by Exurb1a
“And you’re still young. When you’re old enough you can go and explore the tiers, if you like. But most of us stay down here. It’s safer, less to go wrong, less to confuse. We’re closer to how our ancestors lived.”
Argie wasn’t sure what was coming next, but she could predict the flavour of it. And she was correct.
“Progress is only possible via deviation from the norm,” the infant quoted.
“That’s true, but there has to be a limit. Everyone up there has lost their minds. They’ve forgotten what we were before, given it all up. How we’re living now, it’s the safe path.”
The infant was quiet after that, but Argie knew damn well what her daughter was thinking: what kind of idiot would ever choose the safe path?
“Now,” The Navigator said. “Quite a thing, isn’t it?” The peak was unremarkable, built only for the vortex, apparently. The vortex itself span and sang before them, unstable, twisting back through hypergeometry – starting in the Ape Cellar, ending in Lemuria.
Argie looked into the monstrosity, trying to find a single recognisable form or shape. “Will it hurt?” she said.
“Sometimes. Remember, there’s something we need to do first.”
Argie nodded and sent a formal tier transfer request for two. Arcadia granted permission immediately and added a warning about inexperienced travellers. “All right,” she said.
“Well then.” The Navigator gestured to the vortex, put on a paternal smile. “This is the easy part.”
“Just step in?”
“Just step in.”
She edged closer. The vortex began to churn wildly, anticipating new passengers. “There’s something you need to hold on to for me,” she said suddenly. “In case this all goes wrong.”
“It won’t go wrong.”
“Fine, but still.” She gifted The Navigator an enormous selfsense packet; her memories of the last four thousand or so cycles. It took him a moment to examine the thing.
Finally he shook his head. “And what do you expect me to do with this?”
“Just keep it safe.”
“Don’t you have anyone you’d rather-”
“No.”
He said nothing then and nodded and lit a cigarette and beckoned again to the vortex. “Well then, I’ll be right behind you.”
She glanced up the long stem of the vortex, stretching into the sky and beyond it. At the end of that stem, somewhere, lay Lemuria. And in Lemuria, perhaps, was her daughter.
One morning Argie woke on the beach and looked for the child, but couldn’t find her. She walked the cliffs calling her name. Along the way were interfaces, dozens of them, all left lying open. Each one was an information query about Arcadia, about its people and geography, about the culture. Her stomach sank. She found the infant sitting on the edge of a cliff looking out over the ocean. There were no hypershapes now, no exotic five-dimensional animals lolling about. The infant had grown considerably, in body and selfsense. Now she presented as a pale young woman in a sapien dress. She had Argie’s cheeks perhaps, but the resemblance stopped there.
“If I wanted to leave, could I?” Kaluza said.
“I told you, you’re not a prisoner here.” Argie took a spot next to her daughter. “But look. The world outside our burrow isn’t safe. Some denizens are devious and violent and will take advantage. Others just want to see you broken for no other reason than the fun of it.”
Kaluza snapped back suddenly, “And others are trying to reach the bottom of nature. Did you know that? The Grammarists up in Lemuria, I’ve been learning about them. They say they’re close to unmasking nature’s true face.”
Argie chuckled. “They’ve been saying that for ten thousand cycles now, I’d take it with a pinch of salt.”
“Yes but-”
“I get the idea. The world is big and intriguing and you want to go and play in it. Fine then, I’d never dream of keeping you here against your will. But I’ll come with you.”
“All right.” Kaluza smiled and her eyes grew wide.
Argie could’ve just transferred them both to the world outside with a burrow request, but instead conjured a huge golden doorway in the cliff face. Sure enough Kaluza enjoyed the spectacle. The two of them passed through holding hands.
The Ape Cellar hit them immediately, the stink of cooked animal flesh, the blaring light of the mirror beacons. They had emerged into a busy street, folk everywhere; some in cloaks, others naked, market stalls in every direction, some denizens levitating over the market and watching from above, others disappearing into the cobblestones beneath like diving whales. Kuluza’s hand slipped from her mother’s and Argie grabbed it again and shepherded the child through the chaos. She knew the district well enough, she’d lived here as a horology researcher. They passed down a street of buildings reduced to rubble, and briefly through a small forest of some kind, and emerged before a great temple of stone and brass. A few denizens in brown robes milled about on the lawn, but the place was empty for the most part.
A statue waited before them, a sapien male made entirely of glass, the height of ten market stalls.
“The Glass King,” Kaluza whispered.
“You read about him?”
“A little.”
“The Glass King built Arcadia, understand? The world was made, not formed. Thousands of years ago, by the sapien metric.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he build Arcadia?”
“Because sapiens broke easily, and even if they stayed careful they still wore down and died. Not so deep into their history they’d peered into physics and wrapped the universe up in equations and built huge societies, and they still hadn’t done a thing about death. The Glass King vowed to kill it.”
“To kill death?”
