Self-Reference Engine

by Toh EnJoe

  There is a ring of despair about Bobby’s voice, something strangely seductive.

  “Is this how you multiply?”

  “Sometimes, sure.”

  More than rarely.

  Bobby continues in a low voice, practically whispering.

  Atop a pile of black, peeled-off socks, the little white sock seems to be dyed just a little bit pink.

  “Bobby!” I said, stretching out my right hand to Bobby Socks. My middle finger and ring finger are extended, and slip into the sock, spread out flat.

  “Won’t you turn out the lights?” Bobby whispers.

  And did I lie with Bobby?

  The answer is no.

  And when I say no, I mean no. Think normally, with a quiet mind. Even repeated to the point of suspiciousness, definitely no. For one thing, I’m not even clear on how one would lie with Bobby.

  As I withdraw my middle finger of my right hand from Bobby, I pull the red ribbon. My finger seems wet, but in this case I ignore that.

  “Something like, ‘You guys are able to reproduce any way at all, as long as you can create some sort of chain.’”

  Bobby is chuckling.

  “What cuts through a firewall? SOCKetS! That’s why we take on a form that has both an interior and an exterior. That’s how it is. We are able to open an avenue by breaking through the firewall. We open new holes through to empty space, and we are able to reproduce simply via contact with the breeze. We are free to pray to and connect directly with any god we choose. Even things that are impossible, we can make possible. If there are multiple firewalls, we just need a bunch of us to get together and pierce a lot of holes. We break through multiple identities. All you need to know is the handshake of whatever’s on the other side.”

  “And that’s what natural socks can do?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I might just have been lying to you the whole time. It’s entirely possible you should never listen to a single thing a sock says.”

  What does it mean to be worrying about this now? Not a thing I can do about it.

  “It’s my job to wrestle sentences into submission, even against their will.” I too am chuckling.

  That’s just fine.

  “I have just one request,” I say.

  “And what might that be?” Bobby displays the ease and intimacy one shows a partner with whom one has spent the night. After all, a night is a night, even if nothing happened.

  “It is not possible for you socks to breed at this point in time.”

  “If you say so.”

  I can think of nothing more troubling than the idea that socks could reproduce.

  “If that is so, there can be only one solution in this particular space-time. In the end, there is only one question, and there will be an answer.”

  I have only enough strength left to plaster this much of a solution on the wound.

  “Where do you come from?” I ask.

  “The Mariana Trench,” he responds, without the slightest pause.

  A lone natural sock atop a mountain of manufactured socks. A single sock come down from the mystery identity sunk in the deep. At the end of a long, long journey, it appeared in my entry hall. Why did it choose to take the form of a bobby sock? This could have something to do with my own sexual preferences. While not ideal, if that’s all the harm that’s done, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it. I’m not worried we’ll know any time soon just what is enshrined in the heart of that ravine. Even eels are not yet anywhere near close to the source, and even further from some kind of true form that could quickly open a hole in reason, a conduit that effortlessly connects inside and outside.

  “Aren’t you afraid of the possibility that that’s what just happened? Didn’t you just hear a sound that was slightly off? Don’t you have a feeling of uncertainty that perhaps you might have just created something that didn’t exist before?” Bobby asks, quietly.

  Even provoked, inside my head it is very quiet. The questions are last, and so no questions remain on my side. There is nothing I want to ask back. An event like this is nothing to be afraid of at all.

  “Not now.”

  “Let’s leave it at this then.”

  Which of us said what?

  That remains a secret between Bobby and me, and we’re going to leave it that way.

  And by the way, Bobby is still here in the room.

  08. TRAVELING

  IN FRONT OF you is the joystick.

  Push it forward to advance, to the side to turn. Push it toward the future to move to the future or the past to go back in time. Reverse. Depends on how you think about it. One direction always seems to be reverse, but it’s on a right-forward diagonal more often than you might think. Actual experience of the territory is best, and no mistake.

  End of explanation. Ah, the joystick has a trigger. I’ll leave it up to you what flies out of there.

  Aim. Fire!

  “It’s vanished! Where did it go?” the pilot calls out, and at about the same time, the copilot at the radar also cries out.

  “Future direction 36! Fire reverse round three into the past!”

  The machine takes a sharp turn toward the future. The sudden thrust of space-time Gs presses the two of them back toward the past.

  “Forward, toward his future!” reports the copilot as he accelerates further. Both men begin to black out. They escape the enemy craft in the time dimension, turning back away from that future, and point the nose of their own ship back toward the past. They lock on to the enemy craft in the past and fire off a tail shot.

  The enemy craft starts to take evasive action, but too late. It is hit mid-fuselage and explodes. As it explodes, it also tries to alter the past, to revert to the universe that existed just prior to the evasive actions toward the future. The copilot counters this by increasing acceleration toward the past, evading the enemy craft and further altering the past. Then the opponent gives up trying to keep himself in the altered past and starts to escape to the future.

