“Sure you can put a filter on every number to see how many numbers generate it,” He said, looking at the ink-filled paper, “but that doesn’t help us generate a solution, just a pattern. Think about it, a very similar filter could be generated for the Daedalus pattern- but Daedalus flies, Icarus doesn’t.”
“Yeah yeah, I get that” his friend replied, her hair covering the side of her face as she looked at her laptop, “But think about it- it creates a foothold for us to solve the problem.”
“Yeah, but the foothold is already discovered,” he replied, pulling out his phone, “it’s on Wikipedia, after all.”
Her response was a simple groan, followed by “Okay, but we won’t always have Wikipedia!”
“I can only see further than anyone else because I stand on the shoulders of Giants.” He paraphrased.
“Do you know who even said that?”
“Nope, but I have Wikipedia,” he replied, quickly googling for it, “It was obviously Newton.”
She, again, groaned and rolled her eyes, “Newton was also a fan of doing brute force calculations, and I don’t see you doing that.”
“Newton didn’t have a computer to do ten thousand calculations a second for him”
“Newton didn’t even have a calculator, and he still solved pi further than you ever will”
“You say that, but I don’t think it’d be that hard to make a program to solve for it analytically.”
“It’ll be extremely hard to do that when you don’t have a computer.”
He lifted his hand, showing off his phone. “This is like my math teacher in elementary school,” he commented, “who said we wouldn’t always be carrying a calculator. Look where we are now.”
“Ugh, fair enough. Anyways, our project?” She asked, clicking away on her computer. He set down his phone onto the paper, and gently pulled out a laptop from the bag at his side. A few moments later, after opening the laptop, he started clicking away at the computer as well.
“So we’ve decided to do a Lorenz system using RK4 to simulate it?” He asked, typing into an IDE.
“Yeah,” she replied, “take a look at these initial conditions.” She pivots her computer so that he can see the screen. An animation played, a red moving dot that leaves a trail behind it. Not particularly slow-moving, but slow enough to see a short pause between each movement. As it moved on the three-dimensional graph, it drew out two connected loops- what was classically called a butterfly. After a while, the dot stopped, and near where the red dot started, impossibly close to the start of the red trail, a blue dot appeared and began its journey around the butterfly. At first, its path is similar to the red path, but eventually, the blue dot breaks off. The blue trail begins to misalign with the red trail, except it follows the same butterfly shape that the red path does, never breaking out of it.
“Yeah, that's chaotic.” He said, smiling. “How’d you get that working so fast?”
Her face shone a little as she replied, “I ripped it off of Google. After all, that’s the applied solution- isn’t it, theoretician?”
He wasn’t sure if she was proud of her python script, or proud of her insult towards him. Either way, his response would be the same, “It always sounds so much more offensive when an Applied Math major calls me that rather than me calling myself that.”
“That’s why I say it, Pure Math.” She smiled. “I still would have preferred to do the three-body problem for our chaotic system”
“Yeah but 3 dimensions is a lot easier than 18” He replied, “I’m sure I could prove that 3 is less than 18.”
“Using ZF axioms it wouldn’t take too long. Although, of course, in applied math, we just take that to be true.”
“The well-known axiom, 3 is less than 18. Similar to the engineer’s axiom, pi = 3”
“More well known than astrophysist's axiom, pi = 10, or 1- it doesn’t really matter”
“I still feel like that’s wrong for satellites”
“I’d hope so too,” she replied, “anyways, let’s just finish this before the sun goes down.” His response was to simply groan before both of them focused on the python script in front of them.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
After a few hours, they had finished and submitted their project and parted ways. The golden sun was setting in front of him, across an ocean. He gently sighed and marveled at the nature before him. Waves lapped at the shore, gilded with the light of the sun. He almost felt like he could see the fish swimming in the orange water. The sea was calm, but not featureless- unpredictable ripples of waves broke across the orange and blue and green mixture, brilliantly accenting it with texture. The sun had just touched the horizon; everything around it was orange and yellows, the ocean making blues and greens.
As he looked at the ocean, he heard the sounds of cars behind him, the sounds of people moving, the gasp of a child looking at the sunset. Human movement was all behind him- particularly with his bag on his back, he felt that he was the barrier between the natural and the artificial. Everything in front of him was the sprawling untamed vastness of nature, and everything behind him was the ingeniously crafted machines and structures of man.
