Strange Math

         There was, to be blunt, a veritable fuck-ton of blood. On the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling, and not even spattered there. Not a drop of it was out of place; it coated the room in an even-handed, meticulous scrawl. Some places it was script, in others it was line drawings, but everywhere it was... wrong.
         A.J. was a cop. He had seen some freaky shit, and heard his share of freakier stories. A year back, some high-school kids got all caught up in the vampire craze, and started killing rabbits in the park and drinking their blood. That was as weird as he thought he was going to get. Then Franklin Dedgers, PhD. decides 'wouldn't it be just lovely to stab myself in the arm with an old-fashioned feather quill, and scribble fucked up math on the wall? Yes, just delightful.' Needless to say, it had taken more than a few dips in the ink to cover all flat surfaces in the apartment.
         A.J. walked around in the room, stepping from one patch of already smeared text to another, avoiding the photographers who did the same thing. The woman who had done the smearing had done so with her shirt, after removing her eyes from her head with the unfolding nail-scraper on her fingernail clippers. She had already been taken to the hospital, babbling. "It was wrong." she had said, "It was too wrong. I had to- I had to- I had to get rid of it."
         And she had a point. As A.J. paced the room, the lines the late physics professor had drawn on the walls seemed off. Like they were at the wrong angles, corners meeting in such a way that they should be curving, but lines still remaining straight. And the equations were wrong, too. Not in a deep, stomach-turning sense like the lines, but simply incorrect. The problem was, they were correct.
         Where A.J. could see symbols he recognized (God knows there weren't many), he saw equations like 3 times 8 equals 5007. It was obviously not right, but as he read along the line, he found that it made perfect sense. 3, 8 times, obviously came out to be 5007. It could be no other way. Wait, no, outside of this room, 3 times 8 is 24, and always was. He turned from the numbers, feeling a headache coming on.
         He turned to the centerpiece of this nightmarish apartment. The body of the late great Professor Dedgers, splayed on the floor, quill in his hand, and his hand protruding from his stomach.
         The man, so the coroner's report would later say, had been literally ripped limb from limb, then each limb broken down into smaller bits and rearranged on his body. Not sawn, twisted, or cut off; each limb had been pulled off. Where each bit had been reattached, there was a ring of red, bubbly skin, like each piece had been melted on. Imagine smashing a Ken doll with a hammer, then having a blind man use a blow torch to put it back together.
         On the wall in front of the body was the focal point of the mad writings. Not that there was a big red "This is the focal point" written above it, but the eye followed all the shapes and numbers there, like it follows the architecture of a cathedral towards the ceiling. Where it led you to, in this case, was a charred circle roughly a yard high and 2 feet wide, emanating a smell that was most eloquently described by A.J. as he approached it.
         "This smells like someone boiled ass in a hot-spring." He cocked an eyebrow at the nearest blue-jacketed CSI squint. "Care to elaborate?"
         "The smell is sulfuric, hence your hot-spring comparison. The boiled ass, I blame on whatever this residue is. It's all over this char mark." said the squint, picking at the blackened wood with a pair of tweezers. "My guess is it was left by whatever accelerant was used, but I have no idea what."
         A.J. nodded, and walked over to the pile of books on the only table in the one-room apartment, and started shuffling through them. It was mostly textbooks and massive tomes of high-level math and physics, but one leather-bound book stuck out from the pack. He picked it up, and upon closer inspection found it to be a journal belonging to Dedger. On the front, cut into the leather, was a shape that could be seen in the patterns on the walls, like a circle, but wrong like everything else. It should be oval, or a triangle, or anything but a circle, yet circle it was. The inside was filled with handwriting matching that on the walls, and the first quarter or so seemed to be written by a sane hand. Then suddenly, it became an odd mix of letters and numbers, indecipherable. A.J. flipped to the last legible page, and saw the words "For Sammy" in large letters. Time to find Sammy.

