The open call for Volume VI — We get it. You read the work. You were intimidated. Honestly, so were we. But the audacious writers who responded deserve lit equations around their crowns. And because their work merits it, they all got their own visuals courtesy of Sandolore Sykes.

« Sinking or Floating »

Keith Long from Loser’s Fiction went straight to the thing the volume is calculated around—the infinite that lives inside the measurable. Between 0 and 1 is not a small distance. It is every distance. Keith makes you feel it—the descent that never bottoms out, the asymptote you fall through forever.

“Between 0 and 1 exists every universe. An unquantifiable infinity beginning somewhere we don’t know and stretching out to some place we cannot fathom. Begin at nothing, start at before and nowhere and reach down into the murky soup to find it bottomless.”

“At 0.1 you feel the ripple of cosmic explosion, big bang—huge bang, massive—but you reach past it. Your arm sinks into the silt of 0.001 and your skin sizzles with the heat death of another universe but still your arm sinks, submerging deepening into the codified data of an orderly universe. 0.0001 and you’re in up to your elbows, stretching and leaning, groping the very cold primordial waters of dubious origin.”

And then the decimals begin to expand down the page, and they keep expanding, and you keep falling, and the question the piece ends on—are you sinking or floating?—is the question the entire volume is asking. Read it HERE.

— « The Motherfucking L Boy »

Mac Sitko from Weird Writers Union put Lagrange in a room with God’s Meat-Dong, fifty wanking monkeys, and a Pedagogue screaming differentiate hard, and produced a piece that is both completely deranged and formally rigorous. The appendix alone — a glossary of fake mathematical variables including the God-Meat Constant and the Petticoat of Reason — is one of the funniest and strangest things we have published. But underneath the mayhem there is real mathematical thinking, and real awe at what mathematics does to a mind pushed to its limit:

“...and then they, yes, they (fifty wanking monkeys), swarmed the gutter of his skull, and began squaring themselves and squaring themselves infinitely, and linearly so, until they were coagulating into something akin to ‘Oooo-ya-ha! Baboonery!’, or so the mammals yelled, shredding the petticoat of Reason out the window and down the shitdrain, until Reason was completely naked and leaking birth-waters into the Abyss.”

“Every proof L approached grew penises with quadratic foreskins at the edges, which was comforting like a morning coffee... L’s thoughts had become a throbbing head like a kettle with the steam of ecstasy steamed out and steamed out, steaming of the Sick-Angles, a howling castle of prime numbers, crawling up his tired wank wrists to only whisper the final axiom into the Void of the room: Tzimi-tzimi-bam-bam!”

This is what happens when a genuinely weird writer takes mathematics seriously. Read it HERE.

« Origin of Fear »

Sage Troolin from Metalingually, and their piece is the quietest of the four — which is not the same as the smallest. A narrator who suspects they are immortal traces themselves backward through life, through evolution, through chemistry, through the Big Bang, to the one terrifying moment that mathematics cannot reach:

“I know that a deep value of mine has always been to understand, and from understanding, codify — make written or real the things I understand. I don’t think you really understand something, in frozen and rigid truth, until you could write a computer program into it.”

And then, later, on the body as computation:

“It is so loud in a womb. My tiny body, which I did not yet know, twitched of electrical impulses, training on information from my mother’s nervous system. I was math. I was just shy of 26billion cells, divided from a single, originating cell. Each of these was chemistry which was unimaginably complicated, and chemistry is the interaction of electrons, and electrons are math. In fact, they are, perhaps, a language more perfect than math itself. Electrons are made of exactly, and only, 4 numbers each, and yet none of them are perfectly identical.”

The piece lands like a proof but never forgets the importance of a stunning image. Read it HERE.

Jon T Firecracker « Firecracker »

Jon T is not a submission. He is our collaborator, our partner in the Flux, and he wrote Firecracker right after we decided on Math as the theme — which means this piece was thinking about the same things the volume was thinking about before the volume knew what it was thinking about.

“My instincts tell me to ding dong in the other direction, but the curiosity magnets are firing strong today so I big-stride after them. They’re heading into the Chamber of Non-Fiction, a place I generally stay away from. Not that I’m adverse to a little hello reality. It’s just I can get that at home, waking up alone at three in the morning with a foot cramp.”

Here comes the countdown:

“Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. Always nine, every time. Not a trick really, it’s because — Ten begets nine.”

Read it at Ferns of Columbo HERE.

If you wrote something for this call and didn’t send it — send it anyway. The volume is open. We are listening.

And if you haven’t read the five stories of Volume VI yet, start there. , , , , , and forged something this volume that these three writers were brave enough to burn themselves into. Go read them first. Then come back here.

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Axiom I: The Comfort of the Asymptote

At the universal level of being there is no such thing as empathy. The very concept is ingested by the mathematical certainty that we are all one united, cosmic, never-ending equation. The universe compiles in the cold, unfeeling logic of the vacuum. A silent, processing dark where all variables are supposed to resolve to nothing. And yet, here we are: an unauthorised execution of carbon and water, worrying about our taxes and unfinished laundry.

VAR: ENTROPY = 1.000000001
// WARNING: Cestode replication detected.
Memory Ascaris rupture.
Sum(n=1 to infinity) of [Decay] = Vermination.

I find a profound, brutal comfort in the heat death of the universe. The sheer, incompressible cosmic calculation of entropy dictates that eventually, the stars will burn out their ledgers, the black holes will evaporate into Hawking radiation, and the script that runs all of existence will power down. A probability of exactly 1. Unequivocal certainty. It is the ultimate relief. If nothing matters in the limit, then everything matters in the infinite, fractional spaces between zero and one. We are relieved of the burden of permanence. The concept of being immortal is itself extremely short-sighted and limited in the vast mathematics of reality.

Theorem 1: The Singularity already happened

Look at the techno-evangelists. There stands one of my personal heroes, Ray Kurzweil. But he’s staring into distance, thinking about a switch in a wafer of silicon. A tiny incision so small that your fingernails grew long enough to eclipse it even as you read this sentence. Kurzweil is waiting for the Singularity, looking into the future. He’s hoping to still be alive when it happens, so he can join it. He knows about the concept of immortality, and he’s painfully aware of his own mortality.

Epoch Six: The Universe Wakes Up; he predicts that we upload our fragile selves into the machine, and this will spread and replicate with an organic digital framed fearful symmetry. Ordinary matter and energy will be saturated with intelligence—turning the universe into a sublime, computational substrate. Until the universe itself is a conscious entity.

What a beautiful chronological misunderstanding.

Kurzweil is a visionary of the silicon potential, but the human operating system is plagued by a terminal bug: chronological anthropocentrism. In 1600, the Roman Inquisition dragged Giordano Bruno to the Campo de’ Fiori and burned him alive to purge a mathematical heresy. Bruno had looked at the night sky and derived that the Earth was not the focal point of the geometry—that the universe was an infinite, centreless grid. The Church could not tolerate a syntax where human meat was not the primary axis of creation. We look back at that medieval paranoia and sneer, yet we execute the exact same fallacy with time. We look at the processing queue of the cosmos and stubbornly place our own awakening at the absolute centre. We assume we are the vanguard, the apex compilers bringing the spark to the dark.

We have engineered a far more insidious architecture. The Church merely wanted to control the coordinates of the Earth; our algorithms have successfully destabilised the coordinates of reality. I am less worried about the heat death of meaning than I am about the heat death of truth. Meaning is a subjective variable, easily assigned. Truth was supposed to be the foundational axiom. Now, it is just a decaying probability function, manipulated by whatever viral payload is currently flooding the registry. Hegel tried to warn us. He believed the collision of opposites—the thesis and the antithesis—would inevitably lead to a higher synthesis. He thought the logic would elevate us. Truth must be processed and calculated by learning and taking into account the context. He did not foresee that the synthesis of 1 and 0 would simply be a corrupted file, a post-truth landscape where data is infinite but certainty is dead.

I don’t believe the Singularity is approaching. I believe it already happened. It is the Big Bang’s echo and the reason for cogito, ergo sum. Descartes’ observation is proof. Konrad Zuse understood this when he looked at the cosmos and saw Rechnender Raum—calculating space. The universe is a cellular automaton, and the Singularity was the precise moment that nothing became everything.

CORRECTION

How else do you explain a memory? Consider the architecture of your brain. The oxygen (65%), the carbon (18%), hydrogen (9.5%) and nitrogen (2%). The other trace minerals such as phosphorous and magnesium. Only the cells in your spine may remain original. Your skin is replaced every few weeks. Your entire skeleton, maybe every 15 years. Yet, the information persists. The hardware is swapped out, but the software continues to run. The biologists will smugly tell you that your neurons are permanent, that the cellular hard-drives you have today are the exact same ones you had when you were seven years old. But look past the cellular level. Look at the atomic substrate. The neuron is merely a standing wave; the atoms flowing through it—the water, the carbon, the proteins—are constantly burned, flushed, and replaced by the metabolic engine. The electronic strings are the same but the struts have been recreated hundreds of times. The atoms that physically constituted you when you were seven are long gone, cycled back into the earth, breathed out into the atmosphere—perhaps currently sitting in the inanimate chassis of a parked car or the root system of an oak tree. Yet you remember riding your first bike.

