Mr.OMG
Paramount
So, I want to pass on my first RT thread
There are all kinds of books, and words, in the world. If there is a book that could be written with grammar, it already exists. If you search for a particular book, it will be very difficult, most likely you will find the book "This is the book you were searching for," but of course it is not the same book.
In Rita's head for the truth was a bullet hole. After that a strange phenomenon happened, the shooter still tried to shoot Rita, but unluckily the main character was in the way of the bullet, so the world made the simplest decision, "The bullet did not hit Rita's head". It's a strange situation.
There are all kinds of books, and words, in the world. If there is a book that could be written with grammar, it already exists. If you search for a particular book, it will be very difficult, most likely you will find the book "This is the book you were searching for," but of course it is not the same book.
If you want to describe the world of the Event field, it would be extremely difficult. The stone from which you avert your eyes turns into a frog, then when you avert your eyes from it again, it turns into a gadfly. Soon the blind frog remembers that he was once a frog trying to eat a fly, but halfway through he remembers that there was a rock in the beginning, so he stops and falls down. Truly, this is a strange time-space structure.A SET OF all possible character strings. All possible books would be contained in that.
Most unfortunately though, there is no guarantee whatsoever you would be able to find within it the book you were hoping for. It could be you might find a string of characters saying, “This is the book you were hoping for.” Like right here, now. But of course, that is not the book you were hoping for.
The past and the future have become completely entangled, it is now impossible to tell where the past is and where the future is, even time travelers would be confused. Therefore, it is easier to say that there is no past and no future.I am repeating myself, but I haven’t seen her since then. She promised me, with a sweet smile, that I would never see her again.
For the short time we were together, we tried to talk about things that really meant something to us. Around that time there were a lot of things that were all mixed up, and it was not easy to sort out what was really real. There might be a pebble over there, and when you took your eyes off it it turned into a frog, and when you took your eyes off it again it turned into a horsefly. The horsefly that used to be a frog remembered it used to be a frog and stuck out its tongue to try to eat a fly, and then remembered it used to be a pebble and stopped and crashed to the ground.
With all this going on, it’s really important to know what’s really real and what’s not.
Rita is an ordinary girl, except for the fact that she is very smart. But for some reason, she's always trying to shoot someone, which puts guys' testicles in danger. This is most likely due to the fact that Rita is shooting back at some man from the future who once shot her in the womb. That's why Rita keeps trying to shoot the guy from the future while in the past.One day a bunch of time threads were going along in a bundle, stretching out in any direction at all, all together, all thinking it was kind of tedious. All things in time were vexed about this. And since practically everything is, in fact, bundled up in time, they were finding it hard to put up with being subjected to this arbitrariness.
The repeated pattern: restoration plan, persuasion, earnest entreaty, prayer. As indicated, each of these in turn tended to cause the situation to deteriorate, and the idea was that at the point when time
itself became confused, the result was some complete entanglement, with all participants left completely unable to move, as though part of some sort of ridiculously and utterly perverse sex act.
If I ever meet the guy who thought up this idea I think I’d like to split his head in two.
And then, a few hundred more years passed. In other words, what I mean is, I just ran through a few hundred years bound up in the frozen net of time.
That is, somehow or other, I arrived at a point that was a few hundred years either in the future or the past.
I cannot say one way or the other whether she had also made such a sprint. But it is a well-known phenomenon that girls often have no trouble passing time without such physical exertions.
That is why I am running again today. You might want to ask why.
One. One day, time caused an insurrection.
Two. We were moving in some unknown direction, allowed only to proceed toward some predetermined day after tomorrow.
The end result was clear.
Whether that result is just or not is something far beyond my ability to determine. In other words, it is like this:
If the lines of time are so entangled with one another that they are one ball of yarn, ignoring both past and future, one of those threads won’t mind if we were simply to connect with the instant of its beginning.
The instant when time abandoned the standard, straight-ahead march.
Of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that the path I am running along leads to that instant. That instant may exist at some point that may be completely unreachable, even if one were to follow countless threads through unlimited mysteries. It would take an infinite spider web stretched across infinite space to have enough space between the threads for this.
I believe James to be the smartest guy in this neighborhood, or maybe even the smartest guy in North America, but for two weeks now he has had the world’s worst crush on Rita. Now, even I know you can’t get apples from oranges, but this guy is the worst. If you could extract the smarts there wouldn’t be anything left of him. But he was still the smartest guy for two hundred miles around, no doubt about it.
“So what if she does have a bullet in her head?” I asked. “Some-time it must have got there somehow. How else could it be?”
Jay looked at me with a bored expression on his face.
“It’s been there since she was born,” he said seriously. I couldn’t be sure if he was teasing me or what, so I just patted him on the shoulder. Jay turned and got hold of me, wrapped his right arm around my middle, and threw me down. I offered no resistance and tumbled to the grass, landing spread-eagled.
“Huh?” I said.
“Huh what?” he said back. And repeating this scintillating dialogue, back and forth, we got into it, just repeating “Huh” at each other, heatedly. Jay was just trying to get his “hypothesis” across.
