Free One Plus Two Minus One by Tess Mackenzie

“Just…”
    “I know.”
    She fried for
a while, wondering if this was a bad idea after all. She needed him, really needed what he made her
feel, but he seemed to be falling hard, taking this too seriously.
At least for what it was at the moment.
    “ I can tell
you it,” she said. “The maths. I’ll tell
you all of it, if you want me to. It’ll take years. But if someone
does, properly, you might understand.”
    Another
promise, she thought. Another long-term
commitment if he went for it. But it didn’t seem to bother her as
much all of a sudden.
    “ Yeah,” he
said. “You’d probably lose
me.”
     
    *
     
    Beth started
chopping tomatoes for the pasta sauce. She thought. She wanted him to understand. She wanted to
try, even if it meant she was making implicit promises she wasn’t
really ready for. While the onions were frying, she looked at him
and thought. She looked across the room. She had two big framed
pictures on the far wall. Dots arranged in grids, looking random
but not. The one on the left was all the primes from one to a
million. A dot was a prime, with white space left where a non-prime
would go, and different colors to show different types of primes.
She liked to look at the internal structures within the primes, and
know there was a deeper structure she could describe if she wanted
to. That picture told her that the universe had order, down to its
most fundamental, basic, level. Derivatives of order, in that the
underlying structures had structures of their own.
    The other picture was similar, a spiral
rather than a grid, black dots on a white background.
    She pointed to it.
    “ That’s an
Ulam spiral. If you write numbers in a
spiral out from one in the centre, the primes are black dots and
the non-primes are white dots, all the primes line up along
diagonals and axes. No-one knows why, but it works out to huge
numbers. That picture graphs all the numbers up to two hundred
thousand.”
    “You showed us that last year.”
    “ Yeah,” she
said, looking at him. “I did.”
    “And I shouldn’t point that out each
time?”
    “Probably not.”
    He grinned. “Sorry.”
    “ You remember
the rest? No-one can explain it. It just
works. The guy who discovered it was doodling on a pad at a meeting
and realized there was a pattern. Seriously.”
    “ I
remember. And that’s kind of
cool.”
    “That’s completely awesomely fucking cool,
actually.”
    He grinned at
her. “Yeah.”
    “ Just
saying. It’s fucking brilliant. Just the
random chance in that. Welcome to the chaotic universe.”
    “I get it.”
    “ I have a
book somewhere that lists all the numbers from one to a thousand
and their significance. Odd patterns and
unusual factors and all. If you’re interested.”
    “Maybe another time.”
    “ Yeah,” she
said. “Right.” She stood there for a
while, thinking. “Okay, so abstract algebra is simple. And elegant.
It’s one thing, no bullshit with real numbers and limits. Like…”
She ran the tap and dabbed spots of water across the bench, in a
line. “Just simple, neat, tidiness. Like prime numbers. They’re so
clear and obvious what we’re talking about, you can explain it to a
child, and we can start counting them off, work it out in our
heads, but you never stop. Never.”
    He nodded.
    “ If you think
about the sequence of primes for too long, you start realized how
fucking big it all is, compared to you, and you come face to face
with… eternity. Mortality.” Not infinity,
because that meant something different. “With life and death and
everything. Because you suddenly realize it’s so big you can’t
count up to the biggest prime we know of even if you did nothing
else for your whole lifetime.”
    He was looking at her.
    “ We’re tiny,
against the universe. But we can think
about anything we want to, with the right symbols, because
underneath it all, anything is just a language, and that’s
something we know how to do. Once you have the language in your
head,