Logic Beach- Part I

by Exurb1a

  One day, an early day - you’d just moved over to England - we spent the morning in bed, then walked to the park and laid down on the grass. The sun was just hot enough. We got talking about something mathy and abstract, I forget what. I asked you if it was possible we had everything licked, that everything had been discovered, more or less. This question was entirely designed to demonstrate to you that I was not an idiot. I’d read an article about transistors reaching maximum population on a circuit board or something, and computers getting harder to build in the near future. On top of that, quantum mechanics and all that stuff might reach a point where our little brains just couldn’t decipher it anymore. I assumed you were going to say something dismissive, shrug it off.

  Instead you nuzzled up a little closer and whispered into my ear, “We’re still ants, just feeling out ridges in the great cosmic garden path.”

  That seemed pretentious at the time. A few years later and I was the ant, looking for the ridges in your personality; some dumb insect waddling about, it felt like, doubling back on myself, pressing forward, doubling back, pressing forward - just desperately trying to find whatever it is dumb ants are after - respite, solace, and a little love - and not getting so far with any of them.

  “I’ve nothing more to tell you,” Dimitar said.

  I asked a few more hurried questions but he parried them all, so I told him to go fuck himself and hung up.

  That afternoon I tried looking for any research even remotely related to whatever it was you were doing, but I didn’t know enough to even get the search terms right.

  I pestered the police some more, hung out with the cat a bit in the garden, and started drinking around four. I was tanked by five.

  Clare next door said hello over the fence, asked how everything was going. Just tip top, I said. She leaned further over and said in a quiet voice, “You know, it does get easier.” I remembered her husband had died a few years ago. Yes, I was going to shout back, but your husband was old and Polly's not dead, and I realised then that only one of those statements is objectively true at the moment. You could be dead. You could well be dead.

  And with the booze on top of me, it suddenly seemed like human history was just one brutal onslaught of grief, and that losing a lover or a child was really part of the burden of being alive in the first place. Somehow this was a rite of passage, a fucking awful one, but a rite nonetheless. Beside me stood God knows how many millions of other humans: Clare, Chinese peasants, Roman senators, Neanderthals, all of them reluctantly learning to practice the art of accepting the unacceptable. Clare said goodbye and I refilled my glass.

  My phone rang. I let it sing away to itself. It rang again, then again, so I picked up.

  “Benjamin?” said a deep Bulgarian voice.

  “Dimitar.”

  “I’ve spoken with some of my colleagues. If you would be willing to travel over here, we would be willing to tell you more about Polly’s research.”

  “Why?”

  “You want to hear about it or not?”

  We exchanged details. I booked a flight for the next day. They clapped when the plane landed, whatever the fuck that’s all about. I saw your ghost on the roads as the taxi took me to the hotel: that evening when we were on Pirotska Street and you started dancing, hair wet from the rain; the first time we ever properly touched. You pulled me into a doorway and we made out for what could well have been a year.

  A quick sleep, a walk to the cathedral in the morning, a cup of coffee, then the university. Dimitar was waiting outside with a dark-haired woman who did not introduce herself. He asked if I might feel like some tea and I said I would. We walked to a café and sat in awkward silence waiting for our drinks to come.

  Finally Dimitar said, “This is Maria. She was a colleague of Polly’s.” The woman’s expression was as cold as his and she kept her eyes on the table.

  “All right. And what am I here to discuss, exactly?”

  They exchanged a glance, then Dimitar mumbled, “Polly said you were never too good with mathematics.”

  Fuck off, I thought. “That’s true,” I said instead.

  “So you can imagine that trying to condense difficult work such as your wif-” he caught himself, “-such as Polly’s isn’t easy.”

  “I read the paper,” I said.

  “You understood it?” Maria said.

  “Sounded like just another theory of everything to me.”

  They exchanged another glance. “You are not such a stranger to physics then,” Dimitar said. “That’s good.”

  We all sipped our drinks. You’d be proud of the next bit. “As I understand it,” I said carefully, “she wanted to build an algorithm that could start…doing science on its own, right?”

  “No,” Maria said.

  “No,” Dimitar said.

  “Right. Okay.”

  They both wore that expression universal among mathematicians, or your dickhead academic friends anyway; the one that says, Really? I have to explain myself to this primate?

  “Nature is deeply mathematical in places,” Dimitar said.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. As you should have read in the paper, there are lots of phenomena that pop up regularly in spiral galaxies and biology that can be explained alone with an application of logic and first principles.” He glanced again at Maria and made a sort of weak help face. “Common forms manifest in nature all the time. A cell, for example, is not so different to the structure of a society. The nucleus is something of a government, the cell wall a sort of national border. Or, think how similar a solar system is to the structure of an atom, spheres caught in the orbit of a larger body. I mean, particles aren’t actually solid matter in the same way, but you understand I think. Nature utilises the same architecture again and again. Why?”

  “Maybe it’s a fun coincidence,” I said. This seemed like the kind of cynical bullshit you’d come out with.

