At the Hyperbolic Earth Convention
by Zachery Brasier
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“Do you think we’re exaggerating?” Jarod asked. As he did, there was some small part of his brain that rebelled against the place he was in, the sequence of events that had led him to even ask the question. He pushed it down. No, he was smart. The world just never gave him a chance.
“Don’t think so. Here’s the evidence. One, we’ve never heard of the Worcester Committee for Geometric Truth. Two, we didn’t see him on the airplane, but he said he was there. Three, he seemed awfully friendly when he introduced himself to us for no apparent reason. Four, he wrote down our names. Five, he wanted to know your opinion about the seminars. Six, he was talking to someone who was obviously a Fed. Seven, can you think of a blander name than ‘John Smith’? That adds up to some classic counterintelligence.”
“That’s hard to argue with. I can’t figure out: why us, though?”
“Why fake Bin Laden’s death? Why shoot down TWA 800? Why call every UFO a ‘drone’? It’s a machine, Jarod, and machines do only what they’re designed to do. In this case, exert control. We’ll never know why; the logical chains are too complex. All we can do is react and try to find out what we can.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“Tail him tomorrow night, see if we can find out more about him. We might not be able to find out why he targeted us, but at least we can let the community know. Make him a pariah. Shut down this op before it goes too far.”
“Sure. Let’s do it.” Once again, a part of him pushed back against his acquiescence. This was a fun game to play online, but to do it in Real Life...
The gondola drifted out of the casino and into the desert night, starless from the light pollution. A shoreside restaurant erupted into cheers as someone proposed. Liam joined in.
* * *
The second day of the conference sped by. It was a full day of hyperbolic geometry; eight to eight. With DP’s guidance, Jarod was dressed as nondescript as possible, despite his earlier misgivings about the effectiveness of DP’s wardrobe choices. Liam refused to play along.
Their last seminar of the day was about something called Anti-de Sitter space and its connection with paranormal events on Earth.
Apparently, cosmologists believed that if the overall geometry of space time had a negative curvature, then you could model the universe as a hyperbolic disk propagating through time. This would create a spacetime geometry akin to a cylinder, with the boundary of the cylinder having one less dimension than the rest of the universe. In this theory, the physical properties of the 3D universe were actually holographic projections of physical laws on the 2D boundary.
Thus, since the Earth has a similar geometry and also moves forward in time, there is a hyperbolic boundary for the planet, and that boundary can project holograms onto the planet’s surface. To the humans on the surface, these projections would exhibit properties that seem to violate the known laws of physics by appearing and disappearing, going through walls, that sort of thing. This would explain ghosts, UFOs, the Hum and so on. Plus, any being living on the boundary would necessarily be godlike to mortal man, conveniently accounting for the Earth’s religions.
The auditorium was packed, so much so that attendees were standing. One of those people was John Smith. Pulling his thoughts away from the seminar, Jarod periodically checked to see if the presumed Fed had moved or done anything suspicious. But he lost track of time, forgot how long it had been since he had checked last.
As the seminar was wrapping up, DP nudged Jarod and cocked his head towards the back. Slowly looking over his shoulder, Jarod saw Smith on the phone, having an intense conversation. Lots of hand gestures. Angrily, Smith tapped on the screen, pocketed it and stomped to the door.
“Uh-oh,” DP whispered, “that was very suspicious. Something happened. Let’s go!”
Jarod stood, but Liam didn’t. “I think I’ll stay and see the rest.”
Whatever. Shimmying between rows, stomping on angry toes, the two Hyperbolic Earthers made their way to the boundary of the room, through the doors and just caught a glimpse of the donut haircut as it slipped through an exit.
They followed. Fortunately, the time delay already gave them a good standoff distance.
Through the conference area and out onto the casino floor they snuck. Following Smith through the alleys of slot machines — coins clanking and alarms buzzing, pop culture from thirty years ago guaranteeing a win — they saw him stop at a vending machine. DP ducked behind a trash can and Jarod spun to a slot, pulling his hat over his eyes and dropping a quarter. He won a few bucks — surprise! — but Smith was already moving.
Keep your standoff distance. Smith sipped on a water bottle as he emerged into the still-hot summer night. The night crowd was out and about, parents having whisked their kids back to the hotels to keep them away from what they considered to be the real perverts.
Up some stairs, then into Aria’s angular, modern-art mall. Smith wound through the shops, finding an escalator that would bring him towards the Bellagio. DP and Jarod slipped behind a conveniently huge group of tourists. So far, so good. Smith couldn’t have known he was being trailed.
In the air once again, heading across a skybridge. The Bellagio’s fountain show was just starting by the time they got in front of the casino, compressed air launching huge towers of water that crashed down with a thunderous splash. Clair de Lune was being played.
