//------------------------------// // Essay Six: The Logic Knot // Story: Delinquency // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Essay Six: The Logic Knot Treble wasn’t sure if it was ‘Mother’ being true to her word, or their predator having a terrible sense of direction, but the trio had encountered little to no resistance in their excursion outside of the hotel room so far. This wasn’t a sentiment he’d wanted to say out loud, as his particular pastime was more than want to remind him that jinxes were, indeed, ‘a thing’, and would gladly bat you about the head and neck for your hubris. If you had one left. The ‘little to no’ part of things was mainly due to the weird growths on the floor they kept finding, which was a great way to determine whether or not their big-faced fiend had been here recently. The latest hallway they’d found was actually a bit worse for wear than some of the others, so much so that Treble stopped for a second to investigate. Which neither of the girls rightly appreciated. “Any particular reason you’ve decided to, you know, sit still like a good little prey animal?” Sunny growled. Treble, who had squatted down to look at the floor, didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Instead he opted to heave a mighty sigh and stare blankly at the wall ahead of them. “You know, for a scientist and an engineer, you two seem to forgo the scientific method rather quickly. If you haven’t- noticed-” he grunted, tugging at something growing out of the carpet. After a moment, it gave with a snap, and he stumbled back a step. Turning around to show the girls his catch, he continued, “The trail our friend leaves behind seems to have a shelf life. I don’t know how long it takes for this stuff to die off, but it can’t be more than a few hours. This entire hallway looks like a dying flesh garden.” Sugarcoat eyed the withering plant-like tendril in Treble’s hand carefully. “Yes, we’d noticed. One of the many reasons we aren’t fond of stopping here.” Treble’s shoulders slumped in exasperation. “Look, we’re not going to find an exit door, or an elevator, or the stairs again if we keep walking blindly. At least, not in any kind of decent time frame. So our best bet as I see it is to map out what we have and use that to explore the places we haven’t. I don’t know if you noticed but my sharpie isn’t exactly easy to spot from a distance on this god-awful wallpaper, and I’d really rather appreciate being able to ignore a hallway we’ve already been down before I’m halfway into it. Thankfully, that fuckin’ monster of a… whatever they are leaves a time-lapse trail. Now, they aren’t looking for a way out like we are, they’re waiting for their dear Mother to make one. Which gives us a slight advantage, knowing that one already exists. But that means we need to find it before they do. So literally any information I can get from this… stuff is welcome to the party.” Sugar and Sunny exchanged a glance that said something along the lines of ‘Just let him have it’. “You sure like to talk, don’t you?” Sugarcoat asked bluntly. Treble dropped the tendril, seeing his words have little to no effect, and turned on his heel. “It’s the only thing I seem to be good for lately,” he grumbled, and stalked off down a rather clean-looking corridor. The girls traded looks again, this time saying something completely different, and sighed. “Maybe we should-” Sunny started. “You coming or not?!” Treble barked, once he saw he was halfway down a hallway and the girls hadn’t moved. “Or not,” grumbled Sunny, as the two jogged to catch up with him. --------------------------------------- They’d been stomping around for what might have been an hour, might have been half a day, when Treble tuned a corner and sighed in relief. The girls peeked their heads around and saw exactly what he was looking at: stairs. In fact, it looked very much like the stairway they’d taken to get here. At least the door did. Not wanting to draw attention to much of anyone or anything, they casually approached the door, and, when seeing they hadn’t been followed or approached by… something, all three quickly dashed through the doorway into a familiarly desiccated stairwell. Taking the opportunity to revel in the fact they didn’t have to peek around every corner for a face full of faces and demon tar, they all took a seat on the landing and paused to breathe. “Right, fearless leader, where to next? Please do say the park, I’m dying to go outside somewhere,” Sunny quipped. Sugar rolled her shoulders as she tried to get comfortable against the stone walls. “Pass. I’d rather not find out what these monsters consider ‘outside’.” Sunny thought about that for a moment. The shudder she gave was all the response Sugar needed. “She has a point though, Treble. Where the hell do we go from here?” This was a valid question, and one he really wished he wasn’t responsible for answering. “Well, Logically speaking, we should go back up,” Treble said quietly, thinking out loud. “If we slipped in through a hole in the framework they haven’t found, our best bet to find it is to find the floor we came in on.” The girls looked at him exasperatedly, quietly hoping they weren’t about to climb that many stairs. “But I have no idea which floor that is, and climbing that high just to go floor by floor on the chance they aren’t shuffling this place like a deck of cards is a great way to wear ourselves out far too quickly. And the likelihood of finding one floor in the dozens we passed is ridiculous. No, our best bet is down.” Sunny sighed in relief as Sugar’s expression leveled itself out. “But how far down? We can’t just keep walking till we hit bottom, we’d be here possibly forever. It’s like this place doesn’t actually end. It just keeps going, around and around and in on itself.” “Like a fractal,” Sugar mused. Treble blinked. Then he sat up. Then he blinked some more. “A fractal. Jesus, the entire thing… it’s a fractal pattern. That’s why we keep passing the same three hallways on every floor. They aren’t copy-pasting the same five rooms in a straight line, they’re putting a data set into a fractal pattern. It’s the fastest way to create an infinite space in a finite resource. Why build up when you can build in?” he reasoned, getting more and more excited as he talked. “Are you… sure about that? Seems like a bit of a reach,” Sunny observed. Treble shook his head. “Not entirely,” he grumbled, running a hand through his shaggy mane of blue hair. “But the more I think about it the more sense it makes. I mean, some hallways are longer than others, sure, but that’s because fractals compress the farther towards the center you get. Do