Since I had replied to the strange email a couple of days ago, silence had been their only response. I was loath to admit I had been waiting anxiously for any sign of life. A starving dog waiting for the feeding hand of a reticent master. This involuntary abjection of myself gave rise to a self-directed frustration.
This ‘Receiverist’ business is not worth my attention, I had thought on more than one occasion. So why am I opening my damn email every fifteen minutes?
My days had become unbearably long, yet utterly unproductive. In the lecture halls, I would absentmindedly give an admittedly dry delivery of the course material. I would sometimes enjoy going on tangents into the history of mathematics, or present a particular argument or result that I thought was beautiful. But as my mind repeatedly oscillated between the anxiety that underscored my future and the eager anticipation of an electronic response, there was not much room left for anything else. In my office, as my anticipations were always rewarded with frustrated disappointment, I would revise my previously rejected manuscript in the hopes that the nth iteration would finally overpower the negativistic gaze of an argumentative reviewer. But it was done half-heartedly. I knew the maths were correct and the theorems were novel, so what more was there to revise? Perhaps I had felt a sense of dejection from the dismissal of my work, and that my so-called revising was merely the twiddling of my thumbs as I tried to stretch the intermediary period that preceded a future rejection. I didn’t think of myself as a defeatist and I certainly didn’t like to. After all, no one in academia could be, for what was academia if not the perseverance of failed research and bitterly forsaken efforts until the breakthrough of a single outlier? Or perhaps we were all defeatists merely acting as if we weren’t. It would have been funny to logically deduce that all academics were therefore closeted masochists, but if there was sordid pleasure derived from having one’s modest hopes of stability crushed, I certainly didn’t feel it.
And so when the uncertain response did finally arrive, I had expected immense relief. However unlikely it was to solve all my problems, it would at least satisfy some curiosity that squatted in a sizable estate within the finite acres of my mental energy. The effect that the response actually had, however, was antithetical to the extreme. If the strange email had been an annoying curiosity, it was now an existential conflagration that threatened to displace a chunk of some betrodden nation state suffering from a climate catastrophe.
A box. I had woken up this particular day with the expectation it would be exactly like the previous. A lecture in the morning had necessitated an early alarm on my phone that blared at me to begin yet another day of stagnation and worrying. After completing my morning monotonies, I opened my door to be greeted with the nondescript cuboid in its full glory. It was the perfect symbol of perplexity; whoever had left this outside my door in the early hours of the morning couldn’t possibly be employed by a delivery service, as there was no written information on any of its six surfaces. Nothing but the generic brown of a cardboard box, which only made it seem coy. I peeked my head out of my door. The hallway was empty. I was suspicious of the box—not necessarily apprehensive, but rather I was somewhat annoyed by its obscurity. The box was about half a metre in length, as if a laptop could fit into it. I nearly fumbled when I picked it up. It was surprisingly light. An apparent contradiction.
Setting it on my table, the box presented a choice. I could open it to see what was inside, or leave it closed. This might appear like a trivial choice, given that I had the urge to savagely rip it with my bare hands to access whatever hidden world that lay within. Unfortunately, I had a lecture to give. And the time that I had spent appraising the surface of the enigmatic box inched away at the small window I had left before I would be regarded as late. And I couldn’t be late, not when the stakes were this high. But therein lay the conundrum; I could throw my curiosity a tiny bone by taking a peek at the mystical contents of the box. It wasn’t my box. No. It was Schrodinger’s. Within this unassuming box was an overwhelmingly infinite collection of possible outcomes. Unless I observed inside the confines of the brown cardboard walls, it could contain anything I could and could not imagine—as long as it could fit within this moderately sized box. Knowing that I could easily and swiftly collapse its wave function was simply irresistible. Intoxicating. I must open it. However, the contents inside might only lead to more questions. And so with a quick glance at the clock that nagged at me, I set off for the university. The mystery box sat safely on my kitchen counter, waiting—calling—for my impatient return.
The lecture, as expected, was torturous. It was difficult to focus on teaching a subject, even a trivial one, when your thoughts were somewhere else entirely. My body had left my apartment and was perfunctorily defining the concept of an eigenspace, but my mind certainly had not. It stood in front of the kitchen counter, gazing down hypnotically at a physical rendition of a geometric concept. When I returned to my office, I checked my inbox for perhaps the hundredth time that week. There were emails. A stern reminder from the IT administrator to the faculty about not exceeding one’s allocated computing resources. A plea for leniency from a student in consideration of the political instability in their home country. An apologetic institution-wide email that sponsored work visas would be more difficult to obtain due to the shift in government policy. But nothing from the Receiverist Particle Physics Research Group. I knew it in my bones; the box and the email were intertwined. But until I inspected the box properly or received another email from these shadowy figures, I could only speculate. And so I resigned myself to pondering on the contents of the mysterious object as my hands mechanically dug at the pile of unmarked midterm exams.
