by Ryan Notch
And so there it was, sitting there on the hard drive. Just a name on a list of other programs. And yet it contained all the malevolence of the dark it represented. This, just a tiny piece of some larger thing. Something whose presence led 500 people to kill themselves in ways scarcely conceivable. Something that had been led here and brought the darkness between the stars with it, and left all things dead in its wake.
All things save one.
Everyone but me, he thought. Why?
The fact that he almost never thought about it, that he was only slightly curious about it, was in itself a curiosity. He thought maybe he should be more curious about it, care about the answer more. But he wasn’t, and so, he didn’t.
So now it was time to analyze the file. He realized there was a fairly large gap in his knowledge here, something various TV shows and movies had always skillfully alluded to without actually giving any real information on.
So how the hell do you analyze something? he wondered.
As the dinner chime rung he knew he’d have to leave it to tomorrow, as much as he would have preferred to work on it through the night. As he walked out he paused, then turned around. He unplugged the computers from the wall as an added precaution, as if the file might somehow activate itself and crawl out of the computer into the hallways of the asylum.
That night Shaw dreamt again. And again he was in the computer lab. Once more a darkened version of it, lit by the false black glow of monitors. He could hear screams in the hall. People rushing around out there that he couldn’t see through the darkness. He could make out Walter’s far off voice, the sounds of the orderlies wrestling him to the ground.
Once more text appeared on the screen of the computer, and once more the speakers spoke it with the voice of Dr. Hemah.
“You have my data now Shaw. Now you can see it.”
“My data,” Shaw both typed and said back, possessively. He regretted it a moment later though, feeling he’d made a mistake somehow. He looked around the gallery, hoping no one had heard.
“I tried to tell them,” said the voice from the speakers. “But no one understood the message I left with my organs.”
Shaw was only half paying attention. He knew he should be working at the network, that he had lots to get done, but he was distracted from above. He thought he caught a glimpse of something moving up in the gallery.
“I tried to warn you too, Shaw. To warn you to stay out of the black room. But you spoke to it, you made your own black room.”
“And now It’s following me,” said Shaw.
There was something moving up in the gallery. He couldn’t see it through the darkness, but he could hear it. Shuffling, clicking noises. Spider-like.
Moving towards him.
“It’s not following you, Shaw,” Hemah said. “It’s lo...”
But Shaw didn’t hear the rest. With the thing moving down from the darkness above, he fled the dream. And kept fleeing It from dream to dream all through the night.
The next day, before plugging the computers back in, Shaw decided to increase that precaution to the next level by disconnecting all the computers speakers. He then went so far as to delete the sound drivers in each computer, thus assuring it wouldn’t know what to do with a speaker even if one was connected.
So now that the detonator is taken off the nuke, what am I supposed to do with the plutonium?
He tried to brainstorm different ideas, wishing Walter was with him to help. And yet at the same time not knowing what he would say to him if he was, knowing what he had done. Having seen what he’d done.
So, if the file was at the CIA they’d probably run it through a database to see what it compared to. Or maybe a bunch of scientists would search it for repeating patterns. He knew the file could be played as sound, even though it wasn’t sound in its native state, no more than radio waves were. Maybe the key was to try an entirely different part of his brain again and turn sound into a picture. In fact he already had a program that could do it right in front of him.
The Windows Media player came with all kinds of cool little graphic programs that people could watch while listening to their various sound files, all of which were in some way based on a simple waveform monitor. He had to download a few exotic plug-ins to make the media player cooperate, but overall the process was pretty simple. As he got ready to run the program he thought about tying his shoestring to the chair again, but realizing there was no where to go he didn’t bother.
The program didn’t run anyway, not at first. He’d forgot how dense the file was. A regular computer could play the sound, but the graphics took a lot more processor power than one computer had to offer.
Luckily I’ve got a network already set up, he thought. I’m gonna spin this one in honor of you Walter.
He linked in the other computers to help with the processing load, sending the programs data spinning from computer to computer, each handling a piece of the puzzle. It was all so easy. The media player played the sound, though mutely since it had no speakers to send it to. And it showed the sound. The colors bounced across the screen in a kaleidoscope of patterns. Shaw more than half expected a hypnotizing effect, like from the sounds themselves. But this was different. It was nauseating somehow, off-putting. A wrongness, like a double picture your eyes can’t figure out what to do with so they keep switching it back and forth. He tried a different graphical display program and even though it made it look completely different, it still produced the same feeling. He tried to watch it for as long as he could, to get some idea of what he might be looking at, but after less than a minute he had to turn it off. It was making him dizzy. Even after he turned it off he could still see afterimages of it on the back of his eyelids.
Could still see it, and hear it.
“No,” he whispered. “No no no no no.” He covered his ears but that was almost worse because when he covered his ears the sound did stop. It wasn’t in his head, it was really happening. The sound was faint, but growing louder. He was already beginning to hear it for what it was, to hear the sound within the sound. Before he could fall any deeper into it, he ran to the outlet, unplugged the computers. But it didn’t stop, and it wasn’t coming from the computers. It was coming from somewhere else.
