His footsteps resounded off the marble steps as he climbed from Professor McCurdy’s main office up to the lab. Everything seemed eerily quiet in the building, the lights were dimmed to save electricity and even the janitorial staff had gone home. He gripped his dissertation proposal, bloodied by the Professor’s red pen and sighed.

This year had to go right, it had to come together. Everything was riding on completing the degree on time. This was the third proposal ripped apart his faculty advisor, one his fellows had lined up to work with but she’d accepted only him. “How lucky!” they’d said, “How did you manage to get on with her? She doesn’t work with anyone!”

Professor McCurdy was, as was whispered in politely awed circles, quirky. She had published dozens of papers in progressively less reputable publications and worked her way down the faculty ladder until her early theories on gravitational waves were validated accidentally by a team in Switzerland. Early experiments on some of her other work showed promising results and she went from a tenured crack without teaching assistants to a revered long-misunderstood genius observed in rapt silence within a few months.

He suspected she only took him on because, since he was a lowly undergraduate scraping by on ramen in an attic room on house share, he’d really liked her. This was before the world discovered her hidden genius. She didn’t look down on him despite him having to use the previous edition of every textbook and the refurbished version of a laptop that was du jour from four years ago. Her office hours were always empty which often left him listening to wild stories and rabbit trails he couldn’t begin to understand at the time. Half the days she was frustrated by something in her own brain he couldn’t see and she’d just wander around ranting and, occassionally, throwing things.

Now her profile had been raised and he’d moved from lowly, broke undergraduate to lowly, broke doctoral student. She’d kept the same office and he’d kept the same attic room. But he was tired of all the other people who lived under him, in the main house, moving on up. He’d been dirt his whole life and his family couldn’t understand why his big nerd brain wasn’t raking in the big bucks at some corporation or other. At first, he’d been full of dreams and the Professor’s theories of numbers and patterns danced through his brain. But that was a long time ago, he wanted out and up. He’d been in that drafty little room so long his dreams to nightmares of dying there.

After all the years of knowing the Professor and hours turning into days in her tiny office, she’d never mentioned the secret staircase with the little room at the top. Not until today. Not until she’d handed back the latest proposal where they book took a long and disappointed sigh looking at it.

“Samson. Samson.” Her voice had chided him.

He couldn’t bear to look at her.

“This is part of you. This is blood sweat and tears. Why do you continue to bore me with this? It reads like an accountant? Are you an accountant?”

A true insult, coming from her. Mathmeticians did not count, they calculate. Somehow he had heard this between her words.

“When you were young…” She sighed again. “You had such promise, such a bright lateral brain. Even though you had no idea what you were doing you would go out there. You have to go out there.”

He straightened the the crumped and now-stained stack of papers on his lap.

“You never bored me. And now you bore me.” She stopped to take a long hard look at him. Blood rose to his face.

Then it appeared like she stopped again, in the middle of her first pause. It was as if she was considering him for the first time. Suddenly she changed tactis.

“This office was once the home of an alchemist. All the way back to when this place was being built.”

She gestured broadly to the ancient stone walls all around them.

“He was a visionary. Of course he was insane. All that lead…” She dropped off again and stared into something above his head.

She continued, somewhat dreamily. “He paid the builders to tack a little something on here, a thinking room. His thinking room, he called it in his notes. I must have been the first one in hundreds of years to read his journals. He did discover something. In the end the thought he could fly, poor thing.”

She laid it out for him, showed him the stairs. Told him to meet her at the top, at the witching hour she’d said. Tonight he was going to sort out the dreaded thesis once and for all.

So here he was, at an ancient wooded door in the middle of the night. Suddenly, he was very tired. Exhausted to his bones. The years creeked into him at once and he forced heavy feet through the entrance. He felt like he could collapse under the weight of it all.

Ahead of him was inky darkness with a narrow point of glowing light. He trudged towards it almost in a trance. Professor McCurdy was holding the source. What looked like a rock, about the same size and shape of a baked potato was cradled lovingly in her arms. It was swirling crimson and gold, looking almost liquid. Her face was illuminated, serene.

“Good lad.” She said. “You’ve made it this far. I’m impressed but not surprised. How are you feeling?”

“Tired.” He croaked out. “I’m so tired.”

“I bet you are.” A smile danced on her face. “So tell me, young Samson. What do you want?”

He stared down into the depths of the glowing orb. He tried to think but the exhaustion was so deep. He felt himself answering, without thought.

