The buzzing needle burns a slow curve across his forearm; the floodlight overhead, angled into his eyes to avoid blinding the audience, warms his skin. The line completed, the needle lifts, still buzzing, and the robotic arm glides to the next spot.
It’s basically a printer? A man’s voice from somewhere beyond the floodlight.
“More advanced,” he responds without pausing. “It knows what it’s working on. It adjusts to movement.”
Ever had to shut it off? A different voice.
He smiles. “Not yet. And it’ll only get more precise.” He pauses, looking out into the audience beyond the blinding floodlight. He holds up his phone: “If you don’t reconfirm every twenty minutes, it shuts off.”
The questions cease; he lets the machine work. With his free hand, he checks his phone: three new deposit notifications.
***
Transfinite numbers, as described by Georg Cantor, are a sort of starting point for mapping infinity. Aleph-null is the name given to the lowest transfinite cardinal number, called by some the “floor of infinity”.
***
The machine finishes, and the needle lifts and shuts off. With his free hand, he unstraps his arm and raises it for the audience to see. A smattering of applause, not as big as in LA but far from embarrassing. Europe was always going to be a slog. Still, free trip to Amsterdam. He peels the backing off a burn patch and presses it to his forearm.
One of the attendants shuts off the floodlight. He blinks, and as his eyes adjust he sees the post-demo herd shuffling toward him. He swings his legs off the padded lounge extension and pulls on a sweatshirt.
Business cards and QR codes one after the other, but he’s distracted by an attractive woman lingering a bit past the crowd, eyeing him occasionally. He meets her gaze and she smiles and walks over to him.
He hears himself talking: we’re working on AI prompts, should be ready in the next build, but he can’t take his eyes off her, wondering why he’s still delivering a pitch, trying to remember her name: Ilsa? Elsje? Seal the deal, get her to the bar. Anyway, he says, want a drink? She nods, smiling.
***
The Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński’s interest in set theory began in 1907, planting the seed for his life’s work, which could be described as a “mapping of the infinite”.
While the Sierpiński Gasket has an area of zero but infinite length, generating it via a “chaos game” program reduces it to essentially an infinite series of one-dimensional points. The length thus becomes zero, replaced by an endless series of starts.
***
She’s in the bathroom, watching the test-strip she’s dipped in her gin-and-tonic turn blue. Verdomde klootzak, she hisses, you like to play? Tonic cover the taste? She pulls out two vials, palms them, checks her smile in the mirror, and returns to the main room.
“I have a crazy idea. We try the prompt, let the machine…” Though she’s seething, she gives him the most charming brainless smile-and-shrug she can muster. “…do whatever it wants.” The anticipation spikes in her cortex, and for the first time in days she experiences genuine arousal. She bites her lip and smiles. You think this is for you. Smiles bigger. “But you go first.”
***
The “chaos game” consists of choosing any point within a triangle, connecting it to a vertex, and marking the midpoint. From that point, another segment is connected to any other vertex and its midpoint marked. Repeating the process indefinitely effectively creates the Sierpiński Gasket—or at least, an image indistinguishable from it.
***
He tries to form words, but his jaw feels like it’s been unhinged; tries to focus on her, but his vision blurs. He sees, more than feels, the bed pressed against his face. He hears her voice from what sounds like everywhere: They pay me only to install the spider in your phone, but no, you spike my drink. Now we have fun my way, and I keep your phone.
He sees his hands being pulled until both arms are outstretched in front of him; cuffs being attached to his wrists. She grabs one of his fingers, uses it to unlock his phone, taps at the screen. Your app is not bad, even know Python. Make it easier for me. Tapping at the screen. I do escort for work, but I study maths. My friend is a chemist, she give me my own drugs if I need it. Tapping. Vertices ten centimeter, iteration nine, nine, nine, nine, nine…” Her voice fades, then darkness, total and complete.
***
Aleph-null is larger than any number obtained by our primitive additive minds—yet the next cardinal transfinite, aleph-one, is obtained by simply adding one. In this way, a sort of “ladder to the infinite” is built.
***
Vision blurred, face-down, fabric pressed against his cheek. Daylight. Where? Bed? Unable to move, head throbbing. Shrill sounds: a high-pitched buzzing, and somewhere beyond it the warbling of an old landline phone. Hotel? He tries to remember. The buzzing is everywhere, and as he begins to regain feeling, the sound becomes a sharpness, pulsing outward from his spine: the needle lifting, moving, lowering, over and over.
The bedcovers under his stomach are soaked through with something sticky. Another sound joins the cacophony: a sort of dry, birdlike, scraping sound. A banging starts up, booming against wood, increasingly insistent: We are in quiet hours, please keep it down, and then suddenly each needle-lowering becomes a red-hot blade into his back, and he recognizes his own voice, now spent and shredded, animalistic, shrieking, echoing through the room.
Banging at the door, louder and louder, daylight filling the room.
— John K. Peck is a Berlin-based writer and musician. His fiction has appeared in Interzone, Pyre, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Cold Signal, Glasgow Review of Books, and various anthologies, and his novelette “Evergreen”, cowritten with L. Mahler, is part of the Split Scream series from Tenebrous Press. Read more at johnkpeck.com.