It was a small, coastal university town, so sunsets like this were a daily occurrence. Most people took it for granted after their first two or three, but he hadn’t taken much time to enjoy the nature around him. He turned back to head home, and the world suddenly ended.
He later woke up, a headache crushing his thoughts, his body was stiff. The bed he lay on felt hard, and he could tell the room he was in was brightly lit with his eyes closed. He lay there, unmoving, until the headache subsided. He could tell it wasn’t a lot of time that had passed, but it felt like eons. He thought, maybe his first thought, was that he should be thirsty and hungry. His body was stiff, but it wasn’t sore. His throat was dry, but he wasn’t thirsty. He knew he’d been unconscious for a while, at least a night. He also knew, or perhaps it was his second thought, that he was in a hospital. The bed was hard, the room was bright, and he had been unconscious when something had happened, or before it. His limp body had clearly been taken good care of, so he had to be in the hospital.
That's why, when he took his first action, he knew something was wrong. His eyes opened, expecting the harsh, cold, uncaring light of a sanitized hospital room- instead, the light was bright but soft, and warm. It took a moment, but he realized another thing that was wrong- he was looking at a featureless white, rather than any ceiling or sky. There was nothing for his eyes to focus on; he wasn’t sure if everything was blurred or not. He lifted his head, trying to get a feeling of his surroundings. Everything he saw was that featureless white, excluding the ground he lay on. Or maybe including it: it was featureless and pure white, but it looked more substantial than the other white. There was no accenting or color shift, nothing to indicate it one way or another, but it still looked less ephemeral.
He got up, sitting cross-legged. He felt like he hadn’t used his body in a long time, but it still moved as it always did. The featureless white he sat upon was a rather large circle. He could see the curve on it, and the edge of it was maybe two meters from where he sat, but the other end was unseeable in the white void. He was alone. Not only was he the lone person in the white abyss, but he was also the lone color. Everything but him was the same white. He thought, for a moment, of what this place is.
A dream? It seems too real. The afterlife? That’d imply I died- how’d I have died? Heaven? Where would anyone else be? Even Dante’s purgatory had more than this. A prison? I didn’t do anything to end up there.
He stood up and began to walk. As he walked, his eyes adjusted more to the imperceptible difference between the solid white and the illusionary white. He wasn’t sure how long he walked, but he had plenty of time to ruminate on his life. He wasn’t sure how far he had walked, but his edge was now out of view. His legs never grew tired, his arms and legs never hurt, nor did he feel any hunger, thirst, or fatigue. He eventually landed on a simple conclusion: He had died. He had died and somehow ended up in what might as well be the positive energy plane.
A minute or an eon after he had accepted this, he saw the first thing. An arm’s length away from him, the white on itself. He wasn’t sure how he had noticed, but it was moving- as imperceptibly as the ground was beneath him, the white moved against itself. And, most noticeably, it was moving away from him. For no other reason than he lacked one, he chased the movement of white over the ground of white on a background of white, until it reached an edge. The movement leaped or slithered or tripped off the edge, falling into the white, and he staggered a bit.
“I’ve already died- guess I might as well do it again,” He said aloud to himself, his first speech, and he jumped, and fell. He couldn’t tell when the ground had disappeared from his vision, but the movement was still there.
What he saw next, what he was falling onto, was heresy to his eyes. It was color, it was black earth and it was gray stonework. There was green flora on the stonework, and most importantly to his eyes, there was a person. Another being beside himself and the movement, and he was falling onto their little island of color. Not nearby, not passing through, but onto the island of color.
“Watch out!” He yelled, and the person looked up. They seemed bothered by his presence, but they moved out of the way.
Was this where the movement was heading? He wondered to himself- before realizing that he would, in less than a moment, be a coloring of red on the black earth. He began to panic, and tried to orient himself to slow his fall or lessen the damage it would do to him- he wasn’t sure what injuries he could survive or not. He prepared his legs to take most of the bone-shattering force, and wished that he had a parachute.
A rush of thoughts went through his mind, Was I actually dead? Why would someone who is dead feel fear? Why did I jump? I needed to slow myself down. I’m dead I guess.
He braced for impact, heard a loud sound, and felt a large upwards force on his entire body. Except, it wasn’t the sound of bones breaking, but the sound of a parachute unfurling behind him, and his body was feeling the slowdown of speed granted by it. It would slow him down for certain, but he also knew that this would be a rough landing and that he definitely did not know how to land a parachute.