---

ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re currently running our first Kickstarter campaign in more than a decade, to fund Year 17 of Lightspeed and Year 15 of Nightmare. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/kickstarter to check it out. Funding the campaign will bring all-new stories to Lightspeed from the likes of Charlie Jane Anders, Travis Baldree, Olivie Blake, P. Djèlí Clark, Ken Liu, Hugh Howey, Seanan McGuire, Rebecca Roanhorse, Veronica Roth, Jeff Vandermeer, and more. The campaign ends October 15, so back now!

---

You are:

A disillusioned mathematical physicist with a wet open mind.

Desperate for knowledge.

A neo-masochist.

A willing sacrifice.

I am:

A devoted servant of the Outer Gods.

A student of the Great Old Ones.

A slave to the ever-expanding cosmos.

Also a disillusioned physicist. A string theorist with fingers in the multidimensional membranes of existence.

Are you frustrated by mathematical dead ends looping in on themselves without revealing the universe’s secret truths? Sickened by the ugly inelegance of your equations? Do you spend every waking moment burning with the need to know what Hawking missed and Einstein failed to account for?

I have seen what exists outside the universe where there is no matter and no time. I have invented mathematics and written equations so beautiful they will flay your mind from its skull and dissect you all the way down to the wriggling little strings that comprise your atoms. I can peel your personal universe away from the membranes of every universe surrounding you until you float suspended, utterly alone, bathed in the purifying black anti-light that radiates from the cyclopean eye of my ancient Master. I will take you apart to your eleventh dimension.

And then, when you are nothing but a shivering mass of infinitesimal strings, I will feed you piece by piece into my Master’s gaping maw. Your existence will slow to an agonizing crawl as your smallest components are stretched out in delicious, infinite agony. You have never known ecstasy as to be rendered down to the base mathematics of the universe, simplified to the point that you become indistinguishable from pure theory itself. Impaled on non-Euclidean geometry, you will be more fulfilled than you can imagine.

Like a violin, the strings of your suffering will play a melody so exquisite and discordant as to wake the dark and dreaming things slumbering outside and welcome Them into our reality. In that eternity of crossing my Master’s event horizon as the Great Old Ones shift into our plane, you will see the truth and structure of every universe laid out in an equation so simple and so beautiful you will shatter upon its clarity.

Let me unravel you.

Swipe right.

[The only photo upload on the dating profile is of the night sky, uncomfortably void of stars.]