  “Maybe,” Dimitar said. “Or maybe it’s an expression of something deeper, a fundamental logic that would be the same across all universes, at any time. Could you imagine a universe where pi didn’t dictate the circumference of a circle, for example?”

  “With enough LSD perhaps, yes.”

  “From this you would think that the whole universe might be built on some logical principle, even if we can’t…” Maria said.

  “Unmask,” Dimitar helped.

  “Unmask, yes - even if we can’t unmask it yet.”

  “And that’s the theory my wife was trying to prove?”

  Dimitar smiled a little darkly. “Oh no. She took it for granted that there must be an underlying logical axiom, or a set of them. What she wanted to do was tease out the thing itself, with her algorithm.”

  “How?”

  “Difficult to explain.”

  “God damn it, I’ve flown several thousand miles to get here and the last few months have been hell. On top of that you’re now telling me my wife was doing something important enough to draw the attention of the UK government. So you better damn well-”

  “The UK government?” Maria said quickly.

  I told them about Hayden. Dimitar sighed. “That is not good news.”

  I repeated my previous speech and tried to sound a bit more dignified.

  “All right, all right,” Dimitar said. “As I said to you on the phone, it’s complicated, yes? Nevertheless. The purpose of the algorithm was to look for connections between purely mathematical phenomena, like pi and the Fibonacci sequence, and attempt to find correlations in the real world. Science has been trying to do this for a long time now anyway. Polly thought a computer could do it much faster. If enough correlations were found, she wanted to start predicting new physics with it. If the predictions were verified, well then…”

  “You wouldn’t need big particle colliders anymore,” I said.

  They both looked impressed. “That’s right. No more empirical investigation required, not really. Science could be done with reasoning from the ground up, no
t the sky down. Of course the predictions themselves would need to be verified experimentally, but that’s it.”

  “And,” Maria added, “we might get a little closer to understanding why physics is so ugly.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Yes. Why are there seventeen elementary particles? Why is ninety percent of the universe invisible? Why does-”

  “Understood, thanks. How far did she get?”

  A long silence followed. Then Dimitar finished his coffee and lowered his voice and said, “We don’t know. She left the university not long after and moved to England. She stopped talking with us about her research.”

  “At least I wasn’t the only one out of the loop then.”

  “Benjamin,” Maria said and met my eyes for the first time. “We’re telling you this because we’re confident Polly’s idea got up the ground.”

  “Off the ground,” Dimitar said.

  “Off the ground.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Other people will be interested in a thing like this. It could do damage.”

  “A few pointy-heads getting excited about another Higgs boson can't be that dangerous.”

  Dimitar muttered something in Bulgarian that didn’t sound very nice. He switched back to English. “It’s a bold idea. If it worked, it would have the potential to leapfrog physics.”

  “Leap…frog?” Maria asked.

  “Boing,” Dimitar said.

  “Ah boing, yes.”

  Dimitar leant in. “Look. Maybe her idea didn’t work at all. There are holes in it, as with any theory. The amount of computing power required, for example. Plus, it’s not easy to build an algorithm like that. Computers can’t do context. ‘Look for circles’ is an easy concept. ‘Why is an electron a sphere?’ is rather different. You see?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re aware your wife is mad?” Maria said.

  “Oh yes. It’s why I married her.”

  “And she believes very strongly in things.”

  “Another one of her charms, yes.”

  “She believed in this. If someone threatened her idea, she will have put it before everything else.”

  “Even you,” Dimitar said with a hint of a grin.

  They paid for my drink and we took a walk through the park. Dimitar pointed out statues of various revolutionaries and Maria stopped occasionally to pet dogs. They were not bad people, I realised. They just didn’t do the bullshit customary English games of excessive politeness. We made idle small talk about the history of the park and then I asked Maria outright where she thought you had gone.

  “You say she left in the morning. That means she had a plan. That is good. She is good at game theory. She plays games well.”

  “Was I a part of that?” I said, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  “What could she get from you?” Maria said with a sort of reassuring wink. Sexytimes, I thought. And decent tea.

  “There is something I read in Polly’s paper,” I said. “The ‘axiom’. It keeps coming up again and again. What is it?”

  Dimitar stepped in after a bit of thought. “If Polly is right, subatomic and relativistic physics can be summed up in a general formula, just like force and gravity. There will be a mathematical starting point from which the architecture of all matter and energy is derived, and all forces in nature are derived. This formula will be rooted in pure logic, and can be deduced from working backwards to first principles using Polly’s algorithm – if it works. She often dreamt of the axiom when we worked together. She said it must be staring right at us and we’re just stumbling about blind. That was her Waterloo.” I shook my head to say, huh? He thought for a moment and tried again. “If Polly was right then all of physics will be based in logic, however strange and wild it might seem. There will be deep and structural reasons for why there is X amount of matter in the universe, and why it behaves in such a fashion. There will be deep and structural reasons why quantum mechanics is so different to our physics up in big-world. Everything will have an underlying foundation in logic. The universe could not have been made any other way.” He held up his hands. “And since we’re a part of that, we’re sort of special.” He nodded to Vitosha mountain in the distance, the highest peaks kissed with snow. “The Balkan range is a fact, it exists. But what built it was pressure. That pressure was determined by geology. Geology is built on logical principles, physics with trees on top, as the saying goes. The tectonic plates could not have behaved in any other way. You see a mountain, but it’s really just another offshoot of logic’s quiet place in the world, regulating everything as she pleases. The universe is logic’s daughter, and by extension so are we.”

