| A talented female mathematics grad student (who is a postdoc by the end of the story) helps her thesis advisor model the dynamics of Calabi-Yau manifolds, discovering that they are both sentient and deadly.
The leap from seeing the dynamics on a computer screen to concluding that the manifolds are consciously reacting to their "environments" seemed too quick and unjustified to be believable to me. Consequently, I found myself less disturbed by that science fiction aspect of this mathematical horror story than by the way the student is subjected to sexual harassment by both her thesis advisor and department chair. (I suppose that misbehavior by these male faculty members was included so that the would be less upset by their gory deaths.)
This is one of many "mathematical horror stories" in the collection "Arithmophobia" (self-published by editor Robert Lewis). Some of the other works in that collection will have their own entries here, but others are excluded either because they did not qualify as "mathematical fiction" according to the standards of this website. Check out the book if you want to see them all.
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