The Lost Marble
Short fanfiction, recounting nearly scene for scene a dream I had a few days ago. It's basically the creation myth but with maths.
The Lost Marble
Once upon a time, Quater made the first man in his garden. He made him out of wire, so he could test how he moved and talked before moving on with his design. The wire man lived happily in the garden. One day, Quater brought a bag of marbles to him.
“Look,” Quater said, pouring the marbles out into his palm. They were white, red, yellow, blue and black. “I made this for you. With these marbles, you can count. You can add numbers,” he showed the wire man how, “and subtract them. You can use them to multiply and divide, like so. This is how you perform exponentials and logarithms. You can handle singularities and complex numbers as well. Anything you desire.” Deftly he demonstrated everything to the wire man. “With these marbles, you can prove any mathematical theorem. Anything you can think of, you will be able to prove it or disprove it conclusively, once and for all. This is because each of the marbles is a universal truth, and together they make up all the knowledge in creation.”
The wire man watched in wonder. Quater took his right hand and made flesh on it from the marbles. The new hand had white skin and black fingers, and it was the hand of God. It was a hand that, if it took a pen, would write the direct words of Father. It was a hand which, if it took a brush, would create wonderful art. The wire man observed his new hand in amazement.
Quater took the flesh off and turned it back into marbles. He put them on a bench and said to the wire man: “I made this all for you. From these marbles, you will make the flesh of your entire body. They will constitute a brain which can name anything it observes, and a heart which can praise Father with the right words. Do you like it?”
The wire man cried out with delight and rushed to hug Quater. He knocked his creator over, so Quater fell on his butt right in the middle of the marbles. The white, red, yellow, blue and black orbs flew to all sides.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Quater cried out. “Come, gather the marbles up.”
The wire man did his best, but he was only wire. In the end, Quater had to find most of the marbles. By the evening, he counted them and sighed. “One red marble is missing,” he said. “Well, no matter. We will find it eventually. My son, make do with these marbles for now. Make your flesh and brain and heart out of them. You can add the last marble later when it is found.”
The wire man took the marbles bashfully. They were still magnificent truths, after all.
So it happened that when Quater exiled the first man from his garden, the last red marble had still not been found. The man left his creator’s bosom incomplete and unfinished. All people descended from this man, and that is why we feel like there is something missing from our lives. We stumble and err and cannot agree on the most basic of things. We are all missing that last, lost marble. With it, we would be complete. We would know the truth of the universe. Without it, we spend our lives searching the garden of Quater for the marble which would make us entire.
