Subject: Research proposal
From: Secretary <[email protected]>
To: Alex Young <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun 6/26/22 1:14am (PDT)
Dear Dr. Young,
We are impressed by your body of work on stochastic modelling. We are a research group of mathematicians and physicists that work at the bleeding edge of particle physics, and we believe your world-class expertize in probability theory is the key to advancing groundbreaking research in our field.
Due to immense interest in our research, we have secured a research grant of $42,000 USD for a specialist role in the project. We would like to offer you this research opportunity. We look forward to your response.
Regards,
Receiverist Particle Physics Research Group
I chuckled wryly, before summarily executing the email with a singular satisfying click of the “Junk Email” button. This was easily the fakest email I had seen this month. For an academic, it was a rite of passage to become used to spam from desperate and disreputable journals. Poorly written boilerplate invitation letters with only my name and the title of the first article that appeared when one searched it. Last month, I even had the pleasure of receiving an email containing “
To say that I had woken up on the wrong side of the bed would be to severely miss the point. The offender was I had woken up at all. It was a Monday, but that detail was merely an incidental bystander that risked being wrongly accused. The culprit was the twenty-seventh of June. My mother’s birthday. I wasn’t going to call her this year. I briefly pondered whether that made me a terrible son, but I shoved the thought to the back of my mind just as I did the last time the twenty-seventh of June rolled around. And the one before that. Regardless, it wasn’t like I could just change my mind and call her. No. The prison wouldn’t let me do that without arrangements made in advance.
After having my morning porridge—bland and runny and affordable—I left my tiny apartment and immediately felt regret. It was only after seeing the cloudless sky from the hallway windows that I remembered it was going to be a hot day. Something like thirty-degrees celsius. I loathed this for two reasons. Firstly, temperatures above thirty degrees celsius were exceedingly rare in where I grew up. Or at least that was the case a decade ago. And secondly, I was annoyed at the audacity of the sun to mock me with its bright optimism. Do me a favour and never come back, I thought defiantly.
I arrived at my office early in the morning as usual, saying ritualistic hellos to the other inhabitants of the faculty. Despite my moody start to the morning, the day didn’t seem so bad. The planets had aligned favourably as the coffee machine wasn’t out of order for once. Going through my emails, the comedy of sending that spam message to the email jail had brightened my mood. I could laugh about it with the couple of colleagues I got along with. But I refrained. It occurred to me that it was entirely possible the fake email was a practical joke played on me due to my own troubles. The thought lingered bitterly. I tried to relieve it with a sigh and set off to print my lecture notes.
The Mathematics Institute of Miller University was not particularly noteworthy. An outsider would be forgiven if they concluded, based on the bland and outdated architecture of the building, that the institution was an underfunded public college in a state that saw research as heresy. This deception would be comical if the truth wasn’t so humiliating. No, it was a private university that raked in obscene levels of profit from wealthy students from every corner of the world who lusted for a fancy piece of paper that included “business administration” or “corporate finance”, rather than an education. The figures were redundant. You only needed to glance at the Porsche the Dean of Commerce drove to and back from his office—the trip amounted to no more than a few minutes each time. The commerce and law faculties lived in neo-futuristic architectural expressions of art. The kind that separated the general populace into those who felt humbled, and those who saw something of themselves in the magnitude of ostentatious grandeur on display. In comparison, the mathematics building—and the faculty itself—was merely an afterthought. Profit followed money. Money followed profit. And neither followed abstract mathematics.
When I entered the lecture hall, there were a few students peppered among the seats. Most of them continued to scroll social media on their phones while wearing earphones. One who sat a couple of rows from the front nodded at me. I nodded back. Students perfunctorily took first year maths as a requirement for their commerce, science or engineering degrees, and so there wasn’t genuine interest. Hence, even though those courses were straightforward and easy, failure rates were high and satisfaction rates were low. I didn’t blame the students. In fact, I sympathised with them. I too played my part in this perfunctory duet. My job was to research. Well, to publish papers and acquire research grants really. Teaching was merely the dish cleaning duty.