“To kill death.” Argie idled back through her selfsense to her early days at the Horology Faculty. She quoted the Glass King himself: “We shall hereby endeavour to banish endings from the world and train our moral sextants on a new, perfect horizon. We vow to purge weariness, slaughter fragility, and make a court jester of time.”
Kaluza's eyes were wide again, her mouth a little open. Argie quietly prayed she’d made the right decision, bringing the child here with her mother rather than letting her discover it by herself later and misinterpret the whole thing horribly.
How much information was too much? How little would be an immoral lack?
“Did it work?” Kaluza said quietly. “Killing death?”
“Sure. You can end your selfsense whenever you like in the Death Forest, but if you don’t want to then you need never do it at all.”
Then even quieter Kaluza said, “But things will wear out one day.”
Argie considered the next sentence carefully. It would no doubt plant even more dangerous ideas in the child’s head, but like the Glass King’s rantings it was still better coming from her mother than some idiot denizen. Finally she said, “There are Indigos working on that problem, so some rumours say.”
“On killing entropy?”
“That’s the idea.” Argie turned about and went to lead her daughter back outside. “Anyway, things are a bit more bearable down here. No wild schemes. Shall we go back to the burrow? We can talk polynomials and ride dragons if you like.”
Her daughter had not turned about to follow, had not moved at all, but only stood and stared at the effigy of the Glass King. Argie knew then that she would one day lose the girl entirely.
“Well, we haven’t the luxury of time,” The Navigator said. “Tick tock.”
“Give me that,” Argie said. She took a few quick drags on The Navigator's cigarette, sputtered, and gave it back.
Then she passed into the vortex.
7.
19/11/2021
P,
After the delightful Mr. Hayden’s visit to your office, I’ve decided to start keeping these on a USB stick in the safe. Given that there’s obviously more going on here than I’m aware of, it also se
emed like a good idea to start using these letters to keep a record of the investigation. (Benjamin Hare the Righteous, who, against all odds triumphantly locates his wife, rescues her from the brink of whatever it is she’s on the brink of, and gets her home. ((They then proceed to do kinky shit to each other.))
Where to start?
The last week or so I stayed inside. I took lots of hot showers and sort of enjoyed scalding myself and tried to watch TV, but couldn’t seem to follow it that well. Mum came over and was nice and asked loads of serious questions about what to do next. I didn’t actually say it to her, but I know the facts of the matter. There is nothing to do next. The police are apparently working on the case, following up whatever meagre leads they have. Every morning I phone their office and get the same polite secretary who patiently explains that nothing new has come up and I will be the first one they contact in such an event. If I probe deeper about what is actually being done she repeats a line about how they are giving it their best effort and have their most diligent and gifted officers on the case. So I stopped calling. And I stayed inside. And I took lots of hot showers and watched TV.
Can’t shake the feeling everyone who comes over to comfort me secretly suspects you just ran away. Everyone on my side of the family has always thought you were nuts anyway. You’re so detached from reality that I bet that’s news to you. So no Polly, you can’t come away with my family for Christmas and spend almost the entire time by yourself down on the beach and not draw attention. You can’t openly call Mum simplistic over Sunday dinner because she doesn’t understand Bayesian inference. And you can’t just up and leave your life in the middle of the night without causing significant damage to your fucking husband.
God damn, if you did this all on purpose…
One evening we went to see some Polish pianist - I forget who - play at the National Theatre in Sofia. On the way out you said you needed the toilet so I waited for an age by the women's loos. Turned out it was the wrong one. We found each other eventually and you were a bit cold and short and I guess it coloured me cold and short too. You made some passing remark about how forgetful I am so I took a shot at how utterly distant you could be, and within ten minutes we'd descended into a screaming row. I would later learn how that morning one of your papers had been rejected, something you'd been working on for an age. Still, we walked through Borisova Gradina park screaming at each other a while, really yelling, and for the first time since we'd met I decided I was done; done with your hysterics, done with your mood swings, done with sticking up for myself over what felt like the most innocuous shit. As anyone realises with age, no relationship is utopian. There will always be disagreements of course, but at some point one has to put their foot down and say enough. It requires courage.
You walked ahead for a bit, bought a beer, demolished it in true Polly fashion, then slowed down. I decided when you reached me I'd end it, call the whole thing off for both of us, no undo button. Surely you knew it was coming anyway. What with me running out of funding and your career frankly sitting in academic limbo, we'd been at each other's throats for months. No future was possible built on such uncertain foundations.
You joined my side finally and rubbed your eyes with your sleeve and put your head on my shoulder. Then you said, “Want to get married?”
“Sure,” I said. So we did.
A few days ago I got to thinking about your ex-lovers. One in particular, Dimitar. You mentioned him in passing once when we were high. I think I asked a few casual questions that weren’t really that casual and you gave me the rest. You’d been engaged to him in your early twenties, you said. You both worked together at the mathematics faculty on your PhDs back in Bulgaria. That was it.
So I called one of those telephone translators who in turn called your mum. I asked her about the mystery ex and she said his name was Dimitar Ivanov.
