Coming Soon From SludgeMax CinemaTech To A Theatre Near You
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1993.
The Cold War is over.
NAFTA has passed.
Mexicans have 52" projection TVs.
Rap music has become passe.
For the first time in a long while, America's future looks bright.
Then the mathematicians came.
JAMES EARL JONES is
*T*H*E* *T*H*I*R*T*E*E*N*T*H* *A*P*O*S*T*O*L*
Martin Scorsese and George Lucas present
a Stephen King - Russell Walker Production
starring
JASON SCOTT LEE as Wes Huang:
Secret Agent
YAKOV SMIRNOFF as Bogdan Doytchinov,
PATRICK STEWART as Professor R. MacCamy
Music by CFA
Special Effects by SHRT
(Sumner Hayes Ray Tracing)
The moon was full. Fog hung in the air. A phong highlight illuminated the Clock. All in all, the perfect setting for a tense meeting between two agents.
Secret Agent Wes Huang leaned against the door, waiting for the inermediary to bring him the final decision. He flipped from page to page through the Tartan, gathering information about the area of operation. Suddenly, a shadow fell over him.
The man before him was dressed in a trenchcoat, a tan hat pulled low on his face, putting a shadow over his eyes. As Secret Agent Wes Huang began to mumble something, the man raised one hand, indicating silence.
"Here's the mark." The Russian accent, with traces of British and French, intrigued Huang. "Erase him. Orders of the Big Mac. As far as you are concerned, this meeting never happened. FORGET IT." The contact disappeared, leaving only the portrait of an unsuspecting victim.
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Huang hunched low behind the shrubbery. According to estimates reached using Newton's method, the mark would arrive here. His path was constant. The only variable was Secret Agent Wes Huang. But Huang had long since learned that a single variable could tip the problem in your favor. Finally the victim began his approach. As he neared, Huang leapt from behind the shrubbery (a nice-looking but not too expensive one) and pinned the victim to the ground.
"Wh- What?"
"Failure to use the chain rule, bub. Death by derivation. Got any last words?"
"Bu- Bu - But I USED the chain rule, really, I did, let me go, I didn't do it, nobody saw me - You can't prove a thing!" The fear in the man's eyes betrayed him.
"Oh yeah - I've proved the fundamental theorems of calculus. What makes you think I can't prove this?" Huang pulled a small paper from his pocket. "This is the derivative. In small doses, it causes the victim to go comatose. This one is large enough to kill you. There's only one known anti-derivative (up to an additive constant!), and I doubt you'll find it before it's too late. As your time - call it t - approaches zero, there will be no limit to your suffering. All in all, a brutal way to go." He quickly administered the derivative and stood up. As he slipped down the road, he allowed himself a smile.
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Secret Agent Wes Huang pulled into his driveway. As he neared the door, he noticed a note stapled to the frame:
Nice try, but that was a stupid weapon. It only works for delta very small. You forgot the rules of the game: I pick the epsilon, you only get to define delta. And I picked epsilon large. You don't get this victim for free.
The dastardly double agent Doytchinov had languished in the maximum security prison for nearly three days. If he didn't get back soon, he would never have that last problem set graded by Tuesday...
Of course a few judicious trademark 'Z's would hasten the process. Turning his peerless intellect from these depressing thoughts, he began to plan his escape.
Mere moments of thought revealed the solution. Doytchinov began to soften up the guard with innocent-sounding talk of the potential ramifications of NAFTA on Mexican corn growers and their effect on the Russian-American wheat trade.
Lt. Joe, captain of the guard, found the prisoner's bizarre accent strangely hypnotic. He had heard this Doytchinov character was slippery, but really, he didn't seem so bad... that anecdote about Ross Perot and Riemann integrable pie charts was fascinating...
"Do you believe in the justice system, Lt. Joe?" asked Doytchinov suddenly.
"I suppose so," answered Joe loyally.
"Then, presumably, a man who should be in jail will be in jail."
"Yes." Joe didn't see what this had to do with NAFTA.
"Well then, let me ask you another question. There are 5753 cells in this prison, yes?" Doytchinov queried in a most clarksome fashion.
