Negative Space: Prologue 3

Off of a state highway in Arkansas there is a flat building, an unassuming sign reading “Motel” above a door which used be white, or perhaps yellow. On this particular day a bored, gaunt man smoking a cigarette slumped against the counter and flipped through a motorcycle magazine. A cheap cell phone produced a tinny soundtrack.

Distant lands are not so far away

I don’t know why we don’t go

The man picked his nose in response, ogling a cartoonishly attractive woman sitting astride a 1963 Harley that she had never ridden.

The door swung open, rattling a metal tab where a bell had once dutifully hung.

“Excuse me” said Professor Embry

The man pretended unconvincingly not to hear.

“Excuse me. Buddy. Please?” Embry patiently asked.

An overly pleasant female voice with a persuasive, playful voice invited…

Take my hand I’ll show you the way

Pack your bags and sail away

The man looked irritated and apathetic at the same time. No small feat.

“Uh.. yeah bro. Sup”

The professor pleasantly asked “I’ve been expecting a package. Have you had any deliveries?”

“No. I mean yes. I mean, what’s your name?”

“Jim Tiber. I’ve been here for over a week.”

“Ok then no. There’s one for Tim Tiber”

Givens had a momentary fantasy of second degree murder. Crime of passion. No jury would convict.

“Might you take a quick look? Perhaps it’s a J and not a T”

The man rolled his eyes and leaned under the counter. Embry had stayed here dangerously too long awaiting a delivery, most importantly a small brick of cash that would take him the rest of the way to Idaho where he hoped to disappear into a survivalist lifestyle. It wasn’t a great plan but it was the best he had.

“Hey that is a J. Hey sweet dude you got a package!” said the man in a tone as if the previous exchange hadn’t occurred. Embry took a deep breath, thanked him, and returned to his room.

Embry sat the box down and pulled off the tape. From inside he pulled a brick of cash tightly enclosed in plastic wrap, a large ziploc bag of pipe tobacco, and a Glock 17. Three boxes of shells completed the picture. He quickly loaded the pistol, unwrapped the cash and split it into two equal stacks. Picking up his backpack and three bulging grocery bags he went out to his truck, loaded up, and left.

Fifteen minutes later two black Tahoes and an HVAC van pulled up at the motel and two men entered the office. A less patient interaction, it would seem. A single gunshot and the two men casually walked out, got in a Tahoe, and headed out in the same direction as Embry, albeit with a more purposeful speed.

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The days after Embry’s initial discovery were a fever dream of research and peeks at The Equation, as he had come to call the shape, and its physically manifested object. He spent hours looking at figures and drawings, designs and formulae. Religious architecture from India, Iran, Paris, Moscow. He did a deep dive into a subject of which he had only a trivial awareness, Sacred Geometry. Embry may have been the only person on earth with enough knowledge of both the physical and metaphysical to feel a gentle pull towards what seemed to be the only logical conclusion for the phenomenon he had stumbled upon.

The professor recalled a quote by Carl Friedreich Gauss… “God arithmetizes”. He read of Plutarch stating that “Plato says god geometrizes continually”, which had been the source of Gauss’s statement. Further reading led him to the deities believed to manifest in mandalas, of feng shui and the energy flow of shapes. The Golden Ratio, the Latin Cross… shape had been utilized and understood by our ancestors in a way that the modern man, in his hubris, ignorantly discarded. Embry felt the twinge of sadness he always felt when he noticed a connection that others would take no time to consider, hurrying home to their condos and doom-scrolling, dining on the dopamine of righteous indignation. Although he felt the pain of Cassandra with some of his solitary observations, he nevertheless felt compelled to discover.

As he dug into this rich subject he felt the presence of such seemingly supernatural arithmetic just rooms away, like an itch in the back of his skull. Recalling his lone experiment in creating the action seemingly caused by this shape, this physically plotted equation, he was emboldened to try and interfere with what was possibly a concerning chain reaction. Over the better part of six months Professor Givens Embry was a mild mannered teacher by day and an artist by night. Planning, designing, and theorizing… each iteration of the shape using threads leading to the same spark and self destruction. At last he felt confident to try a more permanent fixture.

Embry used linear forms stretched across a wire frame to approximate a portion of the shape. Half of the resulting creation perfectly recreated the appropriate form, half was open space. It took exactly 1,309 titanium wires to create each frame. He then produced a second wired frame approximating the remaining portion of the shape. When he slid the smaller frame into the larger frame each half matched, creating the fractal-like image in the space created by the wires. A simple theory, but surprisingly effective. The first time he nested the two sides a few dust motes, or possibly molecules of water vapor, rapidly coalesced into a single pinpoint. Within moments of being barely visible to the naked eye, the material aggregated and its size began to grow exponentially. By simply pulling the frames apart the phenomena would harmlessly disintegrate. He wondered if a few atoms could be collected by the simple construction and then measured in a more pure environment.

On one fateful day Embry was able to get access to the school’s vacuum chamber. He purged the chamber with pure nitrogen. He then put The Equation halves into the chamber, pulled a vacuum, and used a remote device to nest the two frames. He waited. In moments a pinpoint of light sprang into view, growing slowly. Embry’s heart began to pound as the light grew in size, nearly making him forget to run measurements. He pulled The Equation back apart and plucked it out, rushing home to crunch the data.

After 36 hours and two more attempts it became clear. The Equation created a gravitational density, a force so steady, small, yet powerful, that if there were no particles to fill its void the device would literally pull them from…somewhere else. With those particles came photons, and those photons came from the same somewhere else. And, most astonishingly, those photons were reflected by objects and places, giving a hazy but unmistakable picture of this somewhere else - a place not of this world.

At last he recalled a vision by the mystic, St Hildegard. A thousand years ago she had described a vision she called The Shade of the Living Light. This vision was later the inspiration for Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, an image which Embry now believed showed a man in front of a portal.