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.
Keith Long « 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.
Mac Sitko — « 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.
Sage Troolin « 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. Will Boucher, Caitriana NicNeacail , Alex Shifman, American Woman 1984, Seth O’the Pod, and Stephen Prime forged something this volume that these three writers were brave enough to burn themselves into. Go read them first. Then come back here.
A particular thanks to Jon T — the steering, the thinking sessions that shaped this volume from the inside. His invisible fingerprints and influence are all over it. And to Wendy Russell, whose arrival at SumFlux has already improved the sum.
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So excited to be included in this collection, all amazing pieces on a really cool theme. Thank you!