The Significance of Snowflakes

And the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

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Dr. Cayley Willows stepped down from the podium, surrounded by vibrant applause. Nausea slammed him in the gut. The lights came up and the room spun with vertigo-inducing glitter, refracted from the crystal chandeliers above. It had been one of his most popular presentations ever.

Ugh.

The musicians reclaimed the stage, perfect in their penguin suits. Cello, flute and violin began to lilt in decorous harmony. The champagne diffused the golden hue of the evening as trays full of glasses whisked by, borne by servers who flitted like benign shadows through the background.

Cayley thought he might actually throw up. Grade-school humiliations rose to the forefront of his thoughts as he considered how a gastric rebellion would play out with the Dean.

“Fabulous presentation, Dr. Willows,” said a weasel-faced, atrociously skinny man in an expensive suit. One of the wealthier alumni. “I actually understood you. I didn’t know there could be an equation to predict the ups and downs of the stock market. Now, that’s useful math . . . chaos math, you called it?”

“Thanks, and yes,” Cayley said. The suppression of resentment prodded his unstable innards even farther toward revolt. I wanted to talk about set theory and the structures and motion of galaxies and solar flares and storm systems. They made me do stock market analysis. Is that all that matters to people anymore?

The alumnus was oblivious. “I should hire you as my financial consultant, with your attention to detail. Just like that . . . er . . . Butterfly Effect, yes, that’s the thing. Brilliant. Every little thing matters. Love how you brought that home.”

Cayley clenched his teeth at the man’s keen acceptance of that misconstruction. He swallowed the sourness surging in his mouth and achieved a wispy smile. “Actually, what I said, and what Lorenz originally found, is that every little detail has to be taken into account or the math won’t forecast properly. That’s why we can model the weather, but we’ll never truly predict it. No computer has infinite calculating power. You have to round off your significant digits. Because of that, the model’s no longer accurate past a certain point. There are times when I think the weather has more sensitivity than human beings do.”

The alumnus smiled in return, brandishing his champagne glass like a ceremonial weapon. “Quite a thought, after that last hurricane down in the gulf. It seems you’re a mathematician-philosopher of chaos. Well done, Dr. Willows.”

Cayley fled to the balcony. He ducked off to one side, into the darkness, and sank to his knees.

The outdoor air held a tang of cigarette smoke from inside. Car exhaust wafted upward from the street below. There was no truly unsullied refuge within his reach. Snowflakes melted as they touched the building, their purity absorbed by the carcinogenic crust that layered the city.

When had life become like this? A swirl of politics and the pursuit of happiness, revolving in ever more inward-focussed repetitions. Cayley stared out at the cars flying along the street, headed for who knew where. Galaxies . . . Julia sets, collections of points in motion . . . All around me, escape points flying free, and I’m in the prisoner set. I know exactly where I’m going and where I’m going to end up. That was the plan.

Cayley hated the plan.

He rose from his knees and took up a post beside a gargoyle carving that peered out from the building’s stone facade. The ugly, grimacing head was fused to the marble wall as if trapped halfway between in and out. “Well, old fellow, I suppose you’re in the prisoner set too.”