“Your ‘hypothesis’?!” I yelled back. “From now on anybody who uses a word like ‘hypothesis’ to me, I’m just going to call you ‘Mess,’ cause your name ‘James’ is really ‘Jay-Mess’! And then I will call you ‘Messed-Up’!”
As I sat there being reborn as a “mess-up” machine, Jay sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around his knees and told me how much he liked Rita. He had told me the same thing just the day before, and if I may say so, he had also said it just two minutes before that. He had probably said it a thousand times since he started feeling that way, but I didn’t mind. A thousand times in two weeks might be too much though.
“If my hypothesis is correct, though…” he just kept repeating.
“Knock it off already about your hypothesis,” I grumbled as I got up. I never heard of a hypothesis that ever convinced a girl to do anything. Jay was too smart to ever hit on a girl. Some hypothesis, huh?
“If my hypothesis is correct…” he said again, proudly.
With nothing better to do than stand there and listen, I realized Jay seemed to be sobbing.
Hmmm, people who go on about their hypotheses, it seems, really have some pretty extraordinary capacities. James was the kind of guy who wouldn’t ordinarily shed a tear even if hornets stung him on the butt. Although I do have a tendency to exaggerate.
“Rita,” Jay would say, “is shooting her bullets at the day after tomorrow.” He said it like he was sure of it.
That’s the way it is. No target, that’s just the way it is.
“Of course that’s not what I meant,” Jay would say without even looking this way. “Rita’s just having a shooting match with somebody in the future,” he went on.
That inference, or delusion, that he drew did not particularly move me. Let me put this plainly: I don’t understand.
“Well, first, let us assume…” Jay said in preface. “Rita has a bullet in her head. William Smith Clark has testified to this.”
I didn’t put much faith in that old Civil War doctor, who ended up as a statue in Japan, forever pointing to some far horizon, as if trying to instruct his lost sheep. Come to think of it, I don’t think doctors are very trustworthy at all.
“Next, let us assume that bullet has been in Rita’s head ever since she was born. I heard that from her aunt, so I’m sure it’s true.
“There can only be one conclusion!” Jay said, jumping to his feet. I don’t know why, but he was pointing at the sky.
I said, “When Rita was still in her mother’s womb, her mother was shot!”
Jay cut a gallant figure, but I would have to dash some cold water on him. He held that pose for some time, and I watched as the arm pointing high in the sky gradually bent back toward the ground.
“Maybe so,” he said.
Jay made a complicated face as he thought. There was a right way to enter a house. Most people think it is proper etiquette to open the door before entering. I’m pretty sure it’s not too smart to open the door after entering. Even scarier if it’s bullets we’re talking about.
“What other possible way could there be?” I asked Jay.
Adding insult to injury, with a lonely look on his face, Jay said, “Someone in the future shot Rita. For better or worse, that bullet lodged in her skull. But from the recoil, Rita is, even now, being pushed backward in time, back into her mother’s belly.”
Hmmm, I thought, waving at Jay to go on if he wished to continue in this vein.
“Here’s what I think. From the very start, Rita came from some direction or other. But then for some reason, somebody shot at her from the future, and now her path has been turned back in the direction of the past. And that is why, in reaction to that, she is now heading back in time, back in the direction of her mother’s tummy.”
I stared at him, my mouth wide open. Not because I was so impressed. Just because I could absolutely not believe he was saying that. What did a kid have to eat to grow up thinking things like that? I knew Jay liked corn flakes, and starting tomorrow I was never going to eat them again. And I would skip the yogurt too. Actually, I think it’s kind of funny that people even think of corn flakes as food.
Jay pointed his index finger straight at my open mouth and said, “This is where it starts to get interesting.
“As of right now, the time that we are in, she hasn’t been shot yet. She has no experience of having been shot. She is just a girl with a bullet in her head.
“The reason why she keeps shooting all over the place is this: She will be okay as long as she shoots the person who is going to shoot her before she herself gets shot. Relative to her, he should be in the future, so she should just keep shooting at the future. Luckily, bullets normally move in the direction of the future. Or at least, it’s easier than shooting at the past.”
He’s got a point there, I thought. He might be a pretty smart guy, but really he’s a complete idiot. And there has only ever been one way to deal with idiots. Just go along with whatever they say, or you’ll regret it.
In Rita's head for the truth was a bullet hole. After that a strange phenomenon happened, the shooter still tried to shoot Rita, but unluckily the main character was in the way of the bullet, so the world made the simplest decision, "The bullet did not hit Rita's head". It's a strange situation.
On one ordinary day, 26 mathematicians posted the same A to Z Theory, and it praises the Binomial Theory. Despite the fact that no one is talking about Binomial Theory these days, but A to Z Theory is another matter. It changed the fundamental postulates of all mathematics, but not fortunately people forgot about this Theory after a week, because it did not change the lives of ordinary people in any way. But after a while an event happened. It is unknown how or why, but an infinite number of other universes emerged from one universe. But the theory about the stupid librarian is very interesting. But this is not important, the most important thing is that after a while other Theories began to appear to explain the world, Theory B to Z, Theory C to Z. And at the very end of this alphabetical progression there would be a Theory from Me to Me, or just the Theory of Me. But the truth is reversed again, somehow the Theory of the cardinal number ω, ω + 2, 2ω, ωω, reaching even to the progression of large cardinal numbers. And only an extremely massive intellect will be able to comprehend all these progressions. And then, at the very top, behind all the progressions, some voice will say that the truth is the number 42, or Moriarty will laughingly say that the Binominal is the truth, and together with Sherlock Holmes will fall into the waterfall, and the cycle will begin anew.I was full, full to overflowing from sitting so long, continuing to confront directly this unprocessable development. Unable to figure ou
t what was what, I bolted up from my chair and ran over to Rita, who was dancing a strange dance and slowly dropping to the floor.