"Indeed so," Joe replied with pride.
"Then the probability that I am in Cell 1 is approximately .00017382235."
Quickly calculating, Joe realized that this was indubitably true.
"So you certainly would be foolish to believe that I resided in Cell 1, wouldn't you?"
"True."
"Let us assume that you do not believe that I reside in cell n, since I would have only a minute chance of doing so. Then, similarly, you would not believe that I lived in cell n+1 since my residence in that cell has the same probability. Correct?"
"Undoubtedly, Doytchinov... but what does this have to do with Ross Perot?"
"Perot is not the thing we are interested in. He is just an investigation. So forget it," Doytchinov said mysteriously. "Since we have proved the base case, and the case for n+1, we have proved that you do not believe that I am in Cell n, for any n I care to name?"
Having taken Modern Math, Lt. Joe immediately saw the truth in this argument.
"But if I am not in this prison, then by our earlier implication, I should not be in this prison! ~q => ~p, my dear Lieutenant."
"I am shocked at this injustice, Doytchinov! You are a free man," Joe cried, swinging open the cell door.
Doytchinov thought he might get those problem sets graded after all. He wouldn't care to cross Big Mac by getting them in late. Only one obstacle remained... a personal one. Revenge on Wes Huang, secret agent!
Having tracked the mad Doytchinov across half the Mediterranean, Agent Huang leapt agilely on to the double agent's yacht, whimsically named Waves Rolle.
As he rounded the side of the cabin, a rattle of machine gun fire burst across the deck. Huang gripped a notebook tightly as he danced easily through the gunfire. He struck Doytchinov, knocking the double agent away from the machine gun.
"H...how did you avoid those bullets?" cried Doytchinov.
"Simplicity itself. I suspected you might have a machine gun. So, beginning with Peano's Postulates, I derived the integral and then the derivative. I then noted that if we let a bullet's position be given by s(t) then s'(t) is its velosity and s''(t) its acceleration. Given my extensive knowledge of firearms, I could determine the bullet's acceleration function. From there I integrated to determine its position, which I could find uniquely since I knew that s(0) equaled s'(0) which equaled 0. Knowing the bullets' positions, I dodged with ease." Secret agent Wes Huang waved the thick sheaf of formulae in front of Doytchinov's astonished eyes.
"Damn. A bullet proof packet."
Hey, if Mike can do it, I can too...
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Secret Agent Wes Huang was seated at the Thanksgiving dinner table. On his left was his mother, on his right was his father, and across from him was his sister Eas.
"So tell us about your latest adventure, Wesley," said Mrs. Huang.
"Well, OK.":
It was a dark night in Paris. I was sitting in a cafe on Rue Fourier, overlooking the Egsaque, a tiny tributary of the Seine. I was stumped.
The Big Mac had sent me to Rome a week before, to track down Vic "The Fish" Bolzano, a mafia boss who could lead us to that double-crossing traitor Doytchinov. But Bolzano caught wind of my arrival in the Eternal City, and was gone before I was unpacked. However, he didn't know that his close friend Nick and I are on lowest terms. Nicky is actually an undercover agent hired by the City of Funcsia, where Vic has always lived. They're after Vic because of various crimes he has commited there. Nick was able to tell me that Vic was on his way to Paris. He was the one who gave me the address of the cafe I was sitting in. Vic was known to hang low here for weeks at a time.
I was about to pack it in for the night, when I overheard a conversation between two characters in the shadows off to my left. One told the other that Bolzano was going to see an astrologer between midnight and two. Apparently, he had just learned that the date on his birth certificate was off by a day, a mistake which had zodiacal implications.
This was the break I had been waiting for! I went down to the bank of the little river, and found a boatman who was tying his rowboat to a pier. After an exchange of words and francs, I convinced the man to take me upstream, to a bridge.
