Blood and maths
Dec. 19th, 2013 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnI had an absolutely Christawful dream last night.
I woke up in a Silent Hill-like windowless, dimly lit rusted room, with a group of about thirty other people who were slowly waking up and getting their bearings. Each of us had a hospital skullcap over our heads, with two silver electrodes on our temples, and they were causing a very uncomfortable gripping sensation. Reaching up to touch them revealed that they were fastened securely to our heads, and any attempt to take them off made them press inwards painfully for a second before receding again.
As people stood up, we began introducing ourselves to each other. I can't remember any of their names or faces, but we were all university age, and what I remember was that the great majority of them were working towards mathematics degrees. We went round and found a couple of physicists, a couple of computer scientists like me - almost all of us had some specialization that broadly fit into mathematics in some sense. The exceptions were just a few people in the room who were in English or history or other arts degrees.
After we had stood around, a voice was piped into the room announcing that we were going to take part in a set of challenges. It said that they would be based on our knowledge of mathematics, and that the price of failure would be steep.
Three people's heads exploded, and there was a panic in the now bloodstained room as what remained of them fell to the floor. They had been the people who weren't in mathematics - they had been brought there just to serve as examples. Apparently the head electrodes had some mechanism for sending a pulse through the wearer's head so that the resonance caused it to burst violently.
The voice said that we were going to be split into groups. I can't remember how that was organized, but half of the group stayed in the original room while the others, including me, went out and through an equally shabby hallway into a very similar room opposite. In this room, there was a long table with a small box of cards on it - one of our number upended the box and spilled out a set of twelve cards on to the table.
Activity began immediately, with people in the group scrambling to pick up and read the cards - each had a question on them, none of which I recognized, and the people who had picked them up feverishly began writing their working on them in some alien symbolic language. I saw the question on one of the cards, which asked about something meaningless in real life like the "first five symbolic primes", and feeling that I couldn't be of much help, I wandered out into the hallway.
A group of three people were sitting here, and one of them had a laptop out. I asked him if he could look up the symbolic primes, and he shook his head, saying "He's bound to be watching". So I went back into the room again, where the people with the cards were feeding them into a small device with a screen on the wall. As some unexplained timer ran out, the last of the cards was fed in, and the screen began slowly listing the results.
The occupants of the room held their breath as the results were displayed one by one - the number of the card ascending from 1 to 12, with a "correct" symbol (which for some reason was a percentage sign) being displayed next to each one. After a pause on the twelfth result, the % symbol appeared next to it as well, and the room collectively sighed with relief - which quickly became panic again as a thirteenth row appeared on the screen.
We turned back to the table, and the one who had touched the box before looked inside it again, rattling it and scraping inside with his fingers, and more fell out of it - there had been twenty-nine cards. A cacophony of shouts and screams went up, I hid under the table to avoid the fighting, and suddenly there was the wet noise of three more heads bursting in turn.
I retreated from the room, looking into the original room, where a fresh splash of blood on the door signalled that the other group had not fared better than ours. Beginning to break the narrative of the dream, I decided that I didn't want to watch this and had thought that it would be much more innocent than it was - so I went up to the roof and slowly scaled my way down from the building, despite it looking like the height of the falls from roof to roof was far too much to survive.
I think that that was when I woke up. Maybe I escaped.
I woke up in a Silent Hill-like windowless, dimly lit rusted room, with a group of about thirty other people who were slowly waking up and getting their bearings. Each of us had a hospital skullcap over our heads, with two silver electrodes on our temples, and they were causing a very uncomfortable gripping sensation. Reaching up to touch them revealed that they were fastened securely to our heads, and any attempt to take them off made them press inwards painfully for a second before receding again.
As people stood up, we began introducing ourselves to each other. I can't remember any of their names or faces, but we were all university age, and what I remember was that the great majority of them were working towards mathematics degrees. We went round and found a couple of physicists, a couple of computer scientists like me - almost all of us had some specialization that broadly fit into mathematics in some sense. The exceptions were just a few people in the room who were in English or history or other arts degrees.
After we had stood around, a voice was piped into the room announcing that we were going to take part in a set of challenges. It said that they would be based on our knowledge of mathematics, and that the price of failure would be steep.
Three people's heads exploded, and there was a panic in the now bloodstained room as what remained of them fell to the floor. They had been the people who weren't in mathematics - they had been brought there just to serve as examples. Apparently the head electrodes had some mechanism for sending a pulse through the wearer's head so that the resonance caused it to burst violently.
The voice said that we were going to be split into groups. I can't remember how that was organized, but half of the group stayed in the original room while the others, including me, went out and through an equally shabby hallway into a very similar room opposite. In this room, there was a long table with a small box of cards on it - one of our number upended the box and spilled out a set of twelve cards on to the table.
Activity began immediately, with people in the group scrambling to pick up and read the cards - each had a question on them, none of which I recognized, and the people who had picked them up feverishly began writing their working on them in some alien symbolic language. I saw the question on one of the cards, which asked about something meaningless in real life like the "first five symbolic primes", and feeling that I couldn't be of much help, I wandered out into the hallway.
A group of three people were sitting here, and one of them had a laptop out. I asked him if he could look up the symbolic primes, and he shook his head, saying "He's bound to be watching". So I went back into the room again, where the people with the cards were feeding them into a small device with a screen on the wall. As some unexplained timer ran out, the last of the cards was fed in, and the screen began slowly listing the results.
The occupants of the room held their breath as the results were displayed one by one - the number of the card ascending from 1 to 12, with a "correct" symbol (which for some reason was a percentage sign) being displayed next to each one. After a pause on the twelfth result, the % symbol appeared next to it as well, and the room collectively sighed with relief - which quickly became panic again as a thirteenth row appeared on the screen.
We turned back to the table, and the one who had touched the box before looked inside it again, rattling it and scraping inside with his fingers, and more fell out of it - there had been twenty-nine cards. A cacophony of shouts and screams went up, I hid under the table to avoid the fighting, and suddenly there was the wet noise of three more heads bursting in turn.
I retreated from the room, looking into the original room, where a fresh splash of blood on the door signalled that the other group had not fared better than ours. Beginning to break the narrative of the dream, I decided that I didn't want to watch this and had thought that it would be much more innocent than it was - so I went up to the roof and slowly scaled my way down from the building, despite it looking like the height of the falls from roof to roof was far too much to survive.
I think that that was when I woke up. Maybe I escaped.
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-20 06:38 am (UTC)(Append alternative: Oko San will inhale all the math!)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-20 09:09 am (UTC)*hugs gently*
D.F.