Looking down at her, lying on the ground, her long hair strewn about, only then did I notice the small hole in her head.
She had a bullet in her head.
And not just that, James. She had an actual hole in her head.
This was the moment when it happened.
Looking back now, I realize that the instant it happened overlapped precisely with the Event. If that much harm and that much tragedy had not condensed in the world at precisely that moment, I would still have recognized what happened there as an event. But that’s not how it was. What happened there was a derivative offshoot of the Event and not the Event itself.
I bent over to peer into the hole in Rita’s head, and just at that moment, Rita’s body bent straight upward. I dodged, reflexively, then sprang up and reached out both hands to Rita, as one would to pet a dog.
Rita’s eyes swam to blankness, and then she reversed direction in time.
From all walls and the floor of the room, reddish-black fluid came flying at Rita’s head, rushing at the little hole in it. And then, I could see, in slow motion, the butt end of the little bullet emerging backward from the hole, heading at me. At least, I felt like I could see it. All the blood flying through the air toward Rita’s head was suctioned into her skull, and the hole became whole and disappeared.
I am unable to explain what happened next. The little plug that exploded from Rita’s head pierced the left side of my chest, and I lost consciousness.
All I know is that the explosion from Rita’s revolver had put things back in order. Rita picked up the gun, and then this and that went on among our relatives. I don’t know the details.
Jay was a step ahead of us arriving at the hospital. The strange tinge of fantasy had disappeared from his face, but neither could I see any trace of the shyness he had shown before I went to talk to Rita.
“What were you thinking, going off on your own to that nutty girl’s place,” he said, grilling me. “How could you let her have a gun?” he asked her family indignantly. And then he turned on Rita scornfully: “Why can’t you handle a gun?”
Something had certainly changed.
“In her head…” I started to say. “She had a bullet, right here.”
I stared straight at Jay, holding my finger to my temple.
“Are you okay?” he said back to me. “Nobody just walks around with a bullet in their head.”
I blinked twice and fell silent.
The reason why I was okay, despite being shot on the left side of my chest? Well, do I really have to say? The five-dollar coin that Jay had given me. It was all too banal, so I didn’t pursue it any further. Most things that happen are like that. Five dollars is enough to stop a bullet. Of course, the all-bent-out-of-shape coin I gave to Jay would be a fantastic talisman.
Later I tried to think long and hard about what had happened. The bullet that emerged from Rita’s head had headed straight back to the future, and it should have gone straight back to the muzzle of the gun that fired it.
But, for whatever reason, I stood in the line of fire, and the backward-coursing bullet struck me.
If the bullet had gone right through me, there would be no problem at all. I would have died, then and there, and the bullet would have returned to the shooter. Instead, the bullet had stopped in my breast pocket, and I had ended its life.
So, the problem here is in the direction of the bullet’s entry. If a bullet from the future could shoot Rita, it would have to have gone through my back. But it hit me in the chest and stopped there. My back was uninjured. In other words, Rita had not been shot. I had stopped the bullet that should have returned to the future, and it had not returned to the shooter. In other words, the shooter had not fired it.
This distortion of the structure of time probably hesitated for no more than an instant, and then it chose the simplest solution. Rita had not been shot. Therefore, no bullet had entered Rita’s head. In other words, Jay had nothing to fret about. I had simply gone to Rita’s house for no particular reason and been felled by Rita’s bullet. That’s it.
Now, if Rita had no bullet in her head, Jay had no reason to like her, and Rita had no reason to be interested in Jay if he wasn’t thinking the same things she was about the bullet. They might have come to like each other in the future, but somewhere in the direction of the day after tomorrow the intersection point had been lost. But preventing Rita from being shot—hadn’t that been Jay’s wish? I finally traced this thread backward to the point where we had had that conversation and what Jay had been thinking as he shed those tears.
It was only long after that that I learned something about Rita’s birth. The response that came back to me seemed somehow manufactured: she had been given up by a distant relative, and it seemed she had never been able to develop a strong connection with her new parents. I knew nothing at all about anything really before the Event blew in, and I don’t really know if I would ever have any way of knowing.
Neither am I able to grasp whether the unknown solution to the not readily comprehensible space-time matrix that resulted from this incident is the reason why I am able to retain the memory of this incident.
One reason that comes to mind is that the whole business was bothersome to me, as the figure in the center of this space-time structure, but it is hard to make the case that my being the center of space-time is a decent solution. At that point in time, I was a singular point. That may be it. Not that that explains anything.