As I wrote the umpteenth “F” in my oily red pen that could leave no ambiguity in its authoritative calligraphy, my thoughts experienced a sudden paradigm shift. I had continually and fruitlessly contemplated the interior of the mysterious box, but perhaps I was missing the point. The question wasn’t about what, but rather, who. Maybe the box was a bait and I was a prized fish. But who were the fishermen? The people who emailed me? The person—or persons—who had discreetly left the package outside my door? I felt a shiver as I imagined a human shadow watching me during the day and sneaking outside my apartment at night.
But even this line of questioning was incomplete. Was I really the prized fish? Or was it something else, and I was merely a part of a larger machination?
The rest of the day passed through me as though I was but a stubborn pebble in a gentle brook. Time strolled forward at a leisurely pace as my abstracted mind lay outside of it. During lunch, I was yet again at my special table in the courtyard, nibbling away at a sandwich. I didn’t even register what kind of sandwich it was. My eyes stared past the images of refugees on the television and into an imaginary corkboard. It was barren with only a couple of red pins, yet I was convinced there was something in between the spaces. For the sake of keeping up appearances, I stayed in my office until the last grain of the contractually obligated hourglass had fallen. Even as I attempted to revisit my backlog of research ideas, my mind was painfully aware of the lethargic march of the seconds. Contractual obligations had never seemed more pointless. Nothing could be accomplished when the seductive itch of curiosity beckoned.
As I had entered the front door to my apartment complex, I imagined the feeling was akin to that of a dehydrated man reaching a fabled spring in a desert. But as I reached the corridor on my floor, it occurred to me that a little more waiting would be tolerable if it meant some answers. I stopped at the apartment a couple of doors before mine and knocked. I wasn’t sure if she would be home.
I had been poised to turn to leave, when a muffled “coming!” came from the other side. A couple of beats later, the door opened and revealed a woman dressed in a white T-shirt and grey chequered trousers. She must have returned home only a short time before I had—the mismatch between the formal bottom and casual top would have been odd in public.
“Oh, Alex,” she greeted with a cheery smile and a nasal voice. She gestured at her attire with an exaggerated embarrassment. “I wasn’t expecting you at all.”
“Hey Hope,” I said in what I intended as whatever the opposite of awkward was. “I was wondering if you could help me out with something? I think—”
“Of course! Come right in,” Hope interjected with a cordial invitation as she moved aside.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the exchange with my colleague would be more than a couple of sentences, and so in my flustered state I could only nod and mutter some expression of gratitude as I passed her in the doorway. She gestured for me to sit on her light blue couch before disappearing into her kitchen to retrieve the tea she had been making. This was the first time I had been inside of Hope’s apartment since her arrival at the university nearly a year ago. Compared to mine, it felt more homely. Comfortable. And more photos of family.
After a minute or so, Hope returned with a tea set and placed it onto the coffee table. She sat on the same couch and began pouring two cups. The couch could fit only two and a half people. The intimacy made me uncomfortable. I wondered if she noticed my subconscious jerk towards my end of the couch when she had sat. After setting the teapot down, Hope angled herself towards me and rested a leg on the couch.
Were her eyes always green? I wondered.
“How have you been?” Hope asked. “I haven’t seen you as often these days.”
“I’ve been good,” I responded. The intonation on the last word almost made it sound like a question. “And you?”
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Hope rested her elbow on the back of the couch and began playing with the ends of her hair. I wondered if they would still remain blonde in a couple of years. “Not as good, sadly,” she said. “Research has been kinda slow. I’ve been stuck on this one problem for weeks. Not a great place to be at this time of the year, huh?” She smiled ruefully. “Anyway. What’s up?”
“So, uh—” It was the first time I had to vocalise my strange situation, and I was only now realising how hard it was to broach the topic without sounding weird. I ran a hand through my messy brown hair. “Did you hear anyone last night?”
Hope tilted her head. “What do you mean ‘hear anyone’? In your apartment?”
