"Greetings Harvey"
"Hello? I can't see you," he replied.
"Come closer." Came the voice again.
Although somewhat wary of what lay at the end of this dark corridor, Harvey trod steadily down the dim and flawless hall and towards the light. "What harm could it do?" he thought. After all, he was only dreaming.
"What's to loose?" Harvey mumbled - barely audibly.
"Why, only your mind" said the shape that was now beginning to solidify in front of him.
"My mind?"
"Indeed, there is nothing to gain or lose in this realm except the mind."
"Who are you? And Where am I?" inquired the sedate Harvey.
"Oh, I'm so sorry for not introducing myself sooner. My name is Leonard, and this is the Corridor of Consciousness. Beyond me lies the Laboratory of Logic and Lunacy."
By this time, Harvey could see quite clearly the figure standing in front of him. He donned a form fitting blue suit and golden medallion on his left breast. Leonard's hands were tucked neatly behind his back.
"Shall I� Began Harvey. But a strange tinkling of bells and then a voice muted him. Not Leonard's voice - another, more aged.
"Mr. Spock"
"Spock here." Leonard replied to the air.
"Has our guest arrived?"
"Indeed, he seems to be in fair shape although his face is pretty fucked up."
"Fit him with a Brain Retainer and send him in on the double."
"Aye Aye, sir."
"Euclid out."
Leonard redirected his attention to Harvey as soon as he was finished speaking with the apparition named Euclid.
"You're going to have to wear one of those," Leonard said, waving his head in the general direction of a small shelf containing several colored metal hats. "Just in case."
Harvey was already beginning to dislike this trek already but concluded that he had nothing better to do with his REM hours than take a voyage into the unknown antipodes of the Mind's Eye. He felt rather bold actually. A lone traveler! Boldly going where no man had been before! He smiled at the thought, Stepped forward and bore a bluish, wire-wound Brain Retainer, and found himself wondering if the apparition Euclid also possessed Leonard's prominent ears.
"Have you lost your mind?" Harvey asked.
"That, Harvey, is highly illogical." He unfolded his hands from behind his back and held out a great cortex of purple, beating nerves. "Oh, and by the way, you can call me Mr. Spock."
Harvey stepped from the Corridor of Consciousness and into the laboratory. The Corridor vanished without a trace and Harvey was left, standing at the perimeter of a great bubble. From the tip of his feet to the far reaches of this vast room, marble tiling lay in perfect settings. The ceiling - vaulted; a respectful tribute to Pi - originated from the floor into a colossal, transparent, semispherical, dome. Within the dome, thousands of odd jellyfish floated this way and that within the room, while a massive lidless eyeball peered down into the laboratory from outside. The Eye had a myriad hyper-textured chords attached to its posterior hemisphere; they jutted out into obscurity - embalmed in a gelatinous goo - around the laboratory. The vista was eerie and Harvey found himself detached, contemplating the overwhelming perception of the eyeball out, looking in. If the floating beasts hadn't partially shrouded the organ, he would have most likely run frantically about in a futile attempt to escape the gaze of this "thing".
"Harvey of Lexus! Welcome." came a voice on the ground.
Until this time Harvey had paid very little attention to the creatures on the ground, but the one Mr. Spock had called Euclid was undoubtedly approaching him now. A stout, bearded, old man was gracefully lumbering across the dozen-or-so meters that separated them. He was wearing nothing but a white toga and a golden badge similar to Mr. Spock's.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Euclid, Commander of this Laboratory. I'd also like to introduce you to our most esteemed researchers."
A row of men clad in contrasting apparel of many different styles and hues arranged themselves into an orderly segment, undoubtedly a tribute to Euclid himself.
"From left to right we have: Aristotle, Archimedes, Pathagorous, Pascal, Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Einstein, Hilbert, Riemann, Euler, Gauss, Xeno, Cantor, G�del, Plato, and the great Socrates. Along the bisecting circumference of our laboratory are the less renown brains of note. They are merely faceless drones (autonomous, but drones nonetheless) that perform the work laced with tedium. Together, we are a logical collective and this laboratory - this laboratory, Harvey, is our greatest work. Don't take this the wrong way Harvey, our organization has been along time in its establishment. Indeed for centuries we have fought viciously among ourselves. It was not very long ago that I picked Riemann's eyeball from his socket in a heated dispute over my fifth postulate. I have since conceded the argument and returned Riemann's eyeball."
"Very gracious of you Euclid." Said a portly Riemann with a grin.
Euclid nodded and continued to talk.
"Riemann has been a most essential part of our endeavor Harvey, as you may well have already guessed. The construction of our laboratory would have not been possible without his unique geometry - and indeed not without the insights of the collective. Riemann emerged from the great circle not but 200 years ago to claim his eternal face and name. No doubt more of those faceless automata you see lining the lab will step forth in the future."
"What happens to them if they never step forward?" inquired a perplexed Harvey
"Then they are remembered only in the works of others after they're death - us. Ours are the names of those without names and their labors are our plagiarisms."
"That sucks" said Harvey."
"Nevertheless, that is the way of things. Everything has its order, motion, validity, even if it isn't as self-evident as I once naively assumed. We all model the ideal Harvey, but the ideal is far from real. Einstein's Deep Thought, along with G�del's formalization of the Ephemidre's paradox, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Incompleteness Theorem insinuate that the more accurately we model reality the more complex its formalizations become and the more assumptions must be made. We all believe that the only perfect model of reality is reality itself and a formal mathematical representation can only be obtained in an alternate Ideal Reality. We are all Platonists at heart, but even Plato has problems rationalizing it when faced with the monstrosity of the contradictions that appear in the transition from the Ideal, Mathematical World, to the really real world of piss, shit, and steady decay.
In the mind's eye, as Einstein is remembered for, one can model a heaven with myriad bodies interacting perfectly within the system. This model is indeed the visionaries' terra incognita, but is nevertheless contained. The laws that govern the motion of our example are the Platonists' playgrounds. They can be formalized precisely with many sets of differential equations. This is an ideal system but reality, as we know, cannot be modeled thus without the gift of omnipotence. The creator of a mental system can explain it in its entirety, unfortunately, it seems the only steadfast Platonist is the God-Head and even he may exist in a context that negates this ideology - analogous to our own. We desperately attempt to discover the infinite trivialities of our context and fail. But, like ants consumed with not knowing, we continue masochistically unto our demise - a perfect tragedy. Once real factors outside of an individual's ideal model are applied to the system, its correctness is compromised unless it be known to a larger brain of whom we are but a subset of automata. Its just too baffling to think about, where does the hierarchy of containers end? And where does it begin?
Harvey's head hurt as it pulsed with non-understanding. If he hadn't been wearing the prescribed headgear, he feared his brains might leak onto the laboratory floor.
"Your confusing him" said Hilbert "May I?" he asked Euclid.
"Indeed" came the reply.
A bearded, healthy man wearing small spectacles, a rimmed hat with a cleft on its summit and tidy suit stepped forward to clarify Euclid's ramblings. Hilbert began.
"Harvey. I believe Euclid has gotten too far ahead, you see he has yet to explain to you what our laboratory really is and jumped strait towards its implications without offering a good explanation. First things first eh? Axioms before theorems I always say, A good explanation must be therefore logically derived. Our laboratory is not a place of research, it is a vessel of research - the research itself. Our laboratory is a functional model of a Non-Riemannian Great Sphere and thus the event horizon of an artificial singularity."
"What is a singularity? Harvey interjected.
"A singularity is a point where space-time reaches infinite convalescence, infinite curvature, and zero volume. And, according to our hypothesis� your residence."
(Part III unfinished)