The crowd was thick. Semi-legal prostitution services flicked calling cards. DP refused to move around them and shoved his way through. They didn’t mind.
Weaving, rotating, shoulder forward then back, Jarod pushed his way ahead, suddenly finding himself in a gaggle of cosplayers. He elbowed around Elvis and Pikachu, moved aside to avoid a group taking pictures with the Mandalorian, dodged Freddy Krueger and Art the Clown, scurried around women in bootleg showgirl outfits. Finally, a straight path, glowing in the light of a half-sized Eiffel Tower.
He just caught the back of Smith’s head, grabbed DP’s arm and started power-walking. A run might be suspicious, but walking really fast? Who wouldn’t be excited about seeing Caesar’s Palace?
In fact, that seemed to be Smith’s destination. The Bellagio and the Roman-themed casino were separated by West Flamingo Road, always chaotic. Smith stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for the light. The Granite Staters got as close as they could, hiding behind a group of twenty-somethings holding horn-shaped cups and wooing at the empty night.
The Walk symbol illuminated.
Jarod sped to make the crossing, his breath starting to catch. Smith was walking fast. But where was he going?
Caesar Palace’s gaming floor was unremarkable. The games gave way to the Forum Shops, the casino’s main draw: a long, winding indoor mall with an artificial sky.
DP was huffing, Jarod’s calves were burning, but the excitement of knowledge pushed them forwards, past storefronts catering to the ultra-wealthy, there to make the plebs feel that they were within reach of the splendor. They strode past animatronic Roman gods acting out bastardized myths, then once again into the night. A parking garage loomed ahead.
Smith took the stairs to the third level and Jarod groaned. He sprinted after his quarry, taking two stairs at a time. DP could barely keep up.
The parking garage was, surprisingly, not themed, just alleys of cars and distant echoing noises, strange parking structure sounds that made you feel like a street race would emerge around the corner. But it never did.
Jarod looked left. He looked right. He stood on his toes and tried to peer over the big SUVs. He walked forward, turning sideways to get between oversized vehicles. Having threaded the needle, he stopped to hide behind the bulk of the car, looked left again and there... What the...?
John Smith was standing next to a black car. All the windows were tinted. It had silver trim. Smith was gesturing at the driver, who had only nudged the tinted window down a little. Then a hand emerged through the crack and handed off a little plastic bag.
The car peeled away, screeching.
“Come on,” Jarod said and walked out from behind the bumper.
John Smith was walking towards them, looking down at the bag.
“How’s it going, sucker?” Jarod yelled when he had closed the distance. Smith jumped and looked up. DP arrived, gasping for breath.
“What...?” Their quarry looked around the parking garage with fright in his eyes, then confusion. “Did you follow me?”
“Don’t be cute. Goddamn Fed. We’re onto you.” Jarod snatched the bag from Smith’s limp hand. He turned to DP. “Want to see what the CIA hands off to its agents?”
Trembling, he tore open the cheap plastic. A pill bottle clattered to the concrete. Smith reached for it, but Jarod got there first. He held it up. “Eluxadoline? What in the world is Eluxadoline?”
Smith grabbed the bottle back. “I have a bowel condition,” he sneered.
Flummoxed, Jarod pointed vaguely in the direction the car had driven.
“My cousin lives in Vegas. We have a rocky relationship. I forgot my pills and don’t have a car, but my insurance lets relatives...” The man scowled, the lights reflecting off his head. “No. Why the heck am I telling you this?”
“The names,” DP panted. “The man at the bar.”
Smith’s mouth fell open. “How long have you been following me? Actually, I don’t want to know.” He shoved Jarod aside and started marching away, hands animated as he held arguments with himself.
Then he stopped, turned and pointed at the New Hampshire committee. “I wanted to be friends, you know. It’s lonely out here knowing the truth but not having anyone to talk to. Gosh, is it so hard for you people to build a community?
What answer could there be? Yes. How could they make friends in such a dire state of affairs?
State of affairs? Jarod watched the man recede past the reflective cars then looked up at the ceiling, straight into a fluorescent bulb. What am I doing? one part of his brain asked. Another said, Stalking a man because you wanted to feel important.
For once, he let his doubts speak to him.
* * *
The next day — a half day and the last of the convention — John Smith was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the merch floor, he wasn’t in any of the seminars, he wasn’t wandering around Aria’s gambling floor. Just gone.
DP, naturally, took that as a sign of success. “That was a slick trick with those diarrhea pills, something to get us off his trail. Probably wasn’t a physical drop, only informational. Walking all the way to Caesar’s Palace to get away from us. Nice tradecraft.”