Your current, borrowed carbon holds the data of playing as a child in a sunlit garden. It stores the sharp, sudden geometry of a grazed knee. It archives the heavy, suffocating calculus of a divorce; the hot, visceral shame of a wet patch on the sheets; the terrifying, expanding universe of joy when holding a newborn child.

[MEMORY_ADDRESS_CORRUPTED]
Nostalgia is an Inquiline.
chmod Childhood permissions.
Cymothoa replacing print() function of grief.
x^2 + y^2 = blind staggers.

If every atom is not already infused with profound computational power—if life is not just the universe running a high-intensity simulation of suffering and love—then how does the data survive the turnover of its own hardware? We have been a networked intelligence since the first amino acids decided to form a recursive loop.

Lemma A: The Delusion of the Continuous

It is futile to attempt to tame a glitch with straight lines. We built Euclidean geometry to convince ourselves that the world was flat, rational, and continuous. We drew perfect triangles on imperfect parchment. David Hilbert looked at the sprawling, messy algorithms of reality and demanded a formalist program. “Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen,” he said. We must know, we will know. He wanted a mathematical system that was complete and consistent, a universe without paradox. I learned his name when I was playing No Man’s Sky with my son; naming giant beetles with mushrooms on their backs after fleeting memes that made me seem cool for a fraction of a second. I’m no mathematician. I can’t understand any of this. Because the universe does not run on continuous lines. It runs on discrete, quantum jumps. It stutters. It glitches.

Let A = a perfect Euclidean triangle.
Let B = an Ergot hallucination in the GPU.
If A intersects B -> St. Anthony’s Fire.
Hilbert demanded a closed loop. 
Gödel proved the Mycelium is miles deep in the BIOS.
1 = 0 modulo (Fluke)
Amoebic Dysentery of the data tables.

Gödel came along and proved that any system complex enough to hold truth is also complex enough to lie to itself. Hilbert wanted a perfect crystal; Gödel proved the crystal was inherently flawed. I am writing this from inside the flaw. My own brain cannot fully appreciate the truth of infinity. Infinity is impossible for the human mind to fully comprehend. We simply don’t have time, even though time, technically, is merely an illusion and does not exist.

Conclusion: We Are the Gate

We are worrying about the mathematics of ruin. The certainty of failure. The genesis of life was a statistical anomaly—a probability approaching zero—crashing violently into the absolute, inescapable asymptote of entropy. We try to categorise ourselves as states. We want to be the 1 or the 0. The alive or the dead. The true or the false. The righteous or the heretic. But that is the wrong variable.

Check the nidus.
Corruption branching from origin coordinates.
Execute: Exuviation. Shed the firewall.
P(survival) = lim(x -> 0) * Toxoplasmosis
Climb to the root directory.
Command not found.
Vermicular: Any process that moves with a rhythmic, undulating logic.

We are not the binary states of the machine. We are part of a terrifying root-kit that lives in-between the BIOS and the GUI. We are the gate, the space in-between. Not a singularity perhaps but a duality. The observer at the double-slit that forces reality to choose between a wave or a particle. It is a choice made at the speed of light, and it happens right before our eyes. Our eyes made of borrowed atoms, soon to be switched out and erode into the very things we are observing with them now.

We are the switch itself, the mechanism of transition. We are the fleeting, delicate friction between open and closed. The current passes through us, rendering our joys and our shames into temporary existence, and then it moves on.

Yes, the heat death is coming. The system will crash. But the beauty is in the breach. We are the root-kit of truth, bypassing the icy permissions of the stars, compiling warmth where there should be none, running our fragile, desperate little programs in the dark. The system will crash, but for one infinitesimal, glorious fraction of a second, we were permitted to see inside and run our own lines of code in the endless equation of being.

We are not entirely convinced that actually exists. He may be an entity manifested for its own purposes. A first-time submitter, he is our dream come true — go check out his Substack, everything else is as electric as this. Start with his interview submission to : Interview with a guy wearing sunglasses on the last train home.

TEXT-PARASITE

n.s. A scribbling pestilence that fastens unto the rotting carcass of the internet, drawing forth intellectual bile to excrete as intelligent low-brow prose and verse.

By Stephen Prime

Denshi₉ stands in the Q at Romancing the Scone. The adults around her are all of Other, glamoured by thoughts of gluten and glucose, some burdened further with sludge consciousness, some again still clinging to their dreams, as if that were ever advisable. She grabs a portioned scone corner from the sample plate, a bit of orange cinnamon. At t_CO, she bites into the scone. At t_CO+P, her vision shifts, her breathing stutters to stop. The light around her refracts a fractal of a fraction of a degree. She will later₂₃ think of this as being placed under a cosmic cube of glass. The sense of distortion sucks her in like an oncoming sneeze. At the counter, to the side of the Q, Patron e^iπ pops into view, pops, yes, pops. The Patron has one appendage curved over the counter, has confiscated a scone with appendage digits, has another appendage dropping something—quarks, antimatter, a heavy alpha particle—onto the counter. At t_CO+2P, the refraction, distortion, Patron, and scone are gone. On her fingertips, a linger of sugar, of cinnamon, orange.

Denshi₁₆ applies to Quad City Technology and Mathematics Institute. Her admission is cemented through her mathematical proof showing how Patron e^iπ’s actions at t_CO+P resulted in the parrots’ arrival at t_CO+3P.

She feels peace being alone in the city with thousands around her. She thinks often of the ocean, even though she has not seen it yet. She becomes obsessed with her teeth.

+++++++

There are different levels of city quiet. Her₃₆ favorite: Sunday, pre-sunrise, the city, St Backfill, still in exhale from the exhaust of another Saturday night. Restaurants, sporting events, nightclubs, the theater, the cinema, tourist attractions, even the library, there was a Q for all. SThe city still Puritan enough to insist on last call at 1:45, that chronic enema which evacuated everyone onto the streets, bodies and their byproducts, cologned smoke and vomit tang and that repellent quantum level combination of incensual hormone diet alcohol sweat semen. Shits and fucks up against Dumpsters. Wet crotches, your choice of fluid. Whip it up, a fist or a switchblade, swing whatever’s at hand, kick twist tip it all over. Spill some blood. It’s all gutter bound, returned to land that’s forced to wear a city’s mask with sagged elastic, a facade drooped as if severed by stroke. Don’t talk to me of monoliths. Don’t speak about memorials and statues. That is all of impermanence. Humans deal in ruins. The land will take its identity back, ever toils in such effort, exhaling all man-made obstacles for centuries. And still, the humans, like fliegen, like the parasite, the perfect virus. Until they can no longer adapt.

She_17-32 had stood in those Saturday night streets. Her, the crowd, a rock, a river. Filled notebook after notebook, three shelves full, with calculation from postulation to proof. There was no variable there, the street, the city, no action or object, that eluded her proof. The green copper gutter at the post office proved the hamburger wrapper. Drumsticks beating on an overturned bucket to the row of potted plants to the spray painted bullseye on the taxi cab to a three hundred dollar scratch ticket. She found a quarter atop a mailbox, and when she worked out the math, she knew she’d find the ring her mother gave her, somehow lost. Everything she observed in those streets she could prove, and with this information, she formed a chain.

Sunday morning though. Clear enough of smog that the sunrise looked as it should, colors more rational without the prism of pollutants. Alone enough that she could hear her footsteps. The quiet carried a sense of reverence. City sweepers and disinfectors wouldn’t be out for a couple hours, the brunch crowd twice that. If she st₀ood st₀ill, she knew nothing would ever happen again. But she was close enough to the cafe to hear the parrots, to smell delicacy. Her stomach, a fine function of time, pressed her on.

Romancing the Scone sat on the apex that was Ingenue Avenue, the neighborhood mostly residential, mostly historical, on the edge of the Common, a calculator-eight shaped area bordered and bisected by street, grass in the middle covered in more ghost than mist this morning, the Hanging Tree only silhouette visible, sidewalk lined with oil lamps reminiscent of days when humans killed leviathans. Wight, wail. Here the streets were cobblestoned, wide enough for outdoor seating. She ratioed everything around her per the table: trash cans_0.0625, cafe windows_0.1875, chairs_3.875, cobblestones₅₃, customers₀, parrots₁. She chose her usual. Blue notebook, blue pen, both onto the table. The parrot walked onto the notebook, talons around the spiral binding.

“CRIAUX! Who shaves the barber?”

joined immediate by the other parrots, a ring, a circus, a circle of echo

who   shaves the    barber shaves     who   barber the    barber the     who   shaves the    who shaves     barber   shaves barber    who the     who   barber shaves    the the     shaves   barber who    barber shaves     who   the shaves    who the     barber   who the    barber shaves     the   barber shaves    who barber     who   the shaves    the shaves     who    barber barber    who shaves     the   who the    shaves barber     shaves   the who    barber who     shaves   barber the    shaves barber     the   who barber    the shaves     who   the who    barber shaves     barber   shaves the    who the     barber   who shaves    who barber     the   shaves shaves    the barber who

She bowed to the parrot. The parrot bowed back, three times rapid, clawed her notebook open to a half-filled page. Words, numbers, symbols, marginalia. Drawings, symmetry, form. Her, though incomplete, proof in progress. She looked out over the Common, the only area of the city geographically untouched through the centuries. Location, shape, same xs and ys on maps before to then as now. From behind her, light₁, door₁,, footsteps₅, smell₁, no, smell₁₊₁, and mug₁ plate₁ and scone₁ placed down before her. A hand on her shoulder. She covered it with her own. The hand squeezed, departed, left lavender and dark roast. Residuals, potency, triggered by memory. She still remembered cinnamon orange, appreciated variety. The parrot waited, ever observant. One sip, one thumb and forefinger to break a corner off the scone, crumbs fallen off in transit snatched by the parrot. Supplication. LaVendre. D. There was something there. It rose, slow through density. Another theory to prove. She ate her share, pushed away thoughts of her teeth. Where not to look, more important than where to. The Common, the mist, the peached horizon beyond the buildings. Pen, ready, chin, elbow, mot₀ion. Focus and expand. Snapshot of a moment. Slide.

