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"Since I have always been cute, boys who approached me generally did so harboring feelings for me." I give up. It's like she just added an extra two servings of vegetables and a serving of MSG to my ramen. But although I tried to put up a front and acted all confident, I can't just get up and go now. I steeled myself and waited patiently for her to continue talking. "I believe it began during my final years of elementary school. Ever since then…." Yukinoshita's expression was different from what it was just previously. It was a little melancholy. It has been a little over five years now. What the hell does it even feel like to be constantly exposed to feelings of affection from the opposite sex?
Frankly, having been exposed to feelings of disgust from the opposite sex for a little over sixteen years now, I could never comprehend it. Having not even received Valentine's Day chocolates from my own mother, it was a world I couldn't understand. It just seems like she's one of those people who are gleeful cause they're winning at life. Isn't she just making me listen to her fucking brag? But that's just it, isn't it? Although it's about as different as a positive vector is from a negative vector in magnitude, it would be harsh to hit her with my honest feelings. It would be like standing naked in the midst of a raging storm. It would be as harsh as persecuting her in the middle of a classroom discussion.
I remember being made to stand in front of the blackboard alone as the rest of the class encircled chanting 'Apo-lo-gize! Apo-lo-gize!' in a loud voice as they clapped their hands. It would be a scenario similar to that hell. …That was seriously a tough experience.
It was the first and last time I have ever cried at school.
But I'm all good now.
"Well being liked has gotta be somewhat better than being constantly hated. You're spoiled. Too spoiled." I blurted out after that unpleasant memory just crossed my mind. Yukinoshita gave a short sigh. It seemed a lot like she was smiling but yet her expression was clearly different.
"It's not as if I have ever wanted to be liked by people though." She asserted and then added only a few more words. "Otherwise, if people genuinely did like me then that would have probably been a good thing."
"Huh?" I unconsciously asked her to repeat what she said after hearing her soft murmur. She turned around to face me wearing a serious expression.
"If you had a friend who was generally popular with girls, what would you think?"
"That's a stupid question. I don't have any friends so I wouldn't need to worry about such a thing." I gave an exceedingly forceful reply. Like a man would. Even if I do say so myself, I was surprised at how I quickly cut in with a reply before she had even finished talking.
It seemed Yukinoshita was also surprised. She was at a loss for words with her mouth hanging open.
"…For a second, I actually thought you said something cool." Yukinoshita gently put a hand on her temple as though she had a headache, and hung her head low. "Think of it as a hypothetical and give me an answer."
"I don't really care about girls," I confessed.
"What happened to being pet on the head by a cute girl?"
"You don't have to be cute or a girl. I just want to be pet," I confessed with a low chuckle. "All the other boys are constantly pursuing some girl or this or that or the other thing. And I sort of get it but I never really wanted it for myself. I'd settle for being a halfway decent brother if I could and then stepping out into that fresh night when my little sister doesn't need me anymore. I can't really imagine adding a whole other person to the left hand side of that expression. But maybe that's just me. Girls are fine and cute and all but they aren't something that should be chased. At least not by me."
She laughed a little. A pleasant small giggle. "I should have known you'd be so atypical. Well, for girls since I was targeted by boys and pursued by them I was the subject of no small amount of jealousy. Boys liked me but other girls did not. The school I went to was filled to the brim by girls who were jealous of the power I held over boys. They wanted to destroy me without touching me and it's not like I could ever allow that to come to pass. I had to keep going. And now here I am. When I was in elementary school, I had my indoor shoes hidden from me about sixty times but fifty of those times were done by girls in my class."
"I'm curious about the other ten times," I confessed.
"Three of the times were done by boys. Another two times was when the teacher brought them from me. For the remaining five times, a dog had stolen them."
"The percentage of times done by dogs is pretty high. About eight. Dogs must like you too."
