Infinities below the raspily tolling Gemowe Lines, the centrifuged point of the Anularis began to roil ordinates and abscissae into a single bleeding ring.
The rotation being described by the fury-swung point was neither clockwise, nor anticlockwise, but a new direction entirely: Instant.
The Anularis, jealous of the arrogantly paralleling segments above, had already crossed themself in spite of the Gemowe Lines long ago; now they sought to compound their insult into taunt with an even more blasphemous feat.
A nothing from nowhere, the point had simply been laying static and undisturbed somewhere in the vast field, until the intersect-bearing provocateur had overshadowed it, tied it to a chain of vincula, and started swinging it around.
At first, the Anularis flung the point straight up, then marionetted it straight down and then immediately back up, then in three forking directions, then in four, then five, and so on.
The apothems of the point-tipped weapon crowded closer and closer together, until the now-glowing point had multiplied into endless fruit at the end of a whirling tree-branch.
To the scurrying applicates, the contumeliously crossed-out figure being circumscribed by this perfect circle seemed like a tensor product.
Then the Anularis extended their segments into the point’s path, fixed spokes growing into and beyond their spinning wheel.
The Gemowe Lines shuddered in fluxes looking down on this latest stunt of verboten convergence; indeed, the Anularis had fashioned the most affronting of anathemas out of their envy for the pair’s unattainable alignment.
Each time the Anularis’s nib crashed into one of the four cross-lines, the point found that it was already there, and so had to first crash into itself before intersecting into the line.
Limitlessly wind-chiming in on itself, the point was sizzling cacaphonies so great that space itself started wrapping around its violent projection; the surrounding grid strained like fishing net over a whale.
Out of a quadrant of the Anularis’s wincing eyes, they saw that even the Gemowe Lines had now bent in tandem to this proof of their animosity.
“Quod erat demonstrandum! Vos victa stramenta—”
Just then, resistance was born into this frictionless plane as mass started to burn into the Anularis’s fist.
Having been let go on instinct, the wicked whip immediately dissolved by degrees—its perforations perforating into the void—but the somehow-heavy point remained.
From the applicates’ perspective, the lingering afterimage of the infernal circle began to droop after the point had been slung off on a terrible tangent, one that seemed to twist out of their continuum completely.
Sharp and swift, it plunged realms away from the cursing, limb-singed Anularis, and into geometries undefined.
As the Gemowe Lines relaxed into equilibrium, they gave a twice-blessing to the wayward point, whose origin they had indirectly had a hand in creating:
“Iteres ad infinitum, punctillum.”
The point shot past hosts of conic ranges, billowed over shimmering arrays, and needle-holed through looming tessellations of staggering intricacy.
The velocity of the point never let up.
And even after shooting through such domains, the point continued to glow as if still being hurled by its erstwhile tormentor, because, in a sense, a part of it was always in that moment, but another part of it was here, free, in this moment.
Free?
Yes, the point felt.
Though it could not stop, it could now chose where it was going.
Mensuration of thought meant manifestion of tragectory.
It knew what lay beyond, as much as what lay behind, as much as where it was.
For example, only through the means of their absolute slavery could this level of absolute autonomy be achieved, the point realized.
This was the first of very many ponderous contradictions to now start enveloping the liberated/enslaved point.
The point thanked and scorned the Anularis; it joyed and lamented over leaving its field; it embraced and eschewed its newfound dual nature.
It shrunk in disgust at the grotesque constructions it glided over, at the same time as tearing up in deep reverence over their unique forms.
Googols of environs entered and exited the point’s view without a single equally-mirrored thought emerging unannihilated.
Now the point found themself placed in a new stasis field, this time an unpleasant one: A trap bound by their own freedom—negation.
Mass covered abstraction, and abstraciton wrote over mass—was the point definitely a semi-solid?
Or had it always been uniformly quasi-imaginary?
The gridlock would have lasted indefinitely, had a single radiating idea not clung onto the only unchallenged aspect of the point: Its fierce brightness.
Grasping onto the canopy of its rays, the idea shouted as it was being blown away, “CHOSE!” and then disappeared.
Where before the point had only described a straight line through the dimensions, this imperative inflamed it into savage knots and vicious schemata.
The point’s mind was a fractal of opposites as it plowed over parallelepipeds, unfolding them into monkey saddles.
Surds took cover as radicands underneath their jagged vincula as the wave-thrashing point demolished scores of their sets.
Ugliness and rage erupted throughout all dimensions, both positive and negative, as the pulsing pseudo-mass skewed delicate self-similarities into crude aberrations, like an angry finger in mixing disparate colors of paint in a bucket.
