Short Stories


THE FRACTAL UNLEASHED by Bram E. Gieben

Quint sat, or rather basked, in the comfortable arms of his favourite chair on Vista Deck. The chair was made from Hurga hide, the most pliant and heat-retaining leather available on his distant home planet. The comfort of the chair put him in a reflective mood; made him think of home… A good mood to be in when observing planetary phenomenon. In touch, empathetic, connected to the vastness of space.

He was dressed formally in the robes of the Observatory Order: purple trim on a black gown, spun through with tiny jewels that reflected the low lighting of the Vista Deck in spiral patterns. He sighed gently, inhaling the aroma of the spiced liquor one of the Adjutants had brought him a few moments ago. The liquor had been warmed: it gently steamed, curlicues of evaporated alcohol spinning towards his nostrils, filling them with the sweet scent of the Ternis root. He sipped thoughtfully, lifted his eyes to the immense window that ran the length of the Vista Deck. In front and beneath him, a green and blue planet span infinitesimally in the void, light from the nearby star stretching and yawning its way across the Eastern hemisphere bringing dawn to sleeping millions. Clouds swept across the surface of the globe, endlessly looping and spiralling back on themselves; huge weather systems governed by the gentle motion of the planet’s spin.

“The coriolis effect,” said Quint, savouring the taste of the Ternis root, “produces the spiral motion in the clouds. You see how they spin? The bigger the effect, the more the weather system is affected, losing parts of its’ temporary mass, as they spin away from the rotating core. Often, they form smaller weather systems, also subject to the coriolis effect. You see?”

“Yes,” replied the student, standing behind him. Quint glanced in the boy’s direction. He was not looking at the beautiful blue planet. The boy’s face was in shadow, and he stared down, examining his slippers.

“Look at the planet, Karom,” admonished Quint. “Examine the spiralling weather systems.” The boy relented, and raised his eyes towards the planet.

“The coriolis effect is caused by the Earth’s rotation, you see. As it spins, it gently nudges the weather system into a spiral, increasing incrementally until it becomes a storm, or even a hurricane. Generally speaking, the larger it is, the faster the centre is spinning.” Quint paused, checked that the boy was still watching the cloud systems, as they moved their continental mass across the planet’s surface.

“The sun,” noted the boy sullenly. “The planets also spin around the sun.”

“Correct,” replied Quint. “Well observed. The gravitational pull of the local star causes the planetary bodies to orbit it, which in turn makes the planets rotate as they spin around the star – this causes most if not all of the observable phenomenon on the planet, be that the coriolis effect, or the passing of night and day.” Quint paused to sip his warm drink. Ah, the Ternis root! So soothing to the soul, he thought to himself. “All human experience is based on this spinning system – their mathematics began as a way of measuring tides, sunrises and sunsets, the changing seasons. Everything determined by the spinning motion of natural phenomenon. Extrapolate further, and you will see that at the centre of this particular galaxy, known locally as the Milky Way, there is another, spatial equivalent of the coriolis effect. Giant, looping plasma structures – strings of ionised gas – tumble and swirl in the void, densely packed together. Their motion is that of a giant, cosmic dynamo – the rest of the galaxy whirls around it, spinning. Do you see?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “This is what the humans perceive – a cosmic wheel, with their planet on an outer arm. Spinning, always spinning… wheels within wheels.”

“Well observed!” exclaimed Quint, taking a vigorous swig of his drink. “Wheels within wheels indeed. Larger structures and forms that mirror the smaller structures of which they are composites. Now, the humans still conceive the universe… what’s the phrase… ‘Through a glass, darkly.’ They start with their own planetary system, and move outwards, noting orders of magnitude. As yet, they have not physically reached even the next planet along with their primitive rocket ships. With long-range telescopes they can perceive, only dimly, the farther reaches of their own galaxy… those beyond even less clearly. But what do you think would happen if they started from the outside of their universe, and moved in? What would they observe then?”

“A fractal pattern,” intoned the boy. Quint was pleased, but regarded him curiously. What was it about the boy’s listless manner? It was almost as if he was in anguish…

“Well done, Karom. Now, all these fractals are made by positive feedback. They are iterative processes – examine any fractal at any resolution, and you will see the whole image in miniature. This is true down to the smallest observable scale or resolution. But the reverse is also true.”

“They make fractals with computers,” observed the boy. “The humans. They give them parameters – they say: produce a fractal of x by x size.” Karom paused, exhaled a deep sigh. “But if they gave it no parameters, the fractal would be infinite. It would go on forever. Getting larger, and larger, and larger.”