As more students took their seats in the lecture hall, I switched on the projector. A lot of my older colleagues preferred the blackboard, which seemed awfully antiquated. The dryness that chalk left on my hand and the grating sound of the blackboard being struck by it outweighed the prestige of being an old-fashioned mathematician. I attached the microphone to my collar and switched it on. For once, I was grateful that my lecture was early in the morning. The air conditioner still hadn’t been fixed since the previous semester, when a bored student had a moment of comedic genius and fired a spitball into it.
“Good morning,” I said. The echoes of my voice through the speakers still sounded foreign to my ears. I didn’t receive any “morning’s” back as usual. “Before we get started, I want to remind you that your assignments are due next week. Failing a student is much easier than marking their work, so I’m not at all implying that I want you to submit on time.” That earned some chuckles. “Anyway, let’s push on. Today I’m going to introduce the single most important concept in this course. Eigenvalue decompositions.”
I began to write mathematical notation on the paper in front of me, projecting onto the large screens in front of the class. With a little luck, it would also project onto the notes the students took and into their minds. A first year linear algebra course was an unpleasant course to teach. Not because it was hard—in fact, it was painfully easy—but rather it was the most crucial cornerstone in modern mathematics, yet also the most boring maths in the classroom. For the students and myself. I hypothesised the most entertaining aspect of the course for the students was my Estuary accent from growing up in London, but the effect was impermanent and I suspected I could write an impressive array of profanities into the lecture before anyone bats an eye.
It wasn’t long before the hour was exhausted and I dismissed the class. As I began to pack up my materials, a student approached me shyly. He asked politely in an Eastern European accent about proving the irrationality of the square root of two, a bonus problem I had snuck into the last practice set. The idea that an interesting problem might inspire a lifetime of mathematical pursuit was probably the only romantic notion that existed in my neurons. After providing a hint about starting the proof, he responded that he hadn’t thought of that and thanked me. There was a momentary spark of satisfaction, perhaps even joy, at the thought that a student cared enough to try the problem. But like root two, it was irrational. As I watched his retreating back, I tried to guess whether he would go on to work for an insurance company or a trading firm.
As I left the lecture theatre for my office, past the sparse students waiting outside for the next class, I wondered when I would hear back about a research manuscript I had submitted to a conference several months ago. I was about to enter through a set of doors at the back of the courtyard when something compelled me to freeze. It was like hearing the ghostly sound of being watched. Paranoia wasn’t something I typically experienced, but the hairs sticking up at the base of my nape convinced me to look around my vicinity. There was no one there. All the students had entered their class for the next hour, or were taking a break somewhere that actually had seats. I might have imagined it, but it was difficult to shake off a feeling that wasn’t in my usual repertoire of sensations. It had broken my train of thought.
After a couple hours of exploration into some vague ideas for new research directions, it was lunch time. I made my way to the cafe in the courtyard of the mathematics building and ordered a chicken wrap. It didn’t taste good—there was always either too little mayonnaise, or too much—but it was filling and affordable. I sat at my usual table that was off to the side with a coffee I had made from the staff kitchen. It was my table precisely because students and staff alike tended to either miss it, or it was so close to the corner that it looked dank from a distance. The table was underappreciated. On this particular day, it was a luxury to avoid the punishing sun. There were several students spread across the other tables, a few eating and chatting together, while others were making study notes as they nursed a cup of coffee.
… Some experts argue that the rising military tensions in both the Mediterranean Sea and the East China Sea is evidence of the need for a firmer US foreign policy to secure strategic interests in those regions. The woman on the television spoke in the voice that trademarked her profession. My eyes naturally drifted towards the hanging screen like the involuntary motions of an addict. I took a modest bite from the wrap, careful not to stain my only collar shirt that was washed. In other news, a whistleblower has accused the social media giant ConverXe of harvesting user data to target susceptible users with political advertisements involving conspiracy theories and hateful content. A spokesperson for the company responded to criticisms by stating that third party consultants are currently auditing their ethical use of data, and that the company was founded on the philosophy that ethical advertising and free speech can coexist. Their share price remains stable at just under thirty-three dollars.