"Thanks to that, I had to take my indoor shoes home everyday and in the end I even had to take my recorder home too." Yukinoshita said with a wearied expression. Upon seeing her expression, I involuntarily felt some sympathy towards her. Isn't it because of that? The fact that it's similar to what I experienced. The fact that in elementary school, I felt guilty 'cause I was in the classroom at an hour nobody would be around just so I could swap the mouthpiece of my recorder. I was just genuinely feeling sorry for Yukinoshita. It's true. It's true. Hachiman. Don't. Tell. Lies.
"That must've been tough for you."
"Yes, it was tough. All because I'm cute. But it can't be helped. Nobody is perfect. They are weak, they have ugly minds and they get jealous easily and try to bring others down. Oddly enough, the more superior you are the harder it is to live in this world. Isn't that just wrong? That's why I'm going to change this world and the people in it." Yukinoshita's eyes were dead serious and harbored a coldness that could burn you like dry ice could.
"Isn't too insane to be putting all your effort into some extravagant plan?"
"Maybe. But it's considerably better than your plan to dry up, wither away and die….I hate the way that you consider your weakness as a positive." Yukinoshita said and averted her eyes to look outside the window.
"There are some things I want to do before I kick the bucket," I disagreed in part. Gravity. The big seven. The Prime numbers.
Yukinoshita Yukino is a beautiful girl. An infallible truth that even I was forced to acknowledge with the deepest regret. From the outside she seemed to be irreproachable, with grades that were excellent and faultless. However, her difficult personality is a fatal wound in her character. Such flaws are not cute at all. But there is a reason for her to have sustained that fatal wound.
I don't blindly believe everything that Hiratsuka sensei says but by being someone who has a lot, Yukinoshita has her own miseries.
It certainly wouldn't be hard to hide that by continuing to deceive yourself and those around you. That's what most people in this world do. Just like how people who are good at studying get good grades in an exam and say that it was because they had a lucky guess at what was going to be in the exam. Just like how plain looking girls who are jealous of beautiful girls assert that their ugliness is determined by how fat they are.
But Yukinoshita doesn't do that.
She would never lie to herself.
It's not like I won't at least commend that attitude of hers. Because we are the same in that way. As a result of the conversation ending, Yukinoshita looked back down at her paperback book. As I watched her, a strange feeling suddenly overcame me. She and I are certainly alike in some way. I found myself thinking that in spite of myself. The silence in that moment somehow felt nice. I felt my heart beat a little faster. It was like my heart was saying it wanted to beat faster than the ticking of the second hand and beyond. Then… Then she and I….
"Hey, Yukinoshita…If you want, I could be your frie-"
"I'm sorry. That is impossible."
I laughed. I threw my head back a little. What had I expected? She was too good for me and she knew it. Besides, I was a schizophrenic loser. Or something was wrong with me, at least. Every doctor I'd ever seen always said something like 'well you're not schizophrenic.' And they put that emphasis on 'schizophrenic' too.
You frigid ice bitch. I chuckled.
Well, Komachi, I tried.
"You're lucky that you're so cute," I grinned down at Yukinoshita. She scowled up at me. I smirked.
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I put both headphones in and worked.
"Take me through your underworld. I want to be your whore."
I pulled out my notebook and addressed the section on gravity in the context of string theory. You see, in the language of string theory, the force carrying particle for gravity arises naturally out of the eleven dimensions.
"You can be so adorgynous. Keep me in a trance."
That force carrying particle was the graviton. You've probably heard of that one even if you're only an amateur. Presumably they caused gravitational waves and were elemented by the Higgs Field. That field which gave all objects in the universe mass.
"Leave me only wanting more. It's a techno euphoria."
Particles in that Higgs field vibrated slightly and gave off the gravitons. And the Higgs field was caused by the god particle. Or, rather, the 'oh my god' particle. It had to do with the one electron hypothesis. The idea was that every electron in the universe was the same electron. Just in multiple places at once and in some places more often than in others. This worked well with the Schrodinger equation and the hamilton expression. And if the electron was like that, then why couldn't all matter be the same particle just spread out in probability and we registered this probability as what we observed as mass.
"Your back's against a wall. Living in the ruins of a shopping mall."
Most scientists believed that those extra dimensions in string theory were just really small and that's why we didn't observe them. My intuition told me that they could also be very large and we wouldn't observe them either. I set about working at that in my small room. My laptop was open to Arxiv and my digital textbooks.
