MEME: YOUR FIRST FIC!
Mar. 14th, 2011 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sperrywink_ljGakked from ![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
turps.
Post your very first fanfiction. Don't edit anything out. Leave in all the bad spelling, terrible grammar and painful summary.
Tag five other people. Have fun!
I don't tag anyone since you'll do it if you want.
My first story was an episode tag for Stargate: Atlantis's episode Trinity. This version isn't as painful as the first version I shared with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silveryscrape, which was passive voice and just a mess. Still even the final product is quite nerdy and embarrassing even now though.
My comments will be in bold like this. Notice the fancy demarcation above. They are integral to the story, doncha know?
For any formal theory in which basic arithmetical facts are provable, either the theory is inconsistent or it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement which is true but not provable or refutable in the theory.
Nothing says classy like a hyperlinked quote.
Rodney was in fifth grade when he learned mathematics couldn’t solve everything.
It didn’t mean anything to him at the time. He was taking calculus and chemistry at a nearby university after his regular school day. It was through a city-wide honors program that the university ran so he wasn’t the only underage student, but he was the youngest which he lorded over his sister. She was in high school and also enrolled in college classes (literature and sociology), but she hadn’t been accepted into the program until she was in tenth grade. He still had the raw patches on his belly and cheek from where she had wrestled him to the carpet and nuggied him until he pleaded forgiveness and promised to wash the dishes for the rest of the semester in penance for his gloating. He had stuck his tongue out at her back and quietly chanted “I’m still smarter than you’ when she stalked out of the living room in victory. Rodney didn’t let things go easily. This was written in 2005 before we knew anything about Jeannie.
In calculus they were talking about infinity and the professor wandered off on a tangent. He was the epitome of the absent-minded professor, so this wasn’t unusual, and Rodney learned about infinite sets and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem since the continuum hypothesis is improvable within its system. So besides infinite sets and cardinalities and infinity itself, Rodney learned about improvable statements. Even classier are hyperlinks within the story, which there was one here, but the link was no longer active.
This was just another miscellaneous fact about math to Rodney. He was more excited about the concept of infinity and infinite sets than any talk about the limitations of axiomatic constructs in set theory, so that is what he babbled to his Mom about the rest of the night: the symbols used, the vastness, the innumerability yet possible countability, the varying sizes or cardinalities, aleph null and aleph one. OMG, I can't believe what a math geek I was!!I don't even remember what half this means myself! He didn’t stop until his dad yelled at him in the middle of dinner which caused his Mom to yell back and, like every other night recently, dinner devolved into a screaming match between them. His sister sent him death glares and he was happy to have the excuse of doing the dishes to get away.
Soon Rodney loved infinity even more because he found he could block out his parent’s fighting by counting under his breath, visualizing the infinitely far away limit. This was particularly useful when he was barred from practicing his piano or required to remain at the dinner table because one of his parents wanted a normal fucking family dinner, just this once, you ungrateful shit. Trapped, trying to refrain from babbling his unease away, Rodney imagined reaching farther and farther to infinity and, finally, escape.
The list of numbers changed from day to day. Soon half the fun was finding a new sequence. Starting with “1, ½, ¼, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32…” and halving numbers into smaller and smaller factions while his parents sat in stony silence at the dinner table. Tripling numbers into larger and larger integers, “1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 241…” while his parents had one long fight waxing and waning over the weekend. Chanting prime numbers under his breath “2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…” while pots are slammed onto the table and plates are thrown on his birthday. Rodney was captivated by the order that could characterize something vast and innumerable. He could sneak into his backyard when his parent’s fights lasted well after midnight and look into space and imagine it was the closest thing to infinity he would ever see. Soon he started to learn as much physics as possible so that he could understand all about galaxies and the universe and these building blocks of possibly infinite space.