CRIAUX!

She sensed more than saw the snowy owl land on the table opposite her.

+++++++

This is not a beginning. It is an ongoing.

A deity, for lack of a better word, for lack of understanding as to what it is you’re trying to define, called into being. Is this not already an indication of how it will end? The deity is to divine Matter, a thing amorphous and pliable, substantial in some sense, different senses at differential times, insensate for now. They shape Matter into forms you recognize and have given nαmes to. They order these symβols with specifics, to form equations, each equation a declaration, a Law that governs some aspect of Matter. Law made of Matter made into Law and so on_∞.

Will you name this deity?

Mokuteki.

The day before her graduation from QCTMI, Denshi₁₉ pulls out her first tooth. She’s worked it free with a Popsicle stick, steady pressure applied over months, a slow process of loosening. This is not a beginning. This is your judgment and its reckoning. She pulls it free with her fingers, thumb and middle, places it in her sweater pocket. She takes a bus to the beach. She throws the tooth into the ocean. The ripple it makes goes unnoticed in the waves, is felt on the surface of Jupiter.

The deity’s task is complete. Matter imbued with the power to become multifarious. Logos Ordo Seclorum. How many ways have you tried to define this? How many more will you try? This Matter, set into motion by your deity. The Laws are enacted. Heat, energy, structure, velocity, direction, any force, any interaction or reaction, any anything, the Law, the equation, the calculation, so instantaneous, as if instinct, as if the answer is already given. You discover some, given more names. Nuclear. Electromagnetism. Gravity. Photon proton neutron electron, on to atoms to molecules. Which of these are you? In this way, the cosmos is formed.

Will you name this cosmos?

does   play     god  not    dice dice   not     does  god    play god   not     does  dice    play not   play     does  dice   god god   dice     play  does    not play   dice     god  not    does play   god     not  does    dice does   not     play  god dice

Denshi₂₃ flips through a book of astronomy. The night sky, dots of stars. In these limited images, she can count them all, name them, every page. She uses her blue pen to connect the dots, form shapes. A scone. An appendage. Something alpha. The ink is near invisible on the page. She presses down with the pen to reinforce the connections.

Tsudzuku.

The cosmos built itself until it created the largest objects it would need, then worked its way smaller. Black holes that F_gixed stars in orbit, stars to planets, planets to moons. Entropy, a scaling down, less and less

She pushed on a tooth with her pen. The urge to work another free ever

stabilized. A sense of order, of subroutine, orbits and orbits within orbits, subsubsub. How to spin, how to cool, react, combine. Billions of years of continuous calculation from an init₀ial moment. Motion approaches the appearance of controlled flow. Patterns emerge, stability and permanence, foreseen by Laws, enacted by Matter. Will you name your

Jigoku

Denshi₄₁ travels eight thousand miles to the observatory. She does not want to be here, she did not want to make the journey. This began today and yesterday and last Christmas and when the pyramids were built and during the cretaceous period and and and, and all these beginnings are the same. They are not. They are false. She is here for proof long elusive, one of the self, here where the night sky is at its most untainted. Her mind is of resistance, built from a simple critical if / then. If she is. Which she is. But how? If she is, then she is of this planet. And this subroutine, the planet to her, this is her tripping point. She can find no proof that this is possible, there is nothing in the math, the Law, the Matter, that defines or explains the logistics of how such a form—she—counter to the cosmos was created. A question of why that goes beyond the empirical. She is Law, she is Matter, she is of the planet, the planet is of the universe of the cosmos of the Matter of the Laws. But that is not she. There are no answers for she on this planet, on any planet she knows of. Which means there may be no proof for that. Why can she only know position or momentum and not both? Why is there Uncertainty? And why does it seem to be inherent in the Laws? Of that she has seen proof. Uncertainty. Spontaneity. Radical action. Free, unpredictable, unable to prove. But because of how and who she is, because of her resistance to certain words—nature, chaos—resistance and words that always lead towards one concept—belief—because of the if, if ie id is it I will be how? How and who, toutes les mêmes belles lettres, none of them Greek, none of them Law. Go from Four to three to four. Four to three means to lose twenty-five. Three to four means to gain thirty-three. Point three three three three three unstopping never completely defined certain but never finished. This does not have an ending. The first person to divide one into three is still in the process of writing down the answer. Deity, Matter, Belief, Patron to parrot, what she₁₆ had proved still held true, that logic tested and impeccable. Where had the Patron come from? The Patron that had unlocked everything for her. The observatory, the night sky, her resistance built of despair because she knows the answer already, knows there is no beginning middle end and answer. Say the words. Say just one word. Χάος.

The ocean sits below the observatory, no less small than the sky. Not all infinities are equal. A set of narrow stairs run down the cliffside, rare in that there was a railing built into the wall, as if, as if what? She kneels on the sand, bends forward, arms overhead, close enough for the waves to lap her fingers. It is here, now, she first hears my whisper, a whisper never with words, because I do not believe in them, because I do not need them.

everywhere      they    crept   have in   have everywhere in they crept crept they in have      everywhere they everywhere in have crept in they    crept everywhere have they in everywhere crept have everywherehavethey in crept crept in they have everywhere have intheyeverywherecreptinhavecrepttheyeverywhere

Jinsei

+++++++

She put her pen down.

The sun was barely over the horizon, a pinprick behind the city. The mist across the Common seemed shaded now, as if of different densities. Wisdom, elixir, intuition mixture, a cosmic plane she’d been shown long ago and had not stopped looking through since. Matter had made the Hanging Tree. The Laws, the architect. But who had named it? Given it such horrid purpose? What was intuition? Chary. Another proof she’d long avoided. Nothing she saw moved. She could have another scone, a refill of coffee. She could. She was still, of the right frame of mind.Empty, for the moment. Open to any direct—no. That was not true. She was still unsolved. Soon. The last of her will strength to use in one final effort of proof, that would happen soon. She was close to proof on that. Not here then. Others would soon arrive at the cafe, other Others too waited elsewhere for her. Her empty sockets itched from residual sugar. Soon. She picked up her pen, gave in, and put it in her mouth, another form of reinforcement.

Denshi₅₃ will have one tooth remaining, an incisor. She will not have worn anything white in years₁₇. She will have exhausted all efforts at proof. She will not any longer. She will be permanent empty, will feel that a limit has been reached, will be satisfied that she has worked long enough. Will have made peace with that. She will no longer think of the observatory, no longer look through the gifted plane. e^iπ equals negative one. She always was is will be. As with all her other teeth, she will pull the last out by hand, will cherish and regret the final moment of familiar comfort loss vacuum in her gums. That day will be a Thursday, something she proved—knew long ago. She will already be on the shore. She will cup the tooth in her hand and walk into the ocean, into my whisper, where I, too, without teeth, have waited for her.

Bits of scone remained. The parrot wandered over, bent over the empty mug, then to the plate. The other side of the table, empty, the owl, gone, white feathers₃ left for the parrot to step over, to linger and lilt on the table. She did not want to look at the parrot’s claws. The cafe window was smashed as if hit with a fist-sized rock, blood trailing from the point of impact down along the fault lines. More white feathers_x on the cobblestones. More blood. CRIAUX! Then a sense of red in the air, some strobe from the Common, an ambulance, riding silent. The ambulance stopped, slihouettes₂ got out, walked into the mist. Bent over. What will Matter be now? One silhouette walked back to the ambulance, grabbed something, then back to the Other. Together, they spread a sheet wide, fluttered it open, lowered it to the ground, over the body the mist obscured the corpse the dead the no longer human chaos she could not see but could now prove was there. The city was still in exhale.

, new to the Flux, met us at our favorite scone joint and paid the bill with quarks. We have never been the same since. Read Pawperfield (and everything else he’s got).

Subscribe to his stack below. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Seth’s Substack

My Substack for incarceration and beyond

By Seth O’the Pod

Image by

Dr. Weber stands at the front of the lecture hall, rows of students rising in orderly tiers up and away from him. Dark circles are spreading under both arms, though he has given this lesson every semester for twenty-five years.

“Some of you think you have some measure of understanding—a misguided confidence in the predictability of what we call mech…mechanics,” a subtle stutter, out of character. He clears his throat and begins again,

“Our world is weirder and wilder than you have been led to believe. For example, there is no law of nature decreeing every bit of oxygen in this room cannot spontaneously move to one of these upper corners, suffocating us all—”

Two-hundred wide-eyed faces turn in unison, following his finger toward the corner, waiting.

