In this FAQ, I will explain the basics of a Tesseract in much more detail than in the other thread. It will use the deaths of the characters and phenomenon that is witnessed in the Hypercube. Use Ctrl+F (Cmd+F for Macs) to find the questions, but putting in the special number next to it.

Q0 - What IS a Hypercube?
Q1 - What was happening when the Colonel died?
Q2 - What was happening when Jerry died?
Q3 - What was happening when Max and Julia died?
Q4 - What was happening when Alternate Simon died?


Q0 - What IS a Hypercube?
A Hypercube is the name for any equivalent to a cube in a different dimension. A square (also known as a 2-cube, because it has 2 dimension) is a hypercube, a Cube is also a Hypercube, it is a 3-cube.
In Cube2: Hypercube, they are in fact talking about a Tesseract, a 4-Cube. It is a 4D Cube to put it in laymans terms.
A point with no width, depth, height or any other spatial dimension is 0D.
A line is 1D, as it only has height or width, but no more than 1 Dimension. It is, technically, a 1-Cube.
A square has 2 Dimensions, height and width, but not depth or any other spatial dimension. It is 2D.
A Cube has 3 dimensions, Height, Width and Depth. It only has 3 spatial dimensions.
A Tesseract (8-Cell/4-Cube/Whatever) has 4 Spatial Dimensions, Height, Width, Depth and the unknown 4th Spatial Dimension.

Q1 - What was happening when the Colonel died?
In a Tesseract, the chambers are able to move through each other, or fold through each other. It is like the Cubes in Cube moving, but these ones can move through the other cubes. This explains the moving wall that was slowly approaching the prisoners.
However, the room that was moving through the room the prisoners were in had a fast time signature. In a Tesseract, time can move differently in the different rooms/chambers. When the room was moving through the room the Prisoner's were in, it was rapidly aging anything which was placed in to that room when it was moving through it. This is what killed the Colonel.

Q2 - What was happening when Jerry died?
This is another case of rooms moving through a room. The reason it shrank after a while was because the room had gone through the room in to a different room, not stopping in the room the prisoners were in. There isn't much technobabble to explain this. The tesseract grew as it moved in to the room, and shrank again as it left the room.

Q3 - What was happening when Max and Julia died?
Just before they died while having Sex, Max realized that the rooms had different time signatures. Max, as far as we are aware, was in a room with the same time signature as ours, whereas Julia was in a room faster than our normal speed. Max and Julia were so busy having sexytime is the room with the faster speed, they failed to remember that time was faster than normal, so they aged much quicker than they normally would, so they died of old age, but still while having sex.

Q4 - What was happening when Alternate Simon died?
This is another case of rooms moving through each other, however, this time, the theory is that more than one room moved through that one room, hence the columns. This killed Alternate Simon, which also revealed that alternate realities can exist side by side within the Tesseract.



If you have any questions, just post and I'll try and reply (if I know the answer.)