A History of Fences and Fae by AK Senga, PhD
Published in 2027 by University of Minnesota Majestic Press Excerpt from Introduction: "Nancy Reagan, Ulysses H. Wright, and The Last Thylacine”

This story has many beginnings. Here is one: Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928, became one of the world's best mathematicians early in his life, and in 1970, with several of his friends, formed a radical environmentalist group called Survivre et Vivre. This group, after little more than a year, wrote the book that would destroy modern civilization.

The real secret of that third building was below, where seven floors spread like rotten roots underground, long concrete hallways, walls made of chalkboards, computer terminals punctuating the monotony. Evangeline had only seen the fifth basement floor, where she'd been asked to step out for her tests, and Cal had only seen the third, but that had been enough for them. It was the calculators' building, where primes were studied and examined, pursued and caught. Where the mathematicians worked in darkness and silence.

They called it the Sieve.

The only one in the room who didn't laugh at Stone Weaver's guess was a woman sitting at the way back of the room, behind the final row of fencers lounging in their chairs, outside of the purview of the meet-ing. She watched, observed, but did not participate. And when everyone else laughed, she stayed still and silent. A mathematician, one of the Sieve workers, wearing the white-and-black lab coat of her order. On her lap was an open notebook, the glint of a pen in one hand. No matter the meeting, no matter the participants, the Sieve workers always sent an envoy to sit in. Officially, this was to "maintain open channels of communication between the practical and theoretical work of the Midwest Branch of the United States Fencing Bureau," or so the emails between different departments said. Technically, the "practical" workers-fencers and techs, administrators and engineers—were always welcome to send envoys to meetings held in the Sieve, but almost no one ever wanted to go, and the mathematicians were not forthcoming with their own schedules, often burying them deep in the labyrinthine organizational system they used to keep their digital files.

"It's our math friend again, sitting with the only one in the room who can stand her," Cal said, nudging Evangeline and nodding toward the pair in the back. The mathematician, Sister Marla, had been the envoy at their last four or five meetings. "Do you think it's punishment for them to attend these? Maybe she forgot to carry the one in some all-important equation and this is her penance."

What do you think Sister Marla is working on? Cal wrote on his own pad of paper, pushing the message toward Evangeline.

Proof for the existence of a soul? Calculations for fae court power? Plans for world domination? Evangeline wrote back, one eyebrow rising into a soft arc.

I bet it's a grocery list, and she just wants us to think it's something mathy and important.

On September 23rd, 1987, approximately 545² people across the globe woke to find tattoos covering their skin. At first, these tattoos were thought to be merely random, chaotic assortments of numbers placed over the necks and chests and limbs and backs—everywhere but the faces—of these people. However, in time, and with the help of doctors and mathematicians, these tattoos were analyzed and found to be connected, with every numeral constituting one larger number, always prime, and always unique.

Sister Hanka, director of the mathematician corps, stood silent and watchful, her face like a mask. She wore the black-and-white robes of her order, the same as Sister Marla and all the mathematicians working in the Sieve and in every other facility housing the prime seekers and number-crunchers employed to work alongside the fencers and techs. Sister Hanka took her name—her title, really, since there had been several Sisters Hanka over the years—from the holy mother of mathematics, Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck, mother of that dark and desperate prophet Alexander Grothendieck. Like Catholics who worshipped the Virgin Mary as the giver of life to their holy lord, so, too, did mathematicians vaunt the mother of their hallowed daemon.

"What are you always writing?" Cal asked the question as if it had been bouncing around inside his chest for months, which, Evangeline knew, it had. "Do you have some theorem or formula you're plugging this tiny bit of information into over and over? Is it notes to yourself. The met actual writers who don't write nearly as much as you.”

"Excuse my colleague," Incident said, putting a pacifying hand on Sister Marla's shoulder. "He's rude.” The thin wave of humor that had buoyed up Cal's question now re-ceded, and Evangeline could see his thoughts running along the same path as hers, down into that memory of seeing the Sieve for the fins time, being led down those hallways and subjected to tests and questions, made to stand still and alone in a vast dark room while something moved in that vast, lightless space. The strange, geometrically uncanny rooms. The mathematicians in their black-and-white lab coats shuttling along hallways, muttering endlessly to themselves. The sense that those hallways did not end but instead ran onward through earth and stone, under rivers and lakes, until arriving at another Sieve beside another Harbor where more mathematicians worried and worked at the endless problem of the hiding primes.

The only physical manifestation of her [super power] were the red tears that ran in thin rivulets from each eye. … It was the blood of the famous, the disgraced, the brilliant mathematician Alexander Grothendieck.

The Tempest King softened as he spoke. “This is ours. Every bit of this Earth is ours. And thanks to some crazy mathematician in the past who was probably controlled by the Faerie Queen, we gave half of this place over to nature.”