It's Not Chaos

"It's not chaos..." he interrupted. All eyes turned to him, hinging on that one word: "not."

"Explain" we said without words, letting our eyes goad him back into speech.

He looked nervous. His hands twittered at his sides, and he stood up slowly; clearing his throat as he did.

"Its not chaos" he began, stopping to clear his throat again, "have you ever juggled? No? No. of course not. Let me explain."

We waited through another round of phlegm reduction.

"When you juggle, you wait till at least one ball is at the apex of it's upwards flight, then you throw the ball in your hand. If you can catch them all, and keep up the pace of throwing, it looks beautiful...really now, I suggest that..."

He stopped. His eyes were scanning the crowd; he was looking for a partner, a supporter, anyone who understood and didn't think that so far he'd only proved just how crazy a man could be. His eyes fixed on me. He continued "at some point, every ball is in the air. It doesn't matter how many balls are in it. At some point every ball must be in the air or the system will collapse. Juggling looks chaotic. The audience assumes the juggler is constantly making adjustments with every throw to keep the balls flying correctly. No. after all balls are in the air, the juggler's hands simply move in response to a ball falling into them. He might as well be a machine at this point.

His movements, the movements of the balls in the air...everything... even your experiment, its just a set of harmonic sequences overlaid one upon the other. And..."

"That's a pleasant thought old man, but I'm afraid it's a lot harder than that"

"No its...it's..." the man stuttered, and then stopped. We'd stopped listening. He probably had a point though. Not just anyone knew about harmonic sequences. That old man might have been a tenured professor at some local college. He might have even been a genius in his time, but now to us he was just some crazy old man.

Harry had gone back to drinking and drained his pint with a single slurping gulp. Francine finished hers with a dainty swirl of her straw. I was the only one sober. Looking down, I saw the last traces of melting ice vanish underneath the black surface of my rum and coke.

Looking up, I saw Harry staring down at my drink. His eyes watered with lustfully, as if for once the commercial were true and he really could see breasts in the contours of the glass. "It's yours." I said, nudging it across the table. "I'll see you guys later. I have work to do."

That old man had given me something to think about. I couldn't let go now.

"Awwww... you're always working... its Saturday... you need your liquor... you haven't even had one!... your fun quotient has reached traumatic lows... we're worried...stay... please?" my friends chimed in all at once, but to no avail. My mind was made up, and in a moment, I was out the door.

My name is Caster Covas Callas. They say I'm a foreign exchange student, but my father is American or at least he was before he died in search of the truth. They say if I keep it up, I'm going to follow his footsteps into a grave of my own. I say, his footsteps lead to his grave, and I know where that is so I'll deftly avoid death that time, and then begin a path of my own. So far, so good. I'm alive, what more can I want.

I slam the door behind me as it hits me. Another migraine, another attack of pain from above. Spikes jut into my head, invisible things that piece me all the same. I collapse into a heap on the floor. My roommate, if I had one would've been concerned at this point---blood was leaking from my nose. I wait and let the noise inside my skull soften to a dull roar. A dull roar was normal to me. I almost couldn't hear the voice of anguish, almost couldn't hear my body complain that I was pushing it too far.

Tsk. I pulled myself up. Wobbling unsteadily, my knees threatened to buckle with each step but somehow I made it to my room. The room was sparsely populated--just a bed, a closet, and a computer desk. The floor on the other hand was a mine field of soda cans, empty aspirin bottles, and half-eaten pieces of pizza, some in and some out of the box. I gingerly stepped over all this and plopped into place in front of the computer. The leather chair felt comfortable, and I angled it forward to begin work, ignoring the way the room spun as I scooted forward.

I smile despite the pain and begin adjusting my equations. Harmonic overlay, he said... I muse on this point for a minute that seems to stretch forever. My body grows still, and my mind expands to let seventy-six different equation sets play through my head.

E = mc^2? I sniff, simplicity isn't everything. In fact, simplicity is nothing but symbolism for more complicated concepts. What is e? What is m? What is c? What is squared? if you do not know these, if the world had not ground the concepts of energy, light, speed and mass into your mind from day one... e=mc^2, what's that? Nothing. Nothing at all.

On another level, my brain continues implementing harmonic theory. In daze, I adjust, check and re-adjust and re-check my equations. It's nearing completion. I can feel it. My soul is tingling and my typing rattles to a stop.

I sigh. Done for the night, I think. My headache is gone.

If you'd told me 10 years ago, what my father was working on I'd have hit you and told you not to tell lies about my family. My father was a genius and a respected one at that; he'd never mix himself up with crackpot claims. That's just crazy, I would have said.

