At the center of Flatland there was a tall sky-scraper, thirty stories high. In the skyscraper were many offices, filled with workers who spent their days typing at their ledgers, recording the business of Flatland that they could see out of their windows.
After their work was finished every day, they left the skyscraper and went to their homes. They lived in houses and farms spread around the town-†the only town in Flatland.
Flatland was not very big. Perhaps as big as six†football fields.
Fotheringay, the CEO of the skyscraper in the center of Flatland, lived on the thirtieth floor. He watched from the windows as the workers went to their homes. He walked up and down the aisles, checking the ledgers, adding a note here, revising there.
There was very little business in Flatland. There were only a few hundred people. What goods they had they bartered for. But the skyscraper was there, and so were the ledgers. So Fotheringay brought the workers in and they kept the ledgers. Some of them watched the farmers at work†and wrote about their tilling, the clothes they wore, the crops they had planted,†and which were sprouting tubers.
Others watched the school, where the young people were at study, and made notes of the things the teachers wrote on the black-boards, and about which children giggled, and which passed notes, or made paper airplanes from their textbooks’ pages.
Of course, they all used telescopes.
