The Significance of Snowflakes

“Actually, I’m in the escape set,” the gargoyle said. “It’s all in how you look at it, stupid.”

Cayley felt the blood drain from his face. He leaned a centimetre closer.

The carved tongue wiggled. It looked like it might lash out and wrap a stranglehold around his neck.

Cayley gasped and pulled back. “That’s not right.” He rubbed his hands quickly up and down his face. “You’re stone.”

“Stone is as stone does.” The gargoyle half-closed its eyes and shot him a disdainful glance. “Since you’re thinking about fractals and pithy metaphors, I suppose you’re feeling a little confined by your life.” The creature laughed, a pig-like, snorting sound. “The prisoner set. Would you like to escape, Cayley Willows?”

“Somebody must have put something hallucinogenic in the punch,” Cayley muttered. “I should have just gone ahead and thrown up.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” the gargoyle said.

The diminutive monster opened its mouth wider than any jaw should stretch, revealing fangs top and bottom like a snake. Then it breathed in. The blank, city-lit sky stretched and darkened, as if yawning awake.

Cayley developed a case of the shakes.

The gargoyle gasped deeper and deeper. The night plunged downward as the stone maw stretched upward, gulping. Black emptiness shifted in a thousand planes and angles, real as light and far more tangible.

Cayley stumbled back as the night reached for him, hard-edged and many-pointed. “What is that? What’s happening?”

The gargoyle shot him an exasperated sideways glance and continued to draw in the material of the universe. Two rock fists full of talons exploded from the wall and grabbed the crackling darkness. The gargoyle bit it off and dropped it to the grey stone railing with a cough and a wheeze.

“Step up,” the gargoyle said.

Cayley stared at the multifaceted, upward-arcing black bridge before him. He squished his eyes shut and blinked them wide. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a Koch curve. Honestly,” the gargoyle snorted, “I just bisected the universe for you, and you’re not even grateful? You want to explore all its mysteries, right? So step out there.”

“A Koch curve–the universe–a snowflake fractal?” Cayley studied it. On closer inspection, the impenetrable velvetiness did appear to have an endless number of sharp-edged peaks and valleys, climbing and falling within the larger peaks and valleys, which climbed and fell within a yet larger structure. Time, matter and energy–and something more–crackled and bunched, ever flowering towards the infinitesimal, never quite reaching it.

Cayley tipped his head back, his mouth hanging open. He wrinkled his nose and squinted. “The universe is a flake. That explains everything.”

“If you want to get technical,” said the gargoyle, “from this angle, it’s a six-dimensional sphereflake. The seventh dimension got lost pretty early on, but I hear it’ll pop back eventually.”

Cayley swallowed hard, staring. “Isn’t it . . . bad to bisect the universe?”

“Only from a four-dimensional point of view.” The gargoyle folded its rocky arms with a sound like puffed rice cereal. “Think, Professor Pea-Soup-For-Brains, you’re neither inside nor outside your existence now. It’s your choice where you go from here.”

Cayley shook his head and rubbed his eyes. No response came to mind.

The gargoyle sighed, a sulphurous, condescending sound, and waved a sarcastic claw. “Behold. I set before you an open door. Go on. You’re no longer constrained by what you thought you were. Walk to the place where the light slivers through and jump off. Be free.”

The dark, scintillating planes seemed to whisper excitement and wonder. Cayley stared harder. “And then what?”

The gargoyle rolled its eyes and raised both sets of talons, holding them out to Cayley as if the point could be grasped manually. “Escape towards infinity. Be one with the Greaterest.”

“But—but this is a fractal,” Cayley said. “The universe is a fractal. A fractal . . .” He turned toward the gargoyle and pointed a finger at it. “A fractal has an equation, and an equation indicates a mind. You can insult mine all you want, but I’m pretty sure yours isn’t big enough for this either.”

“Sue me,” said the gargoyle. “Come on, nobody ever said snowflakes are the product of an intelligent mind. When things get cold enough, they just happen. Math is an inherent property of the universe. So, apparently absolute zero snowed. Your existence is the dandruff of dimensionality, but whatever. It’s a fractal. Joy to the nerd.”

Cayley blinked hard, over and over. The shimmering blackness remained, a chaos of frightening order.

He hoisted himself up onto the railing, wobbled and straightened, gazing into the unanswering silence. Jump off . . .

Tempting.

He fixed on a single point in the velvet crystalline planes before him. He squinted, and it seemed that he could see a distant whorl of stars flame within that obsidian chip.

A galaxy. Full of solar winds, methane storms, dust rings . . . fractals. Things no computer was accurate enough to fully replicate or predict.

It’s not the butterfly, it’s whether we account for it. “There have to be infinite significant digits, and infinite knowledge of all the variables, or this whole universe would be thrown off. To calculate this—”

“This flake isn’t infinite.” The gargoyle hacked and spat. “You don’t know anything about infinity. Get up there and jump off! Experience the real thing, you chicken!”

Cayley threw back his head and laughed for the first time in months. “I’m standing in a body, in a city, in a country, in a world, in a solar system, in a galaxy. In a multidimensional fractal equation! Carried in the mind of . . .”

“Stop it!” The gargoyle sputtered like a fire being doused with water. “I open the door of your pathetic mortal cage, and all you can think about is equations!”

“Math doesn’t lie.” Cayley hopped down from the railing and perused the squirming stone creature. “But I think you do.”

“Damn me,” grunted the gargoyle.

A blinding flash exploded from the wall. Cayley tumbled backward. He landed firmly on his rear, blinked several times and shook his head to clear it.

He was alone on a normative, three-dimensional balcony; four-dimensional if time counted, though he wasn’t sure about that at the moment.

Was I in time?

Classical chamber music and traffic noise drifted on the still night air, and the sky settled in for the night, anchored properly to the twinkling manmade horizon. He looked around, shivering in the cold. The gargoyle on the building’s facade, oddly, had crumbled into dust.

Am I in time? To account for things I didn’t?

Cayley clambered to his feet and eyed the heap of powdered marble.

The dust lay inert. The only motion in the shadows was the gentle swirling of hundreds of snowflakes.

_______________________

Originally published at Mindflights.com and in Mindflights Issue 2 print anthology, 2008. Available free in all digital reader formats at Smashwords.