Eternity |
|
|
|
Chapter 1 |
|
| This story was inspired by my multivariable calculus book, and specifically a number of pages in which I'd written out the derivation for the error function. Harrrison sat silently in the library. He was supposed to be working on the storyboards for one of his projects, but found himself unable to concentrate. He’d been staring at them for so long he was surprised they hadn’t faded into nothing under his gaze. Even so he was happy, for while his left hand tapped absently at his drawings, his right sat across the desk, fingers intertwined with Alyzon’s. Alyzon herself was preoccupied with her calculus book, neatly writing out a derivation for something called the 'Error Function'. She knew it by heart of course, and could complete it by no fewer than three different methods, each of them forming a piece of her lattice, but Harrison had noticed how she liked writing the equations; setting them out neatly on a crisp, white page. He’d no use for calculus himself, and he couldn’t visualize it the way he did his own work, but he like the way the symbols looked, set out elegantly across the page - Alyzon made numbers look like art. In this, Alyzon had left her peers far behind, now receiving extension work from the university. She might have objected – it attracted attention – but her hunger for numbers drove her to accept. In some moments Harrison suspected that this was due to him; he’d notice the way she always seemed to end up working on her lattice after they spent time together. He felt both pleased and guilty at his continued ability to break through her screen. The current equation was a favourite – he had seen her write it out at least a dozen times before. It was an integral, which meant the area under a line, Alyzon had said. But unlike the problems Alyzon’s classmates were working on, this line didn’t have a beginning and an end; it just stretched on and on, reaching out into eternity. "How can something infinitely long have a finite space under it?" he’d asked her. She'd smiled and pointed out that things were usually smaller on the inside. "Not all things,†he’d argued, and kissed her, a quick peck on the mouth before they returned to their respective activities. It truly was a elegant written down, with the simple curves of the integral sign and those little figure eights that symbolized infinity. He liked those little figure eights best. Harrison might not understand much of the derivation, but those tiny squiggles told him everything he needed to know. The equation stretched out into the infinite, moving through a thousand incarnations, but at the end of the page it always reduced back to one number that could be expressed with a single symbol. Turning back to his storyboard, he squeezed Alyzons’s fingers with his own. All things turned out simply in the end. Even eternity. AN: After writing ‘Gravity’, I decided to do a little maths and physics in order to procrastinate further. I came across one of my derivations of the error function in an old workbook. Most of my friends think I’m crazy for liking the equation so much, but while its hard to get your head around at first, it falls apart quite neatly when its finished. Anyway, I thought to myself that there was one IC character that would love the equation as much as I did. I decided to use Harrison’s perspective though because it meant I could get away with not using any of the proper symbols that couldn’t be uploaded and which the piece couldn’t otherwise do without. |
|
| Views | 428 |