Still. All this was just mental gymnastics to occupy his mind and keep his mouth quiet when he needed to disappear. Everyone in Rodney’s family was loud and confrontational and it was only with his father’s increased drinking and his parents’ increasingly nasty fights that talking over someone else became a dangerous idea. Music was still his salvation while infinity was just an escape. He recognized that what he loved in both was the underlying order of beauty, but the beauty of music was much more breathtaking.
Rodney was in ninth grade when he accepted he was a coward.
He had skipped a couple grades, but still had to go to regular classes despite his work in college courses, which he had complained about long and bitterly. Being nerdy was reason enough to get picked on by the other students, but being half the size of the bullies was pure torture. Rodney consoled himself with his music and his intelligence and used the biting wit he learned from his father to attack his bullies the only way he could.
This worked until his piano tutor told him that being perfect wasn’t enough for greatness. Rodney didn’t quit because he was hurt by what his teacher said; he quit because he had no clue what his teacher meant and knew that was a bad thing. How could perfection not be the highest form of artistry? Being judged and found wanting based on something as unquantifiable as emotion went against everything Rodney believed in. Rodney would rather avoid the possibility than accept anything less as reality, even if it lost him his only salvation. And he’d been to enough recitals and heard enough imperfect playing while people raved about passion and emotion to know there was a good chance he would run into the same kind of mentality in the next tutor. It was too common. He used to think they were just coddling the lesser players, but he can’t risk the chance that they really do think those players are better. Rodney would rather quit than look too closely at the concept that imperfection could be preferable, because if Rodney didn’t have an order, something by which to measure his ability and genius, Rodney didn’t know what he was worth. But he had proved enough theorems and solved enough equations to realize that mathematicians and scientists valued perfection like he did. That was a sure-thing versus the chaotic incomprehensibility of qualitative brilliance in music.
So infinity and the universe provided another escape although it was bitter this time.
Rodney had been in the Pegasus Galaxy for just over a year when he again learned that mathematics couldn’t solve everything.
Even when physics became his world and his comprehension of mathematics was expert, its limitations were only ever a minor twinge at the back of his mind and easily ignored. He could solve 95% of his problems with just calculus and the rest followed with only the addition of a couple of topics from number theory. Everything he could prove and develop about the vastness of the universe was too enticing to suffer doubts about the mathematically unknowably. Even Samantha Carter back at the SGC, when she was pulling miracles out of thin air, had the math to back it up when she went back later to put all the steps together. She just could see where the math was going, even if she couldn’t prove the way yet.
The seconds that he and John were stuck waiting for the weapon on Doranda to overload were the most crushing since his musical dreams were ended. Every second after Radek said ‘the laws of physics won’t apply’ were torture and Rodney was desperate for reality to prove Radek wrong. Rodney needed the laws of physics, mathematics, for order to underline the universe. He believed wholeheartedly it would work because he couldn’t accept less. He didn’t fail because he was less intelligent than the Ancients, he and the Ancients both failed because they were using the same tools. The Ancients may have been light-years ahead of current non-classified mathematical theory, but they were using the same foundation, the same representation. Real numbers, axiomatic systems, Fourier analysis. The Ancient’s math was as obsolete as Rodney’s.
Rodney thought about Miller and his useless death; just one more in a string of them since they arrived in the Pegasus Galaxy and all of Rodney’s expertise proved insufficient again and again. He had achieved nothing in Miller’s memory except failure. Rodney had learned the personal histories of those involved in the Manhattan Project in his final history requirement during his senior year of college. He had found a class about the role of science in World War II and learned all about it as well as Enigma and U-boats. Besides Daghlian, Rodney also learned about Tom Dowd. Dowd began work on the Manhattan Project as a technician when he was 16. After the war he became a music producer instead of a physicist because he couldn’t get university credit for the classified work he had done. He had always been interested in music so he pursued that instead. He went on to create the eight-track console and revolutionize music recording. Such. A. Nerd.
