The Metachronicles of Quark Zombie, Part Two
It was in 2005 that I got a phone call from the FBI asking for my help. They were willing to fly me from Brown to DC to consult with me on a very strange case from the Midwest. I was intrigued and took their offer.
Five days later I was in a meeting room in the J. Edgar Hoover Building listening two agents, Foster and Lecker, brief me on the details.
"So this is one of the first sites of significance. A public library in Fargo. The monster teleported inside the lobby and the radiation was such that people began to die immediately. 20 people died. The creature just stayed in there for a day. apparently reading books, and later, using the Internet," Lecker switched photos, "We have these two images of the creature taken from mobile phone cameras. Can't even tell if it was human, let alone the gender. If we didn't have the earlier hospital report, we'd have never guessed the identity." Lecker paused a moment switching back and forth between photos on the projector, "Rather disturbing to a see a glowing, naked, shriveled radioactive corpse walking around, huh?"
Agent Foster cleared his throat, apparently Lecker was lingering.
"Anyway, that was where we first saw evidence that the monster was trying to communicate. The hazmat team found that nearly all the paper near the photocopiers had been used. We found page after page of mathematical gibberish," Lecker switch photos again.
"That's the first page of the Principia Mathematica," I said, "Written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead? In it they attempted to lay the complete logical foundation of mathematics?" Foster and Lecker looked at each other, I went on, "Later on Godel demonstrated that was hopeless but, it's interesting that particular work was the one creature decided to copy. Let me guess, if I look further into this, I'll find Euclid's Elements too."
Agents Foster and Lecker exchanged another glance, an unspoken decision passed between them.
"This is exactly why we brought you in on this case. That, and your previous security clearance on the Portal Project," Foster said.
"You want me to try to decipher these notes and see what this creature is trying to say or do."
"More or less. In each incident site, the creature has left writings of this nature. The code-breakers at Fort Meade can't spare us any mathematicians and none of us here at the Bureau has the training. We'd like you to dig into this material--and there is a lot of it--and see if you find motives or plans. We want to predict what this monster is going to do next. So far, the capes haven't been able to capture it simply because they can't guess where will strike next."
Lecker put the projector into standby and turned on the lights. Foster continued, "We hope you'll help. You don't have to leave your research or position at Brown but we hope you give us some of your time to dig into this evidence we've collected. It may save hundreds of lives."
Of course I was interested. Honestly, I was more interested in this this than I was in the Portal Project. There might be some new math lurking in the ravings of a radioactive monster. Plus I'd be helping to save lives. My work on the Portal Project opened many doors for me in the past. This was another, similar chance.
"Yes, I'd like to help."
"Excellent. Flynn did me a solid," Foster began to type into a laptop, "I'll be e-mailing some additional material in the next few minutes. I'll overnight the rest to your office in Brown. Of course you understand that all this material is part of a criminal investigation, is legally confidential and is classified under several codicils of the National Security Act."
I nodded my head at that but, I wasn't really happy with it. My first impulse as a scientist is to share my work so that others may check its validity and extend upon it. On the other hand, my long association with the Portal Project and later the Portal Corporation had taught me all about governmental and business manias for security.
So they sent me home with several boxes of notes and pieces of evidence. This was the lighter stuff. Apparently, early on, the Quark Zombie had only a vague understanding of paper and, as such, zapped its formulas into concrete, steel, wood and so on--whatever was handy and durable. There was also material that was intensely radioactive. I'd have to look at that with special equipment. Foster also mentioned some crime scenes where I'd have to review things personally.
The first of it was actually pretty elemental. It was as if Quark Zombie was learning how humanity did mathematics and logic. That was why I saw examples of Russell and Euclid in that first meeting. At the time I presumed that after it learned how we did math, it would learn how we did science. At the time, I thought the reason for this was to learn how to communicate with us.
Later on I learned that was only incidental to the creature's purpose.
Even at the early stages of my investigation, I kept getting distracted by tangents in the creature's mathematical reasoning. I should have been focusing on trying to uncover motives and plans for the FBI and the capes.
But it was a bit like stumbling a notebook filled with Ramanujan's wondrous formulas of continued fractions. I kept seeing tantalizing hints at new insights. The creature was extending our current notation and defining new concepts. I began keeping seperate notebooks to compile these new directions for research but I knew it would take me years to cover it all. I told Foster that, to this properly, we'd need a team of experts from nearly every field of mathematics.
He told me to stick to the point. Science would have to wait. The creature was a menace and had to be stopped; my job was to help do that. So I plowed on.
Evidence from the sixth incident site, an electronics plant, was a breakthrough. It was there that the creature begin to write in English sentences. From then on creature always left a mixture equations and English. But they were very strange sentences. The creature seemed unable to use personal pronouns or refer to itself in the first person. It never called itself an "I." Instead it said, "the author of this statement...." The author it described was never an always present author either. The creature viewed itself as author that changed from context to context. As if it were an entirely different being from moment to moment.
And here's where we get to the really spooky part. As I continued to read the evidence from later sites, it began to refer to me by name.
Well--not exactly--what it really said was something like, "The audience of this statement is a submanifold labeled locally as [a hash of gibberish followed.]...." At my first reading of this later evidence, I ignored the gibberish. At first I didn't even recognize that it was the same gibberish repeated over and over. These hashes of what I'd later discover was encrypted text appeared repeatedly in all the later evidence the FBI brought to me.
