After going around in circles, they had ended up back with Rumiere after all. Duanmu Huai had no choice but to contact Rumiere through his Personal Terminal once again and have her conduct a thorough examination of Kyubey.
The result was...
"Hmm, just as Miss Ann said, this isn't a living organism but the projection of a data aggregate... It should be some kind of higher-dimensional existence."
"...Could you explain that a little more clearly?"
Duanmu Huai admitted that he was completely ignorant in this area and needed some science education.
"Uh... how should I put it..."
Faced with Duanmu Huai's question, Rumiere on the other side of the screen thought for a moment. Then she took out a sheet of paper and an apple and placed the fruit on the paper.
"Let's put it this way. Suppose we were two-dimensional beings living on a sheet of paper. We would never be able to know the apple's true appearance. We could only determine its shape through the part of the apple touching the paper, but that would obviously contain errors. Just like now, we can all see that an apple is pressing down on the paper, but to the two-dimensional life-forms on the paper, the only thing they could detect would be the part where the sphere touched the paper, not the entire apple. So..."
As she spoke, Rumiere took a small knife, cut away half the apple beneath the point of contact, and placed it on the paper again.
"It's like this. We in the three-dimensional world can alter the shape of the apple however we please. We can cut it into a circle, a square, or even a triangle. That's because we exist in a higher dimension and can clearly perceive this existence. However, life-forms in a two-dimensional