Even back in college Rodney saw the irony. Tom Dowd had wanted to become a physicist but became a musician because the physics community hindered him while Rodney had become a physicist because the music community hindered him. At the time it was an interesting reverse reflection of what his life could have been, but nothing more. Ever since he began failing to find the answers to save people, it has become a bitter reflection. He no longer feels any kinship between him and Tom Dowd. Tom Dowd felt blessed by the outcome of his choices, while Rodney just feels insufficient.
John wouldn’t talk to him on the flight back to Atlantis and Rodney was too embarrassed to talk to anyone else on the Daedalus. Rodney’s mind just raced through the equations over and over although he knew it couldn’t help. The theoretical possibility that the laws of physics would not apply versus running into it in reality was too big for his mind to grasp and he felt like a simpleton. It had seemed so crystalline in the moment, beautiful and ordered. His mind would flicker over to the planet-side confrontation with John and his arrogant assurances, but it would then quickly skitter away and back to the equations to escape the messy, unordered emotion and try to refind that clarity and order.
It wasn’t until now that he understood the full implications of this blindness.
Rodney believed everything was provable because if it wasn’t then Rodney had no foundation for his life. Rodney was open about what he was feeling at any given time- Scared, panicked, hungry- but he still shied away from any introspection into who he was. Provability was a simple and clean way to judge the world, everyone in it, and himself. Rodney had held himself above everyone because he could prove they weren’t as smart as he was and thus have nothing to offer him. That was why he couldn’t accept Radek’s claims about the weapon and its unreliability. If the laws of physics didn’t apply than nothing was provable and not only did Rodney have nothing to offer, he had no way to judge those around him.
After his apologies, or attempted apologies, Rodney retreated to his room and sat holding his head in his hands and let the horrifying events unreel again in his mind. Before falling too far into regrets and panic Rodney returned to his lab. He brewed coffee and restarted his work. It was 3am and no one else was there. Even for the middle of the night the labs tended to have some poor soul struck with inspiration, so Rodney was thankful for the solitude.
He re-proved the equations, re-ran the simulations, and in all other ways checked his work and Zelenka’s. Zelenka had already walked him through the further mathematical work he had done, but Rodney needed to double-check it. In the end, even Zelenka’s work only hinted at the unknowability of the system. Zelenka had admitted there were limitations and there was some conjecture, but it went beyond that. It was something Rodney would never have seen.
Rodney had thought maybe he had come into his own in the Pegasus Galaxy, saving the day. He sees now he was still just calculating faster; cycling through all the possible options and choose the best one before anyone else got to it. But he couldn’t imagine the solution just beyond rationality. He never could. It was a leap of intuition for Zelenka to see the consequences so clearly from the little clues hidden in what the equations didn’t prove. It was artistry.
He thought he would hate Radek more for being right, but he doesn’t. He’s ready to look at the truth about the universe (whatever it may be) and about himself. Because if there is one thing everyone’s reactions to Rodney’s mistake has shown him, it is that even when they are furious at him they believe Rodney has more to offer than just what he can prove.
And Rodney’s tired of trying to fit his life and the universe into ordered boxes and tired of being a coward. He’ll start by apologizing again to Elizabeth since she deserves it after their screaming match. Then he’ll try again with John because he deserves it for standing by Rodney until the bitter end. And he’ll end with Radek and tell him how not stupid his conclusions were and how not shoddy his analysis was.
Rodney’s finally willing to accept the unknowable because he can see the perfection in the messy and unordered relationships the Pegasus Galaxy gave him.
Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved.
Cause ending with another quote and then a special demarcation character is also sexy.
This entry was originally posted at http://sperrywink.dreamwidth.org/89857.html.
turps.Post your very first fanfiction. Don't edit anything out. Leave in all the bad spelling, terrible grammar and painful summary.
Tag five other people. Have fun!
I don't tag anyone since you'll do it if you want.
