Nymphomation(32)
Monday already, and Daisy was panicking. She’d spent all Saturday night and the whole of Sunday working on it, getting nowhere, because the question raised so many further problems. It was the first time the professor had directly referred to the dominoes. But more than that, what did he mean when he said that only 75 per cent of the gamblers were playing to win? Surely all the gamblers were playing to win? And how could the actual number of players affect the outcome? Weren’t the dominoes a game of chance alone? Wasn’t ‘Play to win’ just a blurbfly’s mating slogan, designed to increase the takings?
So many questions. Like, what exactly did Professor Hackle know?
OK, only the university’s computer could find it out, maybe.
Daisy opened up a window, into which she pulled the library’s database and asked for the ‘Mathematics Dept: Documents’. On a keyword searcher she typed in ‘play to win’. Pressed on the button.
Bingo! Results…
Fifty-two papers had been published containing the ‘play to win’ words. She scanned the titles, and decided that ‘The No-Win Labyrinth: A Solution to Any Such Hackle Maze’ sounded the most interesting, mainly because of the words ‘Hackle Maze’ in there. The paper was first published in 1968, in a mathematical journal called Number Gumbo: A Mathemagical Grimoire, and written by a certain Hackle, Maximus. Wasn’t that what her father had called Hackle? Maximus? So he did go to school with him. And magical mathematics? What was going on here, with her fabled professor; was he a student of the Black Math ritual? Number Gumbo? OK, so this was way back in ‘68, and no doubt the professor had been a raving hippy, but still…
Out of curiosity, she studied the titles and authors of some of the other papers the search had found. Sure enough, all fifty-two of them were written by Hackle, all of them published in the Sixties and Seventies. All of them called things like Twisted Hackle Paths and Other Such Wanderings’; The Trickster Virus, its Effect upon Play’; ‘Maze Dynamics and DNA Coding, a Special Theory of Nymphomation’; ‘Sealing the Maze, the Theses Equation’; ‘Lost in the Love Labyrinth’; ‘Becoming the Maze, a Topology of Virgin Curves’; and even ‘Fourth-Dimensional Orgasms and the Casanova Effect’.
Daisy just had to try that last one.
But no matter how hard Daisy pressed to open up the file, all she got back was a ‘no access’ message. She tried at least another twenty papers, the same no-go coding each time. What? The professor was keeping his secrets tight?
Only one paper opened to her touch. It was called ‘The Bifurcation Less Travelled’, published in 1979. As the screen filled with words and numbers, Daisy felt that the paper was choosing her, rather than the other way round, especially when she read the opening lines: ‘The Hackle Maze may be navigated successfully only by choosing to be lost. The best wanderers will subsume themselves to the maze, thereby becoming the pathways.’
Digging deeper in the text she saw this: ‘To play to win a Hackle Maze, all the various wanderers must actively fall in love with the puzzle. Every player is dependent on every other.’ And then this: ‘In the lover’s labyrinth, there are no winners without losers, this is the ruling.’ Again and again she saw the strange word nymphomation, used to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers, rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new numbers, which had something to do with ‘breeding ever more pathways towards the goal’. Daisy had never heard of this procedure, never mind ‘having the courage sometimes to take the bifurcation less travelled’.
What was the professor on, way back then? Some crazy, mind-altering drugs, no doubt. He never mentioned any of this stuff in his lectures. Lost in the love labyrinth, indeed! Mind you, from a quick scan of the equations, it looked like real high-level mathematics. Beyond her horizon. The professor cultivated a shadowy figure in the university, and these lost pages hinted at further depths to the shadows.
She wanted to study this further, but the computer refused to save the file to floppy. It wouldn’t even let her print a hard copy; apparently she could only read the file on screen. Again, that feeling of being dragged in by the text. The screen seemed to be scrolling without her help, unless her hand had slipped…
A blur of numbers travelling downwards, faster than the eye, becoming one long equation, without beginning or end… to stop. Dead! On the following line: ‘Exactly 22 per cent of the wanderers must play to lose themselves, in order for the real winner to flourish. The relevant equations follow…’