Therefore, the key is to have no consistency whatsoever.
Of course, I am not a serial killer. I am simply a mathematician working on the edge of a moral boundary.
I did have a problem though.
I wanted all of my paper doll ambassadors to bear a physical resemblance. Blonde, late teens or twenties, slight.
This was hubris, on my part, and I admit it. My selection criteria had nothing to do with the formulae.
I was already thinking about the presentation to my peers. And the Nobel Prize. Or the Wolf Award. And ultimately the book cover for the New York Times bestseller.
The fact is I am not killing anyone.
I am only sending them unwillingly through a reality knot.
They return alive.
And when I announce my findings, all the unseemly details will be forgotten in the excitement. Because, if I am right, and it appeared so from the preliminary experiments, returnees will live forever as a result of their exposure to the unified time stream.
THE NINE AMBASSADORS
Time in an experiment is the enemy of the impatient. I hurried to complete the first phase before Christmas. Moderate risk was already in play; I had to time my acquisitions prior to autumn snowstorms, which would then cover my hillside tracks to the burial site. Just to be safe. Fortunately, that year, the snows arrived late and, by then, the experiment was in full swing.
The following are the personal details of the ambassadors. I gathered this from their belongings (which I have stored for their return) and the events which led to their collection.
The pressure to make this happen in such a tight time frame was grueling and exhausting. For the record, I never missed a single lecture: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. No one saw me come and go; I was extremely careful. On my trips, I stuck to the backroads, never ate, never gassed the Volvo station wagon up, never paid a toll. I left no trail at all.
The ambassadors were:
Madeline Blake – Number 1, student, 22, Quinn University, Vermont, asphyxiation, math mentor meeting, September 2.
Addilyn Winters – Number 2, housewife, 26, Montpelier, Vermont, taken from minivan at Health Nuts grocery store, cephalic vein injection, asphyxiation, September 19.
Hadlee Pellatier – Number 3, barista at Legal Grounds Coffee Emporium, 19, Freeport, Maine, intramuscular injection resulting in coma followed by death, October 4. Broke the ring finger on my right hand in a brief scuffle; multiple scratches.
Kinsey Grant – Number 4, trout fishing on the Musconetcong River, medial cubital vein injection.
Teegan O’Connor – Number 5, Insurance Agent, 29, Hartford, Connecticut, asphyxiated in sales office after laced cocktail, both of us in costume for Halloween, October 31.
Waverly Bradford – Number 6, Grocery Checker, 24, Manchester, New Hampshire, flat tire, cephalic vein injection, suffocated, November 6.
Janette and Julia Dayman – Numbers 7 and 8, twins, cheerleaders, 17, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, post-football game after party, drunk and passed out, asphyxiated with pillow, no resistance, Nov 22.
Sylvia Larsson – Flight Attendant, 26, Holiday Nights Hotel, Mt. Snow, Vermont, on vacation in ski area, very fit, strangled until unconscious, asphyxiated, December 4.
“REALITY IS MERELY AN ILLUSION, ALBEIT A VERY PERSISTENT ONE.”
[8 Attributed to Albert Einstein (1897 – 1955)]
On December 5, the nine ambassadors finally lay in a complete sequence on the hillside, holding hands, a series of perfect chiral unions in a palindromic line—the numerical sequence presenting a postulate to time and reality, an offer to spiral inwards upon itself and through dissonance, force a realignment and thus the rebirth of the ambassadors.
When the first serious snow of the season fell two weeks before Christmas, a heavy white blanket covered the paper doll hyperplane.
I relaxed.
And waited.
MAPLE SUGARING SEASON
When winter loosens its grip and the days are warmer under blue skies, but the nights are still freezing cold, I sharpen my .375-inch drill bits. Relaxing before a roaring fire in the hearth, I use my bit sharpener to get the perfect 59° profile on the cutting edge and the correct overhang on the tip.
I have three of the best German surgical orthopedic bone bits and, once sharpened, they work quite well on the ancient sugar maples that populate the landscape of Camp Quinn.
Spring approached.
The thinning snowpack glimmered in the sunlight as I traipsed through the clearing pulling a sled stacked with buckets and tapping spouts. My tool belt rattled as I struggled through a snowdrift toward the dense forest.
Somewhere beneath my feet, the ambassadors rested.
Months had passed.
I spent the day drilling trees.
They bled sweet sugar sap.
DEATH IS BUT AN ILLUSION CAUSED BY POINT-OF-VIEW
The lecture hall door creaked. I looked up from my notes, expecting a student in search of a forgotten book or phone from the preceding class. At first, I couldn’t see a face as the brightness of the spring day backlit a form, although I could see clearly enough—it was a woman.
She stepped into clarity.
Blonde.
My heart leapt.
“Zach,” she said.
Maddie.
But what struck me most was that she was nude.
And clean.
So very clean.