My first story was an episode tag for Stargate: Atlantis's episode Trinity. This version isn't as painful as the first version I shared with
silveryscrape, which was passive voice and just a mess. Still even the final product is quite nerdy and embarrassing even now though.∞
My comments will be in bold like this. Notice the fancy demarcation above. They are integral to the story, doncha know?
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem
For any formal theory in which basic arithmetical facts are provable, either the theory is inconsistent or it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement which is true but not provable or refutable in the theory.
Nothing says classy like a hyperlinked quote.
Rodney was in fifth grade when he learned mathematics couldn’t solve everything.
It didn’t mean anything to him at the time. He was taking calculus and chemistry at a nearby university after his regular school day. It was through a city-wide honors program that the university ran so he wasn’t the only underage student, but he was the youngest which he lorded over his sister. She was in high school and also enrolled in college classes (literature and sociology), but she hadn’t been accepted into the program until she was in tenth grade. He still had the raw patches on his belly and cheek from where she had wrestled him to the carpet and nuggied him until he pleaded forgiveness and promised to wash the dishes for the rest of the semester in penance for his gloating. He had stuck his tongue out at her back and quietly chanted “I’m still smarter than you’ when she stalked out of the living room in victory. Rodney didn’t let things go easily. This was written in 2005 before we knew anything about Jeannie.
In calculus they were talking about infinity and the professor wandered off on a tangent. He was the epitome of the absent-minded professor, so this wasn’t unusual, and Rodney learned about infinite sets and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem since the continuum hypothesis is improvable within its system. So besides infinite sets and cardinalities and infinity itself, Rodney learned about improvable statements. Even classier are hyperlinks within the story, which there was one here, but the link was no longer active.
This was just another miscellaneous fact about math to Rodney. He was more excited about the concept of infinity and infinite sets than any talk about the limitations of axiomatic constructs in set theory, so that is what he babbled to his Mom about the rest of the night: the symbols used, the vastness, the innumerability yet possible countability, the varying sizes or cardinalities, aleph null and aleph one. OMG, I can't believe what a math geek I was!!I don't even remember what half this means myself! He didn’t stop until his dad yelled at him in the middle of dinner which caused his Mom to yell back and, like every other night recently, dinner devolved into a screaming match between them. His sister sent him death glares and he was happy to have the excuse of doing the dishes to get away.
Soon Rodney loved infinity even more because he found he could block out his parent’s fighting by counting under his breath, visualizing the infinitely far away limit. This was particularly useful when he was barred from practicing his piano or required to remain at the dinner table because one of his parents wanted a normal fucking family dinner, just this once, you ungrateful shit. Trapped, trying to refrain from babbling his unease away, Rodney imagined reaching farther and farther to infinity and, finally, escape.
The list of numbers changed from day to day. Soon half the fun was finding a new sequence. Starting with “1, ½, ¼, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32…” and halving numbers into smaller and smaller factions while his parents sat in stony silence at the dinner table. Tripling numbers into larger and larger integers, “1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 241…” while his parents had one long fight waxing and waning over the weekend. Chanting prime numbers under his breath “2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…” while pots are slammed onto the table and plates are thrown on his birthday. Rodney was captivated by the order that could characterize something vast and innumerable. He could sneak into his backyard when his parent’s fights lasted well after midnight and look into space and imagine it was the closest thing to infinity he would ever see. Soon he started to learn as much physics as possible so that he could understand all about galaxies and the universe and these building blocks of possibly infinite space.
Still. All this was just mental gymnastics to occupy his mind and keep his mouth quiet when he needed to disappear. Everyone in Rodney’s family was loud and confrontational and it was only with his father’s increased drinking and his parents’ increasingly nasty fights that talking over someone else became a dangerous idea. Music was still his salvation while infinity was just an escape. He recognized that what he loved in both was the underlying order of beauty, but the beauty of music was much more breathtaking.
Rodney was in ninth grade when he accepted he was a coward.
