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On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).
For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started. Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.
So follow along if you dare and see a start-to-finish novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes! Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully! Will it be any fun to read? You decide!
The Stats:
Words this entry: 2,369 Words total: 8,398 Words to go: 41,602
The Stats:
Words this entry: 2,369 Words total: 8,398 Words to go: 41,602
Chapter Four
What had followed the episode of the code-breaking was something like a psychotic break, only in a good way.
She would take time to explain to herself what the sensation of suddenly seeing the world this way was like, maybe as sort of a justification to herself for all the time she’d spent hating math before she’d switched sides, becoming, in the end, a traitor to her own cause. It was like, once the Christmas tree is all hung and decorated and lighted up, you look at it and realize that one of its strings of lights might have gone out. You find the plug, and jiggle it, and suddenly the tree, which looked finished before if a little dim, is almost twice as bright as it was before, and you can’t imagine it looking finished without those lights on.
On one side of the divide was one version of Eva, complete with the world around her the way that Eva saw things, and on the other was a completely different Eva with a completely different world, and the two would look at each other across the gap for years afterward, one looking back from the present and the other, still buried inside her memory, looking forward from the past, and each would feel baffled by the other’s existence.
Her grades for that part of the year did a kind of back-flip. English and Spanish, which had been better than satisfactory, began to flag to just adequate to pass, and Physics, math’s handsome but heartless brother, which had been holding her down all year, began a steady and bewildering ascent.
Things finally leveled out and started making sense, and the math teacher offered to pull some strings for her to get admitted to a university on a diet of math and computer science, which he believed would be right up her ally as cryptology had been, but she had gratefully demurred, shying from the commitment (she would start however with calculus proper at the community college that autumn after all).
At first her progress into the world of math in general, and what she learned to call differential calculus in particular (and all the further smaller kingdoms and counties within that division), was so rapid and mercurial that she often wondered whether she was suffering some sort of spiritual visitation. Maybe one of her lost ancestors, some forgotten wizard at math that none of her relatives had told her about, had decided to take half-control of her mind and body for a while, stretch his legs, get out of the afterlife for a while. She could think of a long list of things she’d rather do with a living body if she were a ghost, and doing lengthy math homework was nowhere near the top. Soft ice cream maybe, or a toddy if it were winter, and a movie marathon. Or running clothes through the drier and putting them back on just because. But if she were being possessed, it was the pleasure of whatever was in charge of her interests that she should do the homework. She would work at it until the early hours of a Sunday night or Monday morning, when she had other classes that were important to her to wake up for first thing, and when she knew she didn’t need to explore the answers and their other possibilities as thoroughly as she was. She would, of course, not get graded on the extra work, it was just for her.
On the other hand, she’d never had anything that had really been just for her. It was new and different and very strange and terrible in its small glory. She was developing a part of her that was important to herself, which was also new. She was fairly sure she liked it.
Fortunately for her morale, less so for her academic career, her apparently inexhaustible pursuit of math for math’s sake did not interfere with her following the other parts of college life that nearly everyone enjoys most. She went to both a party and the campus police office in her first weekend on campus sophomore year, when she went from her community college to living at a state school a few hours from home. She was forced to undergo an online remedial education course in order to avoid a formal reprimand and a reduction of campus privileges. The net result was she started going to parties further off campus. Mostly she would walk back with friends, sometimes she’d walk back alone, nothing bad ever happened, but every time she found herself on her feet between street lights that were too far apart she cursed herself for an idiot and swore she’d never put herself in that position again.
It became clearer and clearer to her what it was about math that she liked so much. When she’d realized codes could be changed and improved, it had occurred to her for the first time that math was something people had been forced to invent, that once it hadn’t existed. It wasn’t some absolute, superior, and unchangeable set of laws wielded by teachers for the torment of uninterested students. Or at least it wasn’t just that, didn’t have to be that. It wasn’t needlessly complicated or difficult, and it wasn’t designed to trick people into getting the wrong answer.
It wasn’t good or bad, really. It was a language. It was a way of seeing the world clearly, of trying to express things in the clearest and simplest terms possible. It was a tool.
Her only real trouble was that although she could understand and begin using most of the things she learned as soon as she had to, when it came to her own ideas and suspicions about good ways to organize and express things, it always took forever for her to get what she wrote down to make sense.
Once she began to look at it that way, it began to draw her in completely. She started auditing higher-level classes she wasn’t qualified to take because the ideas in the books she took out from the library interested her. She pestered the three university math tutors at their office hours with questions she couldn’t quite get to make sense, ideas that didn’t actually add up on either side of the equal sign. She started to notice that the were unavailable when she came around, which was irritating, but she supposed she didn’t need any help passing classes. And she did still more and more and more homework.
