“All right, enough old stories, Alia,” Storm decided, no-
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ticing Jubilee’s uncharacteristically quiet demeanor. “We need to talk about why you asked me out here.”
“You’re right,” Alia admitted, the smile fading from her face and her big dark eyes looking down almost in shame. “It’s just—I’ve been facing this alone for so long, it’s so nice to have someone to talk to.”
Jubilee looked over at Alia again. Maybe they were more alike than Jubes had realized.
“It’s all right, Alia,” Storm comforted her. “But I don’t want to wait for another of those so-called ‘chaos spirits’ to come looking for us.”
“There are far worse things that could come looking, believe me,” Alia answered, meeting her friend’s eyes again with her own. “Over the past three months, I’ve fought off a bizarre array of these ‘mathemagical’ creatures, as I call them. In fact, I had to delay our meeting tonight in order to deal with one of them. And they’re all after this,” she added, holding out the fractal disc she had used to save Jubilee.
“Can you tell us what that thing is, now?” Jubilee asked, not unkindly but a little impatiently. She didn’t want to wait for another creature to show up, either.
“I’ve had this artifact for nearly twenty years,” Alia told them while running her fingers over the disc’s engraved hieroglyphics. “I lifted it off a man who must’ve been an archaeologist. When I first saw it, I figured it was just some kind of souvenir. I knew el-Gibar would have no use for it, and I thought it might come in handy as a concealed weapon,” she said, palming the disc and swinging her open hand in the air to demonstrate its damage potential.
“Sensible,” Ororo commented, to Jubilee’s surprise.
She still wasn’t used to seeing this side of Storm. “Almost invisible until it’s being used.”
“Exacdy,” Alia agreed. “It was only later, when I was studying the physics of chaotic systems, that I saw an article theorizing that the ancient Egyptians had dabbled in some kind of supernatural approach to chaos theory.”
“I’ve heard of that, but I never really got it,” Jubilee broke in. “Fractals and stuff like that, right? What is chaos theory, anyway?”
“It’s a new kind of science that helps us understand the properties of irregular fluctuations in nature,” Alia told her, as if reading from a mathematics texts. ‘ A chaotic system is simply one that’s sensitive to initial conditions. For example, the Earth’s weather systems are chaotic—that’s why they’re so hard to predict.”
“Because there are so many variables?” Storm asked, also curious.
“That, and the fact that even the slightest miscalculation at the outset will lead to results that diverge farther and farther from what you predicted,” Alia explained. “For example, a butterfly flapping its wings on the United States’ west coast might have what appears to be an infinitesimally small effect on the weather system there, correct?”
“A butterfly?” Jubilee asked, chuckling despite herself. “Yeah, I think you could pretty much count that effect as being zero.”
“Ah, but you can’t,” Alia told her with a smile. “The effect might be almost zero, and totally negligible for all intents and purposes right there and then. But the slight breeze from its wings would affect the air molecules around it, which would in turn slightly alter the courses of the air
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molecules next to them, and so on. By the time a month had passed and the weather system had made its way around the world and back, that slight change in initial conditions could’ve helped cause a thunderstorm that would otherwise never have happened.”
“Whoa,” Jubilee said. “Heaviness.”
“That’s why, despite all our recent advances with satellites and radar technologies, weather prediction beyond a day or two will never be one hundred percent accurate, nor even come close. It’s impossible to know all the starting variables to an infinite degree—and even the slightest miscalculation on Monday can grow to a huge miscalculation by Friday.”
“So it is just a theory,” Storm concluded, “with little practical basis in reality.”
“Scientists are still exploring the ways chaos theory can be applied to help our understanding of turbulent systems like the weather, electrical currents, heart arrythmia, epileptic seizures, the movement of the planets. ...” Alia answered, trailing off.
‘ ‘But what does that have to do with this disc, and with that thing that came after me?” Jubilee asked impatiendy. She had never been much of a math whiz.