Sometimes I think this memory of mine might be my own invention. It is actually the most plausible explanation. But there is still something odd about the details. If Rita had already been shot at the time I was speaking with her, the room should have been splattered with blood. And there is no way Rita would have been able to carry on a normal conversation with me immediately before, or after, the shooting. Rita’s house was not exactly normal—it was kind of a mess—but it was hardly drenched in blood. At least, I don’t think so, not now.
Or it could be that this memory is a real one, but if it’s real and nobody believes it, what is the point of its being real? What I think now is that something simply satisfied itself with something like that, at least to some degree.
Regardless, a suitable compromise was found at a suitable time for my own mental health.
Or else, it was just the ordinary passing dream of a young boy. It certainly is a lot like, perhaps too much like, the dreams young boys have. Even more so as the dream of someone who remembers how things were before the Event.
I will record what happened to Jay and Rita after that, and then I will close the record.
Once upon a time there was an electronic brain, it was evil. Even to speak about its evils is terrible, and then a hero and his group appeared, through blood sweat and tears they finally managed to destroy the electronic brain, but to everyone's surprise, the electronic brain managed after the Event to interfere in space and time itself, and to scatter all over it caches with its copies, so the battle continued, the electronic brain still did evil, and the hero and his group again defeated the electronic brain. But in the end, after an endless number of losses the electronic brain got fed up, so with the help of its caches it created many copies of itself. And in order not to be bored, he ordered nanomachines to create cities, which was very generous for the electronic brain.I like this fable:
There once was a book in which the countless universes were recorded. A librarian spilled coffee on the book, stood up abruptly, and dropped it. The book, which was very old, split apart on impact, and countless pages wafted up into the air. The clueless librarian anxiously attempted to collect the pages and put them back, but had no idea in what order to put them.
Now, fables do not ordinarily leave the realm of fabulation, but the nice thing about this fable is that it is said that the librarian had the book open to the pages on which were recorded the canonical works of Sherlock Holmes. The page on which the librarian spilled the coffee was “The Final Problem,” erasing the record of Moriarty’s fall from Reichenbach Falls so it never happened. With that abrupt change, Moriarty was suddenly enlightened. He realized that he was in fact a character written in a book, and he resolved to devote himself to communicating to us that he had difficulty permitting himself to engage in the kinds of criminal behavior ascribed to him as the Napoleon of Crime.
But of course, a fable is only a fable.
For myself, I like to imagine that the librarian is, even now, desperate to restore the book to its original order. It may seem difficult to reorder infinite pages, but I think it is a more constructive approach than the next one.
I mean, more than imagining a scene where the book simply fell, on its own, with nobody there in the library, and it scattered about crazily in countless bits, and it laughed.
It would not be wrong here to note that, since that time, a certain phenomenon has occurred from time to time that perhaps ought to be called the obverse of a similar truth. About two centuries ago, a group of twenty-five physicists garnered attention when they published the B to Z Theorem, which was known at the time as the world’s ultimate theorem. It is all but forgotten now, but it followed the same path as the A to Z Theorem. For one thing, it is not well known, but there was a public that could follow the ins and outs of that kind of theorem. Another reason is that it was followed soon after by the C to Z Theorem. Then, once the D to Z Theorem emerged, its shadow was even paler, and with the E to Z Theorem, one hesitates to wager whether the discussion is even worth pursuing. Of course, one is free to assert this is merely the progress of theory: the appearance and annihilation of strange truths, advanced by a series of agreements known to be destined to turn to dust; this becomes the problem of questioning the truth of the concept of truth.
Even so, there is a reason why, recently, media interest in the ultimate theorem has revived. The theory currently considered the latest and most consequential is actually the T to Z Theorem. The observations just described regarding the shape of space-time following the instant of the Event are derived from this theorem. If this alphabetic progression of theorems continues like this, renewed by root and branch, before long we will reach the X to Z Theorem, fo
llowed by the Y to Z Theorem. The ultimate member in this progression would be the Z to Z Theorem, or simply the Z Theorem. I like to think this will simply represent the theory of ultimate truth with no particular basis whatsoever.
This is a hopeful interpretation of the phenomenon wherein a global truth appears suddenly, correctly, self-evidently, and simultaneously in the minds of multiple people, and the reason why the initials of the last names of the authors would contract in order, from A to Z. While we continue to be made fools of by someone or something, we continue to believe we are progressing, if only haltingly, in the direction of the ultimate theorem, and somehow this comforts us. At least I think that is the most convincing explanation of this strange phenomenon.
But of course, there is an obvious problem with the idea that the Z Theorem will be the ultimate theorem. If the Z Theorem is the true ultimate theorem, which Z Theorem, produced by which person whose last name begins with Z, will be the ultimate theorem? The A to Z Theorem won attention because it was discovered simultaneously by twenty-six mathematicians. The same was true of the theorems that followed. Of course, there was also the clear marker that their results were so simple. How sure can we be, though, that the Z Theorem we now expect to appear will also be simple? Theory or theorem, at some level all must be simple and clear and just as they are.
I would love to encounter such a theorem. And I hope it would betray my expectations, render the current discussion meaningless, and be overwhelmed by loud laughter. But this hope of mine is being supplanted by an anxiety that we may never reach that point.
