	RodMer Short Story Package GG Leslie and the Universe
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Here is Short Story Package GG -- a short story by Rod Anderson.

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This short story was written in 1986, before the amazing progress on the Human Genome Project was anywhere near as advanced as it is today. It is one of my many works (both short stores and poems) featuring the universe as protagonist. Must be some sort of fixation. But, hey, what else is there, anyway?

LESLIE AND THE UNIVERSE

Approximately 1,800 words

Leslie is walking down the street. People keep saying hello to her -- usually men. She likes that. She hopes people will keep saying hello as if they knew her. She pushes her black hair back over her shoulder with one hand. Hello Leslie, hello Leslie, they say. And she smiles back. She knows they're just emissaries. A quaint custom from the past. Rosenkavaliers. Leslie smiles. The universe is causing all this. The universe wants to be her lover. It keeps sending her messages, like flowers, on strange men's lips. Hello Leslie, hello Leslie. Silly universe! But it's quite touching. Some day she will consent to make love. Some day she will sleep with the universe.

Ten years ago Leslie didn't know. She didn't know about any of this. She was just a young student. A doctoral student in mathematics. Hello Leslie, her professor would say every time he passed her. He passed her every day going up and down the creaking wooden stairs in the mathematics building. Hello Leslie, he always said and frowned, as if slightly puzzled at his own greeting. That's why one morning she left off her work on the Fourier Series. Stopped right in the middle. Then amused herself by counting up the number of times the sequence 08-05-12-12-15 appeared in Wronski's Random Number Tables. It occurred 56 times. About what the laws of probability would have predicted. This assumes that the tabulated numbers were properly random to start with. The Wronski Tables contain 500 pages of absolutely random numbers. They have been subjected to countless tests and come out clean. There is no order to them whatsoever.

Hello Leslie, her professor said, frowning, as she was leaving for lunch that day. Slightly annoyed, she dashed off a satirical article called "The Hello-Test for Randomness", as she sat in the cafeteria munching on an egg salad sandwich. Naturally, the choice of English had been arbitrary - as, of course, was the ordering of the letters H-E-L-L-O in the alphabet. Still, her professor was amused. He smiled at her that afternoon for the first time. Hello Leslie, he said, as she left. Why doesn't he ever say goodbye, she wondered.

The universe is love-sick over Leslie. If she doesn't consent soon, things will become desperate. The universe plays with itself a little. Curves on itself tightly in certain exotic regions of space. That doesn't help much. Then it pretends that it itself is merely an illusion. Maya. Something it had read about once in some book. This doesn't help either. Its hunger for Leslie keeps getting worse. Poor universe.

Well why doesn't he say goodbye, Leslie debated with herself. And then on a whim, she pulled out her Wronski Tables again. Since any given five-term sequence should occur about the same 56 times as HELLO, she chose the five-character sequence G'BYE, for investigation. After suitable 'normalization', into computer code (ASCII range), G'BYE can be represented by the sequence 71-39-66-89-69. Leslie was startled to find only 7 occurrences of this sequence.

Here, a well-balanced mind would have let the subject drop. Indeed, a well-balanced mind would not have investigated the occurrences of HELLO and G'BYE in the first place. But well-balanced minds don't make mathematicians. Leslie was a mathematician. At least she wanted to be one. The arcane oddities of the Theory of Numbers intrigued her. So did Fermat's Last Theorem. And Gauss's formula for the density of primes. She was not about to let an inconceivably low frequency of G'BYEs go uninvestigated.

She pulled out her dusty copy of the 2,000-page Tchebychef Tables and began to comb through it, squinting and pushing back her long black hair. The HELLO sequence occurred 224 times as expected. But the G'BYE sequence only 19 times! A twinge of excitement shot down her spine. A tingling dampness collected in her groin. Down she ran to the department library in the basement behind the boiler room. She got out the 5,000 page Weierstrass Tables. She began to run a quivering finger down its columns of figures. Each page took a minute and a half. Ten hours a day for two weeks she buried herself with her obsession. Her face was flushed. The heat of the adjoining boiler room seeped through the library stacks.

And in the end? HELLO 560, G'BYE 27. Probability theory had just taken a kick in the pants! Three months later Leslie became the youngest Assistant Professor ever appointed to the department. It was because of the publication of her celebrated doctoral thesis. She called it: "Fundamental Hello/G'bye Asymmetry in Random Events".