The weirdest part was when she started to get noticed. Towards the end of the first semester at the state school one of her professors, the one running her discrete class, took her aside after class one day and said that if she liked, he would arrange with the registrar’s office to get her into any course he was teaching in the spring semester without bothering with prerequisites or qualifications. Whatever she wanted to study, he wanted to make sure she was able to. At first she was confused, and actually thought he was making a pass, and smiled politely and left. She wasn’t overly pleased that she was getting that kind of attention, as it was a little creepy, but it was surprisingly flattering that he’d said something. She had never considered herself to be pretty, and for a few days she wondered what she had done to get the otherwise straight-laced seeming older man’s attention.
Later she confided in one of the teaching assistants for that class what had happened, and what if anything she should do, and was more or less set straight: it was her grades and the things she said in class, and what the professor had in mind was making the math department available to her because she seemed to be good at it and to be genuinely interested. Would she take him up on it? She was a little surprised to realize she was genuinely interested in one or two courses she could jump ahead to this way when she looked over the catalog. She decided to go for it.
While it lasted it was a toilsome sort of heaven, or at least nirvana. While she had a problem of which she was trying to make sense, none of the minutiae of life, the petty little annoyances and difficulties of life, they all went away and didn’t matter. She had her little corner of zen staked out, and she cultivated her garden of interests and abilities with every moment she could find to spare. It eventually got so bad that it almost interfered with her partying. Almost.
Then she started running out of time. It was getting closer and closer to her last semester at the university. She had little or no interest in jumping through the hoops she needed to jump through to get into a master’s or a doctorate’s program. But she would have to work out something or they’d make her stop studying math.
Teaching was more or less out, she didn’t have the people skills. Her one semester of being a teacher’s assistant in junior year had been a nightmare of office hours, group meetings, extra sessions with the students and professors, it was awful. Making the math work she was good at. Helping other people make it work was next to impossible, she just didn’t know how to talk to people about it clearly enough.
She had taken a quick look at engineering and other practical avenues of applying her abilities outside the realm of pure math, and had been completely unmoved. Translating what she was good at into what had no interest in her, the moving and shaping and lifting of things, and back again. How dull, she’d rather get a day job and a library card and a notebook and pencil. She drifted around the science department for a few days, thinking there must be something there she could sink her teeth into, but finding nothing. Everything essentially had already been done, it turned out. Most everything interesting that people were working on was a matter of either verifying other people’s experiments to make extremely subtle refinements on the standard model of particles and their properties, or were being done in one or two of the sophisticated labs around the world that she had worse than a one in ten-thousand chance of getting a job in. And besides, she hated the lab. For some reason the idea of all the careful preparation and documenting and scrubbing and sifting and infinitesimal arrangements to a hair’s breadth of accuracy made her feel tired and bored. Inviting the necessity for an endless list of chores into her life to do the same thing that, again, she could do with a library card, a notebook, and a pencil on her own. Why struggle against the world’s intrinsic mess when she could see things so much clearly in her own head from the start?
Half a year passed in this restless anticipation. She could try and get a masters in math, but how would she pay for it? She was already up to her eyeballs in debt just from the state school. All the really good schools she heard people talking about were either worlds away or required a compact with lords of the underworld to be afforded, or both.
At the start of her last semester she had drifted in again into the halls of the physics department, feeling listless and as though she’d lost her way. It was then, or shortly thereafter, that she saw the board. A upperclassmen student had put it together for a project, one of those tacky contruction-paper-and-printout affairs that goes along with a large paper and a in-class presentation. Every board in every department of the university had held at least one of these every semester since she’d started, but this was the only one she’d ever stopped to look at.
It was the three word title at the top of the board that got her attention:
CALCULUS WITHOUT LIMITS
The topic of the board was something being controversially referred to as “quantum calculus,” and seemed to be as vague and poorly defined as Eva’s future at the moment was. The general idea was that it was a new demi-field of physics and math that was being invented, more or less in different ways by everyone who used it (or so she gathered from the board) in order to approach some of the larger unsolved problems in physics.
She’d read about the problems a “theory of everything” had in her first semester at community college in an overview of modern science course, about how quantum mechanics and general relativity didn’t really play nicely together, and the study of physics was essentially split in two. She had forgotten about it almost as soon as she’d read about it; interesting no doubt to the players involved but from the bleachers it was two distant and specific a problem to be interesting.
But the math on that board wasn’t distant or cold in her mind’s eye. The equations and half-answers and guesses strung up on the little cardboard squares caught hold of her imagination and started that visiting spirit in her eyes and fingers moving almost before she’d realized it. They snagged at her brain like an impossibly catchy tune and refused to leave again.
That evening she went to the library, took out half a dozen books on the history of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and did not sleep or leave her apartment until the evening of the following day.
By the end of that semester, she had somehow managed to get herself enlisted in a PhD program at a major university on the other side of the continent, and all the ink and blood on the requisite financial devil’s bargains needed was dry. She set off with the contents of her small apartment packed into the back of her little car, and on the passenger seat were several semi-accidentally stolen library books, a notebook, and a pencil.
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