         Sammy was Sammy to everyone who knew him, so when a man called asking for Samuel, Sammy put on his professional voice and opened with his professional greeting. "This is he. Who may I ask is calling?"
         When the police detective had told him of Frank's death, he was stunned. They had been friends for years. When he was told the cause of death, he nearly fell out of his chair.
         "He was ripped apart?"
         "It appears that way."
         Sammy felt breathless. He felt numb. He felt like he was just watching himself talk. He felt all those clichés and more. "Who would do that? Why?"
         A.J. sat at the kitchen table across from Sammy. "My best guess? A sick fuck bodybuilder. But we don't have many leads right now. We're hoping you might be able to help us with that."
         Sammy told the detective that as far as he knew, Frank had no enemies, no mob connections, and didn't owe anyone money. In all honesty, he hadn't even talked to Frank for more than a year, not since Sammy had attended a conference at UCLA last fall.
         "Well, you two might not have talked, but he thought of you." He placed the packet of papers he had been holding on the table, and slid them over. "That's a photocopy of a journal your friend kept for the past few months. Turn to page 35. That was written about seven months ago, and is followed by some weird code. Can you explain this?"
         Sammy flipped the page over, and saw the code A.J. was talking about. "It's a code we used to use in college. We both took a semester in cryptology for the hell of it, and devised this. It's a Vigenere Square combined with a modified nomenclature cipher." The detective blinked. "Basically, we had a secret word that would tell us which of 26 jumbled alphabets to use on each letter, giving us another bunch of useless text. Then we would look at each block of three letters, which we would look up on a list we had made telling us what sound that block of letters represented. We would combine the sounds into words, and have the message, though we used this thing for maybe a week on short notes before we found it too cumbersome to use. To write this much in it... it's insane."
         A.J. still didn't get it. Time to deflect. "Well, your friend got pretty batshit there at the end. He covered the walls in his apartment with his own blood, scribbling crazy shit everywhere with a quill. Writing in a pain in the ass code is small potatos compared to that." He pointed at the bowl of peanuts in the middle of the table. "May I?"
         Sammy just nodded, turning back to the stapled together packet.
         A.J. popped a handful of the nuts into his mouth, and stood. "So you think you could translate this mess into something useful? I don't know how much information is going to seep through the crazy, but there could be something we need to know in there."
         "Yeah, I think I still have the list in a box in the garage. It would take a while, though. I have students. I can't drop everything and do this. But I can, with time."
         "The sooner the better, but I understand." He handed Sammy his card. "Call me if you find anything. A name, phone number, address, whatever."
         "Sure thing."
         A.J. walked over to the door, opened it, and stood in the doorway. He looked back for a moment, said goodbye, and shut the door behind him.
         Sammy sat looking at the door for a while. Eventually he stood up and made some coffee. He took his black, though he despised the taste. He had started doing it to impress a girl, and thought it made him seem tough. It had grown into a habit. He poured his vile brew into a novelty mug with a caricature of Sigmund Freud on it that he had been given by an acquaintance (he never understood why the Freud was significant), and set it on the kitchen table. Then he left for a moment, and came back with several yellow legal pads and a pen, and sat down.
         He sat, and hefted the stack of photocopies, straightening the already straight pages, and set to work deciphering the first cipher. Their secret keyword was very memorable, as it was a particularly nasty insult aimed at their cryptography professor. In their defense, they were in college at the time. Armed with this phrase, he could translate the first cipher by memory.
         "Prof Sawney sucks donkey cock. What delightful students we were, eh Frank?" he mumbled, bent over his legal pads. His was a quick mind, this first layer should only take a couple of weeks to finish, then he could settle in with the hard part. Wouldn't that be fun.

         There were 44 different combinations of letters and numbers on the slightly yellowed printed page. One for each phoneme, or phonetic sound, in the English language. It had taken slightly longer than three weeks to decipher all 65 pages of script, and now Sammy sat at his desk, more legal pads at the ready, a fresh pen, and the old list of code and corresponding sounds. The first three letter block was FB4. He checked the list to see what sound it made, and saw listed next to it the letter S, and an example, "Sun," with the S underlined. He wrote an S on his pad, and moved to the next block. N7N. A, as in cat; M, as in man; EE as in sweet. S-A-M-EE. It was his name. Sammy. His hand gripped the pen tight, and he had to take a breath to release some of the tension. It was creepy, reading the words of his friend, and thinking, "This was written by a dead man. My best friend is a dead man." Though he had come to terms with Frank's death, he still felt strange thinking of him as 'my dead friend.'
         He moved to the next three letter block, 23J...

         Sammy,
         In all the time we have been friends, we have studied mathematics. But always we learned math that others had discovered, math devised long ago. Though there are still discoveries to be made in the mathematics we know, and in fact there are every so often, math and physics have grown quite stale. No major advances in physics have been made for about 60 years now, and I have spent the last few years attempting to remedy this. You know about my work with string theory, and how I thought that we had stumbled onto something. The problem was string theory, though pretty, is absolutely un-disprovable. It cannot be proven or disproven as it makes no predictions that we can measure, because the math required is so complex, just creating the equations is impossible, even with state of the art supercomputers working around the clock. I believe that the only way to make any further advancement is to create, from scratch, a new math. Something free from the rules and impossibilities of the mathematics we now use.
         I have succeeded. In the following pages, I will attempt to explain myself and my math, and to show what is possible with it. It is beyond your wildest imaginings. Nothing is impossible, now. We just needed a new way to look at things.