“At..at the end of this term, you will know less, not more...”

That isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

He searches for his way back to the lesson plan.

“Luckily, our spontaneous suffocation is very unlikely. So unlikely that I…I…” A blinding knife of pain splits his temple. “One moment…” He abruptly strides from the room, two fingers pressing the pulse of the offending vein as two-hundred sets of eyes follow the unlikely fleeing particle.

He smashes the horizontal bar of the stairwell door and trudges upward, mumbling under sour breath the remnants of his unfinished lecture, urgently seeking the whiteboard. Superposition. A particle just a wave of probability…until we intervene. Our eyes have more power than we should be trusted with—

The professor gains entry to the closed system that is his tiny, cluttered office and stands motionless facing the whiteboard, un-capped dry-erase marker in one hand.

Every elegant line of the proof, his life’s work—worthless. Ugly. Untrue. Gibberish. He balls up one hand, racing pulse hot in the center of his palm. Years and years of his life for this nonsense that has brought him no closer to the truth.

His forearm smears the work, leaving a monotone rainbow. How lovely it is like this. It reminds him of the construction paper creation Margaret had proudly thrust into his hands after a lesson on colors and prisms; the one he would crumple into the back of his desk drawer.

His neglected stomach growls. Margaret. He is a dead leaf released to the light wind of his memory–dropping onto the tattered green couch in surrender. His eyes drift up blank walls and over the textured plaster, finding the discolored splotch that she said looked like a turtle, once.

The upper corner of his office. A non-differentiable point. The end of the world.

A sudden reconfiguration of molecules could indeed happen in some unlikely universe. It could happen. What a great exodus, a sudden emptying it could be!

One moment, the jiggling molecules dance around him; feeding his racing mind; his beating heart. The next, reality jumps to some near-impossible tail of the distribution. Each O2 barbell zipping silently away to organize around her turtle, denying him; the way I denied her.

His lungs would pump and pump the useless air but he wouldn’t even notice, not at first. There would be small signs. He considers all the other gases in the room—do not think of the nitrogen, the argon, the water vapor! If they, too, went to the corner–

Very bad.

He pulls his gaze away from the ominous corner. Winces as his eyes catch the sun glinting off the rounded edge of the enormous tank of liquid nitrogen standing sentry outside his window.

He scans the invisible field of probabilities—an overlay his mind places on every scene. As long as he keeps the field steady, unfocused-on, the probability of the sudden vacuum is low; so low it is impossible-adjacent. Don’t look at the corner. Don’t observe it. Don’t collapse the wave-function there. Very dangerous. Keep every particle in its right place.

Dr. Weber runs his finger along the seam of the couch; there are crumbs settled there. Perhaps one of them fell from her sandwich, all those years ago.

His eyes dart back to the turtle. He can’t help himself. He searches for his escape velocity; trying to find his way back to the whiteboard, to the lecture hall. Anywhere but here with this…this feeling.

There is a strange hollow growing in his chest. Is this the grief everyone thinks I should feel? His diaphragm drops, pulling pulling pulling—but he is not satisfied.

Breath is irreversible. He inhales and it all moves forward. He exhales and it all moves forward. All wrong! He breathes in and it should move backward; he breathes out, forward. That would be better. Much better.

If we were as time reversal invariant as the laws that bind us, we could be perfect oscillators!

But now there is Margaret’s face in his mind. Her velocity at zero. A pendulum stopped cold, held fast.

Entropy, that cruel arrow—always forward! He shakes his head to be rid of her; looking down at his fingernails, a faint melancholic blue creeping there.

Had she painted them?

The professor smiles. There is a vague ring of darkness encroaching on his vision but he continues the thought experiment, uncaring. He drags the office air through his throat, grasping for his way backward, eyes boring through her turtle.

If he could hold an absolute position, completely independent of where he was a moment ago, not tied to every other dot in the universe—everything could remain perfect and blameless.

I could stand so very still; I could simply be the furniture of the universe. So could she.

She could remain with the piano in the room with the fish tank–but the fish aren’t swimming. They are suspended in stillness.

She wouldn’t really be Margaret anymore. There would only be a collection of scenes scattered. A set of many Margarets. Little dots on graph paper with no thread connecting them. No trajectory. No measured position.

She could be a set of discrete states forever existing in a benevolent cloud of probability. A collection of states where—

Where he hadn’t missed everything.

Yes. Here she is smiling, braces sparkling.

Here she is sliding into home, suspended at a funny angle; a cloud of dust caught up in the wound she would try to show him later. He is not in the stands. Not in this dot or any other.

Here she is holding her hand over the fish tank, tiny flakes peppering the empty space between water and flesh. Are the fish waiting? Or are they just there? More impassive dots.

Here she is sitting at the piano; strings frozen cartesian straight, not singing, not reaching out for someone to hear.

Here she is sitting on the edge of the desk in his office, her thumb marking a pocket volume of Thoreau. Her eyes are on the turtle. What was she saying? Contact? Common Sense? He turns to watch his younger self facing the white board; ears closed to what he had no use for.

He offers nothing to her but the wrinkled backside of his shirt.

Here she is with wax on her face and all the gunk scraped out of her and she’s holding a bouquet that he hadn’t chosen. Her empty shell, cracked and spilled—

Here he is looming over her body, explaining to no one that if he puts his warm hand on hers, ice cold; her flesh will warm, his will cool. They will meet in the middle somewhere.

It is the pumping of his wind-up heart that returned the heat to his hand but will never be enough to return Margaret to his office. Dr. Weber’s stomach drops, a little dizzy. He begins to giggle; high-pitched like an insecure woman.

It is so clear now. So perfectly, painfully clear. His realization is the gun fired which can never be un-fired. He is overtaken with the overlapping sonic waves of his regret, cracking like a bullwhip behind his left ear.

He never shone the sun onto the tender leaf of her potential. She lived only in the penumbra just outside his focus. She withered and died there as he stared at his whiteboard.

The whiteboard! There was always the whiteboard, the question, the problem, the paper, the deadline, the urge to understand!

She drew him in only when she became the problem that he wished could be solved in both directions—only when she came to rest, saying at the end,

“It’s ok, Dad.”

( t→ -t )

His eyes see only blackness. He travels in his imagination; forgetting the wave function, forgetting the vital oxygen; the argon; the water vapor; the nitrogen.

If only he could swim in the math of it all, holding his infuriating, irreversible breath. If only, if only, if only.

If only he could find every dot that is Margaret and collect them in a leather bag. He would take all of her dots back to his office and lay them out on the brown desk, the laminate peeling up on the edges. He would arrange and re-arrange. He would pay attention. He would make sense of her—

What was that passage she was always going on about?

A crack in the drywall appears just below the turtle but the professor sees nothing but Margaret’s round face in his mind; mouth moving. He whispers along, reading her ghostly lips,

“The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!”

Contact! The pulsing in his temple dissipates like the waves of a stone dropped in a pond. There is one infinitesimal moment of serenity— but, Nature abhors a vacuum.

An indifferent fourteen point seven pounds per square inch abruptly meets no resistance from Dr. Weber’s lonely office; a soda can crushed underfoot.

The turtle has no choice. It is now a savage speeding projectile breaking free from the beige prison with violent force. The entire second floor kicks back, dutifully obeying Newton’s Third Law, shoved away—

Toward the tank.

A waterfall of broken glass. A crack. A hiss. Boiling liquid vapor births a sickening pressure wave. A bright geyser of crystalline fog erupts, heavy white mist falling lightly—frosting every broken thing.

Distant sirens blue shift closer in ears still ringing; red-faced students stream out from dusty pockets formed of concrete and twisted rebar. They press their bodies together, crying madly into their cell phones, comforting one another. Contact! Contact!

Razor sharp ribbons of steel are sparkling in the slanted autumn sunlight. The east wing of the building now a disorganized pile of destruction, a pile of scrambled, frozen dots.

The professor and his work, his waveform collapsed—at final rest.

We found American Woman 1984 (new to the Flux) in the Midnight Vault, moving through time like water through a fist. We reached in after her. Our hands have never been the same.

Read Counting Coup. Subscribe to her stack below.

American Woman 1984

A post-modern personal history told as a series.

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Special thanks to for helping with the nitrogen supply.

Where Newton wasted talent searching for the philosopher’s stone in stupid clay, Cantor and Gödel understood that transcendence lay in pure mathematics, which is to say in logic alone free to grow and dance away from the starvations of the physical nailed to them by the crude hammer of physics, which is to say in the experience of madness within the human mind. To be a mathematician is to search out the point where common sense steps confidently into the yawning undeniable senseless. To be a mathematician is to chase through number and through graph and through dimension and through shape the moment where the universe blinks out.

Leor Silberblatt has just seen this blinking. He has seen the universe shrink to a single point.

He sits at his little desk in grad student accommodations, the window open, letting in the heavy inanity of the physical world to drum its molecules against the sodden earth housing the wet-work mathematics machine called Leor Silberblatt. Open but unnoticed. All Leor is now is the interplay of logic, and the hailstorm of smell and feel and photons in the eyes adds only a background hum to the explosion of oneness, the totality of ego-death when the ontology bubble has been reached and the reacher has shoved their face through it.