Healthy wasn’t an adjective I would assign to my relationship with the news. Simply put, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. There was a distinct kind of powerlessness that came from knowing the trajectory of the world. A taunt from an ugly, authoritative voice saying, Well, what are you going to do about it? Yet to avoid the news wasn’t any better. The climate of anxiety permeated in the air, and through osmosis, one would know precisely how bad things were without a single detail. So it was futile. One could choose to read the doctor’s diagnosis or throw it out the window, but it didn’t change the fact that they were on the deathbed. Perhaps it was naivety—or masochism—but I had always imagined there would be less guilt with the former. I wasn’t sure that was true.
“Alex,” came a reedy voice. I resigned my fate and needlessly looked up to greet the stubby, mid-forties man who approached my table. I held a barely contained sigh.
“Peter. How are you?”
“Good!” he answered in his unique tone that blurred the boundaries between joyful and assertive. “Mind if I sit?” I nodded, which he seemed to take as an invitation. He took the napkin that was for his greasy sandwich and wiped across his forehead, before dropping it onto the table. “Christ, it’s hot today.”
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“Yeah. Makes you wonder if they’ll ever fix the broken ACs around here.” I strategically took a bite of my wrap to relocate it away from his discarded sweat napkin.
Peter took a large sip from his iced coffee. “I’m honestly this close—” he pinched his meaty thumb and index finger for emphasis, “to buying a portable AC for my office out of pocket. I know it’s not great for the environment and all that jazz, but how am I meant to think in a god damn sauna?”
I chuckled in what he thought was agreement. The answer was simple; he didn’t need to. Peter was, by all metrics, a successful academic. His research papers had garnered an impressive amount of citations and he was in a comfortable tenure track position that he didn’t need to worry about. Not the least because he had beguiled a regiment of postgraduate students who slaved away at the actual research work in exchange for Peter’s name on their testamur. His contributions were merely signing off on their research proposals. He was an excellent researcher once—he had to be in order to reach his position—but at some point he became more interested in entrenching his own status by any means possible.
“How’s the linear algebra course going?” he asked after a moment of mutual mastication. “It sucks that you drew the short straw, but you’re saving all of our asses here.”
Before each semester, my colleagues and I drew straws. The unfortunate few who drew the shortest were assigned to teaching the first year courses.
I shrugged. “It’s going alright. I really could have used that time to focus on research grant applications, but somebody had to do it.” I realised my mistake too late. This wasn’t a conversation I needed.
“Oh yeah,” Peter said in a sympathetic voice that he knew he was good at. He leaned back into his chair, pretending to be bearing the metaphorical weight of trying to survive in the research industry. “It’s a real shitty time to be an academic, let me tell you. Did you hear about what they did to Sewell Uni?” Of course I did. “Fuck, man. It makes me sick. Can you imagine that? Dedicating decades of your life to this fine discipline, only to let you and half of your colleagues go because of the lack of funding. And the surviving half merging with the surviving half of the physics faculty too. It’s criminal.”
As I watched him shake his head with Shakespearean prowess, I couldn’t help but realise that perhaps we did have something in common. The academic world had never been kind, but it had never been existentially challenged with the vicious winter that now threatened even the embedded veterans. Not unlike the tourism industry, the pandemic had devastated academia in ways that no one had foreseen. The halt of international students had meant that every universities’ most plentiful source of funding had dried up almost overnight. While countries had begun to timidly test the waters of international travel and some students were returning, the universities were in trauma. Cost cutting was at the forefront of every budgetary policy, and mathematics faculties were seen as little more than necessary cost centres. They can exist on but a drop of water, I imagined the gluttonous board members would declare.
“But I’m sure you’re safe from the chopping block,” Peter continued. I resented that he brought me as a subject into this conversation. “I’ve heard you’ve applied for a few research grants, and I know you have a safe number of papers in review. It’s the ones that don’t who should be worried.”