He had skipped a couple grades, but still had to go to regular classes despite his work in college courses, which he had complained about long and bitterly. Being nerdy was reason enough to get picked on by the other students, but being half the size of the bullies was pure torture. Rodney consoled himself with his music and his intelligence and used the biting wit he learned from his father to attack his bullies the only way he could.
This worked until his piano tutor told him that being perfect wasn’t enough for greatness. Rodney didn’t quit because he was hurt by what his teacher said; he quit because he had no clue what his teacher meant and knew that was a bad thing. How could perfection not be the highest form of artistry? Being judged and found wanting based on something as unquantifiable as emotion went against everything Rodney believed in. Rodney would rather avoid the possibility than accept anything less as reality, even if it lost him his only salvation. And he’d been to enough recitals and heard enough imperfect playing while people raved about passion and emotion to know there was a good chance he would run into the same kind of mentality in the next tutor. It was too common. He used to think they were just coddling the lesser players, but he can’t risk the chance that they really do think those players are better. Rodney would rather quit than look too closely at the concept that imperfection could be preferable, because if Rodney didn’t have an order, something by which to measure his ability and genius, Rodney didn’t know what he was worth. But he had proved enough theorems and solved enough equations to realize that mathematicians and scientists valued perfection like he did. That was a sure-thing versus the chaotic incomprehensibility of qualitative brilliance in music.
So infinity and the universe provided another escape although it was bitter this time.
∞
Rodney had been in the Pegasus Galaxy for just over a year when he again learned that mathematics couldn’t solve everything.
Even when physics became his world and his comprehension of mathematics was expert, its limitations were only ever a minor twinge at the back of his mind and easily ignored. He could solve 95% of his problems with just calculus and the rest followed with only the addition of a couple of topics from number theory. Everything he could prove and develop about the vastness of the universe was too enticing to suffer doubts about the mathematically unknowably. Even Samantha Carter back at the SGC, when she was pulling miracles out of thin air, had the math to back it up when she went back later to put all the steps together. She just could see where the math was going, even if she couldn’t prove the way yet.
The seconds that he and John were stuck waiting for the weapon on Doranda to overload were the most crushing since his musical dreams were ended. Every second after Radek said ‘the laws of physics won’t apply’ were torture and Rodney was desperate for reality to prove Radek wrong. Rodney needed the laws of physics, mathematics, for order to underline the universe. He believed wholeheartedly it would work because he couldn’t accept less. He didn’t fail because he was less intelligent than the Ancients, he and the Ancients both failed because they were using the same tools. The Ancients may have been light-years ahead of current non-classified mathematical theory, but they were using the same foundation, the same representation. Real numbers, axiomatic systems, Fourier analysis. The Ancient’s math was as obsolete as Rodney’s.
Rodney thought about Miller and his useless death; just one more in a string of them since they arrived in the Pegasus Galaxy and all of Rodney’s expertise proved insufficient again and again. He had achieved nothing in Miller’s memory except failure. Rodney had learned the personal histories of those involved in the Manhattan Project in his final history requirement during his senior year of college. He had found a class about the role of science in World War II and learned all about it as well as Enigma and U-boats. Besides Daghlian, Rodney also learned about Tom Dowd. Dowd began work on the Manhattan Project as a technician when he was 16. After the war he became a music producer instead of a physicist because he couldn’t get university credit for the classified work he had done. He had always been interested in music so he pursued that instead. He went on to create the eight-track console and revolutionize music recording. Such. A. Nerd.
Even back in college Rodney saw the irony. Tom Dowd had wanted to become a physicist but became a musician because the physics community hindered him while Rodney had become a physicist because the music community hindered him. At the time it was an interesting reverse reflection of what his life could have been, but nothing more. Ever since he began failing to find the answers to save people, it has become a bitter reflection. He no longer feels any kinship between him and Tom Dowd. Tom Dowd felt blessed by the outcome of his choices, while Rodney just feels insufficient.