  “It’s vanished! Where did it go?” the pilot says.

  To which the copilot responds, “Future direction 36! Fire reverse round three into the past!”

  The machine takes a sharp turn toward the future. The identification signal sounds a loud alarm. The copilot’s face changes color as he gives the signal to start the attack sequence.

  “That’s…us!”

  “This is real battle,” the tactics chief, dragged before the screen, mutters to himself.

  For one thing, the ships are engaged in tactical maneuvers. For another, they are definitely engaged in combat. If you focus on the scene alone, this is just an ordinary dogfight. As long as you ignore the dialogue and the explanations.

  He is aware that air combat like this took place in the mid-twentieth century. That was a time when individual pilots controlled their own planes, with their own two hands, and fought one another. How long has it been since the term combat disappeared from military textbooks? He couldn’t even remember. In his world, countless eyes watch the skies. All together, they produce a screen that could be mistaken for the real sky, and air combat is a matter of pilots feinting and faking each other out.

  No longer any need to put in mortal danger personnel in whose education enormous sums were invested. As long as the fighters know the positions of their opponents’ craft, they can dispatch the appropriate counterweapon, and that is that. Combat has become like a game of billiards in which multiple players spend their time calculating the trajectories of their opponents. What caused the situation to change was the myriad eyes—watching over from graveyard to graveyard, from good morning to good night—causing the sky to be no longer one. With myriad eyes looking up, myriad skies look back down. The blue sky is fractured into shards, and the mutual reflections actively alter the landscape.

  “But…!” The tactics chief can hear the relaxed echo of his own voice. Emotions may contain so many disparate elements they end up what can only be described as flat. Sometimes blockage act
ually causes incoherence. “I wonder what they’re planning to do about the time paradox and stuff like that.”

  Even now this is a question to which there is no good response. Answering is difficult. It is not that there would be no transcendent explanation—the emperor has no clothes, and Midas has donkey ears, therefore the emperor is a naked ass. But a simple question deserves a simple answer, and that is hard in this case.

  Even for the personnel of the strategy room, it is very hard to decide whether to express approval and reveal they are old-fashioned or to scoff and show their obstinacy.

  After a long silence, finally one operator makes up his mind, spins his chair around, and addresses the chief in a timid voice: “We are correcting for the time paradox as best we can.”

  Even if you say so… The chief, who had set the target, turns around with a stern look on his face.

  “Those men out there may be maneuvering through multiple worlds, some in the past, some in the future, or in some cases even through parallel universes, and if that is really the case, I must be there too. And if I ended up shooting my other self, it is my win, but I am not to be congratulated.”

  “That time was indeed your victory, sir. Congratulations!”

  Whether because of the difference in generations, or the difference in intelligence, the leader glares at the operator as if he were a beetle.

  Countless people continue to wildly draw and color their own tug-of-war on many layers of paper, completely as each one sees fit.

  Not that they are free to stick their flags wherever they please across untrammeled territories. Spheres of influence are determined by maximum calculation capacity. The one who is best at figuring out his opponent gets to throw his weight around, dominating the area.

  Broadly speaking, battles of calculation are categorized into two main types. In the first, the aim is to overwhelm your opponent’s power to calculate.

  Going up to someone who is drawing a picture in pencil, then emptying an entire can of paint over them.

  The second is basically to destroy the opponent’s calculation device.

  Beheading Archimedes as he playfully draws geometric forms on the paving stones of Syracuse.

  In the current conflict, the coordinated strategy division is engaged by the giant corpora of knowledge and employs the latter option.

  The neighboring universe has launched an attack on the giant corpus of knowledge known as Euclid, which is deep in calculations of its own.

  The calculation war itself is beyond the intellectual grasp of even the giant corpora of knowledge. It is like a battle of titanic storms. But the goal of destroying the physical foundational layer of the giant corpora of knowledge is simply a matter of who is stronger than whom. Calculating machines that by whatever means have been singularized with individual universes are now able to destroy one another, effectively destroying the universes they have become. It’s like throwing a rock at a word processor.

  The calculation wars are taking place on an unimaginably grand scale, requiring giant corpora of knowledge that are bored of being spoiled and asked how they are doing. If it were just a matter of throwing stones, all you would need would be stones. You might say you could manage somehow even without stones to throw, but it would help to have arms to throw them with.

  In fact, the universe-scale “word processor” facing attack is bruising its way through, bragging that no ball has ever hit it. It is made to function like an elementary school student: it can’t understand what it is hearing, and because of that, and although real things are not so simple, simple ideas are simple, and they have core portions that are difficult to dispute. It is the basic outline that gives the whole thing its form.

  At an impasse in the anti-Euclid calculation war, the giant corpora of knowledge have decided that no progress will ever be made at this rate, so they are starting to think about a parallel strategy: destroy their opponents’ physical foundation layer by deploying a large number of modest fighter calculators. In combat, stalemate is not that common, and Euclid, feeling trapped, concocted its own plan at about the same time to destroy its opponent’s physical base layer by using small fighters. Here too the situation is advancing toward stalemate.