“Like I was saying, I did some research and found that the ancient Egyptians w'ere apparently dabbling in this area over two thousand years ago,” Alia told them. “They had more of a supernatural approach, of course, but I believe it all comes down to the ability to comprehend and actually rewrite the mathematical code that we call reality. ’ ’
“Mathematical code?” Storm asked. “I don’t understand.”
“If you accept that all matter in the entire universe is composed of atoms and subatomic structures that follow very strict physical laws,” Alia continued, “then it’s possible to see those atoms as being numbers in a huge cosmic equation, which all fit together to form what we perceive as reality. Now, if it were possible to read those numbers, to see the equation, to understand the mathematics of it—”
“You could change some of the numbers and alter reality?” Jubilee finished. “Wow.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Alia contended. “Both you and Ororo display mutant powers that may very well be tapping into this ‘mathemagical’ sphere of influence. Especially you, Ororo—your ability to affect a chaotic system like the weather may involve your mutant x-factor helping you retroactively change initial conditions on a truly cosmic scale.” “Intriguing,” Storm admitted, “but you still haven’t told us who—or what—is sending these creatures after you and that artifact.”
“I believe it’s an American archaeologist named Damian Sharpe,” Alia answered.
“Damian? Ooh, that’s a bad Omen,” Jubilee joked halfheartedly.
“There are a total of ten fractal talismans listed in the historical records,” Alia continued. “Over the past decade, Sharpe has been involved in the recovery7 of the other nine. It’s said that the talismans can’t be destroyed by conventional means—that if you try to do so, they’ll simply reappear someplace else. That’s why I haven’t just thrown this disc away or smashed it—it’d show up somewhere else, and he’d find it. He only lacks this one. And he’s willing to do almost anything to get it.”
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“Why?” Storm pressed. “What will he do?”
“If he’s able to bring all ten talismans together?” Alia asked ruefully. “Anything he wants, Ororo.”
He was just about to call it a night, when they silently beckoned to him.
His candles were extinguished and packed, the nine talismans were safely stored in his beaten-up leather backpack, and Damian Sharpe had concluded that the numbers favored a morning attempt to rework the variables. He was just opening the door to his dirt-encrusted Jeep, knowing that tonight’s failure to eliminate one of the strange attractors would make tomorrow’s efforts doubly challenging.
But the talismans called to him in a way they never had before. Something was happening, the numbers were changing, right now.
He looked up at the stars, and for a moment just stood there in the deep desert, dumbfounded. It appeared as though some cosmic prankster had decided to draw lines between the stars—as if to give official weight to the ancient astrological signs that had been founded so close to this very site, in ancient Babylon, thousands of years before.
Then he realized the lines were not in fact connecting the stars, but were coalescing into a geometically perfect pattern, which was growing and moving directly toward him.
The tenth talisman, he realized in awe, dropping his backpack and fumbling to get it open. She
’s bringing it right to me!
He yanked the bag open, and was surprised to see that the stone artifacts were glowing with an eerie green light. He reached for the largest of them, the fractal breastplate—
—and was smashed backward as the glowing flat stone flew out of the backpack and into his chest!
Burning, screaming, Sharpe was only dimly aware of the other talismans also impossibly leaping toward him nothing is impossible painfully grafting themselves to his knees, elbows, waist pain is mere perception feeling his conventional grasp of reality fade an illusion no more real than a picture on TV overwhelmed by his dream-state image of the master equation.
The numbers continued to change.
“There he is!” Jubilee yelled to Storm and Alia as the three women floated high above the craggy desert. “Gotta be, right?”
Storm concentrated on keeping her compatriots and herself afloat on mutant-controlled desert winds as they followed the geometric light pattern emitted by Alia’s fractal disc. The talisman was building a bridge of light across the sky, a fiery white latticework that was leading them toward a glowing green figure wTithing on the ground, next to a Jeep parked near the entrance to some kind of archaeological dig.