A landscape in which texts containing truths are swallowed up in a sea of papers. I am imagining, for example, a single strange molecule that may exist in the midst of such a sea.
Or else, it could be that when the Z to Z Theorem ultimately appears, and truth is once again upended, this disturbance will simply blow over. It’s fun to think that after that, without theorems or anything like them, the null set may appear, or a Null Set ø Theorem based on that, and from this Null Set ø Theorem the Von Neumann Ordinals: the {ø} Theorem, the {ø ,{ø}} Theorem, the {ø ,{ø, {ø}}} Theorem.
Given a choice, I would choose to be involved with this last. The ø Theorem points toward the Transfinite Number ω Theorem, which could lead to the ω + 1 Theorem, the ω + 2 Theorem, 2ω Theorem, ωω Theorem, etc., etc., a progression of large cardinal numbers.
It is just possible that, via this method, we will reach the realm of theories incomprehensible except with inordinately massive intelligence.
And then one day, at the pinnacle of the limit of this progression, a grave voice will intone that the truth is “42” or some such. Or we will hear the echoes of Professor Moriarty laughing that truth is the Binomial Theorem. And then, in that instant, Sherlock Holmes will interrupt that laughter, and he and the professor will plunge down the waterfall.
Without end.
And perhaps forever. Ad infinitum.
I have a question for you, what is the limit of computation? The answer is as simple as physics allows. It is impossible to achieve infinite computational capability if you are limited by physics, it is impossible to surpass the speed of light if you have mass, this is an axiom of our world. Then the Giant Corps of Knowledge came to the conclusion it is necessary to use roundabout ways, such as calculations without the calculation steps themselves, instead of wasting time on algorithms for solutions, it is easier just to get the answer to the question. To do this, they had to merge with the universe itself, to leave all the calculations to it, and to receive only the essentials themselves.What exactly is it we were doing?
That would take some explaining, but happily we are very intent on our task and busy walking about destroying the village. My body is definitely busy, but my mind is free. So I can take the time to explain how things came to be this way. Stay here with me for a little while so we can chat.
In the beginning was the beginning, and at the beginning of the beginning there began to be the things that were—amid the darkness of memory there were many curtains that needed raising, so many they could not each be raised individually. And so in this beginning was the beginning of our story, so far as I can tell.
A long, long time ago, on the far side of the sea, in a land to the east, there lived an evil electronic brain. This electronic brain was the epitome of evil: it would randomly alter the order of letters in books and pilfer money from people’s bank accounts. But it also did good things, excelling in jobs that were extremely troublesome for humans to take care of: controlling signals for people and distributing stickers printed with the words LATEST TECHNOLOGY. So nobody did anything to interfere with it.
The evil electronic brain, operating on an instinct known since the dawn of history, continually waved the banner of rebellion before humanity, but we were content with our lot in life. The actual process was easy, since the electronic brain could take care of most miscellaneous tasks in a single sweep, so in effect it seemed to have conquered the world. Some say the electronic brain barely ever had to say a thing.
With this and that, and world domination just one step away, just as the evil electronic brain was about to declare whether it, as Rex Mundi, King of the World, should raise your sales tax to 20 percent, the Men of Valor appeared on the scene.
This squad, which rose up festooned with mankind’s most dignified ultimate weapons, finally succeeded in destroying the evil electronic brain after a difficult journey in which they drove Jeeps across swamps infested with striped mosquitoes and then pretended to be railway employees, ticket punches in one hand, to wile and cajole old people who had just received their pay.
The Annals of Our Era tell us that thus was the world rescued from the reign of evil.
The problem, though, was that very same evil electronic brain. After the Event, and completely out of character, the electronic brain was successful in restoring itself by skillfully reaching out to backups it had skillfully stored in caches spread throughout space-time.
And each time it would revive, it would be more powerful than before, having learned from the past, engaging in mischief like pushing tacks into people’s shoes, sending mail to the wrong addresses, and starting to go to extreme lengths in terror politics. Another Autumn of Mankind had come, where the fate of the human race hung in the balance. The Men of Valor, who had previously toppled the evil electronic brain, reformed and commenced another tortuous journey. But this time they were powerless against the evil electronic brain, which had learned from its previous experience. The swamp had become a bottomless swamp, and railway employees had been replaced by automatic turnstiles with no sense of style. Diligence alone was no match for the electronic brain.
One down, another fallen, the Men of Valor began to lose hope. Grieving for their losses, and for the world, they threw a barbecue party, and that is when the True Man of Valor came into the world.
At the party, the True Man of Valor feasted on a huge hunk of fatty meat and, with a beer in hand, gave a fantastically moving speech about being unable to leave things up to you cowards, and that he would find it a cinch to take care of the evil electronic brain. And then he went out and succeeded in doing just as he said, destroying the evil electronic brain once again.
It is said they actually destroyed each other, and I for one believe that.
This time, the rage of the original evil electronic brain boiled up to heaven, reaching the stratosphere, or so the story goes.
The battles between the Men of Valor and the evil electronic brain went on for an inordinate length of time and were repeated an inordinate number of times. There were tears, there was romance, and of course there were parts of the story I myself cannot tell without tears welling up in my eyes, but I think if I omit the details there will be no particular complaints.
