The air was silent tonight. Too damn silent, she thought. Fucking humid too.
She had become accustomed to the acoustics of the Model-F keyboard and the drones of the System/370 mainframe crowding the room. It was looking to be another late night spent hunched over in the lab, cracking away on something big—something they’d forget about in a few weeks. They were burning away the midnight oil, gazing into an abyss through small amber monitors, never looking up to acknowledge the other’s presence. The Crypt, as they smugly called the room to conceal its existence from those not worthy, was where they performed experiments. Stale air and dim light might have screamed ‘final resting place,’ but it was really the university’s old mainframe room—a burned-out basement relic from the war their professors daydreamed of while prattling off half-sober lectures no one listened to. Both of them thought that slaving away in the dungeon was the best way to spend a Friday night, although neither of them would ever admit it. Vern was out drinking at the local shithole, but he would be in before 2:30—like clockwork. The real fun would begin then.
She was beginning to sweat. It seemed the AC was out for the third time this August. That was the best El Paso taxpayer dollars could do, she thought as she took another sip of motor oil. It was miracle enough the college had air conditioning in the first place. Entering The Crypt was the first time she felt that artificial centralized breeze. She hated it.
She tried to bury that feeling by saying something to Santos, continuing her work all the while:
"Did I ever tell you I used to wear glasses?"
He also continued his typing as he responded:
"Oh? You switched to contacts, huh? Doesn't surprise me. The dorky look doesn't suit you."
"No. I never got contacts."
"Really? I didn't know you could get that kinda stuff fixed."
"No...well, yes, you can—but I didn't. I just stopped wearing them."
"So you're telling me...you can't see right now? Funny one."
"No. I can see. Need glasses doesn't mean you're blind without them. And besides, blind people can see too. A lot of them, anyway."
"So you didn't need the glasses?"
She pauses.
"The first time I put them on...I was with my mom at the eyedoc. I can't remember exactly, but I know I must have been five or six. I couldn't have been seven, I knew better by then."
"What do you mean?"
"I was aware by then."
"Aware?"
"Of reality—cause and effect, truth and lies, syntax and semantics...you know what I Mean."
"Third eye opened before second grade, eh?"
"I didn't understand what things meant back then. Did you?"
"I mean, I knew Spanish by then. Hell, I knew English by the time I was six too. I could read and I had plenty of...well, maybe not plenty of friends but...I had enough of them. I knew enough for all that. But every…every kid knows that much. Tsk."
She could tell Santos had hit a wall—one she would have to help him over in a few minutes. She didn’t want to get up yet, though. Something compelled her to keep going:
"I didn't—but that's not what I meant. I could process the things happening around me, but that didn't mean they made any sense."
"Sounds like you were hitting grass too early."
"Yeah. Well...yes and no. That's a decent way to describe the feeling, but I wasn't on anything then. I knew the words. I could tell you what they meant…what I was told they meant…but they didn't mean anything to me. The definitions were just something to memorize and recite, like I was reading a foreign language phonetically."
“Sounds like your Spanish.”
She ignores the comment, pausing for a moment before continuing:
"So when I went to the eye doctor and they made me do all those tests, I didn't understand any of it. I was just scared. The tests did that to me."
"At the eyedoc? What, did they try to lobotomize you or something? Fuckin’ hell, who wrote this shit?"
"It was...everything, I guess. The blank walls, the white lights, the dispassionate commands, the endless staring...it was like I was a specimen in a lab."
"Well...I mean...you kinda were."
"No. You don't get it. I wasn't a patient in a hospital bed. I was an alien on the dissection table. I felt like they were going to bring the scalpel out as soon as I blinked. I could see that look in their eyes."
"But I thought you couldn’t-"
"I spent every second praying that the tests would end, but every time I thought it was over they would just make me do another one. They dragged me endlessly from one lab room to another. At first I thought I was just doing the tests wrong. That I was being punished with another one until I did it right. The one test with the air, you know? Where they push your chin down on the table and force you to stare at that damn hot air balloon, unflinchingly, while they wait for the perfect moment to take the shot...that was my own personal hell. I was just sitting there, with my neck forced into that awful machine, staring at bullshit pictures of paradise for several eternities, waiting for them to end me. It made my blood run cold. I started to cry too, but I don’t think they noticed it. That had to be punishment. It just had to be. What could they possibly even be testing?"
