The possibility that space travel causes mental disturbance makes for extremely bad PR. So in the 1968, when one of the former astronauts began to sleepwalk, he and his family were encouraged to keep it to themselves.
It was an odd form of somnambulism. Deep in the night, he would wake up, walk to the front door, go outside, and look up at the moon for several hours. His wife caught him at it early on. She found him outside on a chilly night, staring wide-eyed up at the crescent moon, whispering a word to himself, over and over again.
The word was “Axiom”.
She woke him up with some difficulty, and brought him back to bed. He had no memory of the event.
When there was no moon in the sky, when it was either clouded over or still below the treeline, it didn’t happen. But if there was a moon to see, even if it was a new moon darkly circling the sky, he would go out to gaze at it for a few hours. And very little could prevent it. Methods tried: sleep medication, locked doors, hypnosis, travel, therapy, weighted blankets. One night he had himself tied to the bed with rope. He didn’t get up, but he struggled so hard he moved the bed across the floor, and then he began to scream, and didn’t stop until his wife dashed water in his face. They never tried it again.
It wasn’t the most destructive of mental disorders, merely disturbing in its constancy and strangeness. In the 90s, he described in in his memoirs, but dismissed it as the inevitable mental trauma that came with the trials of space flight. And yet, he titled the book Axiom.
In 1998, the Very Large Array began to receive a strange, repeated transmission from the moon. It was a long series of radiation bursts, short and long alternating in seemingly random patterns that resolved into a sequence that was repeated again and again. Diagnostics were performed again and again, but the VLA was certain that it was coming from nowhere but precisely the moon’s surface. Astronomers puzzled over what natural phenomena could produce such a sequence. It wasn’t until 1999 that an intern suggested that it was similar to Morse code.
The notion was laughed away at first. Still, the transmissions continued, always the same pattern. And as the code was widely distributed in scientific circles, it was only a matter of time before cryptographers began to play with it, and in 2003 one suggested that it could be binary code. If it was an intelligent transmission of some kind, could it be an algorithm? The question was tantalizing.
The answer, discovered in 2004 by a student at Yale, ended up being strikingly disappointing. The code was the binary of a 2-bit jpeg image, and that image was of a mathematical formula, written in white on a black background. The formula was a simple and nonsensical statement:
Ø ≠ 0
The set containing no elements is not equal to zero.
The scientific community at large threw up its hands in exasperation. It was obviously a prank, albeit a sophisticated one. But who had the technology to fake a transmission from the moon? Russia was suspected, so was China. Satellites were analyzed in depth, but the transmissions remained inexplicable. Still it was ridiculous to anybody who knew anything about mathematics… first of all, comparing a set to a number makes no sense. The empty set has no elements, but that doesn’t make it equal to the number zero. The empty set can only be compared in equivalence to other sets, and given that it is only ever equal to itself, saying it’s “not equal” to something different from it is obvious and unnecessary. It was the equivalent of saying, “blue is not equal to triangle”.
The transmissions continued, arriving with rhythmic regularity.
Ø ≠ 0
It became old news. Mathematicians refused to have anything to do with it, but philosophers were fascinated. What was this person trying to say, and why go to such great lengths to transmit it from the moon’s surface? Could it be called art? A student’s dissertation was written in 2014, citing the old astronaut’s memoir Axiom and suggesting that an alien intelligence was refuting the existence of the empty set. The paper referred to the alien intelligence as “Axiom”. The dissertation did not result in a doctorate, but it was picked up by the news, and a religious cult was formed around the equation and the name. Pop culture found this hilarious, and the phrase “Nothing ain’t zero” found some popularity on t-shirts and mugs for a little while in 2014-2015.
Still the transmissions continued, and still the source remained a mystery.
In 2020, the transmissions suddenly changed, and now they were much faster and closer together, creating a larger, more complex file. It took the pattern over an hour to repeat.
The half-annoyed, half-interested techs managed to translate it, trying one file format after another, and finally resolving it to an mp4. The result was an image of white text being written on a black background, but the equation had changed:
Ø = 1
The audio was the sound of a voice saying, “I am.”
Even the philosophers considered it a joke this time. But one thing was clear, that whoever had created the transmissions was either still active, or had passed the torch to a new prankster. Someone somehow had altered the message: the empty set is equal to one. Doctoral candidates were openly discouraged, by mocking professors, from producing dissertations on the subject. “Nothing ain’t zero” was briefly revived by the bumper sticker makers.
In 2045, physicists first postulated the existence of another elementary particle that actually forms the empty space between quarks and electrons. They called it the emptron. Emptrons could not be observed nor interacted with, but they could be mathematically represented by the force exerted against quarks and electrons as they moved through the space packed with emptrons. After ten more years, it was accepted as a legitimate theory. Emptiness was not truly empty. Mathematicians were the last to be converted, as the concept of nothingness was essential to certain proofs, but eventually logic began to evolve. The empty set came to mean something subtly different from what it meant before.
Then one physicist suggested that since there could not be any space in between emptrons, that perhaps there was only one single emptron, filling up all spaces between subatomic particles. The scientific community acknowledged the possibility, and one professor jokingly named the entity “Axiom”. The name quickly caught on.
In 2072, a tech at the new VLA realized that the old moon transmission, long dismissed as a satellite gone awry, had changed again. The bursts were even faster and closer together, and it was only with recent technology that they could be identified as a pattern instead of merely a single, eight-hour-long burst. The pattern was massive this time. It was no longer the archaic image format, now it was a three-dimensional hlg file. And when it was decoded, it formed an irregular and seemingly meaningless shape, black, like a 3D Rorschach splatter, that moved and spoke.
It said was “I am.” Repeatedly, “I am. I am. I am.” As the shape twisted and reformed and made new shapes.
One of the astronomers present, who liked to dabble in physics, jokingly said, “Hey Axiom, is that you? Blink once for yes.”
Axiom blinked.
Outside, the hologram formerly known as the moon disappeared.
Chaos resulted. There was no physical result on the planet, the tides continued, and Earth’s orbit kept the same as though some great hand were directing its progress. But that didn’t prevent people from panicking. Many took it as evidence of God. Many took it as a sign of the apocalypse. Many took it as a government hoax. Nobody trusted any of the scientific theories that emerged about it, and scientists found it difficult to theorize amid the general uproar.
But everybody suddenly doubted their fundamental assumptions about what the moon had been, and what the Earth was, and what they themselves were. Within two years, mass destruction and war took over as every government blamed every other for the event.
.
.
.
In the Outer Aether, Axiom pushed the Earth two revolutions back on Time’s line, resetting back to 2071.
He was almost able to communicate with them.
Perhaps another twenty or so revolutions would do it.
The Home of Forgotten Stories 