The scenes presented from the viewpoint of the experimental subjects have the tense feeling of a surreal escape room. And those from Roop’s point of view seem to be designed to give us a glimpse into the dark side of the whole research enterprise.

Hopefully, the real world of neuroscience research is not quite so horrific as what we see here, but Ratnakar is in a position to know: The author is a neuroscience research assistant at Boston University and so a lot of focus is understandably on the psychological and biological aspects. But, she manages to squeeze a bit of mathematics into it as well. The architect who designed REMedy’s facilities (essentially a whole city) incorporated structures inspired by the octonions, and this abstract mathematical structure is realized to an even greater extent in the virtual world inhabited by the experimental subjects. (More specifically, paths that people can follow to move around and a melody shown in musical notation are determined by a diagram representing the multiplication table of the eight unit octonions.) Another slightly mathematical aspect is that Roop’s job involves the use of Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm (which has the result of keeping the employees from understanding what it is they are doing at work).

The experimental subjects are called “Down”, “Strange”, “Charm”, and “Higgs” apparently in reference to to the quarks and mass-giving boson in particle physics. I’m not sure if this is supposed to resonate with the octonions that are mentioned. Indeed, I know that some have speculated that the standard model should somehow be connected to the algebraic structure of the octonions. However, I haven’t actually seen such a connection made rigorous and so to me it seemed like just one more obscure academic fact “shoehorned” into the story.

IMHO Viewed as a work of mathematical fiction, this one is inferior to the author’s novella Axiom of Dream. They are similar in many ways, but the mathematical ideas arise more naturally in the more recent work.

This story appeared in the February 2022 issue of Clarkesworld and (at least as I am writing this) is available for free online. Thanks to the author for writing to bring it to my attention.