She pauses for a moment.
"The tests kept getting stranger. Their demeanor did too. I was being asked to stare at nonsensical images—blobs of abstract colors—and explain what I saw. But I didn't see anything...I just saw the colors and shapes. There wasn’t anything greater to them. At least, I didn't think there was. All I saw was structure—there wasn’t any meaning. The doctor said I could give any answer I wanted. There was no wrong answer but...I really didn’t see anything at all. I wanted, desperately, to have something smart to say, but I couldn’t think of anything. There was nothing in my head. I had no point of comparison…no pre-recorded phrases I could answer with."
He considers saying something, but thinks better of it.
“Then they started using words I had never heard before—daltonism, achromatopsia, dichromacy…”
He realizes his chance to lighten the mood, even as he grows frustrated with his stalled progress:
“Well shit…I don’t know ‘em either.”
She ignores his remark and continues:
“I didn’t know what it was like but…I felt like I was dying. They wouldn’t tell me that in clear language, but I knew it was true. They had finally found what was wrong with me, but they wouldn’t tell me. Maybe they thought I didn’t know that they knew. Mom always thought I was slow.”
“What’s changed?”
She cracked a small grin. He sensed that, even if he couldn't see it.
“That’s why she took me to the eye doctor in the first place. She was hoping something, anything, would explain my bad grades and social issues. Maybe I just couldn’t see the board, or something like that. That’s the reason I had no friends. She liked to believe in that.”
“Well, she was on the money…About the board, I mean.”
“Nice save, hotshot. She might have been right about my vision, but if I passed those tests, she would have taken me to get my ears checked next. Maybe I just couldn’t hear the teacher or the other kids…you know how it would have gone. She knew there was something wrong with me—she would have used any excuse to close the case.”
“Sounds like a real charmer.”
“When they told me I was colorblind and had bad astigmatism, I didn’t understand at all.”
“Astigmatism I get, but colorblindness? How'd you miss that one? It’s in the name.”
She appears frustrated with Santos’ inability to connect the dots. Rising from her scrap-metal chair, she walks over to his terminal and sighs after one glance at his screen.
“There’s a fall-through in your switch. Break after the third and seventh cases. And stop using goto for Christ’s sake. You’re gonna burn the whole lab down if you keep that shit up.”
As friendly as usual, he thinks to himself. At least she knows what she’s doing. Beats those drunk codgers. Thank God they’re out with Vern right now—I’d probably kill one of them if this lab got any hotter.
“Ah, fuck. Duh. …thanks. Although I’ll choose to ignore that goto comment. I like you more than teach, but it’ll take marriage to change my ways.”
She usually had a sardonic counter ready after Santos’ desperate pleas, but tonight was not one of those nights. She returns to her station, taking a moment to light a smoke before resuming her percussive spring-loaded symphony.
“Still can’t believe you removed the smoke detectors in here. Maybe my code will do us in…”
“Anyways, like I told you, words didn’t have meaning then. I could read about it in a book—I probably tried at some point—but that didn’t mean I could understand it. How could I? Someone was telling me that I was seeing the world wrong…that what I was seeing wasn’t even real.”
“I thought you didn’t understand reality back then…or whatever the hell it was.”
“Maybe I didn’t…but I sure as hell knew what the color red looked like. Nothing they said made any sense. I knew what I saw. It was all I could see. That wasn’t a mistake—that was my life. The only life I had known. But then they said that when I put on the glasses on everything would be ‘fixed.’ I’d be right as rain, and they could pillage the scraps of Mom’s deadbeat dad fund. It was like they were saying that I was wrong—inherently wrong. Like I was busted by design and needed their correction. I had failed too many tests, I guess. Mom almost looked happy about it. God…I…I couldn’t comprehend how bad things would get.”
“Glasses were pretty ugly back then.”
“They took me out to the display area in the front. I guess they liked to make a show for potential customers. Mom had already taken the liberty of picking out my frames—awful fucking things. Too boyish. I know there weren’t many options in a place like T-or-C, but she knew what she was doing. The bitch.”
He refrains from the joke in his head, knowing this was a sensitive topic for her.