Jarod wasn’t so sure. Who would want to be near their stalkers?
The conference approached its end. Although Jarod felt like he understood more about hyperbolic geometry, he was less confident in its application than when they had arrived. He sat silently, only idly listening to the speakers, looking around the rooms and making inferences about the people around him.
Are these people I’d associate with in day-to-day life? Well, yes. That was what he’d done for the last few years. Life was something he had been unwilling to play at. It was limited to interacting with digital simulacra whose company, now materialized in flesh and blood, was starting to become embarrassing.
But the “why” behind it all was finally going to be answered. That was the name of the last seminar. “Why Are They Doing This?” presented by the Sarris, a husband and wife duo out of Colorado.
They got right into it, bouncing ideas off each other, completing each other’s sentences. No Powerpoints, no pictures. Words only. A laundry list of enemies, incoherently strung together into one grand plot to hide the hyperbolic truth.
For an hour, Jarod listened, shocked and horrified by what he heard: bigotries he didn’t know existed, slurs he had never heard, secret societies spanning back to the beginning of time. Forget dogwhistles, this was a marching band of hatred. Experienced internet denizen though he was, it scared him. These were things from the very depths of the web, places for the dregs of the human race and the Feds trying to entrap them. Had the Hyperbolic Earthers always been like this?
DP nodded along, Liam was glassy, and Jarod wanted to run into the street and hug a stranger, to tell them that they were okay, that they could live anywhere they wanted, that they were loved by someone and had an inherent dignity just by nature of being a human being. Short of that, he wanted to vomit.
Instead he sat. When the lecture ended, he announced that he wasn’t feeling good but he’d meet the other two for dinner. They should get off the Strip, eat something that wasn’t hotel food.
And they did, taking the car past the glowing casino fronts and out into the rest of Las Vegas. They picked a Mexican restaurant.
It was full of life. University kids devoured their cheap, flavorful food. It was a place they’d look back on with fondness, almost reverence, the restaurant whose reasonable prices kept them alive. Burritos were the size of small animals. There were decorations in stratified layers, added over time by successive restaurant workers and never taken down. The music was too loud. The menu had more than a hundred items. They all looked delicious.
As Jarod ate, he thought about the Sarris and how, according to them. half of the people in the restaurant were his enemies, accounting for Nevada’s nearly fifty-fifty electoral split. DP whispered away, tying everything together, having finally discerned the structure of not just the Earth, but the power of the people on it, the grand conspiracy that encompassed everyone and everything.
When Jarod had heard enough, he suggested they park the rental car and walk to The Sphere. He had seen it in pictures, but in person the four-hundred-foot tall spherical amphitheater was overwhelming. The outside of the dome was a massive wraparound screen, formed by one-and-a-quarter million LED emitters, each having forty-eight diodes. They displayed images: a horrifying giant eyeball, political ads, psychedelic patterns, etc. The light glowed through the surrounding area, a nighttime artificial sun.
If the corporate casinos catered to the ’90s concept of luxury, this was a high-tech toy for a child of the 2020s. What else could the modern world dream of other than the biggest screen possible; a building with no form; a shifting region of high-definition light? It was an affront to nature, a construction that made no attempt to pretend it belonged on Earth. It was the most impressive thing Jarod had ever seen.
They walked around the exterior. The display was a big emoji-style smiley face, blinking and rotating, its dead gaze imploring the citizens of Las Vegas to be goddamn happy. In the yellow glow, Jarod felt his mind starting to leave his body. He desperately wanted to go home.
There were benches around it, observation points for one to stare and ponder, to consider the world that had made The Sphere and think about what might come next.
“This is how they mock us,” DP sneered, pointing at the structure. “Why make something like this other than to enforce spherical geometry? Did you know that sometimes they map the ‘world’ onto it?”
“Stop,” Jarod croaked, hunching over. The image rotated and looked down, staring right at him.
“Awfully convenient: step outside, and the sphere is blasting right into your eyes. You know what? I wonder who might be behind this, something to think about when we—”
“Stop!” Jarod yelled, turning to the man. His voice seemed to carry through the desert night. A breeze blew his hair around. DP was visibly shocked, genuinely at a loss as to what caused the outburst. Liam continued to stay silent. “It’s an auditorium. It’s a tourist attraction. It’s a screen.”
“You seem a little tired. You know how this goes. They put the signals out there, they create symbols to change how we think, they tell us what to say...”
Jarod pushed his palms into his eyes, willing it all to go away. He could still see the smiling face, that simplified geometry of a fake emotion, as it faded into a dim afterimage. His words were gone. All he could do was repeat himself. “It’s just a screen, man. It’s just a screen...”
Copyright © 2026 by Zachery Brasier