They tell me I'm crazy now, for doing what he did. I know I'm not. I'm just dreaming the same dream as every man woman and child on this little ball of dirt, we call earth.

My name is Caster Coves Callas and like my father, I am a genius. And like him, I spend my nights alone without remorse, separating myself from the world for one goal: build a machine to understand the universe, to know the patterns that underlie our every action, our every thought. Build a machine to know the present fully, and using that to predict the future.

I sink into sleep, curled up my unmade bed. My work is nearly complete.

A few days later, I was sitting at my lab desk; staring at a graph where several lines converged. This was perfection, I thought. This was what I was aiming for. Clicking a button, the display changed to show the current state of the project. In this layout, instead of a beautiful convergence of curved lines, there were four dozen different points of intersection between different lines with no three lines touching at the same spot. I sighed. Was it even possible to connect all those lines? The data sets they represented were so conceptually different—it had been a miracle to find a connection between just two lines. I nibbled on my pen. I'd been more than seventeen since my last meal, so the blue ink almost tasted delicious.

"Caster!" I jerked in my chair, nearly swallowing the ballpoint. Turning around, I saw Harry leaning through my open door. His hand brushed back a mop of sandy blonde hair, styling it expertly into a slightly more presentable cow lick. "Working hard? Or hardly working?" he chuckled, taking a few steps into the room.

"What is it Harry?"

"Tsk. It was just a joke. You don't have to get---- "he paused and brushed back another offending tuft of hair, "Caster, it's your equations. Specifically, the one's you made up last night after the bar. I hate to say it but even after three days, I don't understand them."

"What's to understand? The work."

"But why? Why does it work? I'm a mathematician same as you. Maybe not on the same level, but I need to know why. I need proof that this new equation set can fit in with the rest of our theory."

I nearly said 'my theory'. I nearly corrected him. He'd not done a whit of imaginative work since I'd come to the project. He knew and I knew this, and knowledge of his insignificance had already needled him into heading to the bars every night after work. His sole job was checking my work, looking for the proof of why it worked.

That it worked was never a problem. My equations always worked.

"Can't you just know that it works? Isn't that enough proof for you?"

"No... "He shook his head, and his pocket began to vibrate. He pulled out his phone and stepped out the room for a moment. I sighed and mused and typed, and waited. He came back "its Francine, she's calling in sick today."

I nodded. Staring at the screen too busy to look away. "She does that a lot doesn't' she?"

"She just needs a break. Caster we all need a break. Take a look at yourself, you're a mess. Have you eaten lately? Have you seen the daylight? You can't go on working like this. Progress is important but you can't kill yourself over it. Come on, come out with us tonight."

"I don't' drink"

"That's not it...you just..." he sighed "you'll never understand."

"I understand that I'm close. I know it on mathematical level. The differential between the graph lines has reduced by a factor of five. Just today, I created two more overlaps---"

"Overlaps aren't' everything! You have to understand why these things are happening or else it might as well be fraud. Can you honestly tell me that you know what you're doing? Can you interpret this data, make it meaningful?"

"Yes." I said, locking his eyes with mine. My eyes are grey, and looking for unease within them is like trying to find nervousness in a stone. It can be done, but only by unhinged and clinically committed.

"P-prove it...please" his voice trembled only slightly. That was proof to how well Harry knew me. Most people simply ran away once I gave them 'the stare'.

"Okay...bring over your print out. I'll try and explain it to you." I knew I wasn't going to get out of this. Harry was the sort to never let things go. Traits like that made him a good mathematician. In his days as an undergrad, he'd continued working on impossible problems, long after everyone else in his class had given up and become English majors. Four years later, he graduated as the only Applied Mathematics major in his class. If he didn't understand my work, then no one could.

Harry left my room a few hours later. The expression on his face was no less confused than when he'd first entered, but I think I set him of in the right direction. I wish he'd stayed. I think distraction was the only thing holding me together because as soon as the door clicked shut, my demons came out. Detaching themselves from the tangled shadows the four corners of the room; they filled the air with wild screams and converged upon me like the horsemen of the apocalypse. I would've run, if I could have, but I knew they would only follow me. So I simply sighed, and clenched my teeth waiting as one by one they drew their scimitars and stabbed the long blades unerringly through my skull.

Migraines are horrible little things. They're worse than hangovers. They strike at any time, not simply in the morning after a happy night of drinking. Creeping up silently, the pain starts small but grows exponentially, exploding like a grenade in your head. The blast force set's your world spinning in unpredictable ways. Light turns brighter, darkness gets darker, and everything in-between dissolves into a murky blend. Your vision fractures into a thousand subsets of itself so it is impossible to even look in the mirror and check if mayhap there really is a monkey clinging to your back and beating your head like a drum.

