As Happiness Approaches Infinity

Originally published in Learning to be Human by Flame Tree Publishing, January 2025

The first time I met Dr. Antoine Farid Kopernicus, I found him possessed of an intense and suffocating misery. He did not smile when we shook hands - his grip was weak and slippery, like an eel - and he mumbled something about vultures when I informed him I was the journalist he’d been expecting. His thinning hair stood in unkempt wisps upon a shining pate, his dark eyes were avoidant behind wire-frame spectacles, and a general dourness lay heavy upon his hunched shoulders. 

We sat in a dimly lit classroom, the whiteboard muddy with the corpses of mathematical scribbles, and the air rich with a spicy, sweaty scent. He poured me black coffee and didn’t offer cream or sugar. The coffee was terrible; the company seemingly matching the beverage’s acrid taste. I took out my phone.

“I’m going to start recording now.”

He scratched his beard. Though he was two years my junior, a mere twenty-six, there were flecks of grey in the dark strands. “You don’t write it down?”

“I could type it, but it’s easier this way. You can always tell me to turn it off when you want to say something off the record.”

“I want the whole thing off the record.”

“I’m afraid that I’d leave if you insisted upon that.” I smiled, the exertion straining my facial muscles. 

He looked at his laptop, on which various graphs were displayed, some still plotting as the code executed in the extended monitor upon the desk. “People like you think nothing is valuable unless it can be regurgitated by any half-literate moron with internet access.”

“People like me?”

“You’re the media. I’m a mathematician. A scientist.” He gestured at nothing in particular, and I noticed various stains upon his collared blue shirt. “You contribute nothing. You only publicize the deeds of those who are better than you.”

I adjusted my glasses. The chair creaked beneath me. “You don’t think that’s valuable?” 

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why did you agree to do this interview?”

“Because no one cares about what I do unless someone like you makes them care.” He reached into his desk drawer, which screeched as it rolled open. The computer whirred with frantic energy as the graphical display showed a curve rapidly shooting upwards. “Your book was shit. I read it five times; it got worse every time.” He tossed the novel at me.

“Thanks.” I held the book in my hand. The spine was worn out, the pages dogeared and smudged. Part of me stung to see my debut so badly manhandled, but another part felt oddly touched. It is a rare comfort among writers to know someone has read your book so frequently it has disintegrated to shreds. “Truth be told, that’s about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about this book.”

He mumbled something incoherent and slurped coffee from his cup in bestial fashion. His fingers twitched as they tugged at the collar of his shirt. 

I decided to ask a question. My curiosity was piqued, despite, or perhaps because of, his truculence. “Your doctoral dissertation was considered a brilliant, if impractical, exercise in the new field of mathematical psychology. Can you explain, in simple terms, what this field entails?”

He stood up and walked to the whiteboard. His sneakers, yellowed and flopping at the soles, squeaked against the grimy classroom floor. The computer stopped whirring and an error sound rang through the room with a dull alertness. I glanced at the script, but could discern nothing.

“Professor Kopernicus?”

“Farid. I go by Dr. Farid.”

“Interesting choice.”

“My sister called me that when we were children. It stuck.” Farid dragged his marker across the white board, scratching out a rather simple function. “L as a function of H is equal to a constant, K, divided by H.” He turned at me, meeting my eyes for the first time. He no longer looked miserable. His dark eyes were shining in those recessed cavities. “Take the limit of L as H approaches infinity. What happens?”

I was reasonably familiar with mathematics. “L goes to zero, of course.”

“Yes,” he said. His mouth exploded into a wide, crooked grin. In that moment, he looked like a five year old boy. “As happiness approaches infinity…” He turned away then, and his shoulders slumped once more, crushed by an unknowable burden. “That’s what mathematical psychology is. I can offer no better explanation.”

I turned off my recording device. I knew instinctively that I would get nothing more from him, and yet, what I had captured would be enough. 

“It’s been a pleasure.” I extended my hand to him and smiled. It came easier, this time.

He shook it. Firmer, this time.

#

The second time I met Dr. Farid he had a full head of hair and his arm wrapped around a handsome young man half his age. My wife insisted on taking a photograph with him, and to this day that remains the only photograph I have of us together, two couples grinning stupidly at a future they could not comprehend. In contrast to our first meeting, Farid was effusive, ecstatic, and altogether exhausting. 

“You must come to the facility sometime,” Farid said, smacking my shoulder like my uncle after he’d hit the bottle. “We’re doing great work. Great work.”

“Sure,” I lied, as I nursed the glass of wine in my hand. “But I don’t know if I’ll have the time. I appreciate you inviting me, though. And I certainly appreciate the chance to attend your launch party.” I looked at my wife, chatting with Farid’s date. “Is he an intern?”

