Six Symbols

Chapter 1. Marked

Leon suddenly found himself at work, he had no recollection of how and when he got there, he remembered going out of bed, and taking a shower, he remembered seeing a strange mark in his wrist, a symbol, tattooed in his arm in bright blue ink, but he never got a tattoo.

Hi tried to remove it, after all it should be something that should wash off, nothing permanent. He was unsuccessful. After that everything became a blur, as if autopilot had taken over while his mind obsessed about the strange symbol in his arm.

Leon was a mathematician, working in a huge company, he was in his thirties, a strange lonely guy. He had no family, lived alone, and never went out with his coworkers, in fact, he had only one friend, a young engineering intern named Katherine, a voluptuous red-hair in her late twenties who was unmistakeably infatuated by him, probably because he was the only straight guy who did not pay any attention to her, his mind was always full, a picture of his thoughts would have been scary, even for other mathematicians, for him people were only distractions he had to deal with.

Physically speaking, Leon was a regular guy, in fact most of the time he remained invisible, blending with his surroundings, he was just too average, average height, medium complexion, brow hair color, and he did nothing to improve his looks. He used to dress the same everyday, with the only difference of his T-Shirt color, which he decided was all the randomness he needed to not look the same all the time.

He was sitting in his cubicle, staring at the symbol in his wrist, wondering, How can I search for a picture on the Internet if I have no idea of it’s name or origins?, suddenly Kathy came in as she did every morning, with a nice smile, preparing to greet him, when curiosity stopped her and made her look at the place he was insistently staring.

- What does that mean? - She asked on a surprised voice - I never took you for the type who wanted to look more interesting by getting a pretentious tattoo.

He turned to her, slowly, inexpressive, still processing the sounds of what she had just said, it took a little time for him to finally give meaning to the sounds. She waited patiently, used as she was to be only background noise when he was thinking.

- I wish I knew - Answered Leon turning again to watch his wrist, as if by mere concentration he would get the meaning- Why do you think is pretentious? Have you seen it before?

She sat in the table next to his computer, and thought hard, had she ever seen that symbol before?, she didn’t think of herself as a geek, but she knew a lot of them, the guys who learn nonexistent languages from sci-fi books, the kind who knew the elfish alphabet, or knew how to read runes, the ones who learned some kanji or traditional Chinese characters while they superficially studied oriental philosophies, she even met one guy who tried to impress her by sending her a poem written in solresol, which turned out to be an old artificial language which nobody speaks. After thinking about this she had an answer to both questions.

- Every guy who has ever tried to convince me he knew more about life than the rest of us because he knew some weird cryptic symbols was pretentious, but I guess there are those who actually know about this stuff and do not study it just to try to make themselves look more interesting. But I never saw a symbol like that one.

- Cryptic... - Repeated Leon almost absently, as if from all she had said that was the only useful information. - How can I decrypt this with so little information?- he asked mainly to himself which Katherine fully understood.

- Why would you get a tattoo of a symbol you don’t even know? - She asked, puzzled, coming to the realization that he did not have the slightest idea of what that character in his arm meant.

- I wouldn’t - he answered - I don’t remember ever getting it, it just appeared there this morning.

- Are you trying to spook me?, I have never heard about a spontaneously appearing tattoo. Did you get drunk last night?

- I remember precisely everything that happened until the moment I went to bed, and I can’t think of a logical explanation. - He said raising his eyes to meet hers, his face reflecting the intense puzzlement he was experiencing.

Katherine pride herself on being smart, logical, rational, however this was Leon, the guy who was so good understanding everything, the guy who could explain things to her, revealing the most intricate secrets, and later leave her in painstaking confusion when he showed her the math behind it, a giant in her mind, she dared not think he was losing it.

- We can solve this - she finally said, convinced that there was no puzzle big enough for Leon and her - I’ll come back for lunch, we will discuss it then.

She stood up, and left the cubicle, knowing that he would not be abandoning the puzzle until lunch, but also knowing she could do nothing about it. While Leon was a theoretical guy she was a field girl, she knew it would take some legwork to find out if there was a tattoo studio which offered that design. And luckily there were only so many near Leon’s place, they would ask in each, and they will also see if anybody remembered seeing him.

It was 8:15, and they would not go out for lunch until noon, so she had some 3 and a half hours to get some work done.

Leon went to his browser, opened the search engine, and typed “writing systems”, the second link sounded promising, it read “Omniglot - the guide to languages, alphabets and other writing systems” - he clicked and started looking at it, he knew he could spend the whole morning looking at that web site, but he had other thing to attend to, so he bookmarked the site and headed for his first meeting with the software developers, the company needed a neural network system for analyzing trends on product health based on measured parameters, and they wanted to make it general enough that even managers could use it, seemed like a impossible task, but then again, that is what he loved to do, achieve the impossible.