The conversation continued into faculty gossip, which I couldn’t have cared less about, and so the relief I felt when Peter realised he was late to a seminar was immense. When I returned to my desk, my muscle memory involuntarily made me click the pixels that opened my email inbox. I never understood why the idea of notifications settled into the collective consciousness of humanity without violent resistance. For that reason, I set aside times of the day to check my inbox, and after lunch was one of them. Usually, this would involve me deleting spam or irrelevant emails and responding to students’ enquiries with two-sentence messages. On good days, I would even respond to questions about my publications from other mathematicians or journals.
Unfortunately, today was not a good day. In fact, the day conspired against me to become a calamitous one. The topmost email in my inbox was from the National Science Foundation. I was initially pleased I had finally heard back after months of waiting, however that was quickly and harshly rectified when I had read the contents of the email. It was to inform me my application for the research grant had been rejected. Worst of all, the reason they gave was laughable. What do you mean ‘the research did not meet our standards for relevance’? I angrily asked an imaginary old geezer who had no hair left to lose. Why am I penalised for originality? Just because I’m one of the only researchers who’ve tackled this problem doesn’t mean it’s worthless!
What had left me seething wasn’t the rejection itself, but the fact it had taken them over two months to write this rejection letter. That was two months in which I was criminally misled to believe I had a safe research grant baking in the oven. I couldn’t even begin to think about the implications of this rejection, which was surely to reach our head of faculty. In my wrath, I took a moment to calculate the average rate of neuron firing that was logically implied by the length of time they took to produce a rejection decision and letter. It did not look good for them.
The admittedly silly mathematical exercise proved to be therapeutic, and in amusing myself I felt soothed, even if only a little. For a brief moment I considered sending them these calculations as an example of a “truly relevant” research, but I refrained. This proved to be merely a respite, however, as my eyes landed on the next email in my inbox. A rejection letter from the conference I had submitted my manuscript to. With the weight of two back-to-back rejections, I could not escape the implications that it had on my career. For most academics, rejections were simply a part of the job. One had to push on to the next journal or research council to submit their respective paper or research funding application. However, I was in a perfect storm of multiple contexts that conspired to destabilise my life. The fact that times were tough and that the faculty was more stringent than usual when it came to renewing contracts wasn’t enough to imply my livelihood was at risk. But that was compounded by the additional constraint that performance appraisals were just around the corner. And now, I ran the very real risk of not only not having nothing to show for this season, but I had earned the additional honour of incurring two consecutive rejections in a prestigious and expensive institution where I was supposed to be a world-class academic.
My vision caved in as the colours dimmed in their hue. My heart thumped against my chest, each beat heavier and faster. The only thing I could do was grip the end of my desk as if it was a lifeline, I was a drowning man, and everything else was an antagonistic void threatening to engulf me with its hungry, infinite mouth.
The moment, like everything else in life, passed indifferently as if it hadn’t even noticed that it stepped on a nondescript insect. It was only afterwards I realised what it was that truly shook me. The rug under my feet had been pulled and my delusions about the stability and control in my life came crashing down into unsalvageable pieces, requiring the purchase of an expensive vacuum cleaner that I—despite being an early-thirties man—couldn’t afford. My one-bedroom apartment appeared almost anachronistic with its outdated aesthetics and functionality, but rent wasn’t one for discrimination. And even that was the least of my problems. Losing my position at the university would mean I would have to return home.
I drifted through the rest of the day in an ethereal haze. My emotions cycled between the seasons of indignance, despondence, dismay and detachment in such fluidity that I wasn’t truly sure what I had been feeling at any given moment. All the while the rational parts of my mind tried to reason out futile plans to revive my prospects that were indistinguishable from fantasy. I was glad I didn’t have any teaching duties for the rest of the day—not because I had better things to do, but because I was sure the students were paying eighty thousand dollars a year to see more than just a sad man in a crisis.