Farid snorted. “Don’t be crass. Simon is a musician.”

“Didn’t take you for the musical type.”

He stiffened and lowered his arm from my shoulder. There were three inches of space between us, but it felt like more. “You should try my algorithms. I could program the snark right out of you.”

I gave him a cool smile, or as cool as I could manage. Snark I could do, but frost was something I struggled to efface. “I prefer to live a life outside the bounds of your equations, Farid.” 

“So you’ve said. In every editorial you’ve penned, in your emails and blog posts, even in that scathing novel you called satire,” Farid said, his face contorting. There was a meanness to it, a cornered weasel’s look in his eyes, and I found myself suppressing laughter at his new hair. It was ill-fitting to such a bitter countenance. “People love my formulas. It makes life simple. It lets them be happy.”

“If they find value in it, that’s fine. I don’t.” It was a bit of a lie. Truthfully, I envied those who had been programmed. I ridiculed them, sneered at them, but inside, a part of me could not suppress the desire to be free of my misanthropy and cynicism. And I suspected Farid felt the same way. 

The party rolled around us, waves on a placid ocean, while we stared each other down. Their voices and the clinking of glass were a hum in my ears by now, as Farid’s dark eyes gleamed the way they did, all those years ago. When I looked younger, and he looked older.

“You’ve always been a naysayer. Ever since we first met, you’ve tried to bring me down,” Farid said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

“I wrote you as I saw you. And people loved what they saw in you. They loved what you gave them.” I rubbed my jaw. “Why do you care what I think, anyway? You’re about to be the richest man in the world.” The music was repetitive, shrill and needling. It made me hot under the collar. My head began to throb. “You have everything you’ve ever wanted, thanks to your precious proofs. What do you want from me?”

His brow furrowed, and his body shrunk inwards. I saw a flash of the old him, the grubby scientist-philosopher-mathematician, a Grecian relic locked away in the bowels of academia. I wanted to capture it in my memory, sketch it in my words and plaster it to the minds of everyone who knew him as Farid the visionary, the futurist messiah, the man who turned anger and sadness and humiliation into a series of ones and zeroes. And then it was gone, and he was standing tall and grinning, as unflappable as ever.

“I would have liked to have you on my side,” he said, patting my arm affably as though no rancor had transpired between us. “If I could put you in the system, we could understand each other. It’s just a matter of algebra. Variables to solve for.”

I peeled his hand away, gently. “Enjoy the party, Farid. You’ve earned it.” Then I leaned, my eyes downcast. “And I’m sorry about what your mother said. About you and your sister. I wrote an editorial in your defense. But you seem to have forgotten about that.” Walking back to my wife, I felt a tinge of guilt for my moment of heavy-handed sanctimony. As the night wound along, I watched Farid embrace his man, give a rousing speech, and shake hands with a hundred different people. 

I never once thought his smile was real. The algorithm just wouldn’t converge.

#

The third time I met Dr. Farid was the day after his mother’s funeral. He lived twenty-two miles northeast of me and my wife insisted I make the drive. We’d kept an irregular correspondence over the years, and he always wrote me whenever I published a new novel. He never had anything nice to say, but it was nice of him to read them, so I thought passing on my condolences in person was the least I could do.

It started to snow as I approached his mountain ranch. The leafless poplars stood stark against the skinny pines and the car shuddered as it skidded over patches of ice. The sky was cloudy and as I parked the car and stepped outside, the mournful howl of a coyote could be heard over the craggy ridgeline to the west. I stuck out my tongue to try and taste a snowflake, but it took too long so I gave up.

The cabin was unassuming but well-furnished inside, more of a luxury apartment than a mountain retreat, with sleek chrome and gleaming countertops that winked at me. Farid was greying, false temples receding. His breath smelled of whiskey when he opened the door and he barely grunted a hello before walking back inside and slumping on the couch. The carpet smelled of ethanol and pine resin.

“Most people like to keep animals on their ranch. All I saw were a couple of deer and a squirrel,” I said, slipping my jacket off my shoulders. “Where’s Mario?”

“Gone.” Farid didn’t meet my eyes as he poured me a glass of whiskey.

I took it and turned the amber liquid around in the glass aimlessly. “I thought you two were nice together.”

“You never met him.”

“I saw the pictures. Read the stories.”

“You don’t know him. You don’t know me.” He sipped at his whiskey the way he sipped coffee when I first met him. 

“At least get a dog.”

“Enough with the animals,” he barked. “Why are you here?” Still no eye contact. He was twitchy, his fisherman’s sweater hanging oddly off his bony frame.

“To offer my condolences.”

“My mother was a bitch.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t be sad about it.” I took a sip of the whiskey. It bit my throat, suffusing my face with warmth.