Great. Do you have his number?
No.
Do you know where he lives?
No.
Can you help in any way?
No.
What is your general opinion on Half-Life 3 ever being made?
No.
Sometimes when I eat parsley, my ears turn slightly red. What could be causing this alarming phenomenon?
No.
Top work, thanks Mrs Alexandrova, you witless arse.
Luckily the internet exists.
There were fuck knows how many Dimitar Ivanovs online. One was working at Sofia University in the mathematics faculty. Seemed like a safe bet.
I argued with the faculty’s receptionist in broken Bulgarian for just under half an hour and she finally gave me what she claimed was his private number. A fairly nice woman called Georgana answered and told me she didn’t know who Dimitar Ivanov was, but that he was probably a liar because most men are. I called the secretary back and did a bit of passive-aggression and she seemed to respond well because the next number she gave me was a man.
His English wasn’t bad. When I went to introduce myself he said, “Yes, I know who you are,” and didn’t sound terribly happy about it.
“I’m the guy who married your ex and gives her abundant sexual gratification,” I wanted to say, but stopped myself just in time.
“What do you want?” he said.
I asked if he knew you were missing. He said yes, your mother had told him a few days ago. Did he know where you’d gone? No. Was there anything he could tell me that might help?
“No. I’m very busy, Mr. Hare.”
So I pretended I was a private investigator in my head and asked what he did. He said it was something to do with health statistics and it was complicated, then gave a small exasperated sigh. I asked what you’d been working on those years ago. He didn’t sigh this time. Instead he said, “Polly was very clever.” I agreed and waited.
And then, with a bit of prompting, he explained to me your Big Idea. You know, the one you never ever mentioned to your husband, and have apparently been pursuing for years now. A bit more reluctantly he even sent me that paper you wrote about it. You know, the one you never ever mentioned to your husband.
EXCERPTS INCLUDED FOR HISTORICAL CONTEXT:
Towards an Effective Empirical Method via Algorithm Utilisation
We should like to present herein a suggestion for a new mode of empirical investigation, particularly in the field of theoretical physics, with a strong emphasis on mathematical prediction. Primarily we would like to suggest an alternative to the traditionally empirically-led mode of modern theoretical physics, and instead lay the groundwork for the assembly of new theoretical frameworks using predictive artificial intelligence, as opposed to deduction from empirical results. Theoretical (as well as traditional) physics has largely proceeded by the gathering of evidence, and the subsequent construction of a framework to explain said phenomena. We should like to present an alternative.
The research outlined in this paper relies on the principal assumption that nature is logical on a fundamental level, or at least that the phenomena physics investigates are founded on logical principles. We would be remiss not to mention that if for some reason nature is foundationally chaotic, our research is ultimately useless in any pragmatic sense. However, with this assumption in mind, one would expect logical and mathematical forms to appear in nature, even at the macroscopic scale, as indeed they do. We regularly observe the golden ratio in a wide range of natural phenomena, for a well-known example. Countless more examples exist in geology, in meteorology, in whichever empirical field one cares to name. Even the distribution of human populations follows a similar distribution to that of celestial objects affected by gravitational attraction. Our present level of understanding, however, may be mistaking these phenomena as apparently arbitrary and unrelated. The energy threshold of the Higgs boson is currently thought to be entirely at the whim of a cosmic lottery. In actual fact it may be the result of a profoundly logical framework built into nature itself, where the particle must be situated at that threshold and no other. In muc
h the same fashion as circles must adhere to pi and an equilateral triangle’s internal angles must adhere to sixty degrees, the Higgs boson and its behaviour (as well as the electron, proton, neutron, and all other particles in the Standard Model) may be intrinsically wired into nature itself.
We shall henceforth call the purely mathematical domain I and the physical domain II. The link between these two domains has been instrumental in the production of new technology, via exploitation of theoretical models in physics. Up until this point new models have operated at the whim of new data. We shall, in this paper, propose an alternative methodology, reliant on a logical groundwork for physics.
The linkage between domain I and domain II has been slow to reveal itself throughout scientific history, given that mathematicians and scientists generally work within the scope of their research. With the advent of supercomputers this need no longer be a limitation. We envisage a sophisticated algorithm undertaking this work that might far surpass previous efforts. The algorithm in question would be tasked with looking for previously unnoticed parallels between mathematical absolutes and already confirmed data in theoretical physics, as well as empirical observations in a number of other fields.
RETURN TO HARE DOCUMENT:
I told him I didn’t know a damn thing about the ‘axiom machine’ or whatever he called it and I swear I caught some sympathy in his voice. And I felt a sort of rage then, one I don’t remember ever feeling before. (God this is nice, being able to say this stuff to you, without fear of some brush-off reply or a disapproving glance.) I’d had your time, your presence, had your marriage vows and all that nonsense, but obviously your mind - or the vast majority of it - belonged with your ex-lover.
“Why didn’t Polly mention any of this to me?” I said to him.
“It’s complicated stuff,” he said flatly.