         Sammy sat back in his chair. From what the detective told him, Frank had gone insane, and the letter he had just decoded sounded perfectly sane. It sounded dry and intellectual, and other circumstances would be a bore to read. Exactly the way Sammy remembered Frank to write. If he did lose it, he did it after he wrote this part of the journal. He opened his desk and set the notepads inside. It was late, and those high schoolers  wouldn't teach themselves.
         As he shuffled about his bedtime routine, Franks words floated around in his head. A new form of math would be damn near impossible to create. Math was math. Oh, sure you could substitute a couple of symbols, come up with your own way of representing numbers; but numbers are still numbers. One is still one, no matter what it is called. Two and two makes four, even if you call two gurble and four flurp. The quantities remain the same. "A rose by any other name" as the Bard put it.
         
         The high school was the black sheep of the district, and actually still used honest-to-god chalkboards. They were the poor school. The inner city kind where they post metal detectors and have to watch for gang violence. Sammy didn't teach here because he had to, he taught here because he thought he could help these kids attain a higher place in life. Idealistic and maybe naive, yes, but it was important work, and was fulfilling to him.
         He was in his third period block class, trying to get freshmen to appreciate algebra. Freshmen were the bane of his existence, put on this planet as a personal trial, or so Sammy thought of them, which is exactly why he requested so many freshmen classes. If he can reach them, he can reach anyone. This particular class was one of his worse classes, both grade-wise and attention-span wise. One boy in the back corner was making faces at him when his back was turned, and thought he could not be seen. Jeff was the class clown and slacker in a class built entirely of class clowns and slackers. Deep breaths, Sammy boy. Deep breaths.
         Third period was the worst of them all not only because of the students, but because it was the last one before lunch. The time of day when he felt most tired and lazy, with food and a break from these monsters approaching, but far too slowly. He watched the clock out of the corner of his eye, just waiting for that bell to ring as he droned on about exponents of variables. He knew he was droning, and hated himself for it, but he just couldn't find the energy to put forth effort. He was up late last night. Again. Every night, he thought, "Only one page tonight. Just one, and then I stop." and every night, he found himself hunched over his yellow legal pads into the wee hours of the morning, only stale coffee and the scratching of a half-empty pen on paper to keep him company. His lack of sleep was really showing in his classes, but he couldn't stop. Franks writings were increasingly disturbed but increasingly... fascinating.
         He had done it. He really had. He found a way around the rules, a way to skip past the problem areas. There was a legend about Alexander the Great, how he was presented with a rope knotted in such a way that it was impossible to untie. He cut the knot in half with his sword, thus taking the most direct path to solve his problem. Frank had surpassed even that. He had simply thought the knot out of existence. He found that when looked at with the right frame of mind, there was no problem. Just a new way of looking at things. And he had detailed the equations and solutions he had discovered in the journal, and Sammy had studied them, mulled them over, lay awake in bed at nights, until he began to see behind the veil, as well. The only problem was, now he had trouble seeing the veil anymore.
         "Wait, hold up."
         Sammy spun around. "What?"
         He saw that the student who had spoken up was Tiffany, one of the more obviously... promiscuous girls in the class. "The hell you writin' Mr S?"
         Sammy sighed. Damn freshmen. "Look, it's very-" When he looked at his examples he saw that he had begun using Frank's New Math. Freakish symbols merged with common ones created a mishmash of nonsensical numbering, until it evened out into legible numbers. The equations were right, but not right. Sane, yet insane.
         Some of the students had begun to pay more attention. The teacher screwed up? Hilarious. He could almost hear the whispers of "dumbass" and "dipshit" merge into a giant, Sam-crushing ball of teen angst.
         "Oh, sorry. Got a little bit carried away here." He reached for the eraser, when Tiffany again spoke.
         "It looks sorta, I dunno, freaky. Like it's written weird, or sumthin." She started to rub her eyes. "Oh, motherfucker, sumthin's in my eye..." and she went down like a sack of bricks, shaking and spasming on the floor. Some of the other students in the front row also started seizing, falling to the ground and having conniptions. Some of the kids screamed, others rushed to help, and still others just sat and watched. Sammy couldn't blame them, he did the same thing. He watched as Tiffany repeatedly slammed her head against the tile floor, the thudding noises she made becoming progressively wetter, until each hit sounded like someone dropping a wet towel. The others fared only slightly better. One black boy had bitten his tongue off, and was trying to gurgle his breath past the blood filling his mouth. If someone didn't roll him over soon, he would probably drown. Another boy had fallen wrong, and a shard of femur stuck from his thigh, making the most awful scraping sound as he rattled and shivered on the ground. And still, Tiffany slammed her pulped head into the floor. The sight of bits of bone embedded in brain matter left on the floor finally knocked sense back into Sammy, and he rushed to the call button near the door. Each class had one, a two way intercom to connect the teacher with the vice principle, in case a student was being particularly threatening.
         He slammed his thumb into the red call button, and screamed into the black mesh screen, "Get a fucking ambulance here! They're fucking dying!" The harsh mechanized voice of the vice principle squawked back at him, but he had already rushed to his students, trying to keep them alive until the paramedics arrived.

