Far Cartouche

Why Buildings Have An Inside As Well As An Outside

Once upon a time, Buildings only had Outsides. If you stepped
Inside through a door, you didn't go Inside at all, but walked out
the door on the other side of the Building.

For many years, the Buildings just sat around. The children
would play tag, and hide-and-seek, and throw balls so that they
would bounce through several houses, but no one else paid them
any mind.

Then one year, there came a young man who excelled in throwing
balls, and had racked up scores of houses traversed far in excess
of anyone else, He loved the Buildings, and decided more could be
done with them. That more should be done with them, since they
crowded up the landscape.

First he figured out how he could deliver fresh baked cheese
pastries to people at home by cleverly calculating trajectories
through the buildings so that no time was lost from the kitchen
to the consumers. He was able to delivered fresh baked cheese pastries
to customers piping hot. This enterprise was such a big success, that
the young man had the capital to begin moving the houses around,
for more efficient deliveries.

The Building-Fast Delivery Service Company continued to rake
in excess funds, and wanted to diversify. They wanted to use Building
Tech in new ways. Soon they hit upon the idea of transporting people
between cities. The Company moved thousands of Buildings so that front
and the back doors were aligned, and a traveller could step through
a door in Schenectady and finish the stride in San Francisco. Travel
was revolutionized, and the economy took off like a bottle rocket.

The Company became filthy rich, and the Building workers
unionized. Soon contract negotiations broke down, and management
eagerly put their hardhats on to show the hands just how it should
be done. A crew in Tulsa inadvertantly connected the El Paso line
into a loop.

In their gleefully didligent haste, a foam tile was knocked off one
of the endpoint buildings when the connection was made. It fell into
the loop, and ceased to exist as a tangible object. It was smeared
over the path of the Building loop, and existed in all places at once.

Now this existence slowly leaked memory into the void between the
doors, and the foam began to quantum tunnel into nearby but off-loop
Buildings. Soon the whole travel network was involved, a critical mass
achieved, and the axiomatic geometric underpinnings of the Unverse twitched.

The head of the Tulsa crew picked himself up off the ground and
gingerly approached the nearest Building. He leaned over, and looked
through a door, into the Building. He stepped through, and was Inside.

The Company promptly settled with the union, and changed into a
rental agency.

That is why Buildings have Insides as well as Outsides.