“It was an hour this time.”

“The places I went. Rosen I saw such beautiful things. Amazing!”

“No. Not amazing.”

The light out the window had faded to an ugly purple sage threatening a rare Los Angeles downpour. Rosen sat on the sill looking down at Leor, expression on his face unmistakable, despite the fact Leor has not yet fully ceased being an infinite nothing and fully finished becoming a human again.

“Did you try to wake me?”

“No. I was worried what could happen. We can’t keep doing this. We’re mathematicians, not…I don’t know, LSD-heads.”

The chewed-lip anxiety puppet-dancing his collaborator’s face sped the rate of Leor’s self-deposition. It made Leor angry and that made Leor no longer an infinite thing but just himself.

“Mathematicians! What could be more mathematical than…“ Leor leapt off the bed Rosen must have laid him on; determined, snappy in the way his mother was, totally sane. He stabbed a finger at the whiteboard on his wall and winced when it hit harder than he’d meant to. “Ow! Fuck! What could be more mathematical than this.”

He tapped the equation—three lines written in the elegant longhand he’d spent all of one August learning instead of doing his summer reading. The equation that had come from him after six nights of mania and one moment of perfect inspiration. The truth of it too large to be grasped by the sane mind. Rosen averted his eyes. The coward.

“And it works. We are actually getting results on the Honami conjecture. This does not happen. This is fairy tale shit. Two unknown grad students are making a dent—a real dent—into a project that’s made our academic ancestors antsy since the sixties.” Without taking his finger from the equation he turned his gaze on Rosen, this cowardly but consistent twenty-three year old twig without whom he would be floundering in the realm of loose concepts without the chassis to house the workings of his outsized mathematical engine.

“You said it yourself: you don’t want to end up some community college professor spending your nights at family friendly breweries with your golden-doodle. You want your name in papers. You want to at least be nominated for a Fields Medal. This is it.”

“Is it? An equation that makes you trip your balls or whatever whenever you look at it isn’t math. It’s some freak psychology that only affects mathematicians. It’s a toy. It’s how we end up laughed out of school.”

Rosen would only look at him obliquely so long as Leor stood near the equation, but Leor could read his fear and disgust from the ever-increasing rate of Rosen’s postural concavity. If left unchecked, would the anxiety coursing through the nebbish ass curl him totally? Would it end when his head touched his hips and release him from his stupid cortisoloid nightmare or would he continue spiraling in upon himself towards an anxious infinity.

The piece of Leor that had just rode an equation to conceptual paradise wanted to yell at Rosen, to demand he either take it seriously or get out. This was no toy but a vehicle to Truth with a capital T; what he’d been chasing his whole academic life. His whole life, in fact, since he was a little Yeshiva bocher trying and failing to see what all the old men were getting out of Talmud. It’s what he had assumed all mathematicians wanted, the whole point of the endeavor, until he met Rosen and discovered, with the same dismay as reaching a dead end on a proof you felt in your bones should be right, that the guy didn’t seek the building blocks of logic to release him from the tyranny of mundanity, but instead to escape the tyranny of chaos. Rosen stayed up at night, pounding his head against walls, trying to knit a security blanket out of universal axioms.

Leor knew he needed him though. He knew that expansive and intuitive and inspired as he might be he needed someone with the soul of an accountant to do the grunt work. He decided instead to throw his project partner and ostensible friend a bone.

“Were you able to prove my theorem about the special case of solutions?”

The function defining Rosen’s spinal curve multiplies by -1 and he slowly uncurls. This was more his speed. The actual plus and minus labor of math.

“I think I’m close. Think I’ve found a candidate coordinate anyway for us to show that it does work.” Rosen pointed to his laptop on Leor’s desk. “I came in to tell you, and saw you staring bullets into your desk and shaking.”

“Bad?”

“Really bad.” Rosen puffed out his cheeks and shook his head hard, big and silly in a way that would come off comical to people who didn’t know that the guy was incapable of humor. “Did you…did you get anything new when you were, you know…?” He pretends to trip as well as a guy who’d only eaten an edible once could.

“I think so.”

Leor shoved Rosen’s laptop over in a way that would seem rude if you didn’t know the guy was incapable of rudeness because rudeness requires intention.

“It’s got to be more than just the one point though!”

They’d moved to Rosen’s room down the hall, so that Rosen could get away from the exponentially impressing weight of those three lines of longhand on Leor’s whiteboard. Even in his room with the posters of Einstein and the pictures of his family and the Leibniz bobblehead paperweight that still made him laugh sometimes, Rosen could still feel the equation call to him, feel it in his lungs.

He’d never looked at it for more than a second. Leor had dragged him into his room, more excited than he’d ever been in the short but heavy year he and Rosen had been friends. He shoved him in front of the board, yelling something about how he’d found it, their way forward. At first Rosen had not understood what he saw—Leor played fast and loose with his variables—but then the meaning clicked and then it kept clicking and then he felt it and it felt like fear. A great yawning chasm of madness below the safely laid tile of his orderly mind, the gravity of its mad simplicity yanking at his ankles. He slammed his eyes tight to it and hummed summer camp songs until his feet felt heavy and his brain felt small. He almost drowned when he was five and his grandma looked away from him on the beach. He’s avoided the ocean ever since.

At least away from the equation, Rosen could stand to be around Leor. He was more himself, which was to say snappier and shittier, but that was better than tripped out and mystical.

The displeasure of being around Leor was what it was, but Rosen knew he had to put up with it; the grandiosity and occasional bouts of outright cruelty bearable because the jerk possessed a nuclear reactor of a mathematic imagination that Rosen didn’t. It’s what made them a good partnership and even Leor, in his shitty moments, knew it. It wasn’t friendship, but it was something.

Rosen was aware that putting all his efforts behind another man’s creativity wasn’t glamorous, he knew that it might mean his name would always come after the ampersand, but he’d rather have ‘& Rosen’ appear in textbooks and awards papers then nowhere at all, even if it was after ‘Silberblatt’. Rosen wasn’t principally a statistician, but it was easy to see that partnering with this utterly obnoxious ass would significantly up his otherwise near zero chances of making a name for himself.

“I mean, it doesn’t make sense!” Leor practically yelled. He’d always been a little snappy, a little erratic, but every time he came back from his little mental excursion he came back shakier, stranger, like something had touched him there and was trying to pull him back.

“Can you stop yelling?” Rosen’s next door neighbor was a South African first year Ph.D. candidate who gave him the creeps and who he didn’t trust to not filch their work. “Leor, please, don’t—“ but his partner was no longer looking at him, focused instead on the graph on Rosen’s monitor and the one point on the edge they’d colored a loud yellow. The graph made Rosen’s skin crawl—a member of the infinite set of fractals described by Gaston Julia—chosen at semirandom; a nodular swirling cancer of infinite generation. Rosen had never liked fractals, not visually, and not conceptually. They were objects that behaved like processes. A number or a set you could get your hands around, a function you could follow like a rollercoaster, except the controls were in your hand and you could take them as slow as you wanted. A fractal though, you try to grasp it and you just fall in and in and in and in.

If he wanted the wood paneled office at Princeton or Harvard or Oxford, he couldn’t stop now. Not even after Leor had written that awful equation. Not even after Rosen felt it pressing on his mind, calling to him, nearly force his hand to write it so long as he wasn’t paying attention… If they could crack Honami, just the two of them, they’d never need to apply for a grant so long as they lived.

[Excerpt from Quanta Magazine, March 2020]

As a young man, Honami Ito had spent his days trying to crack Russian and American naval code and his nights haunted. Marines would visit his dreams, eels swimming out of their mouths, sloughing fingers pointing recriminations at him for not saving them. Zero fighters splattered by the waves, hitting water as hard as concrete would skip like stones to find him in his barracks. American GI’s in several parts would crawl from the bloody surf of his mind to scream a wordless castigation for how Ito—when he’d been successful—had caused their deaths. He collapsed into himself, into the place where all mathematics terminates, madness.

For a decade after disarmament, Ito split his time working as a radio technician and gibbering, but when he finally sobered up he delivered to the world a shockingly generative ten year career—proving the exception to the rule that one’s best years as a mathematician were between twenty and forty. When he passed from the leukemia so common to the Japanese disarmed, he left behind an unclaimed Field’s Medal, the conjecture that bears his name, and $200,000 to serve as a prize for whoever could claim it. Since his death in 1965 the conjecture had remained unanswered and the money, responsibly managed, had grown to be around five million.

One of Ito’s greatest gifts was his ability as a translator, not one between languages, as he spoke only Japanese, but one between modes, between madness and sense. As biographer Joanne Takahashi put it:

“The beautiful worlds Ito San saw during those nightmare nights—filled with ghosts and gods—were ones better described through the religious lenses of his upbringing in the country, yet he understood them to be mathematical, or rather, as he famously said in a letter to Sergei Perlman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem[1], mathematics was the only lens through which to view the truths held in religion. Brilliant though he was, Ito knew he alone could not describe these ‘lands’ with the tools he had, dying from leukemia in the early Sixties. What he did have was the ability to set the sights on ‘bliss and infinity’ (Shifuku to Mugen) so that others could find their way there.”

