# Numbers ## Part I The first number appeared on a Tuesday in Ljubljana, spray-painted in luminescent silver across the concrete underpass near Metelkova. **1836311903**. Nobody paid attention. Graffiti in the old socialist underpasses was as common as pigeons. But by Thursday, seventeen more numbers had materialized across the city—on bridge abutments, transformer boxes, the blank side of the old Kolizej building. Each one ten digits. Each one precise, mechanical, as if stenciled by the same obsessive hand. Marija Kobal, a mathematics teacher at Gimnazija Bežigrad, noticed them first. She'd been photographing urban decay for her Instagram—a hobby that let her pretend she was doing something creative with her exhausted evenings—when she realized the numbers weren't random tags. They were *placed*. Geometrically distributed across the city in a pattern that, when mapped, formed a perfect golden spiral. She posted her discovery to a local subreddit. Within forty-eight hours, the thread had migrated to Discord, then Telegram, then splintered into a dozen channels spanning three continents. They called themselves the **Numeri**. --- ## Part II By the third month, the numbers had spread to forty-seven cities. Tokyo. São Paulo. Reykjavik. Cape Town. Always the same silver paint, always the same mechanical precision. Forensic analysis found nothing—no fingerprints, no DNA, no manufacturing trace on the paint itself. The aerosol cans, when recovered, were generic Chinese imports available in any hardware store, yet the paint inside matched nothing in any database. The Numeri grew obsessed. Forums filled with theories: government psyops, viral marketing, some tech billionaire's elaborate joke. But it was a retired statistician in Prague named Václav Horák who noticed the pattern that changed everything. The frequency of appearance. Day 1: 1 number. Day 2: 1 number. Day 3: 2 numbers. Day 5: 3 numbers. Day 8: 5 numbers. The appearances followed the Fibonacci sequence. When Horák posted his analysis, the internet briefly broke. Mainstream media picked up the story. CNN ran a segment. The Guardian published a long-form piece. Academics debated whether this was evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence or simply an extremely committed artist collective with excellent mathematical education. But the Numeri weren't satisfied with observation. They wanted to understand. --- ## Part III Ananya Krishnamurthy was twenty-three, a doctoral candidate in computational mathematics at ETH Zurich, and she hadn't slept properly in six weeks. The numbers haunted her. She'd written scripts to catalog them, cross-reference them against every mathematical constant and sequence she could find. Prime numbers. Perfect squares. Mersenne primes. The digits of *e*. Nothing matched. Then, at 3:47 AM on a Wednesday, running on her fourth espresso and pure spite, she tried something different. She treated the numbers as offsets. Specifically, as positions within the decimal expansion of pi. The first number—1836311903—when used as an index into pi's infinite digits, pointed to a specific sequence. She extracted ten thousand digits starting from that position. Then the next number. Then the next. At first, the extracted sequences seemed meaningless. Just more digits. But when she converted them to binary, then mapped the binary to a pixel grid... Ananya stared at her screen for a long time. The Mona Lisa stared back. Not a photograph. Not a scan. A *perfect* mathematical representation, encoded in the digits of pi at precisely the positions indicated by the graffiti. As if Leonardo's masterpiece had always been there, waiting in the infinite decimal expansion of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. She checked the next sequence. The Last Supper. The next. Starry Night. The next. The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Every number the graffiti provided pointed to a famous work of human art, hidden in the digits of pi like Easter eggs planted at the beginning of time. Ananya published her findings. The world went mad. --- ## Part IV The Numeri fractured. For most people, the pi revelation was enough. More than enough. The philosophical implications alone could sustain a thousand doctoral dissertations. Were the artworks *discovered* in pi, or had pi always *contained* them? Was mathematics invented or found? Did this prove simulation theory? Intelligent design? The existence of God? Think pieces proliferated. TED talks multiplied. A Netflix documentary won an Emmy. Professors wrote books. Podcasters built empires. But the numbers kept appearing. And most people stopped looking. The mystery had been solved, hadn't it? The graffiti pointed to pi, pi contained human art, QED. What more was there to find? The remaining Numeri—the hardcore obsessives, the ones who couldn't let go—were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, unable to accept a satisfying answer. The world moved on to its next collective fixation. Only a few hundred remained. Scattered across the globe, connected by encrypted channels, still mapping, still calculating, still believing there was something more. Among them was a quiet systems programmer in Ljubljana named **Rok Vidmar**. --- ## Part V Rok had never been comfortable with endings. It was a personality flaw, he knew. His therapist said it stemmed from childhood abandonment issues; his ex-girlfriend said it made him insufferable at parties. Either way, he couldn't accept that the numbers existed simply to point at famous paintings hidden in pi. It was too... *cute*. Too human. Too much like something a clever artist would do to gain attention. And whoever—*whatever*—was creating these numbers, they were not human. Rok had analyzed the appearance patterns obsessively. The precision. The simultaneity across time zones. The physical impossibility of a human agent painting a number in Lagos at the exact moment another appeared in Auckland. Whatever was doing this operated outside the constraints of geography and time as humans understood them. Such an entity wouldn't make art references as their final message. So Rok did something nobody else had tried. He concatenated the extracted pi sequences. Not the images they represented. The raw numerical data. All of it. Every digit from every offset, strung together into one massive number spanning billions of digits. Then he ran his analysis. The concatenated sequence didn't match pi. It didn't match *e*. It didn't match any mathematical constant in any database. But it *did* match something. It matched the Planck constant. Or rather, it