These three linked short stories are presented as part of an exam in "abstract engineering". Each story presents a specific example of device that exists only in "conceptual machine-space". The second involves two lovers, an Italian artist and a Turkish mathematician (both women), who together explore a tiled courtyard in Italy which miraculously transports people in space and time. As the artist predicts, the mathematician experimenting with it eventually disappears, seemingly never to return. But, she does return as an old woman many years later, having developed an intricate mathematical theory of the tiles:
| (quoted from Ambiguity Machines: An Examination)
The only things that the Turkish mathematician had brought with her were her notebooks containing the mathematics of a new theory of space-time. As the artist turned the pages, she saw that the mathematical symbols gradually got more complex, the diagrams stranger and denser, until the thick ropes of equations in dark ink and the empty spaces on the pages began to resemble, more and more, the surfaces of the tiles in the courtyard. That is my greatest work, the mathematician whispered. But what I’ve left out says as much as what I’ve written. Keep my notebooks until you find someone who will understand.
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This beautiful story appeared in the online SF zine "Reactor" in 2015. I learned about its existence from the website MathFiction.net. |