“The doc shuffled me out the door while Mom held the glasses with a big smile like it was a secret gift. She reached her hands out and told me to put the glasses on. You would think Christ himself blessed the damn plastic with how she treated it. I had a hole in my stomach the entire time. But at least it was going to be over in a second. I thought that, but…”
“But…?”
“I was scared when I put the glasses on. I acted like I didn’t know how to operate them—like they were some advanced piece of machinery. I thought I could trick them into giving up that way. Dumb kids think stuff like that works.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I realized there was nothing I could do, so I held my breath and put them on. I closed my eyes at first…I didn’t want to see it.”
“It?”
“Whatever they were forcing me to see. I felt like looking at it was going to change me forever. Maybe it was going to kill me— brainwash me, or hypnotize me or annihilate me…something like that. I didn’t know what it would do exactly—I could only picture the stuff from the cheap movies we grew up watching—but I knew it would be the end, whatever it was.”
The mechanical percussion of his Model-F ceased as he continued to listen. She was in too deep to care.
“I felt something strike my shoulder—something hot and sharp. Something angry. It was my mother. She must have been getting flustered in front of the doctor. Having such a bad-mannered kid was probably revealing how bad of a parent she was too. She couldn’t stand that. It took me by surprise. I opened my eyes without realizing. Then I saw it.”
“…Saw…what?”
“Everything—the blades of grass, the pebbles on the sidewalk, the grain of wood on the sign outside...I could see everything in perfect detail. I never realized that trees had individual leaves. I always thought they were just one large lump of mass. Everything felt like that all of a sudden. It was like I had just been thrown to a higher dimension of existence. I was amazed for a moment. I think that was the only time I was ever truly amazed.”
“Sounds nice.”
“No. It wasn’t. I was amazed for a second—just a second. The realization that there was more to the world—more detail, more information, more life—than I had ever imagined was incredible beyond words, but then I started to see what was really in front of me. That was the end of it.”
He noticed that the 370’s drone had changed. It always sung a desolate song at at 207 Hz—he knew that. One late night spent banging his head against the wall and he bothered to honor its existence with a measurement (or to honor his unending limits for procrastination, as she so nicely put it). The hum was deeper now, closer to 170 Hz, if he had to guess, although he didn’t notice when the change first started. It was the appearance of harmonics that drew his attention. They were so faint that he questioned if they were really there. She didn’t seem to notice the change, which he thought odd. She was always the first one to notice anything in the room, period. Too caught up in storytime? he pondered. But then again, maybe it really was in his head.
The frequencies seemed to caress his eardrums as distant whispers, saying something—definitely something—he couldn’t make out. The harmonics even seemed to be shifting in pitch and quantity. First there were two, then five without notice, then quickly eight before vanishing back down to one voice—which continued to sing quietly above the drone for a few moments. It dissolved back into the drone before noticed its absence.
Two-five-eight-one? He reached out his right hand and recorded the observation mechanically. He was certain it had to be his imagination—a static fundamental frequency couldn’t possibly produce shifting harmonics, he knew that. Even a dumbass like me knows that, and I only passed TWO because of her. Perhaps the fundamental was actually the phantom image, but that didn’t make much sense either—how could there be harmonics without anything to resonate off of? It didn’t make any sense to him.
Well, I suppose I don’t know shit anyways.
He knew one thing at least: the sound was real. It was just that some of it wasn’t—either the underlying drone emanating out of the mainframe, or the harmonics that were drifting around The Crypt's stale and humid air before getting mixed with her trails of smoke. He resumed his work.
“I couldn’t handle it, all of the information. There was just too much of it. Too damn much…I saw the crushed ants on the sidewalk and the dying leaves on the trees. I turned around and saw the godawful makeup caked up and down my mother’s boiled face—the fucking clown. I saw every piece of the eyedoc’s filth and grime too—the ketchup stains and nicotine spots—I was sure there was even more, but my body refused to see anything else, so I looked down. I saw my own hand and was terrified. I realized that it was transparent in the sunlight. I could see all the gory details—the yellowing nails that I had gnawed to oblivion, the discolored patched of dead skin I refused to moisturize, and the veins…Christ, the veins. I saw my own blood coursing through those evil fucking things. Seeing that made me realize—violently realize—that the same vile shit was pushing its way throughout my entire body. I couldn’t fucking stop it.”
Her voice grew strained with every line. He felt like he was the only one who could notice that.
