A Horror of Math

Our hero engaged in a theft. But the math will catch up. And then what?

We ran. Both of us. Her feet in their slippers surer than my bare and blistered pair. We headed up the little trail. There was an unsolved theorem somewhere this way. A fortress. A temporary shelter, I hoped. Jen, casting anxious wide eyed looks behind her, ran beside me. I grabbed her hand and urged her to greater effort. We had to put distance between us and what might be following. My mind shook as it thought back to the moments just before. The cryptographic vault was simply there. Added into existence. It was open. I had reached into it and grasped the glowing formula. It pierced my palm, wrote itself into it and I held up my hand and saw it there. A tightly curled and twisting Mobius, dripping tiny bursts of probabilities. Then something else roared, enraged by our trespass. And now we ran. But our escape was not to be.

The math was breathing hard. Anticipatory, not effortful. It had followed us up here. No shelter, just a little spit of rock suspended high in the air over the snowy valley floor. I pushed Jen gently and stepped in front, shielding her. It snuffled forward, teeth, sharpened fractals of tens and twenties jutted up from its lower jaw. Its eyes were depthless holes of black discontinuity, and its ears were twitching. A pattern of recursing logarithms. I could see its paws but not the legs. And oh, so many paws it had. Each terminating in acute segments of fractional numbers. As it came closer, I could feel the furnace heat and frigid cold of its calculus. It approached slowly, with the inevitability of all time, inching forward sets of sliding paws all at once and each discretely. It shook its head, bits of prime numbers flying off its mane -- a dense coil of graphed asymptotic formulae. Then it roared. A squall of sound, unfinished but never begun. My ears bled and my vision wobbled.

I raised my empty hands, palms up. Surrender. The equation embedded in my left palm squirmed and crawled to the back of my hand and Jen, staring at this impossibility let out a piercing scream. Then the math pounced. Its jaws opening wide. Wider than all of reality. And bit down. Those infinitely sharp teeth sheared through my arms, my body and impaled poor Jen as she hid behind me. They carved us both into pieces, partial differentials, and as my consciousness faded, I could see down the monster's gullet. A coiled and twisting passage that narrowed to a point right before me, close enough to touch and too far to reach.

But incredibly my consciousness held. It faded, certainly, dissipating in a diminishing sequence of real numbers. But it refused to vanish. I approached dissolution. I could see that ending stretching further and further away. Beckoning with a pulsation of never-ending division. I perceived behind me and what was once Jen was gone. It was just a single line. A point in time and a line in space.