Like a scrubbed newborn.
I could hear the clatter of boots on the tiled hallway behind her. No doubt the security guards, guns drawn, were responding to the menace of a naked woman.
“You’d best come in,” I said, grabbing my corduroy sports coat to cover her.
Strangely, the pounding footsteps passed the hall entrance, the door silently shut on its own volition and the two of us were embraced by an awkward silence.
Maddie and me.
SEX AND THE SINGLE PROFESSOR
Maddie sat in front of my laptop, scrolling through endless photos of some post-modern psychedelic band and giggling. She wore a tight-fitting rose-colored dress featuring flowers that I’d picked up at Goodwill when bringing her home.
At first, I thought the dress was more fitting for someone’s grandmother, but on her, well, my thoughts momentarily turned away from mathematics and professorship.
I watched her breathing, her breasts rising and falling.
She hadn’t needed to shower at my residence, but she had anyway and now her damp hair was woven and pulled into pigtails that brushed her exposed shoulders. She turned to stretch her lower back and hips, smiling at me as she did, and I wondered if she knew what had happened to her.
Despite her clothing and apparent adulthood, Maddie seemed more like a puppy than a woman and I realized I’d have to feed her soon. She hadn’t spoken since she greeted me, and I wondered how her speech could be diminished if she could read and laugh. I watched as she clicked the mouse on the computer and it dawned on me.
She wasn’t reading.
She was looking at bright colors.
I added another log to the fire crackling in the fireplace. I felt a chill and although there was only a light snow on the ground outside, I suspected my chill had nothing to do with the weather.
I should explain what happened.
Like an ancient magician seeking to change lead to gold, the Holy Grail of Mathematics is to discover a non-representational mathematical formula. Not a number as an abstract symbol but rather an Independent Functional Initiator (IFI) lacking the precedence of any real-world event. In my case, I discovered operational palindromic primes which result in an alignment of the singularity. I can’t say what that vector of time and space looks like. That’s why I needed Maddie and the others.
But when I glanced at the mute girl watching a Pokémon video on YouTube, I was
concerned about the veracity and viability of my premise.
Still, the other eight should return soon. Perhaps one of them would be mentally intact. The next should be Addilyn, although I had no idea of how soon or even where she would arrive. That might present a problem, although at the campus no one appeared to see Maddie even when we crossed the parking lot.
At the moment, though, the biggest question in my mind was whether this Maddie had deconstructed the Maddie buried in the meadow. Was Maddie’s original human form still rotting in her grave, or was the only Maddie-instance the one sitting here in front of me? With the test animals, the original was always disassembled and reassembled but there was only one way for me to know for sure.
I had a grave to open.
“Maddie,” I said, and she looked up, her hearing obviously intact. “We have to take a ride in the car.”
She leapt to her feet, excited.
I wondered about the wisdom about what I was going to do. What would happen if this Maddie saw Maddie Prime? What if the grave wasn’t empty?
In science, you learn to stand back objectively and let the experiment unfold.
Sometimes, you roll the dice.
And you take copious notes.
“I’ll be back in a minute, Maddie,” I said. “I have to get a shovel.”
“I remember,” said Maddie quietly as I reached the garage door.
Excitedly, I returned to face her; she had risen to her feet and was examining her surroundings like she’d never see them before. Of course, she had.
“What do you remember, Maddie?”
She vacillated, then spoke.
“I remember squid eye.”
She smiled wryly and for the first time I wondered if I had made a mistake.
A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE
I tied a rope to Maddie’s wrist. We climbed the hill, stepping on spring flowers and wet stones poking through patches of snow. Maddie was a slight girl. I could handle her if she ran. She seemed increasingly unenthusiastic as we trekked. At the meadow’s edge, I tugged hard. She came reluctantly.
I didn’t know how she’d react once I opened her grave.
Frankly, I didn’t know how I’d react.
I paced off the location of the paper doll hyperplane and my foot pressed the blade of the shovel into the soil.
Twenty minutes of digging and I hit nothing. Of course, I’d expected that Maddie’s body would be gone. After all, every experiment had started with disassembly, including the nonahedron, which never returned.
I kneeled, to lift out the remaining clumps of soil. Not only was Maddie’s body absent, there wasn’t a hand outstretched from Addilyn.
I shoveled more dirt aside, widening the gravesite.
Confirmed.
No Addiyn.
And then no hand for the next one named Hadlee.
“They’re not here,” Maddie stated emphatically, her voice breaking the silence of the forest and meadow. Then she enunciated slowly, Zach-a-ry.
“I know what you did to me.”
The rush of blood to my head made me dizzy. My heart pounded. My ears throbbed as if to explode. I took a deep breath.
This was a wrinkle.
“We should go,” Maddie said. “Hadlee will be coming soon and I want to freshen up. But first you must fill the hole.”
I shoveled the soil back into the grave as she untied the rope from her wrist.