“I couldn’t take it any more. It was too fucking much. I felt the awful truth screaming in my bones—I had fucked up one too many times, and they were sending me to hell because of it. I was going to die there. I felt the oxygen drying up, and my ears started to ring. I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t breathe. That damn noise was choking me. I kept screaming that I would do anything to escape the nightmare. Anything…but the words wouldn’t come out. Tears did, though.”
He had stopped his typing completely again. She continued without a change in tempo.
“I started to scream bloody murder, apparently. I wouldn’t know though—my mind went blank. Usually that’s because I fainted—I did that a lot back then, frail constitution, as mom always bitched about—but that’s not what happened. Or at least what they told me happened. My mom said I threw the glasses on the sidewalk and started smashing them. The screaming stunned them so much that it apparently took a few seconds to restrain me. She says I even broke away and continued my massacre. It didn't do any good though—the thing was nothing more than fractured plastic and bloody shards of glass by that point. I willing to believe her on that much. The cheap shoes she forced on me were no match for those spectacles, apparently. I still have a scar on my left foot from the carnage. I guess I really was that frail.”
He had a good one ready to fire, but knew interrupting now would be a death sentence.
“I apparently fainted after that though—like I was a soldier with one final mission I had to carry out personally before I could find peace. We were at home when I woke up. I wish she beat me before I could remember things again. But that’s how it was back then. A few bruises on the feet—she could blame that on the incident.”
She let that statement hang in the air for a moment. They sat long enough in silence that he considered speaking just to clear the air. He was working up the courage when she suddenly continued:
“She tried to play nice a few days later, like always. There was a new pair of glasses waiting for me at home, like another portal straight to hell. I wasn’t going to let it happen, no matter what she did to me afterwards. I took the thing and threw it at the wall—hard. She resented me because I wasn’t the sports type—one of her many reasons. Always wanted a baseball player, although I could never figure out why—she hated the sport. But on that day, I gave her a taste of what my body could really do. Nolan Ryan couldn’t have done a better job if he tried. I never measured it, but I was sure I made a dent. Although it could have come from the nasty shove she gave me a few seconds later.”
She enjoyed her last puff of smoke before continuing. He noticed her voice had returned to normal.
“She treated me different after that day. I don’t know exactly why but…she definitely realized then that she couldn’t control me forever. And I realized that I didn’t belong in her reality—I had found mine.”
He drifted through her last sentence for several minutes, failing to notice she had stopped speaking. He didn’t know why she had told him about any of this. She never said anything about her old life beyond the accidental inclusions in daily conversation. He figured that was a boundary he could not cross, so he never did. As far as he was concerned, she had been the same mysterious phreak prodigy that simply manifested out of the White Sands one day. He sometimes saw the cracks, but he thought them to be merely his own. Maybe she just needs a confessional. Maybe she needs a shrink. Maybe she's fucking with me.
Maybe she likes me.
He noticed the 370 had returned to its familiar 207 Hz drone. It was oddly comforting to him now. That fact depressed him. He returned to his work and thought of something else to get all the noise out of his head:
"So if you can't see–"
"For the last time, I said I'm not blind."
"Right, right. Well, if you can't see very well...then how do you..."
"Use the computer?"
"Yeah. I never see you smooshing up on the terminal. You would look better in glasses at that point."
"I don't need to see the terminal well. I already know what's going to happen, so why would I need to see it happen?"
"The hell do you mean?"
"…I guess there is a reason why I had to bail you out of theory."
"True...but you bail me out of every class. I wouldn't have survived to senior year without my all knowing computer goddess."
"Right—and you'll cool it on the flattery if you want to make it to graduation, bud."
Both of their keyboards did the talking for a few minutes. It would be a while before he recovered from that one. Hopefully before Vern stumbles in.
"Lesson One: computers are finite automata. They're bound by regular grammar."
"Well shit, I didn't pay attention in formal languages either."
"Maybe some math will help then. Computers are a deterministic function."
“Right…”
She sighs.
“Santos, can you explain to me what a function is?”
“The thing you put x into—like sine of x and stuff like that.”
“Nowhere near right, but you’re getting closer than ‘infinitely wrong.’”