  “I think I understand,” I said slowly, not sure if I was telling the truth.

  “Good,” Maria said. “Want to go drink a lot?”

  “Yes please.”

  8.

  The Ape Cellar died around Argie almost immediately. She reached out to steady herself, but was unable to control her legs; they had been dismantled already. She panicked, searching next for her arms: also gone. She tried to cry out; no mouth.

  “Just keep it together. Won’t take too long to pass through,” came The Navigator’s voice. She searched about and made out his selfsense ahead of her in five-dimensional space, also robbed of limbs.

  “What’s happening?” she cried with her selfsense.

  “We're in the void between tiers. Arcadia won't let you pass into Lemuria as an ape, so it has to make a few adjustments to us first. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. Just keep it together. You’ve been living in Local Space your whole life. It’s designed to make sense to…your sort.”

  She looked about frantically. They were in a dim murk, hypershapes passing by at colossal speed, flashes of colour beyond the normal spectrum. Bizarre rising and falling tones rang out, almost deafening at times. “We're still between tiers?” she shouted.

  “Yes. We’ll cross over to Lemuria soon enough. We’re moving, though it doesn’t feel that way.”

  She tried to take deep breaths with her missing lungs. There was a howl in the distance. “What was that?”

  “Just keep it together, understand?”

  The howl came again. “There’s something in here with us.”

  “Probably other denizens coming back the other way,” The Navigator said.

  Argie tried to still her mind. “It’s so dark,” she said.

  “Mmm,” The Navigator grumbled.

  Strange Doppler echoes sounded from all around them, animal cries, the din of machinery, nursery rhymes sung in voices that were neither male nor female.

  “Navigator….” Argie whispered.

  “It’s all right, I’m here. Shall I tell you a story?”

  “I…”

  “The story of how the tiers came about. You know that one?”

  “No.”

  And so he told it.

  In the beginning, he said, there were no tiers or burrows, only a single open scape. Denizens were entitled to as much of the environment as they desired. Some built homes of a sort. They were Original Migrants after all, having been modelled on sapien brains. They sculpted mountain ranges and deserts, conjured oceans, painted galaxies. The scape became one enormous homage to collaboration. Some sectors were Escher-like, defying geometry and gravity. Others were prosaic and closely mirrored denizens’ homes outside of Arcadia, pulled straight from their memories. There were ideological differences of course, but nothing terribly major. Most denizens were still cautious about altering their own selfsenses, despite having every chance to do so. Many still used sapien language to communicate for example, still wrote music, still ate and drank, still pissed and fucked. But some pined for children, and so they had children using a very early prototype of the birthing machine in Nufeeja. The babies were small at first, then slowly grew larger and acquired language and the ability to manipulate Arcadia in the same fashion as their parents. They were the first generation born inside Arcadia, rather
than having migrated into it.

  From the outset the children were obviously quite different to their parents, but this was not thought a huge problem. They were less interested in speech, considering it an inefficient mode of communication. Instead they began sharing information by selfsense directly, publicly at first, then privately.

  In some obscure region of the scape lived the Glass King. He had been among the first to enter Arcadia. It was his job to regulate administrative matters, for he had powers and privileges in Arcadia that were unprecedented.

  One cycle an original sapien migrant came to the Glass King. If we keep letting denizens procreate, the migrant said, the children will surely develop beyond our control.

  The Glass King presented as a sapien, wearing nothing but a white toga, his beard long and unruly, but his face still young and handsome. Despite all his flaws he was known for his perfect wisdom. He considered the matter. Then finally he informed the migrant before him that nothing could be done. Yes, the children may develop beyond measure, but it was no place for a parent to limit a child’s aspirations. Trying to retard the process would only make it worse in the long run anyway.

  And so Arcadia’s second generation became estranged from their parents soon enough. It wasn’t a violent process. They didn’t rebel or curse. They simply ceased talking and spent more and more time in an area of the scape where they made it clear they wished to be left alone. Well, as you can imagine, this was extremely traumatising for the parents involved. They may have come a long way from their days outside of Arcadia, but the components of parenthood were still etched deeply into their selfsenses.

  Several parents felt such grief that they retreated into their own private areas (these were the first ever burrows, of course) and were not heard from for many thousands of cycles. In fact this is where we get the term solip, from solipsist, or one who believes the world and the entities within it are merely delusions constructed by their own mind. It became quite normal for Original Migrants to develop this condition after only a few thousand cycles. These private burrows had all the same privileges as any other area of Arcadia, and so the parents reconstructed their children, reconstructed other denizens, even reconstructed their lives as sapiens in some cases. On occasion a lover or a friend would enter the burrow and attempt to bring their selfsense back to reality. Much like trying to wake a sapien from a coma, this was rarely ever successful.