We waited in the boat, in the shadowy darkness, until a quarter past one. Then, I spotted Bolzano's wrinkled face as he passed under a streetlamp on the other side of the bridge. Stealthily, I climbed out of the boat, and crouched behind a barrel. When Bolzano had crossed the bridge, I ambushed him! He was too surpised to resist at first. By the time he regained his senses, it was too late, for I had tied his hands behind his back and blindfolded him. I dragged him into an alley, where I threw him to the ground. I told him that he would answer my questions, unless he was stupid, in which case he wouldn't make sense anyway.
He knew the reputation of The Apostol, and so he submitted quickly. I got a valuable piece of information in my search for Doytchinov, and Nicky got his man.
"Wow, Wes, that's great!" said Eas. "But I still don't understand - how did you know to wait for Bolzano under the bridge?"
"Simple. I knew that whenever a continuous Funcsian changes his sign, he MUST cross the Egsaque, sis!"
Life was good, thought Agent Huang as he sat idly in his office. Doytchinov hadn't shown his face in weeks, and Huang had no cases besides running down some run-away epsilons. Unbeknownst to him, however, all this was about to change abruptly.
Huang's phone began to ring. He picked up the receiver and waited for the customary tongue-lashing from his boss. Today, however, what he heard chilled him to the bone.
"Someone broke into the Pythagorean Memorial Research Center several hours ago." said the Big Mac. "The lunatic stole all the files on the prototype Mk VIII Integrand. Furthermore, he reset it to go undefined at both ends. It's structure can't take that kind of stress. It'll blow itself to bits within a day!"
"Well," replied Huang, unflappable as ever, "can't we just define one of the bounds as negative infinity, so it'll cancel itself out?"
"No, you fool. If even one end is undefined, the result would be fatal! Operative Prevostietski claims he's found some information on where the files are hidden. Using them, we can reset the Integrand. Your orders are to contact Prevostietski, and retrieve the files. Also, we're not sure who's behind this, so be alert."
"But Prevostietski hasn't been to a briefing in years! I'm not sure I even remember what he looks like."
"That's your problem, Huang. He asked to set up a rendezvous in the harbor area, so get moving! (click)"
Huang grabbed his trenchcoat, his Department-issue Magnum 44^3, and his reliable TI-1706D, and hit the street.
Several hours later . . .
Huang paced up and down Euler Ave., waiting. The appointed time for the rendezvous had come and gone, and he was beginning to worry. Finally, he spurred into action, and began nosing around the warehouses. He was about to give up when he noticed a shoe sticking out from behind a dumpster. Normally, this wouldn't be surprising, but this shoe was occupied.
He circled the dumpster, and discovered what had happened to Operative Prevostietski.
Later, at the local police station, a seargent returned with the autopsy report. "It seems he was beaten to death with a juggling club, sir. Time of death was about 2 hours before you found him. Also, we found this in a pocket." He handed over a scrap of paper. Huang opened it and read the scribbled message "X marks the spot". Suddenly, he whirled. "Get me a list of all cargo currently housed in the harbor!" he shouted, "There isn't a moment to lose!"
When the list was handed to him, he scanned it intently for a few moments. "Ah HA!" he cried "Just as I suspected. Seargent! Take your men and search the shipment of lumber registered to Edward the Tenth! Unless I am very much mistaken, you will discover a briefcase full of papers with TOP SECRET written all over them." Sure enough, several minutes later, the seargent phoned in to state that he had indeed recovered a briefcase. "But how did you know?" he asked, dumbfounded. "Simple." replied Huang smugly, " Naturally, log of E.^(the X) = X. This smells like another one of Doytchinov's foul schemes."
The next morning, Huang filed his report on the case to the Big Mac. "Well, I guess Doytchinov is going to have to try again, eh Big Mac?", he commented.
"Didn't you know? We received a report from our man in Moscow. He says he's been trailing Doytchinov for the past week, but he disappeared yesterday. Even so, there's no way he could have been the one responsible."
Agent Huang's eyes widened. "Then who . . . "
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Whose fiendish function has crossed Wes Huang's?
Will Huang derive the answer, or will he be forced to chase the
perpetrator as he approaches infinity?
Will Operative Prevostietski be late for his own funeral?
You won't find the answers to these questions in Modern Math, but only on :
Wes Huang, Secret Agent
