The Answers

Michael has a calculus test. The gods will soon be appeased with the blood of the innocent.

Michael stared down motionless at the stapled stack of paper sitting on his desk, filled with numbers and questions and, worst of all, blank space. He found the clock on the wall and saw that several more minutes had ticked by. These papers lacked a brain, a limbic system, and the ability to harbor ill intent, but nevertheless they were going to screw him over, hard.

He tapped his pencil impatiently on the white space under question three. All around him was the scratching of graphite on paper and the gentle pattering of calculator buttons being pushed. Michael glanced around him, taking stock of his neighbors’ cheating fortifications and the teacher’s current position, but nothing near him was helpful. The clock hands were still racing along. He didn’t have much time left. Michael locked down and re-read question three for the tenth time.

3) Using Green’s Theorem, find the length of the curve of F = ˂ tan(x²), x²˃ along the illustrated segment.

Who the hell was Green? Michael wondered. But inside he was panicking and nothing was coming from it besides an acute sense of dread and a blank image. He wished he knew. He wished he just knew. He’d give anything to just suddenly have the answers to everything.

And then it hit him.

Green’s Theorem, Michael thought, of course! The integral of the area with dN/dx �" dM/dy and the work done, F * dr, was simply F˂x,y˃ * ˂dx,dy˃  and suddenly he knew everything. He wrote like a man possessed and filled the entire page with his newfound wisdom.

Michael flipped the paper over and read the next question. It asked about spherical coordinates. Again, his brain provided the right answers to him. They came without thought. He scribbled the numbers down and continued.

The next question was something about potential functions, but Michael was so smart now that he could read beyond the written question. It was actually asking him about mankind’s perception of death. His thoughts raced in, and he filled the entire white space with observations about good and evil and space-time and guinea pigs until his hand hurt as it held the pen. The answers! Oh, the answers were his now, coming without prompt but ringing with truth, filling him with euphoria. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote, flipping pages over and over and -

That was it. He had arrived at the end.

There was the blank page, marking the conclusion of the test.

But there was another question here, a hidden question, Michael realized. And he alone could see it.

∞) What do you need to do next?

The answer was so simple. Jim. Jim from chemistry. This was his fault. All of it. And the answers kept spilling from his brain to his hand like a waterfall, and he found himself writing all about the dark alley Jim took after work and the wrench he needed to buy, and Michael knew that nobody would look in the river, and then the gods would be appeased with blood, and Michael started grinning to himself because he had the answers!

They couldn’t hold him back for long. The path. The wrench. The black garbage bag dumped over the bridge. He knew now.

He knew everything.

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

Deliciously macabre' and with a well written flow into an inevitable stream leading into an inevitable conclusion.

No criticism, I certainly could not have done this nearly so well. I will note a couple of things: Some readers will suddenly be lost and/or put off by mathematics. If you are a mathematician with a bent toward writing then you can safely say screw the benighted lost, and preach to the illuminated choir. If you are are writer with a bent for maths you might consider a subject more accessible to we the benighted. That was one thing. The other thing has to do with the inevitability of the conclusion, that is to say, I saw it coming. No implication that foreseeing an ending is bad, it worked in "The Tell Tale Heart" and for Crime and Punishment so you are in good company.

It is nice to see a good, sturdy, short story in this place. Maybe if enough story writers arrive it will clear out this infestation of poets.