Spiral by Ward Cameron

Author:Ward, Cameron [Ward, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405958202
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2024-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Charlie

11.08 p.m.

The pain rattles in her skull, sharp stabs, like knives through her eyes.

Charlie blinks away the tears, her body full of adrenaline, her stomach full of acid.

This is the sixth time, the sixth loop, and her watch reads 11.08.

She feels a tremor, a thump of logic and recognition. Patterns in her head. 11.08, this time … and before that, 11.05 … and before that, 11.03, then 11.02 … 11.01.

She takes a moment, glances at Paige, tries to banish the vision of her neighbour screaming in the seconds before her death, replacing it with the sight of her smiling, listening to her music, stealing glances at Otis as he walks past. Charlie recites her waking introductory speech to her, trying to remember what to tell her, what is necessary, what is relevant.

And then she settles into her seat and thinks. The pattern in time. It is a sequence. It hit her last time, but she couldn’t grasp it, define it. Now she knows. Not one hundred per cent certain, but close enough. She feels a tingle, pins and needles spreading through her chest and neck, the exciting shiver of a significant discovery.

The loops are reducing in duration each time, according to a mathematical sequence. A sequence she learned in her undergraduate years.

Universal and all-consuming.

How many pairs of rabbits will be produced in a year, beginning with a single pair, if in every month each pair gives birth to a new pair which becomes productive from the second month on?

Julian presented the question in one of the first classes Charlie attended, the exact question and wording posed by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, otherwise known as Fibonacci.

The result can be expressed numerically as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on.

The Fibonacci sequence. Famous in mathematical circles for millennia. In popular circles, probably since Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was published.

‘Each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous pair,’ said Julian. ‘One plus one equals two. One plus two equals three. Two plus three equals five. And so on, for evermore. It’s a recursive formula. As long as you know the last two numbers, you can calculate the next one. It can be used to model rabbits reproducing, as well as … well, the behaviour of the very fabric of the universe.’

Back then, Charlie listened with the polite nervousness of an undergraduate. She concentrated on Julian’s voice, straining from the front of the lecture theatre at Imperial, as he tried to convey his excitement to his students.

‘Fibonacci is everywhere you look,’ he said, ‘the universe has an affinity for it. And if you take two successive numbers of the sequence, their ratio is very close to 1.618, known for millennia as the golden ratio.’

He glanced up, narrowed his eyes, searching his audience for something. He didn’t usually pick on individuals, but Charlie found herself shrinking in her seat.

‘Let me show you something,’ he said, tapping his laptop, finding the correct slide. It displayed the head of a sunflower, the seeds spiralling out from the centre.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.