an unimaginable cosmic Swiss Army Knife! Why, then, doesn't "Bob" just shift it around and produce a giant space-ark or some mega-weapon, so we can all get the hell out of here or blast The Conspiracy out of their misery? Because, as we mentioned (late) earlier (this part is being written a lot later than it would have been if it were written later earlier), "Bob"'s brain is finite, both in dimensional order and size. Consequently, "Bob" is incapable of perceiving or conceiving of most of the True Pipe (proof of his fallibility?). Only beings such as Jehovah-1 have such infinite capacity (having a lot of Slack helps, and we know who has most of it). Therefore, it's up to Wotan to tell "Bob" how to use this sentient tool. In fact, The Pipe probably isn't capable of entirely understanding itself (much like ordinary humans), but doesn't really care (like most SubGeniuses).
It should be noted that those few who have met "Bob" have reported that although he never fills or lights his "pipe," it never burns out! We believe that this is because the True Pipe has several identical sections which appear as pipes when in intersection with our space-time continuim. "Bob" can rapidly shift The Pipe and cause these "pipes" to be swapped in and out of the universe, rather like peas in the old shell game. The now "nonexistent" "pipe" is then cleaned, refilled, and re-lit. Just exactly how "Bob" does that is still a mystery. [Another late note: we now realize that the image presented earlier is merely the shadow of one of these pipe-like sections, not the entire True Pipe. We apologize for any misconceptions this may have caused.]
Finally, let us end the confusion over the "True Pipe" and "Bob"'s "pipe." The True Pipe isn't actually a pipe as we know it. As we have shown, it is an omnidemensional object for which no proper adjectives exist. Why then, do we call it the "True Pipe "? Because for years everyone assumed that the pipe in "Bob"'s teeth was just that - a pipe - with some sort of powerful secret hidden inside (Look out! It's got de juju in dere!). Thus, to diferentiate it from ordinary pipes it was dubbed the "True Pipe." But it's only one tiny part of the whole True Pipe! Just to keep it simple, from now on we will refer to the thing in "Bob"'s mouth as the "'pipe'" (possibly one of several, remember?), and to the whole thing as the "True Pipe." It would be interesting to know just what it calls itself.
This concludes this report on the Omnidimensional True Pipe, as written by the staff of the RatCave Media Center and Dr. T. M. Oscar.