Fiction: The Equator

The problem with Algebra is the equator.

What equator?

The equals sign. It isn’t meant to be so simple.

Then what would you propose?

A pipe. For example, how would you equate an elephant to a mammoth? The answer would eventually be found by piping elephant through every other known equation constructed, then out the other side. Algebra is meaningless otherwise.

I understand, said the student to her master.

She climbed down the rocky precipice, to her meditation cave. There she rolled hill-slope clay into a thin sheet and folded it into a pinched U-shape. She waited patiently for it to dry so she could hold it. Then, by firelight, she wrote on it in Morseish-Braile. Poking a sharpened stick into the clay to form words, concepts in constraining blocks of big and small depressions.

Her theory was that every block could be defined by a vector. Its checksum which was its position within an equation that could equate normally without pipe. Then, writing that vector onto another clay book would enable the pipe when run over by the fingers of  a scribe, both books, at once.

She wrote the checksums of every mainline / classic equation that she knew into her book. It was her Principia. And when she was done, took it to her master.

The old woman, exiled to the mountain for her heretical Mathematics looked at the clay fold. She ran her hand over it as she felt the equations, their Truth, pipe through her mind and body and sighed.

Another student with an incomplete logic system. So the girl climbed down the mountainside again, to think it over.

Algebra is nothing without bounds. What are ‘bounds’ but the physics of the Universe laid bare as their building blocks. How big should an elephant be to stand against a mammoth? That was imaginary trigonometry.

She cried a little as it was beautiful. Like a fractal that somehow contained every other fractal. Master told her how it was made: by swinging compound pendulums filled with thickened fish bile over the scrubbed smooth goatskin she held up to the evening light.

These were the bounds of creation itself.

But what if we weren’t created? That we just evolved?

Mathematics only applies when nothing in the Universe is fully right or righted. Have I grown old -for nothing?

Then what of the result? Can knowing change anything but to know more, to know better?

That, young one, is Truth.

So, Master, there is Equator, Bounds, and Truth -is there more? Can Truth be equated, piped?

The old woman looked into the embers as she stirred the smoldering fire.

A long time ago, I did that, and here I am exiled for it. What is Truth, *huh…

She gazed upon Master with a different opinion of her now. She had to unravel it alone -the mysteries of existence, maybe unto everything that would and could ever exist.

In her cave, she rocked herself as she thought. Don’t think too hard, her mother had reminded her. Father said the best things come free, naturally. Was this Truth? Was she piping and equating Truth? Oh dear, oh dear… She fell into a deep sleep, pale with worry.

Truth is when something works, said Father. We pursue it as we pursue a goal. Truth is always changing. The more we know, the more is Truth true. Nonsense, Dear, said Mother. Truth is the summation of all knowledge. It exists in flux until every bit of creation agrees to become one. Everyone at any stage reads the flux differently, and therefore becomes a creator. A better and better one. Dear, said Father, THAT is what I meant as well.

She woke up shivering as it was now snowing. How long had she been asleep? Upon the mountain top, Master was gone. There were tracks down the precipice where her teacher had apparently descended, seeking warmer weather.

She had to know what Truth was, to complete the equators, the imaginary trigonometry and the pipes. She gathered her things in a sling sack and followed the tracks down to the plains below.

There she found her master washing in a stream.

Equating Truth, piping it, it’s what destroys, deludes, does it not?

Not true, if I may venture that.

Then what is Truth?

Some believe it can be equated, because they know pure imagination.

What is pure imagination?

The completion of the small set which is illogicality. A joke is the square of pure imagination, a joke is Truth deep within. Do not ask anymore my student. Go your own way.

She thought about it a long time. Her hair grew long and lustrous, living on the verdant plains, and her skin, plump and rosy. She no longer cared about Truth, about Math and all its devices. And one day, lonely, she desired a mate, a family.

What is Truth? Asked her daughter.

What indeed? She replied. The Algebraic equator, its symbol, is a lie, an imperfect simplification, she began. Mathematics begins with what we call a pipe…

The shuttle to the prairie moon was packed. She kissed her daughter on her cheeks. It would be a long time before this episode ended. And as she thought it over, a smile crept across her face -what her parents had done for her, she perpetuated. She could hear the questioning voice running through her daughter’s mind, and the old woman who fought for nothing, climb the mountain in the summer all over again. She saw her scribe training to read Morseish-Braile in the dim of firelight, poking a stick into damp clay, growing her breasts out on the plains below. Her daughter turned to her, questioningly and she laughed, hand over her mouth.