matched the Planck constant with seventeen digits altered in the 834th through 912th decimal places. Rok stared at his screen the way Ananya had stared at the Mona Lisa two years earlier. But where she had felt wonder, he felt something closer to vertigo. Because he understood what those altered digits meant. --- ## Part VI The Planck constant—approximately 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ joule-seconds—is not a number humans chose. It is a number the universe *is*. It defines the smallest possible unit of action, the quantum of quantum mechanics, the boundary between the measurable and the probabilistic. Change it, and you don't just change physics. You change *existence*. Increase it slightly, and atoms become unstable. Electrons can't maintain their orbits. Matter dissolves into quantum noise. Decrease it, and chemical bonds become impossible. The universe freezes into a static lattice of particles that can never interact, never combine, never create complexity. The window for a functional universe—one that permits matter, chemistry, stars, planets, life—is absurdly narrow. A few digits different, and nothing exists. But the modified sequence the numbers encoded... Rok ran simulation after simulation, modeling the implications of those seventeen altered digits. Every physics engine he tried produced the same result: impossible. Incoherent. A universe that couldn't hold together. Until he tried modeling it from first principles. The altered Planck constant didn't create *our* matter. It created *other* matter. A different kind of stable configuration. Different atoms. Different chemistry. Different rules for how things could combine and interact. A parallel physics for a parallel existence. The numbers weren't pointing to pi to show us art. They were using pi—the most famous infinite sequence in human mathematics, the one constant every technological civilization would inevitably discover—as a *carrier wave*. A universal language. And the message encoded within was nothing less than the fundamental constant of another reality. --- ## Part VII The remaining Numeri—barely two hundred souls worldwide—gathered virtually when Rok published his findings. Some wept. Some celebrated. Some retreated into denial, insisting the analysis must be flawed, that no simulation could accurately model alternative physics. But most simply sat in silence, trying to comprehend what they had received. A message from beings whose matter was different from ours. Whose atoms were different. Whose *existence* was different, governed by laws that would make our universe impossible and theirs inevitable. They had no shared chemistry. No shared biology. No shared language except mathematics itself. And they had reached across whatever barrier separated their existence from ours to say: *This is what we are made of.* *This is our nature.* *We exist.* The debates that followed were endless. How did they send the messages? Were the graffiti appearances quantum effects bleeding through from their reality? Were they manipulating our universe at the Planck scale, forcing coherent patterns to emerge in paint and concrete? Or was there some mechanism humans couldn't even conceptualize, some property of existence-adjacent realities that permitted communication without physical contact? And more pressingly: *Why?* --- ## Part VIII Three years after Rok's discovery, a consensus emerged among the Numeri—not a certainty, but a working hypothesis that explained the evidence better than any alternative. The beings had not sent *a* message. They had sent *their* message. In a universe governed by their Planck constant, communication was different. Perhaps consciousness was different. Perhaps the very concept of "information" meant something other than what humans understood. But somehow, somewhere, they had discovered that other existences were possible. That the mathematical relationships underlying reality could take different forms, and that entities could arise within those forms, as alien to them as they were to us. And they had found a way to say *hello*. Not by broadcasting electromagnetic signals into a void that, for them, might not exist in any meaningful sense. Not by building monuments that their matter couldn't share with ours. But by encoding their fundamental nature—the number that made them *them*—into the one structure that transcended all physics. Mathematics. Pi existed in every universe that permitted mathematics. It was a truth independent of matter, independent of physics, independent of the specific constants that governed any particular existence. A perfect circle divided by its diameter equaled pi in our reality and in theirs, in every reality that could sustain thought complex enough to ask the question. So they had hidden their Planck constant in pi's infinite digits, then found a way to point us toward it. *Here is what we are made of.* *Compare it to what you are made of.* *Understand that we are different, that we can never touch, that we exist in modes of being incomprehensible to each other.* *But also understand that we are both here. That existence is not singular. That the void between possible realities is not as empty as it seems.* *You are not alone.* --- ## Epilogue The numbers stopped appearing on the spring equinox of the fourth year. The last one materialized on a warehouse wall in Malmö, Sweden, pointing to the final offset needed to complete the sequence. Since then, nothing. The Numeri wait. They monitor every city on Earth for new silver digits. They run continuous searches for anomalies in mathematical databases, unusual patterns in natural phenomena, anything that might indicate another message. Some have given up. Others have died. A few have gone mad, unable to bear the weight of knowledge that most of humanity ignores—because the world, after the initial furor, returned to its daily concerns. The existence of trans-dimensional entities was, it turned out, less interesting to most people than sports results and celebrity gossip. The revelation that changed nothing practical was, ultimately, filed away under "cool but irrelevant." But those who remain—the watchers, the calculators, the ones who understand—carry a burden and a privilege. They know that somewhere, in a mode of existence they cannot touch or see or measure, there are others who looked across the impossible gulf between realities and found a way to whisper into the dark. *We exist. Do you?* And in the mathematics of our universe, written in the ancient stones of pi, the answer waits for anyone patient enough to find it: *Yes. We do too.*