By the time I had decided that ruminating on all the variables that had double-crossed me wasn’t an equation worth solving, it was late. The university ran night classes, but it was an hour that from my window—the one I had been pacing in front of for hours—I saw not a single living soul on the main avenue of the campus. The late summer sun was finally, mercifully beginning to set. No sounds of life could be heard from the hallway, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone around this late. At every hour of the day, there was always a postgraduate student or a junior researcher struggling with something, somewhere in these corners. When I walked past the closed cafe in the courtyard, I was reminded that my last meal had been about eight hours ago. Comfort eating wasn’t something that I did, but I figured if there was anyone who deserved a minute spark of happiness in the material form of a greasy meal they couldn’t afford too often, it was me a thousand times over.
The burger joint was five minutes in the opposite direction from my apartment, but the stroll was appreciated. The middle-aged man who served me was undoubtedly an immigrant, and not at all the owner of the restaurant. His tired disinterest as I gave him my order was evidence enough of the minimality of the wage he was paid. I couldn’t blame him. If anything, I empathised. My title as a researcher at a renowned university might carry some sense of prestige, but at the end of the day we were all just going through the motions of the same patterns.
The food arrived at my table after a couple of minutes. God, I don’t even like greasy food, I thought wryly as I bit into the burger. The advertised sordid pleasure of unhealthy comfort eating never came, but I could at least appreciate the mechanical distraction in the repetitive motions of chewing and sipping. It was during this unexpected bout of clarity that my mind drifted to a subject I thought had exited my consciousness already.
The strange email. The one I had received much earlier in the day. From before my derailment. I chuckled. I must be really desperate if I’m even thinking about this, I thought self-deprecatingly. But really, what did I have to lose?
A fair amount. There were several hurdles that needed to be overcome in order for the endeavour to be worthwhile. Firstly, it could simply be a scam. One in which I would accept, and they would try to lure me into providing my bank details to syphon the pennies of a poor mathematician. But even if it wasn’t a scam and I ended up publishing with disreputable individuals, then my career as a serious academic would be in jeopardy. But is that risk greater than the risk of not having anything going for me? I rebutted internally as I shoved several chips—fries—into my mouth.
Perhaps not. And the research itself was an afterthought. Whatever it was, I could certainly do mathematics, so that wasn’t a variable at all. But even then, it was still just so odd. Receiverist Particle Physics Research Group. Receiverist. What kind of a name is that? I pondered with incredulity. Is this a niche religion? Or is it meant to be taken literally, like researching receivers? Who the fuck researches receivers?
The more I thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. I wiped my hand with the napkin and typed “Receiverist” into the search engine on my phone. Zero search results. I could feel my right brow jump at the digit. Nothing had no search results. One could type a random sequence of letters into a search engine and something would appear. No search result was surely a violation of some kind of law of physics.
I quickly finished the rest of my fries and my drink—which began to taste foul the more I drank—and paid at the counter. If it were not for the man clearing his throat after I turned around to leave, I would have forgotten to tip. It was dark now, and I walked briskly not out of fear of being shanked but because of my piqued interest in the strange email.
After getting home, I immediately stationed myself at my desk and opened my inbox on my laptop. Reviving the email from my junk inbox, I resumed searching for clues that might reveal who these people were. This forensic task tickled the same part of my brain that enjoyed maths problems. The term “Receiverist” must imply the existence of “Receiverism”, I deduced with mild satisfaction, which evaporated as the number zero returned from the new search query. Even searching for the email domain turned up nothing.
Hours passed by as I obsessively tried to grasp any grain of detail about this “Receiverist” group. It was futile. Like a phantom I was aware of purely by the impossibility of its vacuum and nothing more. It was no longer just my life that lingered on the authenticity of their proposition, but also my insatiable desire to find out what there was to find out in the unending negative space.
My hands felt like they were somebody else’s. They were sticky with sweat and I didn’t know why, until I realised too late that I had already finished writing a response to the email. A part of me was afraid. Something didn’t just feel wrong, but sinister. But it didn’t matter, because the choice had been made. Perhaps it had never even existed.
With a feather soft click, I felt an unnerving, fatalistic omen that my fate had been sealed.