The number line is not just a line that has numbers on it. The number line is a landscape. It’s a world. It’s a numerical Narnia, a mathematical Middle Earth. And this is the story of my journey across it.
Everybody thinks that they grew up in the most boring neighborhood on the whole number line. But trust me: you’d rather spend seven eternities in your home than a Saturday night in mine. I don’t need to describe my home interval; you know it already. Neither terribly close to an integer nor terribly far from one. No famous constants for miles around. No crossroads, no bustling port, no frontier town. Just an anonymous suburb of an unseen city, a faceless stretch on the long gray road that runs from one infinity to the other. Nothing to do? Understatement. There was nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to say. Everyone else was content with this, but I say that they are blind followers of their own false destinies. I had always wanted to be something more. Do something important. Find who I was beyond a sequence of digits. I knew that I was on the number line, but I wanted to be a part of it.
I gathered stories wherever I could, scavenged for tales of distant realms where something, anything, was happening. Somewhere, a trillion covert sequences spiraled towards pi. Somewhere, a mirror reflected the negative image of every number I knew. Somewhere, the integers climbed beyond trillions in an Icarus flight to infinity. Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere…
Adulthood came without sentiment or fanfare. It was difficult knowing that I had to leave, but I needed to know who I was, what set me apart from anyone else. I simply gathered my things and made for the door. I’d like to say that I hugged my parents a half-decent goodbye, but the truth is that I left without a word.
I first traveled to the hub, the nexus, the galactic center around which everything else swirled. I went to zero. Myth and magic sucked me in. For a while, I simply staggered from site to site, a star-struck tourist. I walked the unit interval, gawking shamelessly, unable to reconcile this humble stretch of number line with the thousand legendary proofs and immortal computations that had taken place right here. I rode one famous geometric sequence after the next: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16… then 1/3, 1/9, 1/27, 1/81… and so on, and so on, each trail starting out colorfully distinct, but growing more and more familiar as it converged on the Grand Central Station to which every trail led. People called out and took selfies as they were flowing through numbers. They seemed blind followers, incensed by popularity. They were not on a journey, they were living their lives just like anyone: staying where others are. But I followed too. At last, I stood crowded alongside countless pilgrims, on the cusp of zero itself. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Joy? Awe? Fulfillment? I felt none of these, only a numb giddiness that wore off the moment I stepped away. Beneath the foamy glamour of zero’s city, what was there, really? A null, a void. I learned that day, as the cheap thrill and soft buzz of celebrity faded, that zero is just nothingness with a good PR team. And so I moved on, and with a single step crossed into the country of negatives.
End of Excerpt
Full story: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s65Zg7AnC77ibJcRWnd92FdJlasfT-Bem7t6SMEdukM/edit?usp=sharing