The Day Pi Was Calculated to Its Last Digit

Pi had been calculated to completion. It wasn't a mistake: after the 314 trillionth decimal place, the digits stopped changing, and every digit after that was zero.

Computational mathematician Wen Che was the one assigned to verify it. He had written the validation program himself, and it produced an impossible result: pi was a terminating decimal. In other words, there were no true circles in nature. Every circle was a regular polygon with an absurdly large number of sides. At the smallest scale, spacetime was not continuous, but pieced together one tile at a time. The universe was pixelated, and the ground was a chessboard.

But on the very night the calculation was completed, his mentor, Lu Heng, died in a laboratory fire. The official conclusion was accidental death. Wen Che only had to read the report once to know something was wrong: every figure was precise to two decimal places, neat as if it had been calculated in advance. Pages were missing from the experiment log, his colleagues' memories didn't match, and the versions in the archives were too neat to be real.

He decided to run the calculation again himself. Numbers didn't lie. He would prove this was no coincidence. But the deeper he dug, the colder things got: a man locked in a psychiatric hospital had covered the walls with grids and kept muttering, "The floor tiles are changing shifts." And whenever Wen Che went looking for evidence, someone always got there first, erasing it bit by bit.

Why did pi come to an end? What really killed his mentor? And who laid this chessboard?