“It looks like he is in pain,” Storm observed as they descended on Damian Sharpe’s twitching body. Nine glowing stone talismans were attached—no, fused to him: a helmet, a breastplate, a backplate, shin-and thigh-guards, a medallion at his throat, and a fractal disc identical to Alia’s in his left palm. “Alia. . . ?” Storm started to ask.
But Alia was screaming, her right palm crisping as her fractal disc began to glow with the same green energy that was emanating from Sharpe’s adornments. “Their energy is
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building,” Alia managed to choke out as the women landed and Storm caught Alia before she fell to the ground. “Can’t hold out long before they’re drawn together.”
Sharpe stopped twitching. He leapt to his feet with unnatural speed and agility, turning to face the newcomers. His body seethed and crackled with green energy, and the talismans on his body now resembled the ancient Egyptian battle armor after which they had obviously been patterned.
“It’s sucked him in,” Alia explained, fighting the green energy creeping up her right arm. “He’s lost all sense of reality—all he sees is the equation! And if he gets the last talisman, he’ll be able to change it in any way he wants!” “Then he shall not have it,” Storm declared. She raised an arm toward Sharpe and, like Zeus himself, fired off a lightning bolt. But the jagged arc of electricity somehow raced around Sharpe’s body, as if purposely avoiding him.
Or as if its trajectory had been recalculated at the last millisecond.
“That can’t be good,” Jubilee said, trying to blitz Sharpe with a barrage of fireworks—but they exploded almost immediately after Jubilee created them, blowing the surprised teen off her feet and temporarily blinding her.
(Sharpe laughed maniacally, watching the numbers change and shift light before him. It was within his grasp, he could almost taste full comprehension of the equation—if he could just remove those annoying extra variables. . . . )
Raising the fractal disc in his left hand, Sharpe aimed it at Storm and Alia and released a cone-shaped beam of energy with the same liquid-air consistency of the chaos spirit that had chased Jubilee earlier. Alia quickly countered with a spiderweb shield, which seemed to absorb the assault. But
Alia screamed in pain as the talisman’s green energy continued to flow up her arm. She was losing the ability to hang on to reality.
Storm floated up into the air again, and summoned a gale-force wind to blow7 Sharpe back. But he seemed totally unaffected by it, as if the air itself were moving around him, not into him. Jubilee risked another volley of fireworks, with no discernible effect on their opponent. Seemingly oblivious to the mutant heroines and their desperate attacks, he started walking toward Alia.
He fired another energy beam at her, and she blocked it with another spider-web shield—but just barely. Though her knowledge of mathematics served her well, Alia still possessed only one of the talismans, against the combined power of Sharpe’s nine. And she somehow sensed that the artifacts wanted to come together—they hungered to rewrite the equation of reality, over and over, forever.
In a last-ditch effort, Storm used her control over the wind to lift Sharpe’s Jeep into the air, then brought it crashing down on him. “Nowr, Jubilee!” Storm called, and the teen launched a maximum-power fireburst into the twisted wreckage, detonating it from within. The vehicle’s gas tank ignited, answering Jubilee’s controlled explosion with an even louder one.
Ororo bent the winds, protecting Alia, Jubilee, and herself from the flying metal shrapnel. The wind also served to blow away the smoke that enshrouded the remains of the Jeep.
And, glowing more brighdy than ever, Damian Sharpe emerged smiling from the wreck, reaching for Alia with his left hand. A tendril of bright green energy started to form
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in the air between his fractal disc and Alia’s. Still fighting the energy of the talisman in her right hand, Alia started reluctantly to stagger toward him.
“We’ve got to get you out of here!” Storm realized, swooping down on Alia to lift her away. “Come on!”
“No!” Alia protested, grabbing hold of Storm’s arm and forcing her hand dowrn to touch the fractal disc. Storm screamed, as much from the intense supernatural heat as from the thought that one of her oldest friends was betraying her to chaos itself!