“Sadness is just another equation. Take the depression coefficient, unique to each person, and input various conflating and aggravating factors.” His fingers traveled in air, drawing out formulations and theories no one else could begin to fathom. “You can prove it statistically or mathematically. I’ve done both.”

I looked out the windows at the snow-covered hills, the great peaks that rose behind them. “You’d find more answers to sadness by looking at the mountains. People come up to these places to reflect. Contemplate.” There was a bleakness to their beauty, an intense loneliness that pierced the soul.  

“I’m not sad. I defeated sadness. No one is sad anymore, if they use my program. We can find anyone’s emotional coefficients, and apply corrections whenever they veer towards divergence.” His voice was hollow, frantic, an erratic pulse to his cadence. “It’s been proven.”

“I guess so.” I sat down across from him. “But you said it yourself, the first time we met. As happiness approaches infinity…”

“Yes, yes.” He waved me off. “I’ll defeat that one, in the end. I have all the time in the world.” He finished his glass and poured himself another with shaky hands.

“We’re not young, you and I.” I felt a sense of pity for him. For all my doubts, he’d done the world a service in the eyes of most people. The algorithms kept things going. People trusted them to make all of their decisions. Suicide had been eliminated, marital and familial bliss was at an all time high. Yet, the one who had created this new world found happiness elusive. “You’ll die someday, Farid. And I worry about the world when that happens. You’re the only one who can keep the program in check. It’s becoming all too clever now.”

At this, he laughed. “Oh, I won’t die.”

I raised my eyebrows. “And how do you figure that?”

“As H approaches zero…”

“L approaches infinity.” I took a swig of whiskey and stood up, suddenly overtaken with fear. Fear of this man, what he’d become. “I need to leave now.” My hands shoved in my pockets, I turned towards the door. “It was disgusting, what she said,” I whispered, facing away from him. “To imply that you could have caused it, that you did something like that…”

“You remind me of my sister,” Farid said. I could hear the slur in his voice, feel his dark eyes boring into my back. “That’s why I always wanted you to like me. She hated my work. Hated my equations, my proofs, my models. But I loved her.” His voice trembled and it made me feel sick to my stomach, like the world was turning under my feet. “Just because I like men… my mother, you know.”

“Our mothers come from the same part of the world. I know.”

“If my sister had just tried my software, she wouldn’t have… I’ve cured depression!” Glass shattered behind me. “I didn’t do it. Everyone knows I didn’t do it.” 

“I believe you.” I didn’t believe in his theories and his postulates. But I believed he loved his sister. “You read my editorial, right?”

“Yes.” His voice was a breeze over bulrushes. “It was the only nice thing you’ve ever written about me.”

“It was nice of you to go to your mother’s funeral anyway. Goodbye, Dr. Farid.” I left him again, walked out the front door and got in my car. The clouds parted and the snow dazzled blindingly white, so I put on my sunglasses. I drove away, through the woods and down by the half-frozen creek, and all the while I couldn’t shake that equation from my mind.

“As happiness approaches infinity…”

#

The fourth and final time I met Dr. Farid, I was holding a death certificate. He was giving a speech at the university, in front of his old building, now named Farid Hall. It was a pretty building now, all gleaming new white paint, and from where I stood I could see inside some of the rooms, with all sorts of blinking monitors and holographic keyboards. It had been fifty-two years since we first met, and today I’d come to him with a death certificate.

The speech was nice. Pithy, clean, and lacking in emotion or didacticism. It was the kind of speech Farid had become known for in his old age. He’d shed the transplants, and was as bald as when I’d met him the first time, but with greyer hair. Still, he looked younger than his age, moved his hands animatedly, and cracked a few smiles as he spoke. All in all, I liked this version of him.

I hadn’t told him I was coming, or that I was bringing my granddaughter. She was seventeen years old, eyes wide with awe as she took in the campus. She wanted to attend, of course, and it was just her luck her grandfather knew the esteemed professor emeritus. The sycamore trees swayed above the pavilion as I hobbled towards Farid, my granddaughter helping me with each step. The death certificate I kept clutched close to my chest, in an ancient plastic folder, a relic from my own college days. My granddaughter had never even seen one before today.

“Dr. Farid,” I said, as we came up behind him. “I’d like you to meet my granddaughter.”

He turned around and I saw those same dark eyes, active and powerful as ever. I felt awed to be in his presence now, as he was no longer disdainful, cynical, nor the slightest touch bitter. There was something changed in his demeanor, his bearing, and as he shook my granddaughter’s hand, I felt a furtive sense of glee, being able to provide her such an experience.

“Your grandfather was quite the troublemaker when he was young, if you’ll believe that,” Farid said, his voice a little drier now, but more real than he’d ever been. “Always stirring controversy.”

“Grandpa? No way.”