“Exactly!” cried Quint, setting his glass down and hauling himself up from the chair. His white beard trembled as he began to get excited. “Everywhere in the universe, this observable fractal hierarchy is at play. If you reached the end of our universe, and could look back and view its whole shape, you would see that the universe itself is merely a dot, a blip, a speck in a larger fractal – an unimaginably huge, inter-locking system of chaotic symmetry. Universes stacked inside each other like Clevorkian dolls.”

“Yes,” agreed the boy, his voice still muted and passive. “Galaxies in clusters and chains. Above them, universes in larger clusters and chains. Beneath them, planets clustered in rotating chains. And upon the planets, spiralling gases and proteins and atoms. Observable spirals in the hearts of trees, in the spiralling double helix of human DNA chains…” Karom tailed off, staring into his teacher’s eyes with an empty horror. “But the humans… don’t see it that way. Do they?”

“No,” said Quint, increasingly un-nerved by his pupil’s bizarre mood. “No, they’re quite incapable of recognizing the inherent fractal nature of all matter and energy. They spend huge amounts of time debating the motion of unseen forces… dark matter, dark energy… Until relatively recently, their world-view was completely geocentric – they believed that the sun and other stars revolved around the Earth. The Copernican shift occurred in the sixteenth century: they devised a heliocentric view of their own system, and recognised the orbits of the planets and so on… but since then they really haven’t made much progress. They’re unable to conceptualize the universe as an infinitely huge, ordered system. They have an inherent belief in chaos, random-ness… unseen forces.”

“And what does this mean?” said the boy.

“Quite simply, they believe they are alone.” Quint sighed again, ruminating on the fate of the humans. “Foolish monkeys. Their physicists have proved that there are other, what do they call them again… oh yes, dimensions. They believe they can prove that every time a human makes a decision, their reality branches out into several different paths, each representing the differing outcomes of that particular decision.” Quint coughed, retrieved his drink from the armchair. “They see the divisions between these ‘dimensions’ as membranous – as though one could push through into an alternate reality, like breaking a soap bubble. What they fail to apprehend is that in a fractal system, all of these differing realities are possible. All of them exist simultaneously, at distances completely impossible to calculate using human mathematics. Each single human existence is reproduced as part of the larger fractal structure – all realities exist; stacked, revolving around each other, up and up and infinitely up the scales of magnitude…. Forever.” Quint smiled at the boy – he may have been behaving oddly, but at least he showed some interest.

“And the same is true for us, I suppose?” asked the boy. Something in his voice was dangerous, strained.

“Why of course,” replied Quint. “If you or I were to be… let’s see… let’s say that I took out a Plasma Gun and fired it at you right now. In this order of magnitude, you would be dead. Further up the rotating stack of universes, you might only be injured. Still further up, and you might disarm me, and we’d struggle. And so on and so forth, as many ways as you can imagine. Even inside your body – in the very cells and atoms that make up you as a person and a physical object – there are universes. Tiny, un-observable universes, filled with life and consciousness. Just like the humans, they push and strain at the boundaries of their own realities, unable to make the simple observation that it is all merely a question of scale.”

“I am infinite,” quoted the boy, staring at his slippers again. “I contain multitudes.”

“Ah yes, Whitman,” said Quint, pleased with the boy. “An earth poet, late nineteenth century, as they count them… How strange, and how beautiful, that the human poets should glean the true meaning of the universes, long before their scientists ever could.”

The boy, moving slowly, raised his head and looked Quint full in the face. From within his orange novice robes, he drew out a Plasma Gun, long and black and slender. With a smooth motion, perfectly calm, he pointed the gun at his teacher, and fired a hot, focussed burst of plasma into the old man’s heart. Quint staggered. Before he died, he knelt before the boy, his eyes beginning to glaze, a look of stunned incomprehension on his face.

“Why?” pleaded Quint, with his dying breath.

“Because nothing matters,” said Karom dreamily, smiling, his irises reflecting distant stars, making them look like spiral galaxies. “Nothing matters in an infinite system. Everything is true, and nothing matters. Everything is possible… everything is repeated. Endlessly, with variations that make no difference to the larger pattern. Somewhere out there, you’re still alive, still going on and on about fractals. But here… here, just for you, the world stops turning."

With thanks to Walt Whitman and Fractaluniverse.org.

ByBram E. Gieben, 2008. All rights reserved.





Short Stories