Storm gasped, unable to remove her hand from the blinding disc. Reality started to warp, twist, become a strange mass of color. She felt sick as her perceptions lurched and shifted to another plane.
She felt light. Saw silence. Heard coldness. Sensed nothing but variables, numbers, possibilities. They would drown her before she could comprehend them.
She tried to focus on the familiar. The sun. The rain. The wind.
Just more numbers.
She cried out in despair, unable to accept a universe laid bare to its pure mathematical core. No beauty, no grace, no justice. Just numbers. Her very soul rebelled, withdrew, surrendered, inverted.
Sun. Rain. Wind. Nothing but numbers.
She was drowning.
But she would not die like this! She would not be cancelled, rounded down, written off. The world may have been nothing more than a massive equation on God’s pocket calculator—but she was more than that. She was alive!
She shifted the numbers then, feeling the rush she knew so well, the rush of wind through her hair. She was Storm. Chaos knew enough to arrange itself to her liking.
Now she saw the nine offending points of light. They had possessed a man, driven him to madness, used his body as a conduit through which they could infect reality.
He wasn’t the target. They were.
She reached for their numbers, too, and told them where to go.
They hissed in protest.
“Hey, I think she’s waking up,” Jubilee noted with a smile. “Looks like we get our lift home, after all.”
“Ororo?” Alia called gentiy to her, as she lifted her head slowly from the sandy rock. “Praise Allah.”
“Yeah, all’a that,” Jubilee said, bending over Storm. “You okay, chief?”
“I—I believe I am,” Storm ventured, never more pleased to see Jubilee’s mischievously smiling face. She sat up, trying to figure out just what had happened.
“You used Alia’s disc to eighty-six all of Sharpe’s little toys,” Jubilee answered Ororo’s unspoken query. “Don’t know how you did it, Storm, but it was rad.”
“I’m not sure how I did it, either,” Storm admitted, allowing Alia and Jubilee to help her to her feet. Alia’s right arm was back to normal, and the fractal disc—no longer glowing—lay on the ground, looking much like the innocent desert souvenir for which Alia Taymur had first mistaken it.
Storm looked around for Sharpe, but there was
nothing. Not even a body. “What happened to him?” Storm asked.
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“We were hoping you could tell us that,” Alia admitted. “With your natural ability to affect chaotic systems, Ororo, I suspected you would have greater control over the fractal talismans than either Sharpe or I ever could. You’d only been touching the disc for a second when a flash of light shot out from my disc and into Sharpe. Then he was gone with the talismans, and you were unconscious.”
Storm struggled to piece her memory together. Here in the world of flesh, form, and feeling, it wras already hard to shift her perceptions back to the nightmarish digital world that had almost swallowed her soul. “I—I believe I used the fractal disc to retroactively eliminate the other nine artifacts from ever having been constructed,” she said. “It couldn’t affect or unmake itself, but at least the threat is largely diminished.”
“What about Sharpe?” Jubilee wanted to know. “Is he toast, or—?”
“I think I simply ‘reset’ him, Jubilee,” Storm recalled. “He’s alive, out there somewhere. None of this ever happened to him. He’s never heard of the chaos talismans, because the only one that ever existed is that one.” She pointed at the stone disc on the ground.
Alia picked it up and studied its encrypted surface, as she had done a thousand times before. “So there’s no way to eliminate this last one,” she ventured. “I guess I’m stuck with the last fractal artifact in the world.”
“The only one,” Storm corrected. “Most people would have a hard time using it to predict or control the lottery numbers, let alone alter reality to their liking,” she said. “But in the wrong hands, its power could still be more than a little dangerous.”
“Then I’ll have to protect it vigorously, and use it wisely, eh?” Alia smiled at the two mutants. “Maybe that breakthrough in accurate wreather prediction is just around the corner.”
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