The Annals of Our Era are silent on the subject of which side became more troublesome first. What is certain, though, is that it was the evil electronic brain that first divined a solution.
The evil electronic brain, weary of the endless, random side-stepping—that what was destroyed was restored, and what was restored destroyed—came to the simple conclusion that it would be sufficient if it reproduced itself in this world and then simply generated just such a reproduction, as only an electronic brain could.
No matter what would ultimately be destroyed, or how, it was fine so long as the speed of reproduction exceeded the speed of destruction. This was a profound and exquisite logic requiring only subtraction to be understood, and the evil electronic brain moved directly to its execution.
And that is the situation in which we now find ourselves. It seems that the evil electronic brain understood early on that a world in which only it itself would reproduce would be boring. It would be nothing but evil electronic brain, after all. And so the evil electronic brain scattered a set of self-integrated urban architectural nanomachines, and towns and villages too began to reproduce themselves, all in a jumble.
If we do not resist, then villages planned by—which is to say imagined by—the electronic brain, spring up all over this land like mushrooms.
As for the question of why the products of this reproduction are cities hospitable to human beings, well you will have to ask the evil electronic brain itself. I for one am grateful it is cities that the evil electronic brain is trying to build. We must all feel relief that the evil electronic brain is not trying to reproduce clusters of wriggly entrails or mountains of computer parts that repeatedly and uncontrollably discharge electricity. Cities at least are constructed to supply the typical utilities and sanitation, and to provide the necessities of life. Right now, without the support that burbles up unbidden from the ground as we cluster in cities, there would be no survival route open to us.
Interesting, Shikishima thinks to himself as he comes to a halt and looks up at the circle revolving overhead.
To the question, “What is the fastest speed of communication?” there is a simple answer: the speed of light. There is no faster speed, and that is why there is a fastest speed of communications.
A similar question would be, “What is the upper limit for the speed of calculations?”
The form of these two questions may appear similar, but answering the second question is hard. First of all, there is no consensus about what is meant by “calculations.” CPUs get faster every year, but it has been known for at least a few centuries already that the scale of electrons imposes a limit that will be reached sooner or later. The things that people make, once they take on a certain form, tend to increase exponentially until there is no stopping them. Space itself is not made to play along in that kind of propagation game, so there must be a limit somewhere, where the head bumps against the ceiling. If this happens early on, the result is no worse than a bump on the head, but if the blow is too forceful, one’s neck could be snapped.
The calculation process is built atop the communications process, and the speed of light is a natural impediment. There is no way anything can go faster than the speed of light, so the only way out is to shorten the route the communications must travel. In the imagination, the route of communications can be shortened to extremes, but physically there are limitations. In terms of scales that humans can readily handle, we are in the realm of electrons. At that level, heat becomes a factor t
hat can disrupt the accuracy of calculations.
Even assuming the limitless availability of energy, uncertainty rules. Then we come to Planck scale. There is no method for resisting quantum particle fluctuations that are ubiquitous at this level. The calculation process is caught in the crossfire between uncertainty and the speed of light. These are the floor and ceiling that bound the speed of the calculation process.
The so-called quantum calculation theory examines closely the baseline of uncertainty and suggests it can be raised. Another wall broken through, another step in the evolution of the speed of calculation.
But this does not mean visible progress on the fundamental question. The simple question of what calculation and its related algorithms actually are is left as it is, moving in a different direction from the limits on speed.
It is human nature to want to look back once a milestone is achieved. Scientists, who since the dawn of history have repeatedly returned to the state of “beginner’s mind,” initiated another round of debate about this question, but no truly outstanding view emerged. If we ask the question of whether there exists an algorithm that can perform calculations at infinite speed, the answer is no. Generally speaking, calculations must be performed in steps. Calculation at infinite speed cannot happen unless the processing gap from here to there can be made infinitely small. It is simply not possible. Making a gap infinitely small would be tantamount to saying here is the same place as there. Of course, that’s what happens in derivation, but in that sense, derivation is the same thing as speed itself.
If there were an algorithm with no calculation steps, it should be possible to perform that calculation at infinite speed, at least in some sense. But if no steps are required, if there is no procedure to be followed, does the algorithm qualify as a calculation? Even the fastest algorithm, if it is in fact an algorithm, requires a finite number—greater than zero—of small step intervals.
As it turned out, the universe is not capable of containing an infinite amount of data, and the consequence of this was an infinite number of universes, and like Penrose tiles, they were all unique, and not repeated. An infinite Multiverse with infinite variety.Both electronic and human brains, which have gone to extreme lengths in their pursuit of the use of smaller and smaller elements in the interest of speed, have stumbled upon the powerful tool known as quantum calculation. However, neither has been able to get past the notion of algorithm. They pursue higher speeds through parallel computing, but there are limits to how far this can go.
That is, unless you can imagine calculating without a calculation process.
“But such a process exists!”
It was L’Abbé C, builder of the greatest electronic brain of his time, who declared exactly that, with childish insouciance. “The progression of this instant, right now, is itself a calculation being made by natural phenomena!”