All to feel one or the other more: Contrition, or Justification; Material, or Theory.
Thought the point: The more heinous the transgression, the truer of the two will win out, right?
But no matter how deelpy the point zoomed in on these conflicting positions, they were always, unyieldingly equal.
The point decimated more places than it could count, and then tried to fix just as many as it had scarred, until another moribund canopy-grasping idea shouted, “THIS IS NOT CHOSING!”
And the point’s heartbeat went back to flatline as it accepted this fact, and the formless world quieted down and almost slept in the dimness of the point’s failure.
Eventually, the point thought, “If I cannot choose for myself whether I am positive or negative, whether I am prime or composite, whether I am regular or irregular, whether I am Good or Evil, perhaps there is a form or function out there who can choose for me.”
And, miraculously, no antagonist opinion appeared within the point’s mind to cancel this one out, because this idea in and of itself WAS uncertain—for, does such a counterpart even exist?…
The Anularis could not control the point.
The Gemowe Lines followed the point’s curve.
In all the wanderings of the point, nothing had stopped it—nothing had even come close.
Because, its solid-half would barrel through the abstract; its abstract-half would phase through the solid.
It had no place in any place, and no one to change its vacillating, oscillating nature.
No, the point understood: This was not freedom at all.
But the memory of the vacuous field smoldered in the point’s coliseum-consciousness: Perhaps it’s still there?
Again, this notion stood upright and unassailed in the point’s mind due to its uncertainty.
Yes, it would return to where it had started.
The point could see its past and future selves, and like the circle it bleed eons ago, the two now curved into one.
The poined reversed its path, and for the first time in a long time it had achieved a sort of equanimity—its original coordinate would either be there, or not be there—ah, the simplicity of observation!
An instant of infinity later, the point saw the edges of the field that it once lulled in situ.
The Gemowe Lines had long since fossilized in the sky, and each abscissa, ordinate, and applicate were unrecognizable in their current transformations.
However, they all floated quite scared and apart from one spot on the field, charred and still weakly glowing—the location of the Anularis’s near-immolation.
The binary had been solved, and in the way the the point most wanted, though they did not know it.
The point zig-zagged back and forth into the singularity of its former home, but it could still not sit still inside of it, for its insane velocity (momentum, really) was still constant.
After only a couple dozen iterations of trying to occupy it, the locus half-collapsed from the point’s heat and strength, and then the point was truly with and without place—the coordinate was still there, but at the same time it wasn’t.
As abject misery, as well as abject joy stalemated one another inside of the point, a warm hand gently clutched it, swiping it away from the burning field.
The point could not escape the grip of the stranger, and knew that it must be the Anularis, here to take their revenge with some new power over both abstraction and matter.
But the voice that sounded was not the Anularis’s:
“Point, I am the product of the Anularis and the Gemowe Lines. Soon after this place faded from your view, they reconciled and derived Me. I am ΑΩ, and we share similar properties.”
“Yes, I can see that you are of Two kinds, like I am.”
“I am more than that—I am of Three.”
The point almost felt its velocity slacken—“So, whatever it is that I am feeling, tell me, AΩ, do you feel it more or less?”
“If you mean suffering, then yes, I feel it more. But My progenitors could not have known—I was born out of nothing but Love and Forgiveness, but intentions always have a way of infecting themselves, turning backward like a reversing strip.”
“I am well acquianted with opposites,” the point said, “and I am very sorry. But tell me then, why are You smiling?”
“Because I have invented a Religion, and it gives Me tremendous solace to ponder.”
“I do not understand what that word means, AΩ.”
“Point, a Religion is a cosmology in which everything has its place, especially contradictions and paradoxes; My Religion is full of creatures like Myself, but I’ve come to realize that it’s been missing something: You.”
“What could miss me? I am slippery and inscrutable; my simple brightness belies my vast incompatibility toward all there is, was, and ever will be—truly, I see it, and you must too.”
“But I see something more, my friend; I see something so much more… Now answer Me, do you believe Me?”
Again, spirals and anti-spirals quickly torrented into a calm, glassy ocean upon the point’s soul, until Light reflecting off of it on an Angelic angle of incidence screamed: “YES!”
“I am glad to hear, My dearest partner. In the heart of My Religion, you may even find your own: A Religion that allows you to always speak as true as you have just now—but even We are opposites, so who knows? You may find something even more fitting. Now…”
Strange noises began taking place outside the enclosure of AΩ’s fist.
In the few moments the point spent inside the palm, calmness overlapped trepidation as for what would come next.
Again, the point was now just another thing at rest in a sparse, dark field.
Then AΩ softly announced, “Fiat Lux,” and He opened His hand.
Q.E.D.
by ineptia