But, of course, she was still on the wrong track. Hello Leslie, said Fred one morning, a fellow statistician on the third floor. She thought Fred wanted to sleep with her. So they spent the noon hour making love in the boiler room. But she could see his heart or something wasn't really in it. As if he were a puppet. There's some aspect of all this helloing I'm still missing, she thought to herself, tugging gently at a strand of damp black hair. Perhaps I've been too immersed in mathematics. She began to devote more time to her social life. She went out to parties every night. She stayed up dancing until all hours with artists, engineers, and accountants. She took strange men, mostly scientists, home to her bed. All of them insisted on saying hello Leslie as they left the next morning. All of them were captivated by the subject of hello/g'bye asymmetry, about which Leslie had begun to write so entertainingly in Chatelaine and Toronto Life. One of her lovers, a cosmologist with very long arms, developed her asymmetry theories into a brilliant proof that the universe was 'open' and would go on expanding forever. Another, a red-haired quantum physicist, refuted the then reigning doctrine that the universe was a quantum fluctuation of nothingness. He did this by smuggling a revolutionary article into the spring 1989 issue of Science. He called it: "The Universe as a Net Hello."

It was about this time that the universe apparently decided that its courtship was progressing too slowly. Also that its name had been taken in vain once too often. The very next year it arranged for a Moscow biologist to locate seven extra chromosomes in the human cell. They were curled up tight. They'd been curled so tight that they had evaded all detection methods used in standard biological practice of the time. The new Moscow methods of analysis revealed that the seven new helical chains each contained three trillion nucleotide components. This is quite a large number. So large, in fact, that it was treated as a joke in Western scientific circles. Until bio-research labs in Geneva, Paris, and Stanford all confirmed the findings. Then came the job of decoding.

Of course, it would take years to decode all the imbedded genetic sequences in chains as long as three trillion components. However, the first eleven trinucleotide combinations, when translated into their decimal equivalents, appeared as: 08-05-12-12-15, numbers which all Leslie's lovers knew by heart, followed by 12-05-19-12-09-05, numbers which many of them had memorized as well, often repeating them softly to themselves alone at night in the midst of wet dreams. Such numbers were now encoded in genes in each of the 10 quadrillion cells in each of the 6 billion human bodies then living on the planet earth. All life seemed to begin with the message HELLO LESLIE. Further analysis of the new chromosomes revealed the complete works of Shakespeare, a few of the early issues of Mad Magazine, the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit, and a scientific treatise on the internal structure of quarks purporting to be dated in the year 2024. The last was incomprehensible to contemporary scientists of the 1990s.

The universe wants to sleep with Leslie. Finally the message gets through. At first she thinks this is a bad joke. But she goes along with it. Why not? Though the first time proves to be not very good. The universe is very young - only four solar-system lives old, a thought which had always puzzled Leslie. But they do it again. She grows to like it. The universe brings her small presents. A string of pearls and a small white purse. It's nice to be cared for. She begins to grow fond of the universe. Of course, it has its bad parts. But on the whole she becomes quite attached to it. And besides, what else is there? But she guards her secret sex life from her friends. She doesn't tell her colleague, Fred. Nor his high-strung wife, the calligraphy expert, who always wears green. She doesn't tell Carol in the next apartment. Nor petite Helen who's now having an affair with the red-haired quantum physicist. She keeps it a secret between herself and the universe. It is, after all, a trifle kinky. Straight, gay, and lesbian all mixed up together. But Leslie is happier that she's ever been before. She is in love. She is in love with everything. Her face glistens with health. She lets her black hair grow even longer. Down to her waist. People notice the change in her. The universe feels expansive too. Stars, galaxies, and super-clusters spin in excitement. It seems that this is what everything is about. Leslie wears her pearls to bed every night.

Further investigation of the new chromosomes dominates the field of microbiology for decades. Recent decoding reveals thousands of future works of science, history, fiction, self-help books, birdwatchers' guides, political treatises, and cooking manuals. Strangely, none of them is dated beyond the year 2052. This is a serious puzzle. The puzzle irritates two generations of biologists. They argue about its meaning. Rival schools lobby the politicians to cut off the others' funding. The theory finally accepted is that works beyond the year 2052 presently lie hidden in yet further chromosomes as yet undetected and uncurled.

However, this theory proves wrong. In the year 2052 Leslie rolls over in her bed, gives a startled little laugh, and dies. And the universe stops. Just like that.

First published in Prism international , Issue #26/4, Summer 1988

Rod Anderson
'SwallowHill', 1940 Hill 60 Rd., R.R.5
Cobourg, ON, K9A 4J8
Canada
rod@rodmer.com