“No, I meant in the corridor,” I corrected. “Not necessarily in the night either. It could have been very early this morning too.”
“Hm. Maybe,” Hope pondered aloud. “I mean, I hear people walking in and out occasionally at night. Can you be more specific?”
“Well. I received an anonymous box early this morning. And I didn’t see or hear anyone deliver it.”
“An anonymous box?”
“Yeah,” I said simply. It made total sense. “There wasn’t any information on it. You know, the stuff you’d normally find on a parcel.”
“Oh. That sounds weird,” Hope said as she quirked an eyebrow in curiosity. “What’s inside it?”
“No idea,” I admitted with a shrug. “I haven’t opened it. Not yet.”
“Well I hope it’s not a bomb,” Hope joked.
“Hopefully not,” I responded earnestly as I took a sip from the simmering tea. To my disappointment, it had honey. “Or maybe. I really have no idea.”
Hope considered me sincerely for a moment. “No. I don’t think I heard anyone that might have delivered it. And it certainly wasn’t me. My schoolgirl days are over.” Her smile returned.
“Ah. That’s alright. It was a long shot anyway,” I said politely, trying not to let slip my disappointment.
“I’m not a bomb technician, but I can come take a look at it,” she offered, before quickly adding, “if you’d like.”
It was then that I realised that perhaps I had made a mistake in seeing Hope. It wasn’t that I received no information from this exchange—I did. The fact that she hadn’t heard anything confirmed that whoever dropped the box in front of my door did so at a suspicious hour and suspiciously didn’t want to draw attention to their suspicious self. No. The mistake was in overstaying my welcome. Yes, she was very welcoming and would perhaps be receptive to my continued presence, but therein lay the problem.
I had suspected for some time now that Hope fancied me. In a romantic context. One never had definitive proof in these matters unless it was revealed by the other party, but I felt it to be likely. It was a thought that troubled me for various reasons. Of course, I thought she was perfectly pretty in her own way and had an endearing charisma that was atypical for a researcher in a high calibre institution. As rare as an altruistic personality in executive management. But that was neither here nor there. My reasons for not reciprocating Hope’s signals—and, admittedly, for avoiding her recently—weren’t straightforward. One reason, I had rationalised, was because she was a colleague. It could entirely be the case that she desired getting close to me not for my personhood, but for my intellect and status as a researcher. That perhaps she merely wanted to collaborate and share authorship over a publication or two—nevermind the fact that she researched number theory and cryptography while I worked on probability and financial maths—, or that she wanted me to help solve her maths problems to maintain her early career. Some might see this transaction as not wholly unfavourable, but I was not that person. I was principled. I would not be used in that way.
But that line of thought wasn’t entirely fair to Hope. There was a small possibility that she truly liked the person she saw. That would be truly calamitous. I had been in relationships before. Twice, in fact. I certainly didn’t need a third failure. And neither did Hope, whether she knew it or not. And so for both of our sakes I would valiantly uphold my policy of restraint.
“Thanks, but I’ll be fine,” I said with feigned nonchalance. “But I know where you live if I do need a not-bomb technician.” I prayed my attempt at humour was sufficient to cushion my rejection but not enough to lead her on.
Hope gave her ever-polite smile that I felt almost ashamed to look at. “Of course.”
When the door to Hope’s apartment closed, I sighed in relief. My mind did its best to pivot away from an unreciprocated romance and towards an unreceipted rhombus. Checking that the box was still resting on the kitchen counter was the first thing I did after entering my apartment. No more dallying, I thought with conviction as I reached for my box cutter. With a few slashes of tape, the box unfurled to reveal its hidden contents.
A file. It had an unassuming cream colour and was bloated with papers. There was only a single phrase printed onto its surface.
Property of Receiverist Particle Physics Research Group.
My palms began to sweat as my beating heart pumped adrenaline into my veins. I felt a myriad of feelings and thoughts overwhelm me. It took effort to decouple them. I was right, I thought with some inking of satisfaction. The email and the box were connected. Cause and effect. A part of me must have doubted the tangibility of this mystical Receiverist research group, because I felt a surreal disbelief that threatened vertigo. My mind raced with implications that I pondered and discarded at a dizzying rate. In order to see the meaning behind the facts, I needed to see the insides of the folder.