He knew the actual answer—kind of. He was nowhere near her level of genius, but he wasn’t completely hopeless either. Deep down he knew that he was a B- student, which would afford him a degree and at least a modicum of understanding, even if he was groping around the labyrinth in near-darkness. That was good enough for him. In reality, he liked playing dumb to get her mad. He also knew that she enjoyed it on some level too. He hoped as much.
“It’s a mapping between two things—an input an an output. If you use one input, you get one output, always the same output. No exceptions. Zero. Zilch. Cero.”
“I appreciate your attempts to translate.”
“Anything to get through to you. Anyways, a real function only produces one output for one input. If you think back to the graphs you ignored in Algebra, you’ll remember that a function never doubles back over itself.”
“Like you said, totally ignored.”
“Well…if you draw a vertical line down the graph and hit two points, you’ve fucked up, basically.”
“I was more liable to draw random lines in school, I will admit. But I don’t see why that would stop something from being a function.”
“Think about what the graph means for Christ’s sake. These things aren’t just abstract riddles meant to torture you.”
“I don’t know where you went to high school, but they totally were.”
“Yeah well, I guess that mentality is exactly why you ended up here.”
Fuck you, he thought to himself. Thankfully, his mind won the race against his mouth. She was a minefield of touchy subjects, but reminding her that she was stuck here alongside him—in a miserable basement furnace programming pointless shit on a Friday night in the middle of bum-fuck El Paso—was near the top of that pantheon of deathtraps.
“Like I said: functions are a mapping. You can use them to tie things together—to relate them. Like a poetic metaphor. You could make a function that accepts names and produces social security numbers. Or maybe one that accepts English and relates it to identical French. You can find the integral of sex if you wanted to. The numbers and symbols are just a shorthand—they can be anything you want them to be.”
“Well, my teachers never told me that shit.”
“They did, dumbass. Remember your word problems?”
“Like you said: ignored.”
“Well the point is: those graphs you ignored were just a convenient way to imagine things. You could have drawn anything, as long as you didn’t break some house rules. The horizontal direction represented inputs, and the vertical was outputs. If you could draw a straight line and hit two points, that would mean you had two outputs—vertical, remember—aligned with one input. That’s no good.”
“Okay…makes a sort of sense. But why does it matter?”
“Because you can’t have ambiguity. You should know that much about math. It needs to be consistent. Always and forever.”
“Meaning…?”
“Christ…”
“Hey, help me now, and you may be saving time down the road.”
“You should have learned this shit in second fucking grade!”
“Well it’s better late than never.”
“Functions need to be deterministic. I know it’s a big and scary word, but bear with me for a second without another quip, please?”
Ah fuck, she’s done with me.
He produced an exasperation that approached agreement.
“Deterministic means zero ambiguity. Same input, same output, always and forever. That’s why any of this is possible: the consistency of it all. Math is always coherent and logical. So even if you make some function that connects your dick to your ego, you still have to follow the big rules.”
“But what if it isn’t the same every time?”
“Then its nondeterministic. Shocker, right?”
It was finally his turn to torture her with a little bit of conscious ignoral. He figured a taste of her own medicine wouldn’t do much, but he was starting to get tired of the teasing. She went silent for a few seconds before continuing:
“That’s no longer a function—at least not in a math-y way. Nondeterministic algorithms do exist, but it’s a fairly new area—just got started a few years ago, as far as I know. If you pretend that a computer algorithm is a pure math function, then something is changing when a nondeterministic algorithm is used.”
“What do you mean by changing?”
“Well, like I said…these functions have to have rules. Just like the graphs did—some function defined how they looked. You might need some massive function with twenty variables and a hundred operations to calculate something like the square root of sex, but as long as you maintain consistent logic then there’s no problem. Most functions like that aren’t useful though. Most poetic metaphors aren’t either.”
“I don’t get what you mean by ‘rules’ though. I don’t even remember why we started talking about this…”
“Well, think about a sine function.”
“We’ve hit rock bottom.”
“Fuck’s sake…you at least remember what the pretty graph looks like, right?”
She adopts the same demeaning voice a frustrated teacher would wield against the dumbest kid in the class:
“It’s a wave that goes up and down and up and down…forever and ever and ever.”
“Alright asshole, I get your point.”
“Good. Now why’s it like that?”
“Because some dick thought it would be funny to torture me for four years.”