         He lost his job. He didn't care anymore. Two kids had died in his classroom, for no apparent reason, and four more had killed themselves later that week. All kids with no history of depression, epilepsy, or even common allergies. He might have been able to keep his job; after all, no-one could really blame the deaths on him. They didn't know about the strange math on the board. He had erased it after the ambulance had left. If he had fought, he could have kept his job. But not showing up to school didn't help his case, and that on top of six unexplained deaths was enough to fire him. If he would check his mailbox, email, or voicemail, he would know this.
         He hadn't left his home in nearly four weeks. A whole month. He was so close to a breakthrough, he could feel it. Like something in the air knew what was coming, and was tensed for it. Maybe it was just him.  He hadn't eaten in ten days. He didn't need to anymore. Or drink, or sleep, or any of those things that got between him and the last pages of the journal. He could see everything differently, now. Distance meant nothing to him, it was just another variable to be manipulated. With the right equations, he could find that there was no distance between two points that were considered miles apart. You just needed to think about the distance in a different way. He could walk out his door and be in China, for the math told him he could. If he wanted to leave, that is.
         As he scribbled in his yellow notepad, he grew excited. He could now translate the code as fast as he could write, and as he translated he came to realize the final truth of the journal. Frank had, after thinking a great deal, finally found the answer he had originally set out to find. The final truth in physics. The fundamental building blocks of the universe, that which cannot be reduced to anything more basic than itself. He turned to the page of the notepad, ready to learn the secrets of the universe...
         Nothing.
He had translated the last page, and it cut off. How silly of him, he must have skipped the last page of the journal. He'd just go back to the photocopy and decode it.
         He shuffled to the kitchen table, where the photocopy sat still. He flipped to the last page, only to find that it was the same he had already translated. The final page of the journal was missing.
         The creature that used to be Sammy screamed. It clawed at its face, kicked over the table, and wailed curses at the ceiling. The final page was gone, the answer stolen from him. The detective. He must have known what was on that last page. He was trying to keep the secret from Sammy. He had no right, and Sammy would teach him that. He scrambled over the heaps of trash and papers in his study and picked up a black felt marker. Pulling the cap off, he scrawled several freakish equations and diagrams on the wall in front of him, angles meeting in forbidden ways, numbers twisting and writhing their way around his shattered mind, and he took a step forward...
         ... and found himself in an office, several thousand miles away. The fluorescent lights hurt his eyes, but he could make out the shape of the detective he had met what seemed aeons ago.
         A.J. jumped back from the shadowed, ragged mass that suddenly appeared before him. "The hell?! How in God's name did you get here, and who the fuck are you?" The stinking mass of filth and rags was right in front of him now, hands around his throat. The hands squeezed, and purple flowers bloomed in his vision.
         "Where is the last page?" Its fetid breath made A.J. want to puke. "You are keeping it from me! My answer. I have earned it! It is mine!" As it spoke, it's voice rose higher and higher, until it was screeching nearly incoherently.
         A.J had no idea what this mad, foul creature was talking about, and even if he had, he  could not have gotten a word around the increasingly tight grip at his throat. He grabbed desperately for the gun under his jacket. His frantic searching became wilder as a dark ring began to encroach on the edges of his vision, until his fingers brushed against the grip of his pistol. He drew it, and fired wildly into his attacker. The thing that had been Sammy wailed, spun, and disappeared.
         
         Sammy collapsed in his room, bleeding on his couch from the bullet-wounds in his side. He sobbed desperately, fearful not for his life, but at the loss of the last page. He would never know the final secret. He would forever be unfulfilled, tortured by what knowledge he could have had. Unless...
         Frank had been a second-rate mathematician. So he had gone on to be a physicist and Sammy had become a teacher. What did that prove? Just that Sammy was a far more giving person than Frank. If Frank could come up with the answer, then so could Sammy. He stood, unaware of the wounds in his side. He moved to the wall, and saw the how the numbers and lines would look in his mind. Yes... he could find the answer himself! He didn't need the last page! Absently, he scratched at his stomach. When he felt the wetness, he looked down. His fingers were stained red with blood that had seeped from his wounds. He tore off his shirt, and examined the holes. He stuck his finger into one, and barely felt the pain. He looked back to the wall, and touched his blood-soaked finger to the wood-paneled surface. He drew a line.
         It looked beautiful, stark scarlet against the dark brown wood. He jammed his finger into his stomach again, and drew another. Just as gorgeous. But how would a number look? He experimented, and found that he could write whole equations with the blood that seemed to most powerful and stunning versions of those equations he had ever seen. Now, if he could just find his answer, he would be the master of this strange new math.
         And so the dirty, bleeding, disheveled man, in ruby droplets, began to coat his walls in obscene numbers, madly cackling with glee.