CW // Violence
It is at the end of the journey that he understand why, in 1998, a mother from Bath, England, walked into her home from her Sunday evening walk by her local parish, drew a knife from the kitchen draw, went upstairs and stabbed her sleeping infant son to death before her husband had roused from his doze on the couch.
He stares at the fractal ahead of him. The Moth, some call this one, or the Angel. It has six wings, if you can call them that, across a symmetrical body. The patterns within extend inward, infinitely, and outward to, like gossamer thorns, hardly visible to the human eye. But the brain knows they are there. This is more complex than the others, exponentially so. It has a whole other dimension to work with. In places the borders between colour are so intricate they blur against the indelicate human visual acuity. It feels as if it is moving. As if it is staring at him. But it is static.
He feels nausea at the back of his throat. He feels the sudden urge to leap forwards, as if there is a sudden drop before him. Without years of conditioning, he’d be looking for the nearest implement to stick in his own throat.
The pattern is trying to undo millions of years of pattern recognition. Unhooking those essential nodes from the mind like a comb running through knotted hair. It’ll tear what it cannot untangle. This is because the human mind is, for the first time, seeing what the universe actually looks like. And without proper bracing, it cannot handle what lies before it.
Yes, the Moth is a particularly hazardous fractal, even for him. It borders close to what Chaos looks like, or at least what they think Chaos might look like. Which begs the question, how did it end up on the roof of a church in Bath, built in 1867?
Paddy Dobson
30th March 2021