I flicker in and out of insanity and occasionally brush genius. I know what I must find, and can not count it how many times I've found it. But then it comes back; the damming grasp of reality, pulling me back into bed and tucking the covers over my head. The truth was out there but now as I pull back the sheets, all I see is darkness. I hate my dreams.

I woke up in the morning, huddled in a corner of the lab. Apparently I'd been there all night, because my drool had stained a messy splotch in the wallpaper. Picking myself off the ground, I didn't even have the energy to groan. It hadn't felt as if I'd slept at all. My body felt weak, and even long slurps of day old coffee didn't seem to revive it quickly. I might have pushed myself too far, I thought, maybe Harry was right...maybe I did need a break.

My thoughts flirted with Francine. I imagined myself running my fingers through her flame-red hair and kissing her on both her cheeks. I'd say it was a Spanish thing. She'd nod, blush, and not believe me. Then Harry would come and clap us both on the back to demand that we drink with him. I'd have a shot, and he'd have a pint, and she'd have a marguerite. We'd laugh and pretend we were friends instead of man and woman on the brink of discovery, clinging to the cliff's edge but feeling the dirt crumble daily beneath our finger tips.

Sigh.

I had to get back to work.

I kicked the computer, and it shivered to life. It seemed after days of constant use, the silicon too had decided to take a break and now cursed me for rousing it from its digital coma. Once the monitor came on, I screamed. I caught myself midway through.

"No..." I mused out-loud, "This is impossible... It must be." I blinked and rubbed my eyes. I found the mouse buried under a print-out. Clicking furiously, I tried to get the equations to change. "Impossible...impossible..." I murmured, staring with wide-eyed naked disbelief. On the screen in front of me, every single line twisted and turned, spiraled and spun, rolled and rippled, and eventually... No... it couldn't be. I clicked the mouse. I must be looking at the wrong screen.

I wasn't.

Right there in front of me. Seventy-six seemingly non-complementary data sets converged into a single point. I smiled and spent the next three hours re-checking the work. Apparently, despite the pain and misery, I had done something productive last night. I don't know how... I can't explain my reasoning... but it works. Seventy-six data sets, governed by chaotic equations had converged all at once. Theoretically they should have never converged, but spun into infinite bifurcations that'd have rendered as a haze of graph lines on my monitor. Eight years ago, before my father's stroke and death, he'd made two such lines converge. The result shook the scientific community, and is still toppling ivory towers somewhere. He was right---crazy, dead, depressed but right. And if you put his personality aside, and took the numbers for what they were then it was undeniable. However, only a handful of people are capable of doing that, so five years after his death, I published my first paper: Chaos Theory 101, how convergence is done. It won awards and resulted in the grant that's let me work on finding more and more convergences between chaotic systems.

Alone it seems, chaotic systems are unpredictable... hence the term "chaotic." Yet together, with the right interfaces, the output of the systems weave against one another; moving in tighter and smaller twists till they represent something incredible: order.

Seventy-six chaotic systems... the stock market, water buffalo growth patterns, random number generation via supercomputing, cloud patterns, heat distribution in molten steel, neuron firing in the human brain... the list went on and on but all could be expressed as permutations of one great equation. My equation and perhaps even God's equation.

As I stepped out the door, I put an extra bit of bounce into every footfall. My body tingled with the knowledge; my eyes brimmed with tears of joy. I didn't, of course, let them spill but they were there all the same as proof of my emotion. It might have been the tears. Or it might have been me, so used to a college campus that I jaywalked habitually. Or it might have been the driver, turning blindly into my street at a speed too high to swerve away in time. Whatever it was, where ever the blame lay; the undeniable thing was that to my left, two blinding spheres approached like angelic twins, sent by God to strike me down for treading upon his omniscience. And as always, I couldn't help but assign meaning to them.

...White light is a mix of all colors, bearing frequencies 390nm to 780nm. The human eye interprets equal doses of each frequency as light. And thus, ambient chaos becomes order. A thousand colors become one...

My legs crumpled and snapped at the knee, and the squeal of tires drowned out my scream. It wasn't supposed to end this way. I blinked, but the blood wouldn't leave my eyes. The pain wouldn't stop. I sighed deeply, and afterwards a smile curled to my lips. Wonderful, I thought, so I was wrong. There are worse things than migraines.

My eyes shut and then for the first time, in a long time, I slept easily.