Smoke curled from a forgotten cigarette, half ash, sitting in an ashtray. Next to the ashtray sat a pile of crumpled papers, and next to these lay a single sheet, deeply creased with lines and curves – a rescue from the pile. A woman sat in a chair in front of this paper, cross-legged on a battered wooden kitchen chair.
Her hair was shoulder-length and black-going-gray, framing square black spectacles slightly askew on her face – a face too youthful for the grays already winning the war for her head. She was occupied chewing on the metal band of the eraser of a pencil as she stared at the dense script filling the document before her. The pencil was lowered, and three quick marks made, striking out part of the text, before writing new text above it, in an even tinier script than that which doubled up on the college ruled paper.
The cigarette burned, forgotten, as she retrieved a new cigarette from the pack in the front breast pocket of her shirt, a blue button-up that was several sizes too large for her slender frame, and wrinkled almost as badly as the paper before her. A lighter in turn was produced from the pocket of her slacks, similarly disheveled, and lit after several failures. She took a long drag from the cigarette, and set it next to its abandoned predecessor, then started writing again.
The first cigarette had burned out, and the second nearly half so, before a man's voice interrupted her work.
“Jane, have you had food?”
“I ate.” Her attention didn't shift from the paper, to the man on the other side of the door. Her brother. He'd brought her food, didn't he remember? “You brought it to me, Bill.”
“That was yesterday, Jane. Get some food. Also, it's William.”
“Yeah, alright, Bill.” She waited until she heard his footsteps receding down the hallway, and returned her attention to her paper, frowning.
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She tried to erase the section she'd crossed out, to write it again, but the eraser was soggy, and just smudged it. Jane frowned at the smudge, drew an arrow to the margin, and rewrote the crossed-out section. It was … odd. The proof felt odd. She'd written it a dozen times now, and each time it felt off. It was just this little section, but it felt like – it felt like her assumptions listed above changed every time she looked at them. She had been working on this part for three days without sleep, and had gone through a month's supply of her meds in that time. She considered, then pulled a fresh sheet of paper from her desk drawer, and tried isolating the troublesome logic.
Six cigarettes, one of which she actually finished, and thirteen sheets of paper later, she stared at the tiny – it was a proof in itself, really, but she struggled to quite understand what it was she was looking at. The physical paper seemed to be vibrating, very gently, and, isolated like this, trying to read it was making her feel a little nauseous. Well, a little bit more nauseous, the nicotine and stimulants really didn't help.
But she could almost swear that every time she moved her eye, the parts of the logic she wasn't directly looking at were … changing. Jane smiled, just a bit, and rose from her chair to cross the pile of clean laundry – the dirty laundry she kept by the door – to get to her backpack. She was aware sleep deprivation was a thing, but this had been giving her trouble even before then, and now she had the problem isolated. As her laptop booted up, she debated where she would post it, and how.
The word processor crashed halfway through writing it. The simplistic system editor got slightly further, but crashed the entire system when it did. She had to yank the battery out of the computer and put it back in before it came back up, and then tried a few websites. The first seven went down, and didn't come back up immediately. Oddly, the meme generator finally worked, and she posted the tiny proof, under an absurdly stupid meme.
Jane waited several minutes after posting it to one of the forums she frequented, but seeing no immediate response, headed to bed, the missing sleep coming upon her like a semitruck. She'd check the replies in the morning. Well, according to the clock, it was only slightly after noon now, so later tonight. She shoved the pile of folded clean laundry off her bed onto the clean pile to the side, where it belonged, and slid beneath the covers without bothering to undress.