Alone with You in the Ether by Olivia Blake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Olivia Blake
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy fiction Romance
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- Size: 2.9 MB
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The day before was nothing special. It was special only because of
how unspecial it was, or perhaps by how unspecial it would very
soon become. Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was
a funny little consequence of time.
Aldo, who was called less frequently by his surname, Damiani,
and even less commonly by his birth name, Rinaldo, had rolled a
joint five minutes prior to his episode of silent meditation. He was
twirling it between his fingers, staring into nothing.
SCENE: The air that afternoon has the crisp, weatherless quality that only happens in
Chicago for about a week in mid-September. The sun is bright overhead, and the leaves
on the tree above him are mostly undisturbed.
ACTION: ALDO raises the joint to his lips, saturating the cigarette paper.
The joint was unlit, because he was thinking. He’d come out to
this park to sit on this bench to solve something, and he had been
sitting there for ten minutes, thinking for nine and a half, rolling for
four, and now fake-smoking for a good thirty seconds. Muscle
memory, Aldo had always thought, was the key to unlocking any
door that wouldn’t open. The act of solving something was, for him,
as superstitious as anything.
ALDO glances at the audience. Noticing nothing amiss, he looks away.
The mechanics of his ritual were simple: Raise the joint to his lips,
breathe in, breathe out, let his hand fall. This was the formula.
Formulas he understood. He brought the joint to his lips, inhaled,
and exhaled into nothing.
A BREEZE slides through the leaves overhead.
Aldo’s right thumb beat against his thigh, percussive to the rhythm
of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,”
Cue soundtrack.
which then infected the rest of his fingers. They drummed against
the threading of his jeans, impatient, while his left hand continued
the motion of faux-smoking.
Aldo was thinking about quantum groups. Specifically, hexagons.
It was Aldo’s firm belief that the hexagon was the most significant
form in nature, not purely because of his fondness for the Apis—
commonly known as the honeybee—but not entirely unrelated. Many
people were typically unaware of how many kinds of bees there
were. The bumblebee was slow and stupid enough to be petted,
which was sort of sweet, though not quite as interesting.
THE NARRATOR, AN AGING, ARTHRITIC MAN IN
POSSESSION OF MANY BOOKS: We interrupt your perusal of
Aldo Damiani’s intrusive thoughts to provide some necessary
academic insight. The great Kurt Gödel, a twentieth-century
logician and friend of Albert Einstein, believed that a continuous
trajectory of “light cones” toward the future meant that one could
always return to the same point in space-time. It is Aldo Damiani’s
essential thesis that these cones travel methodically, perhaps
even predictably, along hexagonal paths.
Hexagons. Quantum groups. Symmetry. Nature loved balance,
especially symmetry, but rarely managed it. How often did nature
create perfection? Almost never. Math was different. Math had rules,
finite and concrete, but then it just kept going. The problem and the
thrill of abstract algebra was that Aldo had been studying it in depth
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