Paranoid examination of the math department has been delayed. It turns out that Michael Ng, graduate student and teaching assistant for Business Math or whatever it is, has office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3PM. A perfect time to visit and ask about his notebook and what he meant about the gates.
He seemed startled when I walked in, panicky almost, until I spoke up. Maybe something's already been threatening him?Tried to kick me out since I wasn't in any of the classes he graded for. When I told him that I'd seen something familiar in the notebook, that caught him. He was too curious to make me leave.
Which brings me to the question of how you tell an insane mathematician from the regular kind. I recognized the word "fractal" in all the babbling, and some of the rest seemed to maybe be about theoretical physics? I don't know, really, Anthropology isn't the kind of science where you need much math beyond statistical analysis. What I understood is that Michael was working on the calculations in the notebook for Dr. Ellison, his boss. Helping to check over some of the professor's research.
Long story short, I have no clue what the fuck he's talking about, but it's apparently really exciting. Probability math and chaos theory. It's shown an amazing ability to predict a number of near-random events, like weather and urban growth patterns. Except, sometimes, it just can't. At certain unpredictable places and times, the predictions fail, and form what he called a Fractal Probability Loop. Which to me just sounds like a cereal for math geeks. I'll quote his explanation: "You can't find an answer. Every prediction's margin of error is an imaginary number that trying to correct for leads you into a different prediction, but there's another imaginary number that pops up, and so on to infinity. Like pi. No, not pie, 3.14159 etcetera. It never ends, and we don't think these errors end."
So I brought him back to the gate question. He said it was from a dream. He'd been working on the problem way too many hours, and was starting to see the numbers in his sleep. When he fell asleep, he saw a hallway full of doors labelled with imaginary numbers. (Note to non-math people, I don't mean things like levenge, or bleem, or that one mathematical SCP, I just mean numbers useful in calculations despite having no real-world equivalent...square roots of negative numbers, and things like that.) Every time he went through a door, he found himself in a different universe. Then he got lost, and it started to sound like he was describing a nightmare. A growing silence, nothing but still air, light without shadows, shadowy shapes chasing him through the doors. He scribbled that phrase on the notebook after he woke up, terrified. He told me he planned to see if any part of it might be a useful message from his subconscious, to help with the research. He hasn't done that yet. I think he was too frightened to remember and try to use it. He claims he just forgot.
I told him it might be better not to look into it. That if it gave him nightmares, maybe it's something he wasn't meant to know about. Because avoiding things man was not meant to know is EXACTLY why I started actively searching out Fear activity. I can't expect any less from a scientist...looks like he'll be pursuing some new avenues of research based on his dream.
I don't think I made things better.
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