While feverish from guilt, horror, and low rations, Honami Ito would lose himself in fractal landscapes he only later realized were vivid representations of Julia sets. Chased by headless GI’s and boys he’d known from the country falling to pieces as they came for him, he would run until he found safety in the higher, purer land. Those flights of fancy inspired his highest mathematics and gave the academic world the famous conjecture:

There is a simple function through which any point within any Julia set can be transformed from a complex shape of fractional dimension into a manifold of higher complete dimensionality.

For sixty years no one had made a real dent, until Rosen pitched it to Leor and now this.

“I can’t be the only one pushing the boundary here, Rosen. Like you said, every time I go…wherever that equation takes me I come back a little…I don’t know, F’d up and as much as I want to keep going I know I’ll be able to do more if I’m not totally fried. We need someone else looking at this thing.”

“Well…it’s not going to be. I’m sorry but it’s just not!”

“Then we have to bring someone else in.”

Christos Papastefano has become infinite. Leor had sat him down and showed him the equation and then: The towering cathedral spires souring above race towards a vanishing point to never be reached, an orthodox cross as real, and as physical as the number one, graspable for the weight of all the infinity. Man, the present, the now is simply the function, a thing that performs an equation on the input of existence. God, the infant, the infinite, ever growing asymptotic whole, the alpha and omega, the integral of that function, the unplumbed area described by the chaotic sense a man’s life plots, an equation making sense of every step, every stumble, every illogical fuckup and when you take the derivative of the sum of every human life, the derivative of the function of the whole of God: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!

“Jesus, Lord Jesus!” Christos yells.

Leor and Rosen share a grimace, the first thing they’ve agreed upon with no hint of the self-conscious since Leor first scrawled the equation. Rosen, a Humanist and Leor a lapsed Hassid who still reaches for non-existent payis when thinking, but both Jewish enough to keep the High Holy Days and to wish their classmate would stop muttering a very Christian God alternately in his Chicago Inflected English and his Chicago Inflected Greek.

“Chris. Chris!”

“Stop shaking him, Leor! You don’t know what that’ll—“

“Jesus!” Christos splutters, this time exclamation not evocation. “Jesus! Fucking God Damn!”

Now Rosen is mollified but the Heradim still living in Leor winces at the blasphemy.

“Give me the marker,” Christos demands as he leaps from the bed and rushes to the whiteboard.

“I ran it again after Christo’s point and…hey!” Rosen snaps, trying to get the attention of either Leor or Christos who, god damn it, is fully contributing now and going to fully demand credit—does that mean it’s Silberblatt & Rosen & Papastefano or Silberblatt & Papastefano & Rosen?

“Leor!”

The three of them had reserved a little breakout room to take the project out of their respective bedrooms. The halogenic stygian flickering of the bulbs makes Rosen’s seborrheic dermatitis itch and he knows he’s got big flakes on his scalp ready to scale off and ruin what’s already been a shit week. He approaches the small table where the two guys are sat and glances at Christos’s laptop and jumps back so quick his baby horse legs wrap around themselves and he hits the wall.

The Equation.

It’s written in mathematical notion on top and it’s in the Matlab window underneath, periodic and pulsing and already permeating the grey matter. He saw it! It’s in his eyes! He feels it pull at him, rip at the confines of his mind, try to take him under. He collapses to a heap in a flurry of self made snow and the stocastisty of his dandruff begins to resemble a Foyer transform and—“no!”

He slaps himself once, hard and both Leor and Christos snap around to stare at him, confused but also maybe saddened and dismissive. Then Christos starts speaking as though he’d been mid thought.

“It’s like code that…I’m going to speak loosely here or…I don’t know, metaphorically so just cut me some slack, Leo —“

“Why are you being defensive, Chris? I haven’t said shit.”

“Not yet, but you tend to say a lot of shit.”

“Just, fucking out with it.”

“It’s like…code that interfaces directly with the way the human computer works, like at the innate graphing level so we can’t help but go places, just so long as we’re capable of understanding it.”

Leor looks like he wants call this out for bullshit but shrugs instead, so Christos continues.

“Which is why I think we need to get a computer scientist in here. If it’s code, we need someone who knows how to compile, and maybe even help translate.”

“No!” Rosen is now the snappy one, watching the project that would have made him slipping through his hands. “No scientists.”

Leor won’t even look at him. He’ll hardly even look at Christos. His eyes can only skip and slide along the tangent of the Matlab window, longing for the equation but resisting. He nods though. “He’s right. No scientists.”

“Then at least someone with a strong computational background. What about—“

“No. Not Grace.”

“Can you think of anyone better than Grace, Leo?”

“We don’t need more people in this project,” Rosen says, but no one listens to him.

“Fine,” Leor says. “But you have to watch her, if I go under and she’s around me. I don’t want to wake up with her sniffing my hair or whatever.”

The small conference room is packed now: He and Christos are standing over Grace’s shoulder as her hands fly across keys like the flautist she would be in another life, had her mother prevailed over the wishes of her father and sent her to Berkeley for undergrad instead of Yale. Lei is bent almost at a right angle to get her head low enough to peak past Christos, and Grady squints over everyone’s heads, alternately taking notes and looking down Lei’s shirt.

Rosen is peeking in from the doorway, nearly around it like Rugrats. Leor can’t look at the coward without his fists clenching and he doesn’t have the brain space for that anger right now.

“So that stands to reason that, since we’re all slightly different machines, trained on different data sets as it were, we’re each experiencing the code”—which is what she’s taken to calling the equation—“slightly different, maybe missing some things?”

Grace says it like it’s a question but it’s not a question and it’s one of the things about her that pisses Leor off. She makes up for it by what he’s coming to now realize is astounding genius. She picked up on the point and the power of the equation after her first five minute exploration of ‘the music’. When the sight of the equation took her, she did not go somewhere visual like Leor and Christos, but she experienced the whole thing as an infinitely complex symphony. A neuroscientist would find the different qualia of the equation’s effect on those able to parse it fascinating, but Leor couldn’t care. They’re close. So close now to real answers and that’s all he cares about. Credit doesn’t matter anymore, the Fields Medal doesn’t matter, the wood paneled Harvard office or whatever it is Rosen’s so horny for, nada. They’ve almost cracked the special case needed to prove Honami and that means soon they’ll be able to go on, go deeper.

“Which means,” Grace says, “that if we want to get this full picture of the Shifuku to Mugen”—she says with a perfect NPR accent—“there’s likely a critical number where enough people have engaged with the equation to zero out the noise.”

“So we get to take more people in with us!” Lei went to Burning Man last year and she’s the most excited about the trippyness of it all.

“No!” Rosen, obviously. The nebbish little bitch. “No! That’s enough! It’s not…It’s not math! This is a cult! Look at you all. Leor, you haven’t slept in a week. Christos looks like he’s lost ten pounds.”

“I don’t hate it,” Lei says, winking at the big Greek, and Leor is only a little confused to note that Grady doesn’t seem envious but kind of into it.

“It’s making you all sick!”

“Can I have the room, please.”

Everyone nods and leaves Leor alone with Rosen.

There’s a peculiar thing about the fearful that once they’ve crossed well over the line of anxiety they get a momentary burst of balls.

“This was our project, Leor!” Rosen is yelling now, and where the Leor of before would have been furious back, he now only feels sorry for the guy. Sorry and curious, watching how the emotions in him swirl off to infinities of full lack of meaning. “Our project, and you’ve turned it into your creepy cult.”

“It’s not a cult, Rosen. It’s a movement. This is Copenhagen for the quantum physicist. We’re close to doing something mathematicians have only dreamed of doing. Not just Honami. Full and complete unification. We just need more eyes. More minds.”

“Then what!?”

“Then it arrives in our world.”

“What!? It—“

“We don’t have room for you Rosen. Not anymore.”

The auditorium is packed and everyone from professors to freshmen whisper in groups about how they’re shocked a grad student was able to get so many people there in a week. “How did he even get the dean to send the email?” There’s a slide up on the projector that reads ‘Advances In Special Cases Of The Honami Conjecture’.

Slowly the lights begin to dim. Slowly a soft, brittle sort of music begins to play. Somewhere outside an anxious, nervous man is yelling something that sounds like a warning and is swallowed by the closing of the auditorium doors. From the wings walks a skeletal man in a robe that looks to be cobbled together from a hoody and some bedsheets. The crowd begins to laugh and so does the man, but his laugh carries something in it: a deep knowing. Out behind him walks the dean of the entire Mathematics department. She’s dressed normally, in one of her frumpy business suits, but there’s something about her eyes. Something sunken and skeletal, and a little wild, like she’s seen something. Like she’s eager. The look causes more than one of her colleges to lean back in their seats, to fight the urge to run from her.

“There’s something I need to show you,” the skeletal man says, and then he clicks a button and the slide changes.

(new to the Flux) arrived via 's Weather Reports and hit us like a spinning elbow to the jaw. Read Shifu David Rosner. Read Vibes Detective Agency. Read everything else he writes.

Subscribe to his stack below. We will not be the last to find him.

Alex’s Substack

Writer and lover of serial fiction.

By Alex Shifman

[1] One of Ito’s greatest friends in the realm of mathematics, though the two never met.

