Chapter 8 “A New Dawn.”
Chapter 8
“A New Dawn.”
December 3rd, 2026.
Nothing new existed under the Sun. Or so it was said.
Still, the phrase unsettled Matt more than it should have. There was just something off about it. As if the certainty of such a declaration hid an omission.
He let the thought linger, a brief pause from the larger problem pressing in on him.
Matt scratched at his smooth chin and felt his shoulders ease. The pressure that once tightened his chest no longer demanded every breath. Now, the small comforts remained pure, no longer feeling borrowed.
He stayed there, letting the quiet stretch for a while before turning exhausted eyes back towards his laptop. There, tabs filled with scientific archives, Wikipedia spirals, scraped white papers. He trawled through language databases, semiotic indexes, old missionary codices and physics sub-Reddits like a starving man reading the backs of cereal boxes.
Dazed, he stared at the X button on his FireFox, weighing, weighing, weighing.
Slowly, his gaze wandered across the chalked symbols, tables, and half erased notes. Lines intersected where he had not intended them to. Curves repeated at irregular intervals. He traced one curve with his finger, then another, several columns away. The resemblance was slight, but persistent.
He frowned, then stepped back.
It was not invention that had been missing. It was alignment. He stopped trying to force meaning and let the symbols exist as they were. Using an old college trick he’d half-mastered, Matt led the deluge of data wash over him, imagining himself a lone isle facing waves crushing against his shore.
That was when he caught it!
The heat pressed in as Matt leaned over the workstation, eyes raw from hours of sorting sequences and rotations, mind numb from fighting to keep it all from overwhelming him.
His finger paused over the board.
The curve appeared again, slight enough to dismiss, except it had already done that once before. And once before that.
Matt sat back, eyes narrowing, and followed it across the equations. Not copied. Not mirrored. Reappearing.
He stood and crossed to the whiteboard wedged into the corner of the room. His finger followed the tables. His foot tapped against the cage frame. Then it stopped.
The deviation was small. Except it did not go away. A distortion that threaded through the calculus, barely altering its flow.
Almost coincidence.
Yet beneath the noise, the curve of one glyph echoed others he had seen days earlier. The same turn. The same hesitation. A return.
Matt released a breath and blinked.
Then he smiled.
~ Ѡ ~
December 17th, 2026.
It had taken time for Matt to admit how much of his footing came from work laid down long before him.
He treated it as procedure rather than confession. One step followed another; science moving forward by repetition rather than abruption. Every major leap rested on labor that never saw reward. What mattered was not pretending otherwise, but choosing where to place the next brick.
So his first move was imitation, and he made no effort to disguise it.
He began with the Voyager 1 archive. Beneath aging PDFs and earnest fan recreations, the original material waited. They were the early outreach protocols. Symbols, numbers, chemistry, pulsar maps. All of it arranged to deliver a single, hopeful message.
“Hello. Is anyone listening?”
He studied it until the shape of the idea became clear.
Not the words. That would have been pointless.
He tried words first and deleted them just as quickly. Symbols lasted longer.
Furiously rubbing it all out, Matt next opened a blank canvas and stared at it longer than he meant to.
Then he dragged a single symbol into the center and duplicated it, spacing the copies by eye. Matt moved on to more shapes and let them repeat until they felt familiar. When numbers joined them, he kept only those that survived contact with symmetry.
Matt arranged them, frowned, then cleared the screen again. On the third pass, he kept the numbers but stripped away everything that named them. What remained began to feel intentional.
He erased the labels, erased the text entirely, and let the shapes sit on their own. Numbers followed, then relationships between them. He grouped, separated, regrouped. He added motion next. A looping path. A second body. The spacing mattered more than the detail, so he simplified until only the relationship remained.
Getting into the groove, he could feel the adrenaline amping up!
Visual equations followed. Pictograms of the periodic table. Orbital mechanics. A stripped-down solar model, expanded just enough to suggest depth and distance.
Voyager had said: this is who we are.
What Matt sent said something else. This is how I think. Show me how you do.
He stopped at one slide and lingered. A pulse of light crossed a field of black, marked simply as one year. Beside it, a planet traced its path around a star.
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Simple,” he murmured. “Clear. Elegant.”
He sat back and looked at the sequence again. “Okay, there you go. This monkey can do more than bang on a trunk. Now, show me yours.”
~ Ѡ ~
January 29th, 2027.
Matt spent longer deciding what to remove than what to keep.
He opened one sequence, then another. Closed them again without saving. Slide after slide vanished from the workspace. Whole sections went dark.
His coffee cooled as he thumbed through the archive. His mouth tightened once, then settled.
He paused on a diagram long enough to recognize what it showed. A complete structure of the human genome. Shaking his head, Matt dragged it into the discard pane.
Another followed. This one contained the precise unit measurements of the Solar System. With another shake of the head, that too was discarded. Then another. And another.
“No. No, no, no.” He said quietly, each tap sending swathes of critical information on humanity into an electronic dustbin.
Finally, he leaned back and let the empty canvas breathe.
Matt watched the Coffee Machine by his side while his new laptop softly hummed. Watching the rendering programs work, he couldn’t help ‘pat’ himself on the back after the hours of work. Now, in front of him was a rebuilt sequence of the human genome taking shape, filling in the gaps left where detail had been.
Now, looking on, some of the dis-ease he’d been feeling slowly left his frame.
~ Ѡ ~
February 21th, 2027.
The math was still a gamble.
He duplicated one equation, altered it, then reversed it. Watched what survived. When a symbol failed to carry, he removed it without ceremony.
Through it all, the same question surfaced as the room grew quiet…
How much do I admit?
He glanced at the machine. Whatever had built it had chosen a blunt instrument and made it work anyway.
Draining the last of the coffee, he rapped the board once, as if to confirm it was still there. Then a second and third time for luck’s sake.
“They already know. Probably. What I need to let them know is that I am worth an invitation to the door.” He said. The thought did not argue back.
A half remembered saying drifted through Matt’s mind as he watched lines scroll past his screen. He dismissed it with a blink and kept going. Each new variation earned its own entry. He tagged it, cross referenced it, filed it away, then moved on without ceremony.
Windows multiplied across the display. One parsed shapes. Another tested relationships. A third rejected outputs that failed to hold symmetry long enough to matter.
The system stalled. Recovered. Stalled again. He let it.
At some point, the errors stopped escalating.
Sometime past exhaustion, a new line appeared. It did not fracture when reprocessed. It held when he inverted the symbols and ran it again.
Matt scrolled back. Then forward. The output did not ask for correction. It waited. He leaned closer to the screen. Eyes burning from proximity and dryness, he rubbed them once, then stopped himself and scryed over the generated code.
Then, as he stared on, his eyes glowed!
