Embry's Drive: Prologue 1

Dr Embry walked into a dirty drug store with a heavy backpack over his shoulder, shirt partially untucked. His affect was as unkempt as his thinning hair. Picking up a basket he made his way to the back. Toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, washcloths, allergy pills, a comb… what else? He found a small section of t-shirts and sweatpants, socks and jockeys. Catching sight of a man in a blue button down and khakis, Embry assessed him from the corner of his eye. The gentleman gave a nod hello as he walked by. Direct interaction was a good sign. The standard “Grey Man” behavior wouldn’t allow that. He released a breath he didn’t know he was holding and walked toward the register grabbing some chips and granola bars as he went. As he stood in line a small child, no more than 4 years old, approached him and stood just a foot away. The child looked up at him and reached to touch his backpack.

“Thomas, leave that man alone! I’m so sorry..” said a woman as she pulled the child away. The young boy went without a struggle but his eyes lingered on the backpack. Embry gave the woman a smile that never touched his eyes. The cashier scanned his items with a bored expression he was relieved to see. He pulled from his pocket a roll of crisp bills, paid, and walked out to his truck, unsurprised to see a raven patiently waiting on top of a nearby lightpost. He threw the bags in the back seat and gently laid the backpack on the passenger seat. He scanned the parking lot nervously as he pulled out onto the fairly deserted road and headed west, turning over the events of the past month again in his mind.

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Givens Embry was a C student. A dilettante, one teacher had labeled him. A daydreamer, another. In truth Givens was usually just uninterested in the subject at hand, no matter what that may be. In a world where the name of your college frequently carried more weight than the content of your work, Professor Embry had always been content just trying to connect with students rather than publish papers. One, maybe two students per semester actually seemed to have a spark of curiosity that he found intensely familiar, and this was enough to satisfy him. At any rate, his area of interest in physics at times bordered on spirituality and philosophy, so much so that much of his work was unshared, ignored, or outright reviled by colleagues. His primary motivation was not how or what, but why. At one point it was existential dread that had driven his interests, but as he matured there was a true pleasure in the pursuit. Pairing trips to observatories with a visit to a Tibetan monastery, attending a conference in Mumbai and staying an extra week to study with a yogi in northern India… such activities didn’t draw travel companions. Having grown up a loner he hadn’t much need for external validation of his ideas so, in his estimation, he could quite happily endure this corporeal form for the necessary seven to eight decades in relative solitude and then move on. He did, however, greatly enjoy his relationship with students, especially those that had yet to bow to the conformity of modern academia. He hoped to inspire as many people to maintain their open minds as possible.

The professor considered his most important quest, moreover the most important quest of all humanity, to be that of First Cause determination. He found it profoundly ludicrous that all of science was predicated on the notion that first there was nothing, then there was something. At best it was a clever evasion, a semantic trick to replace “we don’t know and we’re just going to roll with that”. At worst, well if you ask a theologian they would tell you it was a deliberate subterfuge. To Embry it was an ignorance of such weight and consequence that he scarcely could believe that there was any purpose to looking at much else.

Thus, Givens Embry had found himself teaching basic physics to undergrads, many of whom were just trying to take a science that was more interesting than chem or bio. It afforded him an income, tenure, occasional access to expensive databases and instrumentation, and plenty of free time. Most of his days were indistinguishable from the next. Wake up, coffee, pray to what usually felt like the ceiling, yoga and meditation, and then off to say words in front of blank stares. In the evenings he pored over obscure articles from the last 150 years, declassified government studies, barely translated ancient texts, papers written by failed astrophysics doctorate applicants, on and on. Embry consumed data like a wealthy cocaine addict, line by line, day after day, and with somewhat similar stimulating effects. It was in meditation and near dreaming that he poured it all together, attempting to homogenize a mixture which seemed like so much oil, water, and sand. At times he was unsure if he made progress or went slightly more mad each day.

The professor had noted that in all of these disparate sources there were, predictably, many outlying events, conclusions, or data that were the result of erroneous procedures or misinterpretation of results. Bad calculations. Deliberate fraud. Embry had also noticed in this process that there were many cases which could not be explained by one of those inaccuracies, but were simply tossed out for being too many standard deviations away from the mean. Anomalies, or phenomena determined to be inaccurate based not on any proof thereof but merely because they were so unusual. The conclusion was that they must be erroneous because they were preposterous, a practice which perhaps necessarily expedited a tedious process. After consuming thousands of such examples in seemingly unrelated situations, Embry began to be convinced that there was a statistically insignificant number of aberrant or inexplicable events which were nonetheless very real and very confounding. As he looked at the common traits of these more unusual cases buried in raw data, he saw a pattern. Something he could predict. Something he could, well, sense.

Professor Embry normally logged his conclusions or intuitions immediately after waking or meditation, most of which made little sense from the moment pen left paper. He was often amazed at the perfect clarity a dream or conception could have as it was being regarded for the first time and how easily it slipped away despite all efforts to remember. He wondered if this was by design.

It was on a spring afternoon when he pulled a spiral notebook from his bedside table to jot down a picture, a visual which had occurred to him, when it fell open to another page. On this page he saw almost the exact image he was about to draw. The fact that he forgot the previous image wasn’t unusual, but he was puzzled over not seeing it before. He frequently thumbed through his old journals. Embry flipped through the pages quickly and saw the shape again, although this time hidden in the shape of a short, silly poem he had written down. Embry reached under his bed and pulled out another notebook and thumbed through it. Here, another similar shape in the crude sketch of a caterpillar. And again in a crooked paragraph he had written while half asleep. He began tearing pages out and creating a stack of examples of this coiled double helix alternating pattern of black and white, dark and light. He worked into the night with a quickening pace.

The professor took a sheet of plastic made for an overhead projector and laid it on top of the original sketch, placing a dot at each termini of the repeated set of lines. He then placed it on top of each of his selected examples. After a dozen he knew, but he kept going. WIthout exception the pattern was repeated perfectly. Finally, he placed it on top of a piece of graph paper and plotted each point. Not accurate enough. He scanned the plotted points into his computer and logged onto the university’s backdoor AI program. He asked it to look for similar shapes and determine a formula expressing the fractal. Over the course of an hour shapes and images from throughout history returned in proportional similarity to a sort of oblong helix, most closely approximating a fractal. Some he recognized, many he did not. The tree of life, a Mayan calendar, burial mounds, carved obelisks, the face of a moai, a Polynesian tattoo, a medieval family crest, hundreds of mandalas… objects, art, natural structures.

Using each example he averaged the plotted points again and again, until a formula emerged. Embry looked it over and saw variables from seemingly unrelated branches of science. He suspected that he had, indeed, finally cracked. The computer had done its best to come up with a suitable answer but it was essentially a text response program, and he looked at the useless letters and numbers in front of him with some irritation. Gibberish. Not the last dead end he would find on his search, nor was it the first. He wrote the formula on a piece of paper and lazily doodled the fractal shape around it. He looked out his study window and was startled to see a blackbird eyeing him quizzically. After retiring to bed the numbers and images fought for his attention, but his well muscled, meditating consciousness hammered them into a pure, peaceful light. Embry slept.

Embry woke. Not yet dawn. His mind fell into the present moment and he was aware of himself, but he had the frightening sensation of being two places at once. It seemed he had been dreaming for a month, experiencing vivid, fantastic dramas in full sensory detail. It was with no small amount of will that he pulled himself into now and repeated a mantra to himself, feeling the pillow behind his head, the repetitive scolding “tsk tsk” of his ceiling fan, and breathing in the cool morning air deeply. Without sitting up he grabbed the journal beside his bed and began to scribble furiously…