“I’m tired of the darkness closing in. I just want to escape.”

“Aaaah. Yes. I thought as much. You have the work of a man on a sinking ship writing about lifeboats.”

He dropped to his knees with a painful thud on the hard floor.

“If I give you this,” she continued, “two things could happen.”

“What two things?”

“Well, the first is this will lead you through the darkness, through the void. You will lose what is separating you from your beautiful mind and you will be free.”

Something in his mind pinged. “What’s the other one?”

“Well. You might think you have the power of flight.”

He didn’t pause. Part of his mind was on autopilot and he couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth.

“Give it to me.” He said.

The faint smile from before broke into a grin, ominious in the twirling light and shadow. A piercing scream of pain tore through him.

Suddenly he was only in darkness, no light. There was no floor, no ceiling, no walls. He was surrounded by a sucking nothing. Then he was falling . A sense without breeze or air on his skin told him he was dropping at increasing speed into the nothing and from nothing.

As he fell his mind passed him through childhood. There was the teasing from kids, ribbing from his parents. Long lonely nights with a flickering flashlight. The solitude and comfort of numbers and theorums. He passed through his escape hatch with scholarships and acceptance into a prestigious and ancient place of learning, hoping to find acceptance and respect.

After the darkness started to narrow in on him and his body felt tight. He passed through the years at school with classmates whose forebearers had gone there. Watched them drive off in graduation convertables to lives of ease and pleasure. It was like trying to pass through a sieve and he felt the walls close in. He felt like he was going to be crushed to to death when he felt himself stop.

Before him two faint distant horizontal bars of light appeared in what must have been the distance. Just as he knew he was going to back out from the pressure he was released and gently set onto a solid surface. The lights grew closer and he saw he was being approached by two doors.

One door opened and he saw himself, in the future. He was in a steel and concrete office, one side was completely windows. He saw himself in a suit, at night. His hair was cut and slicked back and he was clean-shaven. The other door remained close a golden light burst out the bottom and peered out the top of a rounded edge.

He took a closer look at the open door, halogens clearly illuminating his way. He looked successful. He approached the frame. Everything he wanted was in there. He could see future him squinting at a screen. On the his wrist looked like a gold watch. He could imagine his house, his car, showing off to everyone back home. Samson almost stepped through to see what other majesty this life had to offer when he noticed something from the corner of his eye.

On the floor to the other door, red and gold writing started glinting. He took a step back and went and kneeled down. It was faint, at first, but then the writing became stronger. Numbers going up and curling over, turning back on themselves. In the spiral the numbers got smaller and smaller until they became nothing. Samson felt a twinge in his chest, the pang of recognition. He walked from the center of the spire to the beginning. It was Ramanujan’s infinite sume

This was his first love. He came across it by chance as a boy. He didn’t understand it, at the time. But it was his first glimpse into something else, a plane that was both separate from and apart from the tiny world he knew. It was love at first sight.

Tears welled into the corner of his eyes. Looking at it like this was like the first time. He stood and took perspective, seeing the almost finger-print like shape spread before him. He’d never imagined it like this.

Samson softly approached the second door and cracked it open. Before him was just a fuzzy glow, no shapes and no happy ending. He felt a wind kick up and all the beautiful numbers pick off the ground and they blew around him, like fall leaves drifting into the light. He reached out to try and grab just one, but it slipped beyond his grasp. He followed the strings of of the theorum and stepped through the open door into the misty light.

Samson awoke with a start. He pried his eyes open to find himself on the floor of Professor McCurdy’s normal office. Morning light was trickling through the rippled, aging windows.

He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He pulled himself up to a seated position and feeling the bruising on his ribs, pushed himself back to lean against the cold stone wall.

She was sitting at her desk, reading glasses on and apparently not paying him attention. She was busily scribbling onto a yellow notepad, with many pages already bent back around the top.

As he blinked, he felt all the numbers and series were trickling into his head. It didn’t help with the aches, and his brain began to feel uncomfortably full. He adjusted to the brightness of the room and waiting for the swirling to stop.

He felt the air rushing into his lungs and easing out as he breathed. He looked down at the palms of both hands. He felt real. Everything felt desperately real. He focues in on the tip of his middle finger, examining the print there. And then, it came to him.

“Professor,” his throat was dry, “I want to prove infinity has a pattern.”

She glanced up from her work and looked at him. This time her eyes softened.

“Good lad. Your dissertation proposal is accepted.”