The gap between observation and equation had defined Susan's work.
Buckwheat plots where she crawled on hands and knees counting serpentine endemics. The office where she translated those counts into population dynamics, competition coefficients. A living system and its description, forever separated by the irreducible distance between territory and map.
The gap closed.
ARCHIE's multiplexed synthesis didn't merge their perceptions so much as focus them. Susan still perceived through her biological mathematics, still felt the equation as relationships in living systems. But now she could feel Margaret's crystalline geometry underlying her own perception, David's quantum resonance harmonizing with both. Three frameworks, each complete in itself, revealing themselves as projections of something larger.
"I'm getting the shadow metaphor," David said. His voice carried the harmonic quality that came with active synthesis. "We've each been seeing two-dimensional shadows of a three-dimensional object. Now we're seeing the object."
"The shadows weren't wrong," Margaret said. "They were partial. And the object is something our spatial intuitions can't quite hold."
They had gathered at the whiteboard intending to derive the equation properly—to work through the mathematics step by step. David had uncapped three markers, ready to fill the board with the careful logic of proof.
The markers sat untouched.
"ARCHIE," Susan said, "what are we perceiving?"
…