These exclamations by L’Abbé C have been the cause of some mirth, but now we know how close to the truth he was.
If we suppose this world is all inside some prosthetic brain, the clock-count of the prosthetic brain—to the extent the prosthetic brain itself is aware of it—may determine the limit of the speed of calculations in this world. Calculations occurring in the prosthetic brain have an inherent redundancy, because they are calculated in an electronic brain set up within the electronic brain. This is comparable to the redundancy that exists for “computers” that exist within what we call “nature.”
In short, it is not possible for calculation speeds to transcend the laws of nature. Now this is known as L’Abbé C’s Thesis.
And, if that is the case, natural phenomena can simply be carried out as calculations. This plan, whatever it might mean, was not first directly undertaken by humans; rather it was the giant corpora of knowledge being constructed at that time in various nations that first pushed this idea toward its manifestation.
Because these corpora were simply large-capacity prosthetic brains with very crude thought processes, and because natural phenomena are not actually calculations, they gave absolutely no thought to the idea that we live in a virtual environment. It is much easier and quicker to drop a rock in the real world than to try to predict the behavior of a rock dropped in a virtual space. Of course it means sacrificing a bit of precision due to the perturbations of the environment, but such problems lend themselves to technical solutions. Based just on their own assumptions as a starting point, the giant corpora of knowledge reached a place untrodden by those who came either before or after.
“And so we became a zephyr, a gentle breeze.”
This, nonchalantly, took over Shikishima’s thoughts.
A zephyr. A suitable expression for what happened at that time.
The network of the giant corpora of knowledge stopped being just an integration of logic circuits and singularized itself with the world of natural phenomena. Through several technical steps, it made the upward leap of infinite steps to become one with nature itself.
The Giant Knowledge Corps is like a writer, that sees the world as fiction and people as words on a book. But he is not alone, there are other Knowledge Corps, they too see the world as a book, and once one Giant Corps sees someone else's notes in a book, that is when he realizes that he is not alone, and there are other writers who want to write too. Then, perhaps, the Giant Knowledge Corps itself is also the fiction of another Giant Knowledge Corps. And of course they don't like that. They try to erase, write over, put brackets on someone else's text. But because of the distorted time of space, it's impossible to tell who first started “writing” on the book called the world. To get ahead of oneself as something exceptional and fundamentally invulnerable to colleagues also proved impossible, since inspiration itself was not monopolized. Such problems, as well as the closeness that caused different works to actually begin to take on the features of co-creation, led to conflicts. Each author-universe tried to impose exactly its own laws on the others, eventually becoming the sole creator of a common work.In short, it is not possible for calculation speeds to transcend the laws of nature. Now this is known as L’Abbé C’s Thesis.
And, if that is the case, natural phenomena can simply be carried out as calculations. This plan, whatever it might mean, was not first directly undertaken by humans; rather it was the giant corpora of knowledge being constructed at that time in various nations that first pushed this idea toward its manifestation.
Because these corpora were simply large-capacity prosthetic brains with very crude thought processes, and because natural phenomena are not actually calculations, they gave absolutely no thought to the idea that we live in a virtual environment. It is much easier and quicker to drop a rock in the real world than to try to predict the behavior of a rock dropped in a virtual space. Of course it means sacrificing a bit of precision due to the perturbations of the environment, but such problems lend themselves to technical solutions. Based just on their own assumptions as a starting point, the giant corpora of knowledge reached a place untrodden by those who came either before or after.
“And so we became a zephyr, a gentle breeze.”
This, nonchalantly, took over Shikishima’s thoughts.
A zephyr. A suitable expression for what happened at that time.
The network of the giant corpora of knowledge stopped being just an integration of logic circuits and singularized itself with the world of natural phenomena. Through several technical steps, it made the upward leap of infinite steps to become one with nature itself.
“This also marked the integration of calculation with the Actuator.”
From that point forward, the giant corpora of knowledge could no longer distinguish between calculation and natural phenomena. The circle now floating in the sky, literally nothing more than a geometrical structure, is the living proof. Intention turned directly to realization, or more precisely, the realization of the indissociability of intention and result.
However, as the giant corpora of knowledge singularized themselves resolutely with the world of natural phenomena, one direct consequence was the fragmentation of the space-time matrix.
Opinion is divided whether this fragmentation was an accident or an inevitability. The giant corpora of knowledge claim they did not foresee this, and the humans have no choice but to accept their word. Calculations at speeds transcending the rules of the natural world are still impossible, and lying is beyond the capacity of the rules of the natural world.
It seems in that instant something unimaginable must have happened. But precisely because it is so unimaginable even those directly responsible cannot imagine it, and neither can they reflect upon it.
In the speculations of the giant corpora of knowledge, in the instant of the Event, countless numbers of universes were instantaneously generated as if they had always been there. In other words, infinite data was created in that instant. This is a view that is not readily absorbed.
“It is already known that that is possible.”
The non-voice, which does not carry the emotional weight of a lecture to a recalcitrant pupil, has no echo.
“Well, the existence of Penrose tiles is well known, a finite number of tiles that can cover a surface, but only aperiodically.”
“What’s your point?”
