The Geometry of a Winter Night
The vellum sheet of night was still wet with the last sigh of the day. Snow drifted in tight spirals, each flake a perfect miniature of the storm that started a few hours ago. I shrugged to bring my jacket tighter around my shoulders and hobbled along the cobblestones that led to campus. The lamplight cast amber haloes on the wet stones.
When I opened the door to my apartment, the radiator hissed a low and steady note, and the tinnitus in my ear harmonized with it. I clicked one of my T41 ThinkPad keycaps to interrupt my trippy fractal screensaver.
I entered my too-long password and opened another instance of vim to work on what I had been building all semester: a 3D fractal explorer that incorporated temporality in the design and let people soar through Mandelbulbs, Julia sets, and a handful of handcrafted attractors I had rescued from a forgotten Russian monograph. You could upload whatever fractals you wanted. It was so fucking cool.
The screen flickered to life, and the Mandelbulb rose like a god before me, a luminous vortex of custom violet and teal. Its surface was a sea of ridges that seemed to breathe like the walls were starting to.
I pressed W, and the camera dove into a cusp of the fractal, the geometry stretching and collapsing in a rhythm that was both chaotic and musical. The deeper I went, the more it looked like a cathedral interior: arches within arches, each one a miniature echo of the whole, each lit from within by a phosphorescent glow that had no source outside the algorithm.
I uploaded a photo of a sunflower. Then the vision began.
It appeared on the screen flawless and symmetric, a logarithmic Fibonacci sequence. I learned the sequence from this old Global Underground mix from the 90s. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21-eno-1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. An infinite set. Mathematics is the language of nature.
In the Fibonacci spiral, there was a man in a wool coat, his breath a thin white plume that rose and vanished. His eyes were lenses, each reflecting the infinite recursion of the fractal itself. As the camera circled, the lenses caught the light of the surrounding geometry and projected it back onto the screen in concentric rings that pulsed with a soft, wordless chant:
Scale. Repeat. Return.
The sound wasn’t even a tone somehow. It canceled out tones. My tinnitus was gone for a minute. All I could hear was the vibration in the air of the room.
I transported through a narrow throat of the Mandelbulb and emerged on the other side into a street that was unmistakably familiar. It looked like home, but it was not quite home. Brick façades of brownstones rose on each side with amber light spilling from windows, and the scent of freshly ground coffee and cigarettes flowed through the cold air. The smoke curled into a speech bubble that said “Lattice,” and then it transmogrified into a sign above the spectral coffee shop.
Inside, the tables were arranged in a branching pattern. There was a large central table surrounded by four smaller ones, each of those circled by five still smaller tables, and it kept going like a set of nested Russian dolls. At the near end, a woman with copper‑red hair sat alone, a notebook open before her, a pencil poised above a page of spiraling script.
Her eyes were rendered in exquisite subpixel detail, and so was the rest of her. She was unrenderable. She smiled, a curve that matched the curvature of the ridges of the Mandelbulb. “The fractal is a map,” she said, “but the territory is you.”
The camera pulled back, and she was gone as the Mandelbulb dissolved into a sea of micropixels, pixels, and macropixels, each one a new world. The points coalesced into a 3D Barnsley fern, its fronds unfurling in perfect self‑similarity. A translucent lattice traced the veins of the fern. Each vein of the fern was a miniature fern, and every leaf was a copy of the whole. Then I saw Conway’s Game of Life generate cellular automata that replicated inside and outside of themselves perpetually.
The same me that walks on the cobblestones is the same me that sits at a table in Lattice while the world folds around him in nested patterns, and the same me that lives in a line of code, a single letter, a breath that condenses into a snowflake. And all of them are self-observing fractals.
The revelation wasn’t a sudden flash. It was a slow, recursive unfolding, like watching the fern itself unfurl leaf after leaf. The Mandelbulb’s surface became a mirror, reflecting not only the geometry of the algorithm but the geometry of consciousness itself.
I used a pirated version of Hypercam 2 and started recording a video. I recorded the first one for 5 minutes at first just to make sure I had a copy, because I couldn’t believe what I saw. Then I backed it up to two cloud providers just in case, and then I restarted the recording to stream to my cloud drives for as long as it could. It would do this infinitely, until my laptop crashed or I couldn’t afford my cloud storage bill anymore.
I had just witnessed a Biblically accurate angel. I stood, stretched, and walked to the window to pull the thin curtain aside. I looked over at the snow globe on the mantle. Snow drifted in tight spirals, each flake a perfect miniature of the storm that started a few hours ago.