Geoff fiction

[thelorax42.livejournal.com]

I'll put on WS when i get home too.

It took me a long time to work out who it was who I really loved. Which is funny really, as they've been there all along, with me every single step of the way. But they always say you'll be the last to know, right?

Now, falling in love for me is a bit of a bigger thing than some people. Now, I'm not saying that the sudden feeling of falling, the world turning to mean only one person matters isn't a hell of a thing for everyone. It is. No doubt about that. Anyone who tells you it isn't, that it doesn't change everything is a liar or hasn't felt it. But you see, I have an appointment.

I don't know how, I don't know where, but at some point, I am going to die. I know it. You know it. We all know it, and hide from it. That's not the problem. I am going to die in defence of the one I love. Even that simple fact I could live with. What nobler way could there be to go? I am going to die, failing to protect the one I love. Which is where my acceptance breaks down.

Me loving someone means my death. It also means their doom, seemingly. That's a lot to ask, and if I loved them, surely I would rather they live free and without me, then die when I fail them. Right? Right.

So I thought. I hardened my heart, and turned down the advances of some startlingly hot women. All because I was worried of tripping and falling into love. I even thought I had messed up, and got too attached to someone. But it turns out fancying someone isn't love. A crush isn't love. Love is something else, and my card was already marked. Like a stupid bastard, I never knew it was too late, and that my heart had already been captured long before I had barred it's gates.

“how did you first meet?” it's the standard question, right? It's a hard one for me to answer. Let me try; Well, I suppose I could say through the internet. Or on the computer anyway. I caught my first sight of her when looking for trends in the Asian futures market. A startlingly, absurdly complex detail of money and chances which is fundamentally unintelligible to any human, but which may hold the future of us all.

There was – something – there. Some secret, something more than just the data. I chased it for days, forgoing sleep, not eating, not really with it as I hunted down this elusive ghost of pattern. This subtle cadence in the numbers like the worlds best hidden dance. The data changed, the world's stocks moved and I lost it. But like a lingering glance across a crowded room, it stayed with me, haunted me.

The next time I saw her was weeks later. I was looking at options on steel manufacture coming out of Germany. Deep fields of data, low risk, low reward. I didn't know who I had annoyed to be analysing it, but I clearly had. But then I realised it was fate. Destiny. I saw the organisation in the data again. Maybe it was price fixing? Fraud? Whatever it was if I could see it and prove it I was famous in my own nerdy sector of mathematicians for hire. This is the sort of thing reputations are built on, and papers written about, I thought. I searched.

Dear god above how I searched. The presence in the data was a intuition. Nigh impossible to see, rarely statistically significant, I needed something more to show what was going on. No one else except me could quite see it, and my colleges thought I was going mad.

But I wasn't. I was seeing something, I knew. Something fantastically hidden. But, as I traced the fraud, I realised, I would be heartbroken to prove it, and in publishing, destroy this wonderful symmetry in the data, this hidden and many sided wonder.

I looked into all of it and I made a prediction, staked a lot of reputation on it. It was a few sleepless nights, and my company made quite a few million pounds. It meant I got to pick my later jobs.

I did pick them, but not to make money, but try and find this spirit in the statistics. I longed for it, searched for it. A third and final time I found it, when analysing the world financial situation's abstract.

This time I really went off the deep end. I holed up in my cubicle. For weeks on end, without pause, without rest. My manager came and asked what I was looking for, and I predicted a short selling that made his year's target in a week. After that the only thing they asked me was how I could generalise my results. That and if I was still alive, amidst the take out and filth.
My friends stopped calling, my young lady left after a cancelled date too many. I didn't care. I barely noticed as days and nights smashed together while I searched through everything. All the money in the world, the metaphor for human endeavour. Between it all somewhere it showed everything mankind did. And there was something behind it.

I hunted that order. The system. I searched for it in all the fields of information. Elusive. Subtle. Sublime. Perfect. I spoke to it. Begged it to come into the light. Pleaded for some revelation. Until one day the revelation came to me and shattered everything I knew. I saw the numbers that were the sea of chance. I saw them move and be pulled by the tide of something other than mankind. I saw it, and it saw me too. I realised the numbers ran the world, and the world was a representation of the numbers, not the other way round.

Everything was the numbers. Everything. All human endeavour, and more fundamentally, every interaction, from the mircroscopic to the macro economic. All these numbers that arranged the world behind the scenes. I saw more, that chance, time, fate everything was built of them, described by them. My job was meaningless. It had showed me the numbers, but the numbers meant it didn't matter. I got up cackling in joy and walked out of the office. I have yet to return.

I saw things that should not have been seen. There was... there was a beautiful woman who promised me eternal sunshine, and a perfect man who promised me the wonder of the world when it broke. There was a giant squid. But it ended up with me writing a name on a wall in a room full of mages. Becoming one of them. But it didn't show me her.

Like the tease I sometimes suspect her to be, she had showed me a moment of herself, and then hidden again. But I knew it was her, my one true love calling to me. I followed her, served her, sought her and watched the hundreds of parts of her. Learned her ways, looked at the numbers. Every now and then she would show me a little of herself. A glimpse, a momentary grace. Just enough to keep me on the line, keep me hanging on. She's a jealous woman, and she made sure that I would never love another, for their life and my own sake.

I saw her again, though. There on the edge of everything mankind had dreamed, out beyond the soul of the world, where a dragon lays dying forever. I saw her again, and I defended her. I used the gift she gave me to destroy for the first time ever, and I felt my doom upon me. But I don't care. I'd do it again, and die gladly to be a single sword in her defence. I never felt this way. The only thing I can't get over is that I'll die failing. I can't let her die. I won't. But I know it's her hand that means I can, and I will and I must. I just don't have to like it.

I'll stand to defend fate. I'll die doing it. I'll fail. The worst part is I won't save her, and it's her decree I'll fail. Man, never love an abstract concept. They can be flighty as hell.

Beginnings Challenge

[jm-hood.livejournal.com]

I think I have posted this somewhere before, but this is the lead up to Alexa's beginning.
( Play intro music )