Using her hands, Ivy carefully parted the flowers as she stepped into the field. After just a few paces, she gave up trying not to snap any stems.
She pressed forward, her eyes scanning in all directions.
A honeybee buzzed close to her face and she gently swatted it away. Her movements stirred up dozens of tiny hoverflies.
Come on, where are you?
The bugs, the heat, the noise. Any one of them could have unsettled her. Yet calm washed over Ivy. The field held some of her best memories.
She kept moving.
“Hello?” she said softly.
A grasshopper replied with a raspy rattle.
“Hello?”
Her movements left a trail of bent flowers in her wake. She spotted another such trail to her right.
Ivy moved into this one, trying to limit the damage the way one might step into existing footsteps in freshly fallen snow.
Someone else was here—someone else had made this path.
She found this someone less than five minutes later.
This was Eugene Reeves’s happy place—everyone knew that. When taking a break from his work, he would often come here or a place like it, sit in a field of Queen Anne’s lace, hold one of the flowers in his mangled hand.
Stare at it while he spun it ever so slightly.
A perfect radiating fractal. The florets start from a central stalk, then spread outward. Here, hold it close to your face, Ivy. Now pull it away a little. A little more. More. See? It’s the same pattern, repeated at every magnification. Queen Anne’s lace grows following a Lindenmayer systems pattern—predictive, recursive geometry at its finest.
How old had Ivy been when Gene first explained fractals to her?
Nine? Ten?
It didn’t matter. She might have been as young as four.
Gene never used age as an excuse or a limiting factor. He was the one who had explained to her that learning anything was a process from A (not known) to B (known). The path between these two points was different for everyone, for every subject—loops, backtracking, precipitous drops.
Peaks and valleys.
But no matter the route, this process had one singular name: frustration. And the only thing holding you back from learning something new, at any age, was your inability to remain in a frustrated state for a prolonged period of time.
Ivy didn’t want to break the serenity of the scene that opened up before her.
Was remiss to do so.
But she had no other choice.
She took one step, then another, before dropping down to his level.
“Hey.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
He didn’t answer. Just spun that fractal in his perfectly smooth and pink hands. His fingers were shorter than normal, the tips having been too badly burnt to save.
Ivy reached out, gently caressed his cheek. Didn’t flinch at the roughness of his mottled skin.
The entirety of the man’s face was covered in patchwork sections. Most of his left ear was missing.