He ran into the hall, freezing for a moment in indecision. Should he run towards the source of the sound, or away from it? Where was there to run away to? He was trapped in here, his only chance was to stop it. So he ran down the hall, to the rec-room. It was in there, coming from the TV. As he approached he began to see it was interfering with the picture somehow. At first he thought the forms were the thing’s shape, but no. They were just the characters on the black and white show, but twisted somehow. Horrible looking through the thick static. He turned off the TV and the patients who had been watching it looked at him confused, as if waking up from something. Bobby Scott was amongst them, and a kind of realization dawned on his face. It was the most sane look he had ever seen from Bobby. When he spoke it was with real fear.
“What have you done?”
Before Shaw could answer he saw a twitching coming from all around the room, from all the shadows. Not a one was holding still. All jittering and thickening, no longer flat. Then, as if every light went out simultaneously, as if the sun itself went out, everything went black.
A perfect dark. The darkness of underground seas that had never flowed in the sun. The darkness in-between the stars. A perfect darkness, but not an empty one. And then Shaw knew what had happened to the students who had been at the university that night while he was covered in Brock’s blood miles away.
And now it didn’t matter whether there were speakers to play the sounds of its voice or not. No one needed to hear it, because they could feel it. Because they were inside it.
That’s when the screaming started.
Chapter 15
********************
Upon receiving the first data sets from the W. Dyer Research Group, Collin immediately set to work with
a will. The project, though hardly begun, had already taken on for him all the connotations of a last hope. Though he tried to tell himself it was hope for a bright future as a famous mathematician, in truth his main purpose was just to find his purpose again. Or at the very least a distraction.
Yet despite this diligence, this store of energy waiting to be released, from the very beginning the work seemed to go nowhere. It wasn’t just a matter of working at a grindstone, he had to first figure out exactly what he needed to do. The figures, he just couldn’t make them work. He tried permutation and algorithm both exotic and sublime, all for naught. The patterns he needed to find just weren’t there. It would be easier if he could prove it was just random meaningless noise, but random is a pattern too and that didn’t track either.
He began to lose faith in himself. Began to think that they should have given the project to someone else. A real mathematician, not some hack who couldn’t do the work because he was too love struck to think straight.
So instead of making progress on the most important project of his life, he just stared at a white board full of half formulas and aborted attempts to make sense from chaos. Whatever it was he needed, it was right there in front of him. Waiting for him to be smart enough to see it.
“What am I missing,” he sighed.
“How should I know,” asked his friend Joe, whom he had decided to meet for coffee after deciding he was at an impasse. Collin had gone to school with Joe. Joe was what people in his circles referred to as a “sell-out,” someone who did math purely for corporations instead of for the betterment of humanity or the advancement of the science. In this case Joe had sold out to Halliburton of all places, helping find oil deposits. It had cost Joe a lot of face in the academic community, but Collin still liked to talk to him occasionally to brainstorm. After all, Joe might be a greedy bastard, but he was completely honest about it.
“There’s got to be something there, Joe. Those bubble chamber impacts aren’t just appearing out of nowhere.”
“Frankly,” Joe continued. “I thought those results sounded bogus from day one. I mean these guys are desperate to make funding and running out of time to do it, and then all those hits just come out of nowhere one day? Come on.”
“You say that about everyone, no matter what they’re working on,” said Collin. “Must be the paranoia of the corporate atmosphere.“
“Hey, we’ve got nothing on academia. You know there’s a rumor that what happened at Meresin University was some kind of sabotage by rival research groups?”
“Yeah,” said Collin. “I heard that one. So what else is new in corporate science?”
“Wellllll,” said Joe as he leaned forward conspiratorially. “Don’t tell anyone, but there’s discussion of using Tymoczko’s four dimensional music theory to create a random song generator for Mac computers. We’ve even got a prototype a couple people are beta testing. It could make iTunes look like a baby toy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jesus, are you serious? You really have been out of the loop. Dmitri Tymoczko of Princeton recently proved that music only makes true mathematical sense in four dimensions. The musical masterpieces of history form various complex hyper-shapes. It’s the biggest advancement in the math of music since Pythagoras.”
Collin paused, considering. The idea that something could only make sense in four dimensions was something he hadn’t considered. It was a long shot but…
“Thanks Joe. I have to go check something out.” With that Collin got up and walked away from their table.
“Hey, where are you going,” Joe called after him. “You’re not going to tell anyone that I told you, are you?”
What Collin needed to do wasn’t easy, even for an ace mathematician. There were no real shortcuts to taking the three dimensional bubble chamber impacts and plotting them as a path in a four dimensional plane. It took him all night just to get a start on it. But some time around dawn he had the first real solution he’d found in weeks. It worked. Whatever it was that was passing through the bubble chamber, it was only the edge of something much more complex.
