Chapter 3: Fritz
“Ha! I just proved that pi is irrational!”
Andrew’s pencil point snapped. “Dang it, Fritz! They did that years ago!”
Fritz’s face fell. “Really? I mean, this is a fantasy story…”
“I think it was centuries…” Sam said hesitantly, trailing off without completing the thought. Rana just ignored them; she was not a math person at all.
“Darn…I thought I was on to something.” Fritz sighed. “Sometimes it’s hard to be a math nerd.”
“That’s ‘geek’, and don’t you forget it,” said Andrew, pointing his broken pencil in Fritz’s general direction.
They were sitting in the Mathematorium, a room constructed long ago by the great mathematicians Xu and Chen. This was Fritz’s second home, a place where he could go to keep his math side in top shape. Unfortunately, it was currently run by one of Chen’s distant, distant relations who dropped in from time to time. This other Chen was at times quite annoying, but other than this paragraph does not appear in this story. Xu also had living unrelations (even more distant to the point of effectively being unrelated), one of whom will indeed appear later on. But that’s getting ahead.
“I just feel like I’m destined for something more than this. Like a hero in a story or something,” Fritz sighed.
“What kind of heroes are there in math?” Andrew asked incredulously, “The guy who solved the hexagonal packing problem?”
“Kepler conjecture, please,” replied Fritz with a pained look on his face.
“I’d say being able to tell us any digit of pi in any base is pretty good,” Sam put in from behind a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fantasy. Being a non-math book, it had come from outside the dome-shaped building (technically a cylinder with a hemisphere on top, with a radius of 3 spans and a total height of 11 spans).
Fritz sighed. “3.1415926…” he began, his way of calming down and passing time.
Fritz’s talent was a farely useless one in a fantasy world: he could, as Sam had said, name any digit of pi in any base if asked. He could also use it in his calculations as easily as an integer. The one catch was that if anyone tried to get him to explain how it worked, he would go into epileptic shock. The thing that most amazed others was that Fritz could name the last digit of pi, “by working backwards” he said. Most people didn’t realize that this was only possible due to a logic trick in the previous sentence. It was a three.
“…5358979323846264338327950…”
“Hey, Rana, convince Fritz that -1 doesn’t exist again,” Andrew suggested brightly.
“…28841971693993751058–what?”
Rana spoke, looking down from the book Math Curse. (Down? Well she was leaning way, way back in her chair.) “Not again…you get too much fun out of that, Andrew.”
Rana was somewhat of a mystery. She had arrived in the dead of noon, saying her teacher had/will left/leave. For ten minutes everyone had understood what she meant. Then she had stopped speaking, and the whole explanation faded into a blur. It was in this way that they discovered her talent, but not her origins, or who her “teacher” was/will be. Fritz, unfortunately, knew very well that her talent was to convinvce nearby minds of something for up to ten minutes. He knew this unfortunately well because he was often the target, thanks to Andrew and Sam.
No one knew much about Sam either, but he was very obviously quiet and reluctant to speak. Fritz thought this was very sensible, given his talent, which was to change the surroundings to any place he spoke of…as long as he kept talking, and had his hat off. No one had yet figured out what the hat had to do with anything, but Fritz hoped to be the one to do it. That, and to solve Fermat’s Second-to-Last Theorem.
Andrew whacked the table, exasperated, and it sailed up to about 10.7 spans in the air, stopping narrowly before hitting the roof. And also almost taking off Fritz’s nose. “Whoa!”
“Oh, sorry Fritz,” said Andrew, not sounding nearly sorry enough, “Stupid talent.”
“What’s your talent again?” Fritz said back, annoyed.
“Energy.” Andrew looked a bit embarrassed. “I can put energy into things. I guess that was potential energy.”
Rana spoke again. “How do you know about potential energy?” she said accusingly.
“My brother’s been to Fi,” answered Andrew. Fi Zix was a region about four or five periods before Foreign Zix. Most residents of Coo Portino went there at least once in their life.
“Yeah, but…” Fritz decided to let it go. “More importantly, I need to find something to solve. Let’s see, unsolved mysteries…”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Andrew, grabbing a book on the shelf, which immediately burst into flames. Rana yelped and whacked wildly at it with her coat, which she had just found under her chair.
Fritz took the slightly singed book into his arms (it was heavy, but part of that was the special feature multimedia disc), and opened it up. His eyes fell on something. “Talent: omnipedia,” he read aloud, “In theory the distribution of talents is such that there must be an individual who is the source of all information in the universe. Given that there are an infinite number of people, as chosen by lit-er-ar-y convenience”–sounding it out–“such a person must exist. However, no proof for this theorem exists.” He dropped the book on the table before realizing that the table was still in the air. It thudded on the ground next to Sam’s foot. “That’s my project!”
“Are you crazy?” said Andrew, “What’s wrong with pi? Mmm…pie…” Rana smacked his shoulder.
“No, I’ve got to do something. And I know just where to start.” Fritz grabbed his bag and strode out of the building.
“Well, if this lasts longer than a year you’ll get disqualified!” cried Andrew as he and Rana ran to catch up.
Sam kept reading until the sun went down. His eyes (or maybe just his pupils, whichever gives a better image) got bigger and bigger. Then suddenly…“Oh my god!”…and everything went black.