“Definitely.” He looked at me. Eyes avoidant, always. “How long has it been?”

“About twenty years, I think. I saw your family was here.” His husband had passed away the year before, but his three sons and two grandchildren were sitting not far away. “You look pretty good, Dr. Farid.”

“Come on, let’s take a walk. Abram,” he said, waving at one of his sons. “Why don’t you show my friend’s granddaughter around the newly renovated hall? She’s applying here.” He winked at her. “And getting in.”

I was definitely going to be the favorite grandparent after this. “Don’t cause trouble,” I told her, but she was already scampering off.

We walked through the old winding streets of the university. We didn’t say much, because at our age there isn’t much to say, even among friends who have only met four times in our life. It was a little sad, but truthfully, we could never have stomached seeing each other more frequently than that. Perhaps our emails will one day be published and gawked over by future generations. Two brilliant minds with a tortured, often acrimonious, friendship. Or rather, one delusional half-baked writer and the man who changed the world.

“They say suicide is impossible now,” I said. “You’ve managed to create an infinitely looping happiness function that maintains a healthy balance with only moderate fluctuations.” As we passed by a dancing fountain where birds splashed around, and college students sat in the shade and studied, I couldn’t help but whistle in amazement. “And after doing that, you shut the whole thing down. Went off to be a professor. Got married.”

“You sound surprised.” He sounded amused, which irked me a bit. I was supposed to be the snarky one.

“I’m impressed.” I bit my lip, hesitating. “Are you content?”

He exhaled. “Yes. I lost Stephen last year, and it didn’t break me. I accepted it, and I dealt with it.”

“Do you still use the program?”

“No.” He frowned. “Sometimes, I did. But towards the end, when he was dying, I took myself out of it. I lived life, the way you used to see people do in movies. But everyone here,” he said, gesturing at the world around him, “these kids, they’re all living my models. It’s like I made them myself.”

“It must be exhausting.” He hadn’t asked about the folder in my hand but I’d seen his eyes on it. “But if you aren’t miserable anymore…”

“I’ve started to age, yes. But my deepest misery is so strong, I fear I’ll outlive my sons.” He stopped then, and I stopped with him. He pointed at a bench nearby and I nodded at him, secretly pleased for a chance to rest my aching legs. “I don’t want that to happen. But I can’t shake it off. I think I’m just about the only sad person in the world left.”

I crossed my legs and swept a hand through my thinning grey locks. “Except for people like me, outside the program.”

“Less than one percent of humans are untouched by my program. I’ve changed everything.” He grimaced and rubbed his jaw with his lip. “It is exhausting, yes. Surely you know that.” Farid glanced down at the folder again, and this time his gaze did not waver. “What did you bring me?”

“A way out. The truth about your sister.” My fingers trembled as they unraveled the wire wrapping the two enclosing buttons. It had been decades since I’d used something so primitive for storage. “If you want it.”

Farid sighed. “It was my fault, really. I should have paid more attention to her. I never knew… she was suffering. I left her alone with my rancid parents, to fend for herself.”

“It was your fault.” The words were hard to say. “But she wasn’t suffering. Not when she died.” I pulled the certificate from the folder and laid it out on my lap. “The cause of death was not suicide by lethal overdose, as was reported. Your parents hid it well.” I kept talking, knowing that he was not looking at me, that he was looking at the death certificate. “In fact, it was written down as a heart attack, but that wasn’t really what happened either.”

I could feel him shaking beside me. “What do you mean?”

“It was the day you published your great proof.” I reached back in the folder, pulling out the coroner’s report. “When you showed the world that happiness is a function that can be expressed mathematically, and therefore manipulated, and that the only limit to happiness is the human lifespan itself. L is inversely proportional to H, as you showed me that day, so many years ago.” He hadn’t said a word, so I kept talking. “You dedicated the proof to her. You sent it to her.”

“Yes,” he croaked.

“She read it.” I tapped the coroner’s report. “She wept tears of joy, according to your parents. They put it all in here. She couldn’t believe you still loved her, after all she’d belittled your career.”

“She always hated my work.” His voice was small. “Are you sure this is true?”

“It’s true. She was too happy. Far too happy. As happiness approaches infinity…”

“Life approaches zero.” He exhaled. “She proved my theory.”

I smiled at him. “And now you can die happy, just like her.”

It was slow. It spread across his face with the pace of the lazy sun on a cold winter day. But it was the only real smile I ever saw from him. A smile that could burn through the pitchest of blacks. And then he stiffened a little, slumped back on the bench. A tear slid down his cheek. 

“Thank you,” he said. “It was a pretty story. Your best.”

“That’s the only nice thing you’ve ever said to me.” I sat next to him awhile. They found us there, eventually. One man asleep, the other dead. Both at peace, algorithms converged.