I began to find other blocks of encrypted text. These strings of gibberish would always appear with a statement that read, The audience of this statement is given a key." It was that point I realize that using encryption to send secret messages to specific people. I soon decrypted the blocks of text referring to me and realized, given the strength of the cipher involved, that these messages were could only be read by me.
It was like the creature had personal knowledge of me for months before the FBI brought me in on the case. The hairs on the back of my neck crawled when I made that first realization.
How was this even possible?
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(Continued in Part Three.)
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
((This is a solo story for a character I developed a few years ago in this game. The character can be found in the "Chateau Rouge" thread as well. It's an overly ambitious attempt at nonlinear storytelling that might end quite badly. Here's hoping it doesn't. One to part one.))
The Metachronicles of Quark Zombie, Part One
You, the audience, come into this story somewhere in the middle. Beginnings and ends are contextual and arbitrary things so, I won't say this story begins here. Nor will I say that everything ends happily or in tragedy because nothing really ends.
So which middle to start with since I'm forced to by the dictates of conventional narrative? Shall I start with the middle where Amanda Wilkerson died and was then used? Shall I begin with the middle where Quark Zombie was destroyed? Shall I start with the middle where I enter the story? That's were I bring you in so, if you insist, you could say that the story begins here but that's not really accurate. It only seems that way because of the limited way we humans view time and space.
You think this is all matters. Yet each struggle you make, each loss you suffer through, each victory you win only matters to you and the few around you. On the greatest scale it doesn't matter. You never die and your birth was never unique. There are an infinitude of exact copies of you scattered over enormous stretches of time and space. God, if there really is one, is a remote and grand thing indeed. Perhaps she had a hand in our creation but it would be very presumptive of us to think that we figured large in her plans.
The Quark Zombie knows this and so came a time I came to know it. Some might say this knowledge has made me insane but I've worked out the math and I find it to be rock solid. I've seen copies of myself. I've even seen exact copies of copies of myself, with exact copies of Quark Zombie, watching other exact copies of ourselves, watching the infinite regress. It was as if I was a little boy again but the fear wouldn't go away. This time I knew it was actually infinite, not merely potentially so.
When I was a little boy, I was deeply frightened by parallel mirrors. Not so much that I'd burst into tears but enough that I couldn't remain in their presence long. They just seemed unnerving to me. At the time, I didn't have the sophistication to put these fears into words but, looking back, I think my fear was based on the sight of something that was potentially infinite. Later on I realized that the tunnel of duplicates that parallel mirrors made was not actually infinite. It was kept from that by the speed of light and the lack of perfection in the mirrors and their alignment. But because that potential was there, I was frightened. These mirrors showed me, as a boy, perhaps in the same way that stars at night did, that the universe was a lot bigger and stranger than I expected.
I think my childhood fear of parallel mirrors was what drove me to become a mathematician as adult. Once I saw an example of it, I wanted to understand infinity. It was because of my mathematical training and my drive to understand infinity that I was hired by the Defense Department to work on the Portal Project.
That was what the Federal Government called Dr. Brian Webb's research back in the 1980s. The public thinks that Webb's Portal Corporation was entirely a privately formed and funded business venture but, nothing could be further from the truth. It had been known for many years that some superhumans could contact and even travel to regions outside the realm of space-time we call the universe. Not surprisingly, this fact had enormous national security implications and research projects were funded to discover the physics that underlay these phenomena with some hope of attempting to control it. It was Dr. Brian Webb, during his membership on the Freedom Phalanx, that made crucial breakthroughs in understanding how these portals to other universes worked. His story is better related elsewhere but suffice it to say that his teleporter patents weren't the only thing that funded the creation of the first portal generator. Once it became an engineering problem, the DoD poured in billions of dollars.
I joined the project in 1988, while still finishing my doctoral thesis* when the first portal generator was completed. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Flynn was my boss. To the public he was labeled in the corporate org-chart as an outside military consultant but, in reality, he was the chief Pentagon liaison officer for Dr. Webb's research group. Mostly I was there to build the mathematics that informed the computer models that controlled the portal generator. The work they gave me was rather simple--Dr. Webb had already done all the hard work years earlier--and I had a great deal of taxpayer funded time to pursue other interests, such as searching for perfect Euler bricks.
But even though the intercosmic travel was now technically simple, there was an explosion in data for physics, mathematics, history and all the social sciences. It was possible to contact and explore alternate versions of Earth where history happened differently. For example, exploration of allohistories, allowed us to make economics a more rigorous, comparative and observational science. There were versions of the United States, for example, that followed different economic policy than the United States of Prime Earth. As such they kept me and a group of physicists and mathematicians on staff to work out some of the endless details. By the middle of 1990s, when I returned to academia, I had two humble contributions to science. I had coined the phrase "cosmonymics" to refer to naming schemes of alternate universes. I also managed, in a bit of mathematical anthropology, to work out some of the interesting arithmetic systems brought back some of the more alien parallel Earths. It was this latter work that put me on the short list for either the Fields Medal or the Able Prize.
And that was where things stood in my life for more than a decade. It wasn't until the freak emergence of the Quark Zombie that my life became interesting again.
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* Which was on novel forms of tensor analysis for the boundary conditions of topological defects--if you're actually interested that is.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."