This is the actual beginning fractal to 
After a day spent researching the mysterious past of Alleaume's great cathedral, Chief Inspector Jean-Paul Dubois of Interpol decided to take a break and walk through the beautiful French village.
Even without the cathedral, Alleaume could easily have been a tourist attraction because of its location nestled in a little cut of the foothills of the French Alps – after a quarter-mile climb from the valley floor, one came to this little bowl of a village in a vale, rising a little way into the hills above.
Chief Inspector Dubois was 52, but he kept himself in his old Army trim, so going from the town square all the way up to where the highest roads wound around before coming back down was certainly a nice challenge, but easily doable. The road layout was really a sort of a double spiral anyhow, ascending from the village center one way by car, and descending another way, with passage roads built in at appropriate spots.
While at the bottom, the chief inspector made sure to go into the village shops and talk to the proprietors. French culture was not like American culture, where you walked in, bought what you wanted to buy, and left. That was considered rude in France, and really, across Europe with its long history of artisans, craftsmen, and guildsmen. Small shopkeepers wanted you to recognize the tradition of labor and creativity that brought an item to you, and Chief Inspector Dubois had always resonated with that, since the labor of his African ancestors in North America was traditionally and regularly overlooked. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – a guiding principle for him.
And with that, something that he had learned in France: Ne vois pas la chose sans la personne aussi – “See not the thing without the person also.” The thing in the shops was whatever the shopkeeper wanted to show you, and you learned and inquired about this and that before choosing an item as a recognition of both his value and yours: meanwhile, the other thing everyone wanted to talk about was the missing cathedral.
Alleaume was a village in great grief, no matter who you talked with, but Chief Inspector Dubois had not yet spent his entire shop budget before he realized there were at least three strands of this grief.
The first strand, and most common, was the grief over losing the town's major tourist attraction. The cathedral was like no other in France or the world. It had put Alleaume on the map, and without it, the town would become just another sleepy little mountain village – and that would be bad for business. Given that France was as deeply secularized by the 21st century as it had been religious in the 12th century, the chief inspector was not surprised to understand that in 60 percent of the conversations he had in the shops, the shopkeepers were grieving the future loss of business, with little thought to the religious aspect.
In the shops in the first strand, Chief Inspector Dubois noticed the souvenirs commonly offered – postcards and figurines of the cathedral and its ornamentation … several of the “gargoyles” had a life of their own alongside more standard icons of the Catholic Church common to cathedrals everywhere.
However, there were postcards with a figure on it that looked familiar somehow to the chief inspector … a beautiful fractal traced in the gray of stone kissed red by evening sunlight.
Chief Inspector Dubois asked the shopkeeper where he bought the card what the symbol meant.
“Oh, that is Alleaume's coat of arms, if you will,” he said. “Les Dormeurs – The Sleepers. Of course it is sort of a joke now, since we never could get people to realize our cathedral was more unique than Notre Dame and Beauvais and truly have the people awaken to Alleaume and Alleaume awaken to step into its rightful place in the world. It was a joke before the cathedral disappeared. It is an even crueler joke now.”
Chief Inspector Dubois bought a Les Dormeurs card in every shop of the first strand of thought, learned from and commiserated again with the shopkeepers, and made a note to himself to research the symbol when he returned to his makeshift office that night.
The third strand of grief, and least common – the second we will return to – was that expressed by those shopkeepers who were Christians, as distinct from church attendees and “cultural Christians.” All three strands contained people that attended services at the cathedral, but this third strand of shopkeepers was on a different kind of journey that that the loss of the cathedral did not affect. Were they concerned about the loss of business? Of course. Yet those in the third strand also spoke of the matter in another way: the loss of tradition was not a hindrance to the life with God, and at times, the loss of tradition could actually be a help. Not many said that last part aloud; most were observant at church … but the cathedral was only a small portion of their religious life, and some told Chief Inspector Dubois about house meetings and Christian ministries that already had sort of sprung up.
Come to find out: there had been small Christian communities “sort of” springing up since at least the first century, and even when the organized church had finally made it to Alleaume and the cathedral was officially complete in 1260, somehow, there had still remained this community outside.
In the shops of the third strand of grief, the postcards and souvenirs were not as “casual” in feel … the religious icons had their own section and were strictly garden-variety Catholic where they existed at all, and the postcards were largely scenic photographs of the village and its surroundings, including one from outside the village in the evening, showing it winding upward from the center and glowing on the sides of the foothills. This too looked vaguely familiar … the chief inspector could not place why at the moment, but he bought several postcards with similar images and an aerial shot of the village as well.
Nowhere in the shop of the Christian shopkeepers could Chief Inspector Dubois find a postcard or other souvenir with the Les Dormeurs symbol on it, or any of the “gargoyles” that were a nod to the idols from the old cult temple … yet in this fruitless search, the chief inspector realized that if say, all those gargoyles were to be calmly taking a nap, and – again – if you could flatten the cathedral into two dimensions and look at it like the face of a coin, the result would be Les Dormeurs.
