Bypass

This feeling is not human. It doesn't care if we have it or not.

My OCD had gotten worse lately. I seemed to find comfort in the sight of numbers. When I locked my door and yanked on the doorknob the extra nine times, always in sets of threes, my eyes turned to the number on the door. Apartment 14. I looked at the digits, considering them as I carried out my routine. There was something about them that calmed me down. It was a good, solid number.

I'm not really sure what to think of the classic dilemma regarding mathematics, whether it was invented or discovered. The sense of control that is so reassuring to me stems from the fact that I imagine us conquering the world in a way, placing it all within our own context, bending it to our will. But it could also be said that it's just a semblance of agency. When a house burns down, how comforting is it to hear that it burned at 1200 degrees?

I get plenty of that at work. I measure samples submitted by scientists. Mass, the exact size and dimensions, density, contents. At some point I had hoped that this job would bring me closer to some understanding of physics, but I settled for being able to interact with more numbers.

On Monday I was given a new sample to be measured. It was a piece of wood. It could fit in the palm of my hand. It was somewhere between a sphere and a cube, with flat surfaces and edges, each one a bit skewed, none equal to another. The edges and vertices were unusually sharp. It seemed like they had been carved and recarved over and over by different tools. There was a precision to it that struck me as unusual. Before taking the measurements - is it taking or making? - I talked to the woman who brought it in.

"Was it you who found this?"

"Not me, but someone from my team. It was wrapped in a few layers of cloth. Some sort of ancient ritual, I believe." She seemed to enjoy this assertion. Maybe it was a source of some dispute in the group.

"Why the sharp edges? I mean, I would expect an object like that to be passed from hand to hand. To become blunt and smoothed down over time. It must have taken a lot of effort to preserve this thing."

"Exactly."

I put the piece of wood on the counter and sat down in front of my screens. It took just a moment to scan the object and map it in three dimensions. Its mass, contents and the length of every edge were displayed in front of me. I glanced at one of the numbers at random. It was 54219573. I spent a moment just staring at it without much thought. Some sort of uncontrolled sensation came over me, a sudden rush of excitement.

I looked away, glancing at the woman standing behind me. Her brown hair of medium length neatly slicked back. Furrowed brow, expressing some sense of focus and commitment to her task. She was looking around, a bit impatient. She seemed like an assertive person, not for any particular or intentional reason. You could tell she was serious about the world.

I spent a moment trying to find out what I had just experienced. The number was right there, I could look at it again, but I did not really want to do that. I did not want to look straight at it. I suddenly felt ashamed, afraid that some weird obsessive behavior of mine would embarrass me in front of another person. The feeling was overwhelming in a way I had never experienced before, certainly not as a result of my disorder.

I clicked on another window to hide the data.

"It's going to take a bit longer to get the exact readings of this thing," I said. "Could you come back tomorrow? Say, around 11?"

"Of course." She looked a bit disappointed. She gave me a polite nod and left the room.

It wasn't really true. I felt bad about lying, but I needed some time to think and look at whatever this was.

I stared ahead with a sense of dull, vague excitement. I compiled all the readings into a single text file and copied it onto my flash drive. I got up from my desk and approached the object to take a closer look at it. The sharpness of the edges was truly exceptional. After a moment of silence I put it into a secure bag and filed it in one of the cabinets. The rest of the day was rather uneventful in comparison.

---

Later at home I copied the file onto my computer. I hovered over it with the mouse cursor for a moment. Finally I opened it and scrolled down until I found the measurements section. I read the bit of text prefacing that number again. It was the length of edge J. It was 54219573 nanometers. Again something came over me, but this time I did not budge. The comfort of my own home allowed me to stare at the number a bit longer. I felt some sort of excitement, a sense of arousal. It did not seem to be caused by anything visual, it wasn't the shape of these digits put together. It was just the number itself. The feeling seemed to be evoked through visual stimuli but it was based on my understanding of the concept. It began the moment I internalised the number.

I looked away again and the feeling got weaker, although this time it lingered a bit. I felt crazy. I copied and pasted the number into a calculator. There was that pleasure again, a passive sort of satisfaction, steadily rising. I subtracted 1 from it and looked at the result. There was still some sense of tension, but a bit milder. Like circling around a thing. Teasing. I added 2 to the number and received a similar feeling. I subtracted 1 again and divided the original number by 3. Again, there was something there, but very mild. Whatever the measurement was, it seemed like a starting point.

I returned to the initial number and just stared at it. I do not want to dwell on this for too long, but the experience felt complete in itself. Elegant, in a way. The emotions it evoked were so self-contained it didn't resemble anything else in the world, as if they were separate from it. Unattached to my mind, my personality, my humanity. They felt complete in themselves, not related to any external stimuli. Satisfaction caused by nothing. Joy from thin air.

I could not fully grasp the implications of the piece of wood. It had eleven edges. The file I had on my drive had the measurements of all their lengths. Up until this point I had not as much as glanced at the other ones. Logically speaking, if a number was able to make me feel this intense in a particular way, there was the possibility of another number making me feel a different emotion, just as strong. Sadness, anxiety. I was afraid of the implication. I did not want to test this just yet. I turned off the computer. My sleep was very uneasy that night.

---

The following morning I met the woman who brought the object outside the laboratory. She seemed more relaxed than before.

"There are some things I'd like to discuss with you," I said. "Could we do this over coffee?"

"Sure! There’s a cafe in the building, right? Let's go."

"I'm Julia, by the way."

"Marie. Nice to meet you!"

