MANDELBROT
On behalf of the void: When Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia began to investigate the field of mathematical complex dynamics in the beginning of the twentieth century,
and when Peigen and Richter unleashed the Mandelbrot set on the new world of personal computers,
they buzzed with life and crashed when you dared to zoom in on the intangible fractal.
SEAHORSE VALLEY:
What to do when gold is pyrite
and websites are not found.
DOUBLE SPIRALS:
Not quite parallel, crashing at a point even when they do all they can to avoid it,
SEAHORSE:
twenty-five spokes and twelve spokes and one spoke,
and you won’t speak, not even when the doors of the brick-and-mortar block-corner tech store close and there’s no one to idly chat with about music and math while the cold breeze blows past the mildly cracked glass doors that the manager won’t fix because “no one has broken in yet”.
And when your computer bluescreens, remember it could have been you
behind the counter.
Next, the MISIUREWICZ POINT:
A pre-periodic critical point. Non-recurrent, just like
a second, like a year.
A complex quadratic polynomial only has a singular critical point. We reach this point at the end of a SEAHORSE’S TAIL:
And when we spoke for the first time, we mumbled about the Mandelbrot set, you in the flash drive aisle and I shelving GPUs. And when we spoke for the last time,
you were knocking on the store’s front door and the manager told me to not let you in because we were closed so when he left I opened the door to you and your ragged green jacket with tacky rock band patches and the chilly city air and I knew that the world was going to keep me away from you.
And it did,
SATELLITE:
You didn’t know this part (it’s fairly new research)
I told you the definition I regurgitated from a pretentious, hardcover Guide to Fractals that I manipulated an ex who worked at a bookstore to special order for me. But there is a different SATELLITE out there as well, the ones in space I knew, watching us, and loving us with cold mechanical hearts and unfathomably precise eyes. And I knew that the SATELLITES were watching us at that moment.
The Mandelbrot set is
“a simply connected set, which means there are no islands and no loop roads around a hole”,
and, let’s just say we were navigating its infinity, weaving through the aisles of the store I worked at, but there’s no way to cross it, you at the X and I at the Y.
And a SATELLITE makes a crown, from the antennae to the Christian-repelling prayer-inducing Biblically accurate concentric middle. And nature was God to you, and math was God to me. So yes, the SATELLITES are watching.