We walked down the hill.
Shouldn’t Addilyn be next?
MANDALA (SANSKRIT, N.)
A geometric spiritual and ritual symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism representing the entirety of the universe.
SQUID EYE
(MADDIE’S NOTES)
Maddie wrote:
At the center, which is not a center, the great squid eye floats in the nothingness and sees all. The eye exists but doesn’t exist, a numerical representation of zero. Like zero, it exists in a conceptual realm but is equivalent to a mathematical set containing a null value.
All stars, galaxies, and realities orbit the great squid eye. A low frequency hum vibrates but I can’t hear it when I arrive, I can only feel it penetrating the luminous ball of energy I’ve become.
When one arrives in the nothingness, one perceives the great squid eye in the distance, which means it is neither near nor far. A simple thought and you are next to the eye, which is simultaneously infinitely large and infinitesimally small. It blinks without an eyelid, its massive undulating pupil spewing luminescent purple time streams in all directions.
None of the time streams have purpose, including the ones we perceive and those that can never be perceived. The time streams simply dance as discharges of energy, stretching to all horizons, of which there are infinite.
When the eye blinks, each emitted time stream is broken. Whatever was in the time stream slowly degrades to non-existence. Time stream occupants can do nothing. Everything dies and is eventually reborn. Matter persists. There is no time in the nothingness. The great squid eye only exists in the eye of the observer. The observer only exists when seen by the great squid eye.
While I rested there, eight other luminous beings arrived. I did not know them, yet I knew everything about them.
A sparking time stream touched me, and I instantly found myself standing outside a classroom.
Flesh and blood again.
Reborn.
I slipped her handwritten notes into a manila folder and went to a file cabinet.
Someone rapped the knocker at my front door.
I slammed the drawer shut, locked it, and went to see who it was.
As predicted, it was Hadlee.
She hoisted a plastic sack.
“Maddie wanted better clothes. What you gave her was total crap.”
The experiment was officially out of control.
VICTOR HUGO MEETS THE INFINITE SQUID EYE
As Victor Hugo once remarked, “When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.”
Maddie and Hadlee sat on the sofa; Hadlee leaned forward aggressively, Maddie easily tucked her legs beneath her new dress.
I shifted uncomfortably in the easy chair.
The chair in which I had killed Maddie.
“Will the others be arriving soon?” I asked, trying to figure out what the hell was going to happen next.
They both sipped Chardonnay. Maddie had opened a bottle and poured. No opportunity for me to catch them off guard.
“We’ve all returned,” said Maddie. “Only Hadlee and I wanted to see you again. For starters, Hadlee wants to break your fingers. I think breaking your fingers is insufficient. We understand your math now. We are considering.”
Hadlee smiled.
She said, “We know something you don’t.”
Maddie winked at me.
She said, “We can augment the formulae.”
Their eyes studied me and it was then that I knew what was different about my two ambassadors. I hadn’t noticed it with Maddie alone but looking at them now, it was obvious. Although their sclerae were white, their eyes had undergone a subtle transformation. Iris and pupil had merged into a singular blackness.
A sucking blackness darker even than Vantablack. [9 Vantablack: A substance made of Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays of carbon and the blackest artificial substance known in the Universe, absorbing up to 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum.]
“What shall we do with him?” Hadlee asked.
“You know what I think,” said Maddie.
And I realized they were talking out loud for my benefit.
“Until we decide, you’d best give us your car keys,” Hadlee said, hand outstretched.
I tossed the keys to the Volvo.
“Don’t get any ideas,” said Maddie.
The fron
t door locked itself.
I tried to rise from the chair.
I couldn’t.
MATH AND THE LAW OF KARMA
[10 Jargal Dorj. Mathematical Proof of the Law of Karma. American Journal of Applied Mathematics. Vol. 2, No. 4, 2014, pp. 111-126. doi: 10.11648/j.ajam.20140204.12]
That night, trapped in the easy chair, I could not sleep. Provided with a pencil and pad, I made what I assumed would be my last research note.
Question: What if the law of Karma is a natural law like Newton’s law of gravity? Does Karma mathematically resolve itself?
THE SNAKE THAT EATS ITSELF
(WRITTEN AT HADLEE’S INSISTENCE)
I smell smoke.
I think the barn is burning.
Swallowing the last of the Chardonnay, I set the glass aside to write these final notes.
I have no free will.
Throughout this day, I have given the Maddie and Hadlee all my secrets.
I am to be an ambassador.
A wave of heaviness sinks into my body.
Drug impeding thought.
Nearby, Hadlee stands, watching, resting weight on handle of shovel. Nonahedron sprays table blue light.
They have made some modification.
Objects colors threads beams
Blinks
polybufohexane-12
blood pulsing heart pounding
eyes bulging wanting to explode
see Hadlee stretch duct tape my iPhone
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