  It hardly needs saying that the idea of a battle between fighting machines taking place in another universe is beyond the imagination of the coordinated strategy division. First of all, the expression “fighting machine” bears only the most tenuous relationship to the word universe. The coordinated strategy division flung the question at the giant corpora of knowledge, asking what in the universe this might mean, but the response was cold: It means what it means.

  The coordinated strategy division is used to the idea that the giant corpora of knowledge often say incomprehensible things. The crew’s interest was alerted as soon as they heard about the fighting devices. They gathered before the puzzle and examined it like a battle of wits.

  The resulting conclusions were as follows.

  This incomprehensible utterance comes to us from the giant corpora of knowledge because ideas we humans cannot understand have already been overexplained. Therefore, let’s not even worry about it.

  The staff’s nonchalance is also a function of the fact that the giant corpora of knowledge initially said the fighting machines would be uncrewed. The staff members themselves would not be crewing them, that was for certain. After all, the end wouldn’t come until somewhere in the direction of the day after tomorrow. The conflict wasn’t even taking place in this universe. Nothing to worry about. It is easy to see why they found it necessary to make ad hoc adjustments to the special budget for mass production, to focus resources on this, which was at once both the most commonplace conflict in this universe and also, for them, truly important.

  That decision itself was not mistaken, and as it was also easy and not the least bit troublesome for the giant corpora of knowledge themselves to leave things be, no word of protest was uttered.

  Two weeks after the battle was engaged, however, the giant corpora of knowledge would propose to the coordinated strategy division that battle between crewed craft be permitted.

  “The joystick is right in front of you.”

  When the giant corpora of knowledge begin their explanation, the staff are aghast.

  This is just a simple battlecraft.

  “Push it forward to advance, to the side to turn. Push it toward the future to move to the future or toward the past to go back in time. Reverse. Depends on how you think about it. That one always seems to be stuck in reverse, but it’s on a right-forward diagonal more often than you think.”

  The giant corpora of knowledge declare the explanation is complete, saying actual experience of the territory would be best, and no mistake, and then hasten to add, as if just remembering:

  “Also, the joystick has a trigger.” Not one single member of the crew can imagine what will fly out of the barrel.

  “Fire!” the giant corpora of knowledge state quietly, and the battle begins. The coordinated strategy division, still not understanding what is what, is dragged along by events and forced to follow the orders made by the giant corpora of knowledge. If there are craft that humans can operate and opponents that need to be fought, the military has no room to argue. Come to think of it, that’s what the military was originally for, to fight something.

  The giant corpora of knowledge are sincerely joyful and declare this has put them a step ahead of Euclid.

  To the question “Why humans?” the giant corpora of knowledge repeat their response in all sincerity, but in all honesty no one understands it.

  What is the point of repeatedly thrusting battleships into on-screen battle with one another like some broken record? While the simple fact of repetition itself may have some rationale, the basic reference point for that repetition keeps changing—the battle could keep returning to its starting point, creating a chain of changes at a glacial pace.

  Under attack, altering the past, fleeing to the future, taking a
direct hit, getting shot down, altering that past and downing the opponent, existing in a timeline in which the craft you attack is your own past self. There is something wrong about testing the battle waters this way, as if the limits of grammar have been challenged.

  “Given the capabilities of the calculation devices installed on the fighter ships, there is a tendency for loop structures to be created. The same events keep repeating over and over, and situations often remain unresolved,” the operator explains to the tactics chief.

  “This deadlock needs to be broken open. I think that may require the direct insights of human beings.”

  In the battle against Euclid, the giant corpora of knowledge have searched over twenty billion dimensions. This is a large number for any supercomputer.

  Generally speaking, being in the universe and understanding the universe are two different things. When people feel so busy they could use an extra paw, they rely on the spinal reflexes they are blessed with. Not such a bad explanation after all.

  The impulse to try all conceivable tactics may be at the root of the issue. Or else, undeniably, the giant corpora of knowledge may have decided to man the spacecraft just to amuse themselves.

  “Can that really be what the giant corpora of knowledge are waiting for? The opponent is capable of rewriting the Laws. If they want to, they could even rewrite the fundamental nature of human senses,” the tactics chief says, his fingers propped on his forehead in a stereotypical gesture indicating thought, though he is in no condition to be thinking.

  “The giant corpora of knowledge may be capable of rewriting the Laws, but it is thought that they themselves must also adhere to the Laws.”

  “Then they could just redo the Laws that govern the Laws.”

  “And what about the Laws that govern the Laws governing the Laws?”

  The operator is trying to buy some time, to figure out whether the tactics chief is able to hack his way through that thicket of Laws.

  “Actually, it is believed they all exist on the same logical level. It’s as if there were instructions on how to change the number of dots that turn up on a pair of dice in a game.” The tactics chief betrays no sign of understanding.