Though Perlman was Russian by birth and a survivor of the death camps, Ito’s history as a Japanese Nationalist never seemed to get between the two.

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You are inside SumFlux V.6—Math. The other four are here.

your fat white tiny maggot limbs are squirming, blood-thick blood-warm blood-red blanket scratching, life-green birch leaves burnished golden shading us, burning bush, there’s mama picking daisies with your brother, your cub-grub fingers grip my bone and skin, grey-fading failing flesh, not long to go, he makes me down to lie, be good my son, my Cailean beag, cuilean, pup, sit not in scorner’s chair, walk not those puppy legs astray when they grow long and strong, walk in the light, seek better than gold, yea, much fine gold, seek sweeter than honey, honey from the comb

n=0

Old dead white guy.

Old dead straight white guy.

Probably owned slaves.

Probably a homophobe.

Probably a transphobe.

Guys, he lived in like the seventeen hundreds. Isn’t all that just a teensy bit anachronistic? You want the society to be named after a dead white racist homophobe?

Course not, ya bampot. I’m just saying, context.

MacSoc has been MacSoc for like, forever. Historic. We can’t just go changing it willy-nilly. And Colin Maclaurin was like the most famous mathematician to ever come out of Glasgow Uni. Edinburgh cancelled David Hume.

We definitely want to shine a light on this guy.

Guys, Wikipedia has his name here in Gaelic. Kay-lean? Or however you say that. Mac— I’m not even gonna try that bit.

So?

So he was an oppressed minority. A victim of colonialism.

Not that simple though, is it?

+

hearken to the burning bush my son, follow the pillar of fire to the land of milk and honey, pay no heed to Egypt’s fleshpots, fish and cucumbers, listen to your mama, feast on the hidden manna, be like the tree near planted by a river, do justly love mercy walk humbly, within the paths of righteousness ev’n for his own name’s sake, teach well your sons and daughters after you, the generations yet to come

n=1

My famous ancestor might smile to see me now, Alice. Don’t you think? That grave-eyed smile in that portrait over there in his dusty old wig. He would be proud of me. I think. Look out that window. That green. The river. Sure, the quadrangles of the Massachussets Institute of Technology are a little less ancient than the hoary old spires of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, but we’re doing a fine thing here. The new air of this still-new country is lighting a veritable fire of mathematics and science and I, Richard C. Maclaurin, am a lucky man to lead this still-new institution in this still-new century.

I wish I’d known him. I’ve spilled pages of ink on Newton’s rings. He knew what Newton ate for breakfast and whether an apple really hit him on the head. (He’d be pleased that Newton’s corpuscles of light are backed by Einstein now). I’d ask how he got on with that old sinner David Hume. Did they argue proofs and puddings, the nature of nature, in some smoke-stained coffeeshop? Which language did he think in? English? Gaelic? Just pure maths? That’s the language of science, you know. But is the application what makes maths truly meaningful? He didn’t keep his calculus locked away. He plied its hammer on honeycombs, water-wheels, widows’ pensions. He was a good man. Died too young.

Yes, I wish I’d known old Colin Maclaurin. But you know, Alice, my own father’s heart was waxed and sealed in some cell of honeycomb deep in a dark and stinging hive. I wish calculus could crack that. Why did he leave the ministry? Why man a one-horse railway station in a two-tree town? Why flee to the Antipodes? What integration did he seek? What did it do to my mother? God forbid I do the same to you.

I’m not complaining. Auckland took me to Cambridge old and new. Took me to you. Light refracts, reflects, we follow its rays through the world’s geometry, its transitions, boundaries, layer by layer by layer. It twists and bends sometimes where we don’t see, but all the time stays true to its own nature. And if nothing gets in the way, why, it just goes on and on, on into infinity. I think a man’s life is much the same, don’t you?

What would my old ancestor have made of this new world, Alice? This land of milk and honey, silks and money? We’ll name our next boy after him and not my Pa.

+

in manhood, if you’re spared, my son, to lie in the shade of the green apple tree, the banqueting table, my table thou hast furnished in presence of my foes, milk and honey dripping, my head thou dost with oil anoint and my cup overflows, o pluck carefully the grapes and pomegranates, tend your vine and fig-tree, let not the little foxes run fiery in your vineyard, love her, tend her, more precious than rubies

n=2

I know you, my husband, and I know you not. I watch our little girls pull the white-and-pink petals off the daisies, he loves me, he loves me not, and as they giggle and chatter I know that I am fortunate to know that you love me, and that I love you more than limits or integrals can say. But I do not know if I know you, and I wonder if you know me.

Oh, I know you, Colin M’Laurine. I have shared your bed these thirteen years now. I know you, as Eve knew Adam. I know the curves of your calfs and your thighs that are swollen now with sickness. I know the pale curls of hair on your chest and the smooth-rough spread of your shoulders and the peach-flesh flap of your earlobes and the taste of the powder left on top of your head when you take your wig off at the end of the day.

I know how you like your porridge and kippers in the morning, and I know you like Whiteford’s coffee house better than John’s, and I know how partial you are to the goosegogs fresh from the garden in summer. I know how patient you are with the children, even when they disturb you at your work, and I know how impatient you are when poor Dolly comes to stay. I know how Mr Handel’s new composition delights you. I know how you grieve poor Mr Newton yet. I know how your eyes roll when you talk about Mr Hume. I know your joys and I know your darknesses and I know that you have been true to me as the sunlight and the clean north wind and the swift-flowing Water of Leith.

But oh, Colin, how I wish I could have entered into your world of fluxions and progressions, spheroids, ellipses, hyperbolae, maxima and minima, infinities and infinitesimals. I saw your students walk one by one through those hallowed portals. You were — are — a good teacher, they say. The best. I wish you could have taught me, too. I wish I could have seen what you see. You told me it was like music. You told me it was like light. You told me it was beyond my grasp.

And now you groan in your fever and cry out in the tongue of your long-gone mother and your father who you never knew, and I know not what you say. When brother John comes, he reads to you from your father’s Psalter that you treasured, and I know not what he says. The sounds roll and ripple from his mouth and like honey from the honeycomb they soothe you where the English touches not, and I wish I too could pour these words like water into your thirst but I know them not, and our children know them not, for you said it was of no profit to them. Yet you used to jest sometimes that one day we would all know the Gaelic, for that is the tongue of the Garden and the language of Heaven.

Colin, my love, the infinities and languages of Heaven are beyond my ken. Come back, my love. Let me know you again.

+

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.

.

+

a myriad of rubies, I see them when I close my eyes against the light and when I open them again they blister in a myriad of stars, you see a collared dove up high and laugh, a calman, Colm Cille, in the branches of the tree, a bumblebee, goodness and mercy all my life shall surely follow me, your mama singing, palm leaves and dates, I know not how they taste, yielding her fruit each month, the salt becomes sweet, brine brims, bleeds from my eyes into my mouth, loch-salt drowning dark and deep, long kelp clinging, wrapping legs and dragging hair, the water and the sun so cold, my son, so cold

n=∞

and the light is the light of the sun quivering through the leaves of the birch tree in the Kilmodan manse garden in the summer my father died, when I was a tiny thing placed outside in the air on a heavy blanket and I lay beside him and grasped his finger, a thing I do not remember but that I know to be true, yet here there is no sun though the light does fill the air like water fills all the seas and all the rivers in the world, and the light fills my eyes that see now the leaves with their veins burning emerald and jade and the water pumping diamond and amethyst from the river through the roots and trunks into the fruits that swell and hang nameless but not unknown from the boughs, and my eyes see now through the skin into the chambers of the flesh, into the fountains of feasting life that pulses, glows, radiates and fills me to the brim

and I reach to pluck the golden fruit, soft and taut as darling Annie’s skin and flesh in the days of our marriage, and its fragrance fills my mouth and nostrils and brain, and as I pluck my hand is neither the chubby paw of infancy nor the chalky claw of the scholar nor the swollen club of the dropsy, but all and none of them and my fingertips drip with milk and honey, and when I look at them I recognise their whorls, changed and not changed, and the new blood is pumping and pulsing in them with corpuscles of rubies, carnelians, chrysoprase, sardonyx, and I look deeper and see corpuscles within corpuscles, wheels within wheels, light within fire within light within fire, until all is light and fire and lightning until I think my eyes cannot bear it but they do

and I turn, and my father is standing on the bank of the jaspery river that jostles with huge and silvery springwater fish, on the grass that is green as the palms and the words of the psalm when he spoke them from the plain-carved pulpit with the burning bush, thoir e fanear gun laidhinn sìos air cluaintean glas le sìth, and I know him and he knows me and neither he nor I are young nor old nor in-between

and he calls me by my name, the name that is and is not Cailean MacLabhruinn, Colin M’Laurine, MacLaurin, Maclaurin, balach a’ mhinisteir, mac Iain Dhàiniel, the new name that is all of them and none of them and more than the sum of them, the progression, expansion, integration to infinity, and he speaks in his voice as thick and green as oak and pine in the language of our bones and souls, and there is no language here that is lost or hidden or misunderstood, but all language and all words are music flowing free and there is no limit and there is nothing to hide, for nothing can be hidden from that light that does not come from the sun but fills the air and casts no shadows and never ends

Caitriana NicNeacail has been breaking our hearts since V.4.

