| A mathematical prodigy (she derived her own version of calculus to compute volumes when she was only seven years old, and by age 18 she had three PhD.s, including one in a field she had invented) teams up with an experimentalist who wants to test her theory of chronons. As their romance blossoms, they prove that time does not exist, generating fame, fortune, and tragedy.
This short story was one of the submissions to a request by Tor Publishing for stories based on a painting of a woman standing in front of an unusual tree. So, its first publication was in 2012 in the book "The Palencar Project". In this story, the tree appears as the apparently fractal geometric structure of the "instantiations of happenstance" in their theory. Interestingly, another short story based on the same picture is also mathematical: see The Sigma Structure Symphony.
The story is currently available for free at Tor.com and was republished in the anthology "Not So Much Said the Cat" (2016). |