"Nothing is as it seems. Original killer hiding under sick machines."
After all, why couldn't those dimensions be arbitrarily large. But this talk of arbitrary largeness and smallness which were proof talk for infinity and zero reminded me of the Yang Mills Mass Gap. The Yang Mills Mass Gap was one of the big seven and apart from the debacle between Quantum Loop Gravity and String Theory it was the biggest unsolved problem in physics.
"Believe in the mystery. Drag me through the dirt."
The laws of quantum physics stand to the world of elementary particles in the way that Newton's laws of classical mechanics stand to the macroscopic world. Almost half a century ago, Yang and Mills introduced a remarkable new framework to describe elementary particles using structures that also occur in geometry. Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now the foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories, but its mathematical foundation is still unclear.
"Disguise and deceive. Keep me in a trance."
The successful use of Yang-Mills theory to describe the strong interactions of elementary particles depends on a subtle quantum mechanical property called the "mass gap": the quantum particles have positive masses, even though the classical waves travel at the speed of light. This property has been discovered by physicists from experiment and confirmed by computer simulations, but it still has not been understood from a theoretical point of view. Progress in establishing the existence of the Yang-Mills theory and a mass gap will require the introduction of fundamental new ideas both in physics and in mathematics.
"I love the way you make me hurt. It's a techno thriller."
You see, a million dollars was waiting for whoever could come up with a new theory of particle physics which better fit the data. And it would have to be done in at least \mathbb{R}^{4} or four real dimensions. This was because of Einstein's theory of relativity already operating in \mathbb{R}^{4}. So you had to do at least that good. It would be revolutionary and was often called the hardest of the millennium prize problems though that was debatable because the Zeta hypothesis and the P vs NP problem both slap.
"Your backs against the wall. Living in the ruins of a shaping mall."
One of the other stipulations of Yang Mills was demonstrating that mass gap. The question was this: is there a minimum massive particle to the universe? That \delta m was critical to understanding the universe. And I believed we could create a theory of particle physics where that mass gap was arbitrarily small. Again, arbitrarily small was proof talk for zero.
"Nothing is as it seems. Original killer."
I didn't believe that there was a bottom to the universe. I thought you could always go smaller and experimental results seemed to be on my side. Experiments from the Large Hadron Collider and Fermi Labs were firmly in my camp of belief. But did that make the universe a fractal. A fractal was an object with a partial dimension. Most objects we imagine have three or two or even one dimensions. Higher dimensional objects were hard to imagine but it could be done with mathematics. If the universe was a fractal than we shouldn't be trying to solve in \mathbb{R}^{4}. We should be trying to solve in some fractional part of a dimension. And that would fit the data better because it would automatically give us a theory of everything.
"Hiding under sick machines. Professional sinner. I love the way you make me hurt."
Those were just my thoughts at least. It wasn't even strong enough to call a conjecture. It wasn't testable because I didn't have that dimensional number. Specifically to be a fractal the fractal dimension had to strictly exceed it's topological dimension. Fractals often appeared self similar on different levels of magnification. One way that fractals are different from usual geometric figures is the way that they scale. Doubling the edge lengths of a polygon multiples it's area by four. Four is two raised to the power of two. It's the ratio between the new sidelength and the old raised to the power of the dimensions that the object sits in. However if a fractal's one-dimensional lengths are all doubled, the spatial content of that fractal scales by a power that is not necessarily an integer. A whole number.
Analytically fractals are nowhere differentiable which means you can't do calculus anywhere in their space. That severely limits the number of tools that can be brought to bear against fractals. Poincare disks often had fractal properties. That's what made them a contender in my book for a state of the universe.
You may have heard of The Mandelbrot Set.
f_{c}(z) = z^{2} + c
Was the complex function for the Mandelbrot Set. It was so simple yet so true. Of course the golden spiral was sort of a fractal too if you stretched the definition. As was the sphere.
What were the implications if the universe was a hyperbolic fractal?
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-WG