A horror of Math

Math as a creature brings horror to an intrepid duo

We ran. Both of us. Her feet in their slippers somehow surer than mine in my leather and worn hiking boots. We headed up the little trail. Surely nothing would follow us. Jen, cast anxious wide eyed looks behind us as we ran. I grabbed her hand and urged her to greater effort. I knew that we should not have taken it. I clasped my left hand to my chest, our theft clutched close and kept running. 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 had been just sitting there. It was open. It was our only chance. I had reached into it and grasped the thing. Something else had roared in rage in response. And now we ran. Away, just away. But our escape was not to be.

The math was breathing hard. Anticipatory, not effortful. It had followed us up here. To this little spit of rock suspended high in the air over the snowy valley floor. I pushed Jen gently and stepped in front of her shielding her from the apparition of wet and maddened math. 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 wicked hooks 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 one sliding paw at a time. It shook its head as if to roar and bits of prime numbers flew off its mane which I suddenly realized was a dense coil of graphed asymptotic formulae.

I raised my empty hands, palms up. Surrender. The equation tattooed on 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.