The most passionate grief of all the shopkeepers was of those of the second and second most numerous strand of grief. These shopkeepers represented a sizable minority in Alleaume, a sizable minority that by itself was the cause of Alleaume being much more religiously observant than the rest of France – the cathedral had services every day, and 38 percent of the population of Alleaume was in the cathedral, every day. The vast majority of that 38 percent was represented by these shopkeepers.
Many of these shopkeepers were scarcely able to function, but, they had families to feed like everyone else, and they appeared to be sustained by larger traffic than anyone else in the village, all of people similarly distraught. Chief Inspector Dubois was as close to being ignored in these shops as he could be in French polite society because there were so many other villagers coming through and expressing dismay.
The conversation among those experiencing the second strand of grief was distinct from that of the other two entirely – there was no thought to the loss of business. The cathedral was everything, and they spoke of it not as a part of some valued past, but as a thing of power in the present that had protected Alleaume and had within it the promise of awakening the proper destiny of the village and its people. What was a joke to the secular shopkeepers and not so much as hinted at by the shopkeepers who identified as Christian more than Catholic was a dream denied to those in the second strand of grief, a dream to which they had been deeply devoted for a long time.
Perhaps a VERY long time … Chief Inspector Dubois noticed that in these shops, the standard postcards and religious icons were present but subtly de-emphasized in favor of images of the cathedral itself either as exquisitely sculpted icons or of beautifully detailed hand drawings. Part of the high traffic was that now, people desperately wanted these. They were selling quickly, but the shopkeepers' despair did not budge even though they and the artists they worked with would be making bank into the foreseeable future.
As for the Les Dormeurs fractal, it was not on sale, but it was nonetheless present … sometimes as a soft pattern woven into the center of the carpet, and while those who did not see it in time walked right over it, others seemed careful to trace the pattern with their feet, one way up the rounded polygon, and down the other side on the way out. Chief Inspector Dubois saw this enough times to know it was an intentional motion for many grieving people who, notably, bought nothing that they seemed so upset about. Some of them were wearing earrings and pendants of Les Dormeurs of much higher workmanship than those available for sale in the secular village shops.
Others did not have carpet, but if you looked at the light coming through the window, you would see that someone had tinted the pattern of Les Dormeurs on the glass and so the soft gray pattern of the fractal moved across the interior as the day progressed, silver in the morning, kissed with red in the evening. Others had storefronts with multiple little windows – close up, they were charming, enticing little portholes into the lovely little shops, but looked at catty-corner from across the street, again, there was Les Dormeurs in a slight guise!
Still further in this vein as the chief left visiting the shops and began his walk in earnest – Les Dormeurs was everywhere, and in some cases, looked at from the right angle in the right light, the figure appeared to pop out in three dimensions – and THERE appeared the missing cathedral at Alleaume! This happened enough times to so disorient the chief inspector that he had to take a break from his break and return to the office to think things through before resuming his walk.
Trompe l'œil – deceive the eye. This was a well-known French art genre in which two-dimensional objects were visually represented to appear in three dimensions. This is actually why Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation had come to mind – not just because the character represented Black people from French Louisiana to the world, but because the chief inspector's youngest sister had loved Levar Burton as host of Reading Rainbow, and one day while stateside, the chief inspector had sat down with his sister and watched Mr. Burton explain a picture book that had illustrations based on trompe l'œil!
Chief Inspector Dubois had half-remembered this when looking into the two-dimensional crater where the three-dimensional cathedral had once stood … it was why he had thought of using a computer to “flatten” the cathedral into the crater and had gotten an image that was rounded off. He had used the the last known images of the cathedral, taken in the evening on Friday, June 21, 2019, and that had yielded the idea of that first fractal mandala, with Jupiter, Helios, Mars, and Vulcan awake and ready for battle.
And yet – the second fractal mandala, Les Dormeurs, was an even older two-dimensional representation of the same cathedral. Looked at in the right light, the cathedral's image jumped out in dizzying accuracy. Sure enough, when the chief inspector checked images of the cathedral before June 21 and flattened them, one did not get the figures ready for war, but one got them “sleeping” – with slight variation depending on the time of day and the year, Les Dormeurs appeared again, and again, and again.
Except on June 21, 2019, from noon until just before sunset – in the morning of that day, one still got Les Dormeurs, but after high noon, one could see the light hitting the cathedral differently, and at exactly 7:15, the last known image, one finally got the “waking” mandala fully represented again.
Chief Inspector Dubois looked at the calendar. It was Monday, June 24, 2019, the fourth day of summer. Friday, June 21, 2019 had been the Summer Solstice, 800 years to the day that the records said the new team to work on the cathedral at Alleaume had begun their work – and that too, accounting for changes in the Julian and then Gregorian calendars, had likely been the Summer Solstice of that year.
A check of the records confirmed that on June 22, 1260, the cathedral had been completed – and that would have been 759 years to the day AFTER whatever had happened to the cathedral in Alleaume in 2019 had happened.
A chill ran through Chief Inspector Dubois's body as he considered these things … what had happened to the cathedral? What was meant to happen? What could have happened, but hadn't?
The finale, tomorrow ...