“Correct! But he had other motives too. A sine function is a function, remember? It describes a relation. In this case it connects a triangle and a circle. That’s not actually right, but I don’t think you’re gonna care either way.”
“Correct! I’m too busy crafting my masterpiece over here to care about the small things.”
He hadn’t made progress since the drone changed. He needed a magic number to make this all work, but it wasn’t coming to him.
“That connection is why it repeats forever, because circles have no beginning and no end. The rules of the game are constant—cram a right angled triangle inside a circle, and the two points that touch the circle are sine and cosine. All you can change is the angle of attack, which changes where those two points end up. Viola, trigonometry.”
“Well, knowing that would have saved me a lot of grief when I was 16.”
“You should really be praying that it saves you some grief on next week’s exam. Otherwise I’m gonna be back here explaining the same shit for the twentieth time. Then I’ll be the one grieving.”
“Shit, that is next week, isn’t it? Well what’s the point of remembering anyways? I’m sure the old bastard will just find a reason to fail me.”
“Wimp mentality as always, but I don’t have time to be your therapist today. The point is: sine has some rules, it follows them, and we get all the marvels of human civilization. That’s why consistency and coherence matter. We need determinism, otherwise everything is useless.”
“Well why can’t a sine wave get outside the box and express itself a little, here and there?”
“Because it wouldn’t be very useful anymore, would it be? You’d have to pray to God every time you used the fucker—not too different from your godawful code.”
“Hey come on! Don’t act like you’ve never written a bug before.”
“Have you ever seen me do it, bud?”
“Well…”
He raced frantically through every shelf in the mental library: Come the fuck on! There’s gotta be something in here! There’s no goddamn way…
“Exactly. And the day you find one is the day I vanish. You better remember that.”
“Alright, alright. You got me this time.”
“Your code sucks because its filled with side effects. You want it to do one thing—and maybe it does if you’re lucky—but it also secretly does another thing half the time, if it does anything at all. Functions can’t have side effects—that would make them non-deterministic, and that’s no good.”
“I get the point. You can stop using me as the dictionary definition of ‘fuck up’ now.”
“I’ll decide that once I see what you’ve written over there.”
“Well…then give me another minute…I’m almost done.”
He hoped that would buy him enough time to climb over the wall in front of him.
“Good. We don’t have the time to be screwing around. I know something has to be up with all this. It’s too weird. That, or the federal government is somehow stupider than zombies that stalk this campus every day.”
“You really think you’re smarter than the fucking U.S. government?”
“You wanna bet?”
“I let Vern borrow my last twenty, sorry.”
“Borrow. Cute.”
“Jeez, give the guy some credit, alright? He might be a little rough around the edges but he’s an alright guy, you know that.”
“Fuck off. He’s a creep like the rest of you computer boys, plain and simple. He still somehow manages to be the worst of all the bunch. A fucking wannabe punk who can’t do shit but piss away his liver and beg for chicks.”
“Yeah…but his drunk code does stuff I could never imagine pulling off in my wildest dreams.”
“That’s because you’re about as wild as the beige hunk of shit in front of you.”
“Jeez…give me a break for once, eh?”
He tried to focus on the problem at hand. Time was running out, and he didn’t want to take shit from her again. She was acting strange tonight.
“I don’t write bugs because I understand the necessity of logic. Computers are deterministic creatures. We should know—we made them. That’s why I don’t need to see what’s on my screen, because I always already know what’s going to happen next. That’s what coherence means. Same input, same output. No exceptions.”
“Oh, that’s what this was about. I forgot about your blindness.”
“I’m not fucking bli-…Oh, forget it. You’re hopeless. I’ll bet in ten minutes you’ll have forgotten the rest of my informative lecture too. You better start praying for next week.”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
She sensed a sad frustration in his response. It was a pitiful enough tone to make her back off. They returned to their work. He’d rather die than ask her for help tonight, but it seemed hopeless. Maybe she’s fucking right. No matter how many times I think I’ve got things stable, I always find a new way to fuck up.
A question suddenly popped into his head. He decided to ask her:
“But…how do you know those functions are deterministic?”
“Come on. I just told you how.”
“No. I mean how do you really know that?”
“Because they give consistent output for a given input.”
“But how can you be sure about that?”
“Because you can prove it with formal logic. But there’s no way I’m going into that tonight. Go ask Bertrand Russel if you really wanna know so bad.”