We proceeded to the nearby cafe. I got some truly nasty black coffee which at that point I was used to. It tasted better because it was familiar, or at least that's what I kept telling myself. Marie got a muffin and a latte. We sat down.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"Okay. I don't fully know how to explain it. Just bear with me, please. Laugh if you want."

"I won't. You said you discovered something about that wooden object?"

"I did. But if it's okay, I'd like to do a little test before I tell you more. I wouldn't want you to be biased."

"Test?"

"Take my pen and this napkin. Write the digits I tell you as one long number."

"Alright."

"Five, four, two. One, nine, five. Seven. Three."

She wrote them down rather quickly, without really paying attention.

"Look at the number for a moment, please."

She glanced down. I watched her facial expression. It did not immediately change, but it seemed as if new feelings began to slowly ripple through it. Her lips twitched. Irises widened a bit. I saw her shoulders tense up and at that moment I felt a bit of regret. I reached for the napkin, but she grabbed it first. She seemed to wrestle with it. Finally, she covered it with the other hand.

"What is this? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything. I'm sorry for doing it this way. It's the number."

"What?"

I explained my theory to her. Her disbelief was only momentary. She had already experienced the feeling. I think more than anything I felt relieved that I did not prove to be outside of some norm. I wasn't some fringe outcast with a math kink, or maybe we all were and I was just the first one to learn about it.

---

We went to the lab and I took the object out of the filing cabinet so that we could inspect it again. I pulled up an office chair for Marie to sit down. The wooden piece was on the desk in front of us, sealed in a plastic bag. We stared at it for a bit.

The object seemed to have its own gravity. Marie reached for it, pulled it out of the plastic bag and cradled it in her hand, carefully examining the edges. She traced her index finger along one of them. She was elated. She started exhaling rapidly and let out a quiet wheeze.

"Does it..."

"Yes, it works. Kind of. I think it's different this way. I can't describe it. It begins in a different place, even if it goes towards the same destination."

She carefully rotated the piece of wood in her hands. Her fingers seemed to tremble every time she touched one of the edges.

"Why would math have this effect on us?" I asked.

"Maybe it's always been there."

"Is that what you believe?"

"Is it not more believable now?"

"I mean, someone had to come up with this... this device. Someone invented this."

"And we can make it available to everyone."

"Reproduce it?"

"I guess. I mean just the numbers. I mean, you can't gatekeep those. Everyone will be able to feel these emotions."

I struggled to imagine the future. I felt as if we were about to make a big mistake. Marie looked at me with intent.

"People go their entire lives trying to achieve anything close to comfort, joy, arousal. This would be..."

"A shortcut?"

"If you will. Why the disdain?"

"It's nothing like actual comfort. This feeling is not human. It doesn't care if we have it or not. It's not ours to have."

"When is a feeling ours?"

"When it came from the external and internal stimuli that we experience. It's a composite. It's created out of all those little moments, senses, nerve endings."

"What are you getting at?"

"I just mean..."

"Let's look at it again." She was excited. I sighed as I put the number on the screen.

She moved her chair a bit closer to me. We held hands.

"Was this the blueprint?" She proposed.

"For what?"

"All of us."

My mouth was open, I was trying to formulate some sort of sentence, although at that point it wasn't possible anymore. I gave up on that attempt and succumbed to the feeling. I just stared at the screen.

I thought that human feelings are like a ball of clumped up impulses, bits of other emotions, senses, memories, some subconscious thoughts and beliefs. We are able to feel the weight of this ball, hold it in our hands and examine it in more detail. What the number evoked was not something within our reach. It was somewhere else. As I stared at it I saw all of us on Earth as well as something looming above us. It was a giant sphere, polished to perfection, independent of anything else.

Deep down I tried to hate the number and the piece of wood. There was a sense of revulsion in me from being told how to feel, but I could not internalize nor acknowledge that. I just felt arousal like I was told to. Marie couldn't escape it either. She was touching herself now. I squeezed her hand and our eyes turned to meet each other, away from the number, but there was nothing solid there. Little chemistry between us. Her hand shot out and grabbed the stack of memos from my desk. With a shaking hand she grabbed a pen and scribbled the number onto two of them. Seeing it again was like a jolt. I got out of my chair. She took one of the memos and stuck it over my right eye while looking at me without blinking. Then she did the same to herself. My hands reached under her shirt and hers reached behind my torso and pulled me closer. Neither of us said a word. In our own separate worlds we felt a completeness.

I was scared by the idea that we were stuck in a particular point in time in a particular place, limping along, condemned to imperfection. I had to keep staring at the number not to become obsessed with that fear. Marie as well. I could tell. I knew it because there was only one emotion and we were both under its influence. The presence of this object allowed us both to literally know how another person is feeling instead of guessing some approximation of it marred by language. It was amazing and terrifying. We spent the next hour in a trance, carelessly exhausting our bodies because for the first time we knew there was something more than them.

"I am ready for this," she said after some time had passed.

"Ready for what?"

"Ready to become a slave to feelings. Forfeit my own idea of what joy, sadness, ecstasy feels like."

"You're unwell."

"I'm just admitting that I want something that is true and objective."

"You haven't thought this through."

"I've felt it through."

---

Hours later I was sitting on the ground next to her in her chair. She looked down at me as I caressed her hand.

"Did we choose this?" I asked her.

Her lips moved, but her voice seemed to come from another place entirely.

"I don't know. Does anyone?"

She said she would save my number to her phone under the name J so that she could feel just a tiny bit of happiness every time I called.