Too excited to sleep, he plotted more points until around 10 a.m., which he determined was not too early to wake up Alex and tell him about it. Noel had already gone off to work, and it was somewhat strange of him to want to see Alex alone. After all, this was the man that half of Collin wanted to die painlessly in some car accident. And at the same time, he was still Collin’s best friend. As always, he tried to find a way to explain the math to a layman.
“No one has ever envisioned particles like this before,” he said in a rush that was one part elation, one part exhaustion. “I mean string theory, yeah, but particles? Or at least if they have they haven’t ever found any proof like this.”
“I thought time was supposed to be the fourth dimension,” said Alex. Who was eating a bowl of cereal in a bathrobe.
“Yeah well there’s a bit of a naming convention problem. The word dimension can mean lots of different things in science. There’s the parallel dimension theory in quantum physics, that every decision you make splits off into another universe. And in that old book The Time Machine, time was the fourth dimension, right?”
“They made a book from the movie?” asked Alex, his expression all innocence.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Collin, not rising to the bait. “But I’m not talking about either of those things. Specifically I’m talking about shapes. Hypercubes, you know?”
“Yeah….no. It’s pretty early man.”
“Ok well you know a piece of paper would be like a two-dimensional object. Anything on it; square, circle, line, whatever, would be two dimensional. Flat. Then you take that square and make it three dimensional and now you have a cube. Not flat, depth. Spheres, pyramids, us. The whole world. Now take that cube and make it four dimensional and bam, you have a hypercube.”
“Huh, so what does that look like,” Alex asked. “Or do I have to be high to figure that out?”
“Probably wouldn’t hurt. Supposedly they’d look like a cube inside another cube, only the one inside isn’t actually smaller but further way along a four-dimensional plane. Or come to think of it, maybe to us it would just look like an ordinary cube,” Collin trailed off, lost in thought on something.
“Well...it all sounds pretty cool,” said Alex in halfhearted attempt to be supportive. “You want a beer?”
“No, I’ve got to get back to work. At this rate it takes me almost an hour to plot each point, and I’ve got literally thousands of hits. I’ve got to find a faster way.”
“OK well stop by later. I won’t be home from work til late but you can keep Noel company until then.”
What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Collin almost blurted out. He stared at Alex for a moment, then outside the window at the sun as if it could somehow clear the shadows from his mind enough to think clearly again. After a few seconds he realized he was just standing there, oddly.
“Yeah…ok,” he managed. “See you later.”
With that he walked out the door.
Collin did not stop by their apartment later, though he wanted to. Rather he slept through the day, and waking in the dark. Instead of getting up he just lay there, thinking of her as he usually did when he woke.
You know it’s not real Collin, he thought to himself. She’s not as perfect as you think she is. She can’t be because no one is that perfect. It’s a mirage. You look close enough, and it disappears.
He tried to follow this reasoning, to remind himself of her faults. How she always wanted to talk about the “science” of crystal healing. She was late for movies to the point that even if he lied about what time they needed to be there, they’d still miss the first few minutes.
And if he really thought about it, she wasn’t really that pretty. Was she? It was kind of annoying that she was taller than him. She was kind of thin, didn’t have a lot of curves in the right places. Once while drunk she’d even pointed out how she was sad
about how small her breasts are.
But he was long past the point of infatuation where every part of her seemed perfect. Her belief in crystals just seemed like charming naiveté. And he’d fantasized about touching those small breasts so often that the practice of not staring at them in her presence had gone past the point of politeness into an act of physical exertion. Sometimes he’d even find himself rubbing his eyes with the fatigue of it when in her presence.
“The girl you’re in love with doesn’t exist,” he told himself.
Only he didn’t believe it. Or if he did, it didn’t matter.
Jesus, what good is a mathematician who can’t think straight.
“No fucking good at all,” he said with determination.
He threw himself out of bed and turned on all the lights in the house, squinting his eyes in the burning white illumination and letting it burn out the cobwebs of sleep. He needed to think clearly, and that was exactly what he intended to do. He set to work with the will of an ascetic, starving and whipping himself to purification in the monastic cell of his apartment. He needed shortcuts. Mathematical functions and algorithms to cut out the middle man of the process, which was much too slow. He dug into old textbooks and notebooks. Filled the whiteboards around his apartment with figures, erased them, and filled them again. Driven by pain and loneliness and self hatred, but mostly driven to escape. To escape his own mind into a new one, filled with a work and a purpose that could actually be achieved. To solve a problem that was actually solvable.
He worked through the night and though he intended to work through the day he found when the sun arose he could no longer think straight. No longer had the mind to do the work. Instead, though he told himself he shouldn’t, he spent the day with Noel and Alex. Painting, talking, goofing off. Playing house. Playing Collin. A happier Collin who wasn’t on fire inside, one who wouldn’t have to lie to everyone. In general, having in a fine time of it. Then, finally he slept a few scant hours. He woke at night with ideas on how to proceed with the work and set about it feverishly.