John wouldn’t talk to him on the flight back to Atlantis and Rodney was too embarrassed to talk to anyone else on the Daedalus. Rodney’s mind just raced through the equations over and over although he knew it couldn’t help. The theoretical possibility that the laws of physics would not apply versus running into it in reality was too big for his mind to grasp and he felt like a simpleton. It had seemed so crystalline in the moment, beautiful and ordered. His mind would flicker over to the planet-side confrontation with John and his arrogant assurances, but it would then quickly skitter away and back to the equations to escape the messy, unordered emotion and try to refind that clarity and order.
It wasn’t until now that he understood the full implications of this blindness.
Rodney believed everything was provable because if it wasn’t then Rodney had no foundation for his life. Rodney was open about what he was feeling at any given time- Scared, panicked, hungry- but he still shied away from any introspection into who he was. Provability was a simple and clean way to judge the world, everyone in it, and himself. Rodney had held himself above everyone because he could prove they weren’t as smart as he was and thus have nothing to offer him. That was why he couldn’t accept Radek’s claims about the weapon and its unreliability. If the laws of physics didn’t apply than nothing was provable and not only did Rodney have nothing to offer, he had no way to judge those around him.
After his apologies, or attempted apologies, Rodney retreated to his room and sat holding his head in his hands and let the horrifying events unreel again in his mind. Before falling too far into regrets and panic Rodney returned to his lab. He brewed coffee and restarted his work. It was 3am and no one else was there. Even for the middle of the night the labs tended to have some poor soul struck with inspiration, so Rodney was thankful for the solitude.
He re-proved the equations, re-ran the simulations, and in all other ways checked his work and Zelenka’s. Zelenka had already walked him through the further mathematical work he had done, but Rodney needed to double-check it. In the end, even Zelenka’s work only hinted at the unknowability of the system. Zelenka had admitted there were limitations and there was some conjecture, but it went beyond that. It was something Rodney would never have seen.
Rodney had thought maybe he had come into his own in the Pegasus Galaxy, saving the day. He sees now he was still just calculating faster; cycling through all the possible options and choose the best one before anyone else got to it. But he couldn’t imagine the solution just beyond rationality. He never could. It was a leap of intuition for Zelenka to see the consequences so clearly from the little clues hidden in what the equations didn’t prove. It was artistry.
He thought he would hate Radek more for being right, but he doesn’t. He’s ready to look at the truth about the universe (whatever it may be) and about himself. Because if there is one thing everyone’s reactions to Rodney’s mistake has shown him, it is that even when they are furious at him they believe Rodney has more to offer than just what he can prove.
And Rodney’s tired of trying to fit his life and the universe into ordered boxes and tired of being a coward. He’ll start by apologizing again to Elizabeth since she deserves it after their screaming match. Then he’ll try again with John because he deserves it for standing by Rodney until the bitter end. And he’ll end with Radek and tell him how not stupid his conclusions were and how not shoddy his analysis was.
Rodney’s finally willing to accept the unknowable because he can see the perfection in the messy and unordered relationships the Pegasus Galaxy gave him.
Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved.
∞
Cause ending with another quote and then a special demarcation character is also sexy.
This entry was originally posted at http://sperrywink.dreamwidth.org/89857.html.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:10 pm (UTC)Also, all your links *g*
Thank goodness for the people that took us in hand and showed us the way writing wise. They're saints.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:15 pm (UTC)Mary was definitely a saint. A harsh one, but a saint nonetheless. *g*
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:28 pm (UTC)She certainly was. The things she used to say. I would read what she wrote and then send my story to Ashley and whine about it. Ashley's job was to tell me that it wasn't as bad as Mary said it was.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:31 pm (UTC)It's good you have Ashley for balance. *g*
Happy Birthday, btw!!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:35 pm (UTC)Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-14 10:29 pm (UTC)