you remember that hallway we first showed up in?” Sugar nodded. “The one where we figured out that sound here works on a voluntary basis?” “Yeah. It was what… fifty feet long? And how long was the hallway that took us to the stairs?” he asked. Sunny shrugged. “I dunno, I stopped keeping track of things like that.” “Well, it wasn’t fifty freakin feet, that’s for sure. I think, and let me repeat that, I think, that the stairwell is the outside of the fractal. It’s the edge of the structure, somehow. But this entry-exit point is in the middle,” he mused. “Like the center of the vortex, or something.” “So… what? We hit the next floor and keep walking till the hallways get so short we can’t turn around?” Sunny suggested, only half-joking. “No… I don’t think so. I mean, ‘Mother’ met us on the hotel floor, and she had no idea how we got there. I think if she was on the same floor as such a glaring design flaw she’d have found it by now. Creatures from a higher plane of existence tend to be able to see more than we can. Look in more directions. And if she couldn’t find it I doubt we can. Besides, I really would rather not run into Skeletor back there again,” Treble said with a shudder. “So… what?” Sugar asked. “You seem to have something rattling around in that shaggy head of yours. Out with it.” “Well,” Treble said slowly. “If this place is a fractal -which I’m more sure of than I think I should be, by the way, gonna touch on THAT later- then it makes sense that the floors are repeating, too. Ok, sit with me on this one, cause I’m about to get really wordy and I might get lost.” The girls raised eyebrows at him, and gestured for him to keep talking. “If we stick to the idea that the staircase is the outside of the fractal, that means, on some level, it also spirals to the middle. And the closer you get to the middle of the fractal, the smaller the set, right? Eventually we’re gonna get to sets so small we can’t even fit in the door. I think this is where the structure is weakest. But what if we don’t have to go all the way to the middle?” Sunny nodded, seemingly following the logic. “Right. The smaller the set, the more fragile it is, right? If we find some of the smaller sets, the weaker ones, we might be able to poke holes in it.” Sugar looked back and forth between the two. “Do I want to know where you’re getting all of this? I mean, we are literally dealing with extra-dimensional monsters whose laws of physics are, in no uncertain terms, radically different then ours.” Sunny and Treble exchanged glances. “I’m not… sure, actually,” Treble said slowly. “But I’m way more sure than I think I should be. It’s like I’ve heard all of this before, somewhere.” Sugar rolled her eyes. “Yeah, they cover it in geometry class.” Sunny gave her a sarcastic grin. “Not that, smartass. This whole theory feels really… familiar. Like it’s been in my head the whole time and I just had to wait for someone to say something. Kinda like that feeling you get when someone sings a line from a song you’ve been trying to remember all day.” “Sounds a lot like memeticism, honestly,” Treble mused. When the girls gave him blank looks, he explained, “It’s a type of psychic or magical influence. There’s a few different variants, but it basically comes down to mind control or possession. It’s like a song that gets stuck in your head and keeps playing on a loop until it’s literally all you can think about, and singing or humming it gets it stuck in someone else’s head.” “A psychological contagion, basically,” Sugar nodded, “Memetics is common in psychology and social media engineering.” “Yeah, but not like this. Someone somewhere in history got it into their heads, no pun intended, that you could turn the memetic properties of a statement or idea and turn it into a psychovirus. But I’ve never heard of a variant that sits in your head until it’s triggered. Usually just thinking about a thing will trigger it. It’s more like… a post-hypnotic suggestion. Like someone planted the idea sometime since we got here and just sat back until our… investigation set it off. But I can’t think of when-” “When we were asleep,” Sunny said with a start. “When we were all passed out in that room, and this… ‘Mother’ you keep talking about showed up. Maybe she planted something in our heads while we were asleep? Gave us the information she thought we’d need so we could find the door for her?” Treble felt no lack of unease at that point. “If that’s true, then she’s following us right now, waiting for us to find the door. Which leaves us in a hell of a bind.” “Why?” Sugar snorted derisively. “If she’s gonna help us get out then good for her.” “Yes, but I’d really rather not lead an entire family of extradimensional monsters to a shortcut into our dimension. The other side of that is, if we don’t do anything, she might just decide we’re not worth the trouble, and kill us all. Then she’s free to find the exit all on her own. And we’d have no way to give our friends the kind of warning they need to fight back. Or at least, evacuate,” Treble reasoned. Sunny leaned back on the stairway and stared up at the ceiling. “So what? Either we do nothing and die, or we lead a bunch of monsters back to our petri dish to chomp the whole thing?” Sugar tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Well, you said they were all looking for their father, right? Is there some way we could track him down and get him back before they get to the exit? I mean, we should at least have a little time after we find the exit while she goes and collects her wayward kids for their little family vacation.” Treble shook his head again. His neck was getting sore from all the disagreeing. “I don’t know if that would work. Like I said, time works differently in different places. We might get back to find we’ve only been gone for two seconds, and it could take less than that for ‘Mother’ to gather all of her kids and meet us at the door.” Sugarcoat wasn’t done, however. “Well, if she was following us around, wouldn’t she have heard our theories by now and done something about it? We’ve been chatting for a while and I don’t see anything awful coming to kill us because we’re redundant. Maybe they need us to do more than find the door? Maybe they need us to open it?” “Possibly,” Treble reasoned. “If that’s true, we might have a bargaining chip. Problem is, we still have to find the damn door before any of this means anything.” Sunny groaned. “So we have to play right into their hands right up to the point they play into ours?” At that point, Treble grinned, which worried the two girls more than a little. “In fact, Sunny, I think that’s exactly what we’ll get to do.”