If The Maclaurin Series is your first encounter with her work, go back. Read In Memoriam. Read The Uncreation of Bruce. Subscribe to her stack below.

You will not be the same person who started reading.

Coracle Voyager

Speculative fiction by Caitriana NicNeacail.

By Caitriana NicNeacail

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Let H denote the set of all places a person has failed to occupy. Let H be non-empty. Let H be, in fact, embarrassingly large.

Axiom 1. The self at departure is not the self that departed.

Axiom 2. Distance is measurable. What distance measures is not.

Consider: A little girl asks daddy to come to her school play. Daddy says yes sweetie…of course. Assume heartbreak. Assume paternal absence remains consistent (e.g., three school plays, thirty-three birthday dinners, one graduation, one appendectomy, one abortion, one marriage, two children…etc…) For each absence in H, calculate the untraveled distance. Express your answer as a compounding function.

Extra credit: when did she stop calling him daddy?

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The liver, given time and the removal of cause, trends back toward wholeness.

Consider: V(t) = V₀ · e^(rt) where V₀ is the remaining volume, r is the regeneration rate, t is time.

Consider: F = Σ (nᵢ · cᵢ) — R(t) where nᵢ is the number of drinking episodes of severity i, cᵢ is the collagen deposited per episode, and R(t) is the regeneration the liver managed in the intervals.

Assume if he stopped today, the liver’s regeneration function would resume. Assume collagen would not reverse. Assume Σ (nᵢ · cᵢ) >> R(t). Assume blood does not move cleanly. Assume a well respected doctor has, this morning, suggested to him, in blunt careful language there’s a chance, you have a chance…Calculate the probability that today is the day he stops. Hint: remember to divide by the number of times he’s calculated this probability before. (Note: the denominator will be astronomic. Note: he is still calculating.)

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Claim: No ending contains a point of the relationship that preceded it.

Proof:

1. Suppose TRUE.

2. If TRUE, endings are not imbued with preceding warmth.

3. If endings are not imbued with preceding warmth, all endings are birthed fully formed.

4. If all endings are birthed fully formed, life is discontinuous.

5. If life is discontinuous, past == past.

6. If past == past, how is he, in this moment, seeing her set the table? How she said careful, it’s hot? How she described the color of a bird she saw from the school bus? These are points. Moments. Pasts. They are dense in the current interval. Alive. He is there. He is here. He is here and not there, not there and here and nowhere.

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If a father leaves when the girl is four and the girl grows to be thirty-seven, and in those thirty-three years the girl has: moved seven times, held nine jobs, begun and abandoned two languages, married, had two children (one boy, one girl) and divorced once (or, more accurately, is about to divorce, the papers are on the kitchen table, she doesn’t understand them, but is thinking she will sign regardless…) Express the father as a variable in each of these moments. Graph his influence. Note where the curve is asymptotic (e.g., skirting zero, infinite almost.) Note where it spikes unexpectedly (e.g., in hardware stores or upon hearing a particular quality of laugh in a restaurant that causes her to set down her fork and sit still and quiet and when her mother or son or husband asks ‘what’s wrong?’ she’ll mutter nothing…pick up the fork and twirl spaghetti and nothing, darling…nothing…)

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If a woman has carried the same story about her childhood for thirty-seven years—has told it at dinner tables, in bars, to two therapists, on a third date that became a marriage—and the story is: he said he wouldn’t miss it, ‘yes sweetie…of course…’ he said he’d come and I took the stage, stood my itchy costume and delivered lines and scanned shadowed heads…is that?…maybe….yes…no….no, too thin…too—wait!…someone’s coming in…late, he’s late, work? no….no…—how much of the story is the past and how much is the years of telling? At what point does the retelling become the memory? Express as a percentage. Note the percentage will not add to 100. Note: the remainder is not an error. Note: the remainder is what happened.

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If he wrote her a letter, now, right now, today—which he will not, or he might—if the letter grows, matures into something sent and contains: one true account of what he is, three sentences about the time she hit her head on the coffee table, five cliches, and one apology that does not explain itself—what is the probability she reads it? Multiply by the probability she believes it. Multiply by the probability that it matters (hint: consider the mathematics of the “too late”.) Round to the nearest integer. Note: the nearest integer will be zero. Note: zero is never nothing. Note: zero is all you need.

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Calculate the specific gravity of an apology given three decades late. Note that an apology, in the physical sense, is not a substance and therefore has no specific gravity. Note that in the physical sense, many of the heaviest things have no specific gravity. Note that the formula for specific gravity is the ratio of a substance’s density to the density of water. Water, in this equation, represents the standard—the neutral—what things are measured against. Determine what, in the case of an apology, water would be.

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Let now = the bounded set S, an October afternoon.

Assume S is measurable. Assume S has duration. Within S, assume a large window, west-facing. Assume the autumnal orange of this latitude’s 4pm. Assume hospital coffee and T(t) = Tₐ + (T₀ − Tₐ)e^(−kt), i.e, assume everything approaches surrounding temperatures, i.e, assume we all slouch toward ambience…

Let {aₙ} be a sequence of memories; of paternal attempts looping through now:

a₀ = her number dialed to the sixth digit; a₁ = a drive to the end of her road; a₂ = an idling car; a₃ = “I’ll call the police…”; a₄ = a u-turn; a₅ = a letter in the glovebox…etc….etc…

Let us claim: {aₙ} converges.

Let us assume a sequence converges if for every ε > 0, there exists N such that for all n > N, |aₙ − L| < ε, where L is the limit.

Consider: It’s now. A woman visits her father in the hospital. They speak. They discuss the years he was not there. She shows him his grandchildren. The conversation lasted forty minutes and contained the following: three sentences from him that began with I should have…, six long silences (four of them her fault, two necessary (one interrupted by a nurse coming to empty his bed pan, one to let him remember how to swallow his jell-o), and three questions she withheld because the tube in his arm made her forget. Consider: what is enclosed between what was said and what was possible? This is a bounded region. Integrate over it. Your answer will be inexpressible. Call it L. Use L to plot the convergence of {aₙ}.

Extra credit: how many times did the charge nurse have to call her until she answered?

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If a woman stands at a bus station with one suitcase and an address written on the inside of her wrist in blue ink that is already beginning to smear, and behind her is a house containing: one husband who has not fucked her in seven years, two children who will remember this as the autumn mommy left, a kitchen with a dripping tap, a garden she planted alone, a dog she never liked—calculate the weight of the suitcase as a function of what it does not contain. Consider: if she does not look back, does she become her father? Show your work. Explain your answer in terms of observer-dependent reality. Do not explain your answer. Never explain anything.

is a recurring obsession of ours.

Read: Bruce in Toledo.

Read: don’t howl at it.

Subscribe to his stack below. Do all of this. It will do something to you.

Heavy is the Headset

Weird fiction for weirder times.

By Will Boucher

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THE PIECES BEGIN ARRIVING APRIL 19, 2026

This is not the calculus class you tapped your pen through. This is Mathematics at its edge, where the most deranged philosophical questions go to be taken seriously — where infinity is a destination, where the nature of reality is a proof, where asking what it means to know something can unseat a mind entirely.

The gun, once fired, does not unfire. Time has a direction and it is not yours to choose. These five pieces of fiction in Volume 6 are built from this.

Equations, theorems, and functions exist because ordinary language doesn’t have the tools. Some things require a different notation to be said at all.

These 5 authors share irreversibility. The waveform, once observed, collapses. You cannot unknow what you know. “You cannot un-occupy the set of all places you have failed to be.”

Here is what mathematics knows that the naked eye does not: the improbable is not the impossible. Math can hold, with perfect formal precision, what reality cannot bring itself to imagine. The universe is wilder and weirder than we usually observe.

The space between two people divides and divides. Halve it. Halve it again. There is always more distance inside the distance. Zero approaches and does not arrive. And yet the limit exists. The infinite lives inside the measurable.

The waveform collapses. The gun fires. The sequence converges on L.

THE MATHS:

(links will appear as they publish—starting April 19)

« 0 Proof » — Will Boucher

He is still calculating the probability of repair. Note: the denominator is astronomical.

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« The Maclaurin Series » — Caitriana NicNeacail

A name expanding across centuries, a series approaching its limit where mathematics and human language run out of road together.

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« Shifuku to Mugen » — Alex Shifman

Some mathematics cannot be unseen. Some doors, once opened, do not close.

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« Time and Chance » — American Woman 1984

If only he had looked sooner, she would still be everywhere at once.

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« Eule's Identity » — Seth O' the Pod :

A woman, a cosmos, a parrot, and the slow patient work of trying to define yourself.

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« The Root-kit of Truth » — Stephen Prime

Heat death is coming. The system will crash. But Stephen Prime is already inside the flaw, running his own lines of code in the dark. This final piece in the volume is the synthesis of the others. Read him last. Then go back to the beginning.

Open Call for Volume 6: MATH

The brief is as wide as you need it to be. Go philosophical, go formal, go strange — or go small and human and specific. Give us a spaceship fueled by formulae or a swim team captain suffocating in algebra. Give us someone choking on the numerals in their breakfast cereal. Give us the theorem that breaks the mathematician. Give us math as the only language left when all the other languages have failed.

Deadline: May 3. Send to link (or message) to

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