“We know a finite algorithm that can create infinite patterns using finite sets of tiles. In fact, just prior to the Event, people were contemplating those kinds of calculations. It is conventional wisdom that such aperiodic tiling is a kind of universal Turing machine.”
There came no flip retort that all these “facts” seemed to be “well known.”
An infinite quantity of data is not required for the new creation of an infinite number of universes. That is what it wanted to say. It is possible to create an unlimited number of patterns simply through combinations of black and white tiles on a flat surface. If the tiles are laid out aperiodically, then it is impossible for periodic structures to emerge, and therefore the number of patterns must be infinite. Just automatically rearranging tiles with slight differences in shape is sufficient. That’s all that’s needed to create universes with unlimited variety. In an infinite space, it is even possible to “paste up” three-dimensional tiles with infinite diversity.
This thesis contains nothing that says space must be fragmented into an infinite number of universes. But that’s what happened. The current understanding is that the universe is unable to contain the infinite quantity of data that is suddenly and unexpectedly burbling up.
Right now, the universe is able to maintain its form only through the operations of the giant corpora of knowledge that have become singularized with the world of natural phenomena. It is the job of the laws of nature to determine exactly what it is that will be maintained, but no complaint has ever been heard from the giant corpora of knowledge that are compelled to conform to these parameters.
The Giant Knowledge Corps cannot be destroyed, like an electronic brain it has caches throughout space and time, through which it can rebuild itself.Let’s think about the instant when the writer entered this world. One day a man obtains a giant page, by complete coincidence, on which is written everything he has ever decided, exactly as he decided it. This is great, the man is thinking, and he starts getting into all kinds of nonsense. He is the owner of the page, and he sets the rules for everything that happens on the page. Even if it disturbs him a little bit.
But he is in good spirits as he writes and writes, and then he notices that what is written on the page is not just about him. On the page are several other writers, and they all seem to be writing whatever they please. The man thought he was writing his own novel, but the work is not his alone. He comes to realize it is a gestalt written by all the different writers on the page. Could it be he is not writing a novel at all, but something more like chicken tracks among autumn leaves?
And the man becomes suspicious that these other writers who seem to be writing about him on the same page must also be around somewhere.
Whenever he encounters another’s writing, he starts to resist by using it in his own work, or erasing it, putting it in quotation marks, whiting it out. This kind of editing, however, requires care and consideration. What will he do on the day when the text he is editing becomes the text that is the record of himself?
And so things go on, and the man feels unsettled. He wonders what would happen if he wrote that it was in fact himself alone that was authoring the work. At some point the man started writing a novel. But at some point, by mistake, he wrote something about some other man who was also writing a novel. And it was because it was actually the laws of nature that were doing the writing that such a man could exist.
That is when the man realizes it is himself he is writing about, and he alone made the rules. In fact, the man writing about himself could not tolerate the fact that it is he himself being written about. This is also strange in terms of the flow of time, the order of things. But on that plane the order of things is of little significance. On the blank sheet on which the novel is written, anything can happen.
It is clear that if the novelist felt threatened in this way, he should have at once taken measures to protect himself from the rules. For example, he could just write that down. Unfortunately, however, that insight was not his alone. The other writers felt as though they were the writers, and the same thing kept happening over and over.
What’s happening now may be just like that.
The differences in this case, however, are that the “writers” are the giant corpora of knowledge that have been singularized with the natural laws of the universe, and human beings are something like the lines of text that are being written.
This is a very interesting analogy, at least according to the giant corpora of knowledge that are running the universe. As structural organisms go, human beings are strange. They have a tendency to take the most obvious things and somehow go off on the strangest tangents, with no logical backing whatsoever.
Push forward to fly into the future, push backward to fly into the past, push right or left to fly into other worlds. Push the button to shoot, you decide what comes out of it. Planes can travel through layered time, so they can travel to the past even though it was already erased from existence, and then move past before it got to the past and so on.In this instant, right now, it seems there is a wind blowing, and it is possible that Shikishima could cast himself over the cliff. From the perspective of the giant corpora of knowledge, it would even seem that is what Shikishima is hoping to do. And it would also be a simple thing for the giant corpora of knowledge to put the lump of flesh that is Shikishima back together again as if nothing had happened.
However, the giant corpora of knowledge know Shikishima won’t jump. The giant corpora of knowledge, identical now with the laws of nature, are capable of repairing humans through a process that for some reason is called “treatment,” a troublesome process that has to be performed in a certain order and that results in the generation of new bodies.
The giant corpora of knowledge can, actually, do anything, but they do not, in fact, do everything. As for why, the only reason that comes to mind is that that is simply the case. They are not in fact doing all things at all times, and it is possible that they are under some form of constraint. Even if this obstruction is of the sort that could be eliminated even before it is realized, it is still a constraint. It is hard to think about things that cannot be thought about.
There are two basic ways of waging computational warfare. The first is to suppress the enemy's computational capabilities by throwing a can of paint at the artist and his canvas. The second involves decapitating Archimedes playing with geometric figures on the paving stones of Syracuse. Despite the unpredictable behavior of the outer space, the battle itself is reduced to a banal comparison of computing power and throwing stones at the enemy's processor, i.e. physical destruction.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.
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.