“But…formal logic can be wrong too, right?”
“Not if you use it correctly. A good proof is bulletproof.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Science is wrong all the time about things, right? Einstein proved that Newton was wrong…and Bohr proved him wrong too, or something like that, I think.”
“Well duh—that’s how science works. If we find out something that seems more correct, then that becomes the new theory.”
“Yeah, so…how can you be so sure that your theory is right?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you plugged in the same input ten thousand times? If it comes out the same each time, you said that everything is normal. But what if you used the same input ten billion times? Ten quadrillion times? What if on attempt forty-eight-trillion-five-billion-and-sixty-nine-thousand-four-hundred-and-thirteen it ended up being different? What if there was a side effect in the function, but it didn’t show itself until something specific happened? It might take until the end of time for that to happen, but it could also happen right now.”
“That’s a stupid hypothetical.”
“Come on, you can’t just say that. Why is it so stupid? Who made you the queen of mathematics?”
“One: because you just pre-supposed a problem without showing how or why it’s even real. Anyone can do that. I can just as easily say ‘imagine a counter-point that makes you look really stupid…’ and you can do fuck about about it. Two: because you know just as well as I do that there’s no one within a several hundred mile radius who can even try to take my throne.”
“Okay well…I’ll let you have the second one. But I’m not done with the first yet.”
“Alright smart guy. Take your shot.”
“Whether or not there are side effects depends on the function itself, right?”
“Might as well stop now if this is the best you can do.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ That means you just need a function that triggers a change after a certain number of inputs, right? Then you’d have what I was talking about.”
“Well, can’t say I didn’t warn you…”
“What? I barely said anything. How is that not bulletproof?”
“Because you’re confusing a pure function with a computer. They don’t work like you think they do—if you even think about how they work at all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I thought you said earlier tha-”
“That a computer is a function? It is, in a way…but not in the way you’re thinking of.”
“Jesus christ there’s no end to this! Your damn argument has side effects in it! Then tell me how the hell I got it wrong this time.”
“Computers have something functions don’t, and I’m willing to bet its the same thing that’s keeping you from finishing what I could have cleared twenty minutes ago.”
“Fuck.”
He could sense her evil grin, even though he was staring at himself through the terminal screen.
“Memory. It’s memory, isn’t it?”
“Bingo. Functions get an input and give an output—there’s no memory involved. Zero context. Zero history. No past or future to think about, only the present. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
“Then what did you mean earlier when you said-”
“Memory is not so simple, bucko. Although I’m pretty sure you’re learning that the hard way right now, aren’t you?”
He ignored that comment.
“If you can’t store memory inside the function like a computer does, then you can store it outside of it.”
“Outside? The hell does that mean? What is outside a function?”
“Come on buddy, there’s only two other things it could be, right? Think.”
“Alright…let’s say input then.”
“Took you long enough. Yes, you can pass the memory as input to the function. Take your shitty hypothetical for example—you could pass the number of times the function has run, and it’ll spit out that number plus one. If you keep doing that, you’ll eventually be able to trigger whatever the hell you were going on about.”
“Okay…I think I’m starting to get it now.”
“Computers are no different. If you took every facet of a computer—every address in memory, every line of code currently executing on the CPU, all the bugs in the code and all the ones crawling around the computer case—you could pass all of that info to a function. The output would describe what happens next, dumping all that information out with it.”
“And…you’ve lost me again.”
“What? It’s not that hard to follow. It’s the same principle, just larger scale.”
“I mean, I guess so. But, that’s insane.”
“Why? Thinking about it like that made it easier for me. Computers are just big functions—learn enough about them and you’ll always know what’s going to happen next. Same input, same output. Always and forever.”
“I’m still not so sure about that…”
“Think that’s crazy? I’ll blow your damn mind then.”
“Oh boy.”
“Hey, you were the one throwing me bong-hit math a few seconds ago, don’t get on my ass now.”
“Alright, alright. Sorry. Blow me then, my queen.”
“Fuck off.”
Uh oh.
He knew he had crossed the red line with that one. It was time for emergency procedures before things went nuclear.
“Sorry sorry sorry. That was dumb. I’m dumb. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t even thought it. My bad.”
She remained silent.