My clammy hands opened it with the hope of finding a title that summarised the subject matter of the documents. However, I was perplexed to find that it had no such thing. No title, nor any discernible summaries. The first sentence was “Notations that will be used throughout are defined in the following.” It then proceeded to define unconventional mathematical notations for six pages, before launching into several sections, each averaging about a dozen or so pages. As I rummaged through them, I couldn’t find any words that might hint at what the document was actually about or who the sender was. In fact, there were barely any words at all. A typical page had at most a dozen words, which were generally isolated instances of “assume”, “define”, “such that” and so forth. Even for a mathematical document, this was highly unusual. This was not a document written to be understood. It was composed as if the author had explicitly intended for no one else to understand it. This was, in effect, an alien language.
What few questions that were answered by the opening of the mystery box were quickly replaced and multiplied. Of the material per se, it was difficult to say whether I was disappointed by the lack of clarity, or even more intrigued by the seemingly impenetrable puzzle. Regardless, I wasn’t discouraged.
If there was one benefit of opening the box, it was that I had something more to do than wait impatiently like a Shakespearean character for their reticent lover. I was now armed with the privilege of going through this mathematical enigma in my office without feeling like my time was misspent. It felt paradoxically freeing to be tied down to these physical documents. My thoughts flowed in a more compartmentalised way. The Receiverist business sat neatly in a physical folder to be opened at my leisure, and I could now spare some thought for the rumble in my stomach.
I cooked a pasta meal that took only a couple dozen minutes. It was absent of taste, but it made up for this with convenience and inexpensiveness. After washing the dishes, I decided to take a hot shower. The bathroom lights flickered on and off several times as if they belonged to a nightclub, not a cheap apartment. The water had languidly ramped up in temperature before I got in. The last few days had been a feverish mix of insecurity and worry. The uncertainty brought on by the lack of success of my research made me aware of the thin thread my life dangled on. A mild, untimely gust was all it took for it to fall into a chaos I had vowed never to return to. Crawling out of the desolate wasteland once was a miracle. A second time was an impossibility. The only lifeline I had seemed to be an elusive, phantom rope cast out from the unknown. It could be nothing but a false hope, a final torment from a vengeful god looking to write an elaborate irony. But if it was real, it could be my only chance to claw back to a sanctuary. I didn’t have a choice. My salvation sat in a cream folder atop my desk.
Returning from my shower, I decided to roll up my metaphorical sleeves and properly sift through the documents. To call it painful would have been to describe the sun as hot.
In most mathematical publications, the introductory section that would describe the notations used throughout the manuscript would be brief and filled with explanations of the choices. Neither of these were true of the Receiverist document. The notation setting stretched across multiple pages, each one a formidable desert made up of grains of symbols that were dehydrated of elucidation. There was no intuition to be found. A warehouse of tools for an unknown purpose without manuals. After spending an hour puzzling over the first page of notations, I decided to skip to the other sections.
Naturally, given the difficulty of the notations—the language—it was not at all surprising that the sections were even more indecipherable. With commendable effort I tried to flip back and forth between the first section and the notation introduction whenever the need arose, which turned out to be every second symbol. At some point I felt a headache coming on and had to rest my eyes. There were some concepts I recognised. Probabilities. Randomness. Equilibrium conditions. These were few and far in between, but they lent me hope that perhaps the mathematics wasn’t gibberish and that I could chip away at the monumental task of understanding it.
It wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that I began to feel that there was real maths behind the veneer of maths that the documents presented. That there were fundamental questions posed, questions that had been posed by mathematicians over the centuries in vastly different contexts. The documents appeared to describe a vague idea of some kind of stochastic dynamical system; a complex structure of numerous evolving parts that at its core was completely random. Such things have of course been widely studied and published on, but nothing like this. They outlined a deeply intricate system that satisfied obscure and counterintuitive properties that I had never seen before. The first section I had invested my night into unravelling seemed to pose the age old question of “can such a thing exist?”
It had only been the beginning. The beginning of the beginning. What little understanding I had gained was but a small peek into the shadows of something much larger. Both in difficulty and significance. This research was important, even though I wasn’t sure why or how. I could feel the weight of its consequence bearing down on my blood. It unnerved me in ways I couldn’t understand. The whole situation felt terribly off. But that was secondary now. I was rapt. There was no direction but forward.
Whatever small progress had been made was at the expense of my physical and mental self. My body gave out in the early hours of the morning and I fell asleep at my desk. My sleep, however, was not restful. I heard the endless echoes of my mother’s horrified screams. A bloody red permeated the fabric of my dreams.