“Seriously though…please tell me more about it. I’m really am interested and it really is helping me a lot. I’ve got no chance of passing next week’s exams if I don’t start thinking more in this headspace. Everything you tell me helps a lot. Really.”
“…the universe.”
He somehow missed the first half of her sentence. That was strange. I’ve never had problems hearing her. Is the mainframe getting louder? Maybe I really need a break…
“If you can shove a whole computer through a function, then what would happen if you did the same with the universe? Everything, down to the smallest subatomic particle. If you crammed it all in there and crunched the numbers…”
“Then you’d be God.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
There was an odd weakness in her voice that was unfamiliar to him. It almost sounded like it was coming from a different person entirely. The drone of the mainframe was making it hard for him to tell.
“But that’s just a thought experiment. There’s no way you could make that work—there’s just too many variables and rules to account for. No one could write the function, and there’d be no way to validate it.”
Something shot like lightning across his mind. He spoke the words before he thought them:
“So it could be hiding in there.”
“What?”
“A side effect.”
“Well…no. There’s no God function. And besides, there’s no reason to believe the universe is deterministic anyways. It might be total chaos for all we know.”
“That’s not what I mean. You said it yourself—the universe is too complicated to write into a simple function. There’s no way a person could understand it, even if it did exist.”
“Right. What’s your point?”
“What about the computer example you gave earlier? That function could actually exist, right?”
“Well, I mean…computers are finite automata. It’s possible.”
“Right. That’s what I mean—how can you be so sure there’s no side effect happening in there?”
“You could just inspect the function to check.”
“Yeah…but have you?”
“Well, no. But-”
“How could anyone? There’s no way you could cram all that info into your skull—even you couldn’t manage that.”
“Perhaps. But a team of people could do it. That would still be a human project, even if it was a big one. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The 370’s piece of shit OS wasn’t either.”
“But then everyone would have to be infallible. And you’d have to hope there was no communication mistakes between all of them too. Plus…”
“Plus…?”
“You’d have to pray the math was correct. What if there was a side effect hiding in there too?”
She was late with her response.
She was never late with her response.
“Alright, alright. Philosophy class is over. Lay off the grass for awhile bud.”
He wanted to push back, but considering the limits he just tested, he wasn’t willing to take that risk tonight. He was already tired as-is. Something was throwing him off balance, although he couldn’t tell what.
Christ, I wish that AC was working.
He could have sworn the drone was higher pitched now, but he couldn’t focus on the thought.
“I’ve given you more than enough time anyways. You did finish the script, right?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
She walked over to his terminal.
“Right you are.”
He was awaiting the usual bashing while she quickly scrutinized the monitor. He realized now that she was closer to the screen than a regular person would be.
“Hey buddy.”
“Y…yeah?”
“I know we got philosophical and all, but please tell me that you still know what a computer is.”
“What are you talkin-”
She leaned over him, reaching for the keyboard. He thought that she was too close. He could smell her. It was an awful smell—cheap cigarettes, day-old coffee, and enough sweat to fill the Rio Grande. Yet in that exact moment—hunched over the same 370 terminal on a humid Friday night, trapped in their cramped basement grave, buried deep within the catacombs of the shittiest excuse for a west Texas university at 2 A.M.—he didn’t mind it.
She punched in the magic number he had been so desperately searching for:
Two
“I guess we’re back to square one…”
Five
“You can write shit on the pad…”
Eight
“But it’s not actually going to work…”
One
“Unless you type it into the computer, bud.”
He tried to say something, but words refused to come. He couldn’t focus on anything but the drone.
“That function shit—that was just theory. The paper isn’t gonna magically compute an address jump. Only the computer knows that one, bud.”
She moved back towards her terminal.
“Now try running it. Should work fine now. And hurry up! We’ve already blown enough time as it is. I don’t know why the hell I was going on about all that. And I don’t want you to tell Vern shit about it.”
“Tell me shit about what?”
She turned around
int block_read(int dev, unsigned long * pos, char * buf, int count)
{
int block = *pos / BLOCK_SIZE;
int offset = *pos % BLOCK_SIZE;
int chars;
int read = 0;
struct buffer_head * bh;
register char * p;
while (count>0) {
bh = bread(dev,block);
if (!bh)
return read?read:-EIO;
chars = (count<BLOCK_SIZE) ? count : BLOCK_SIZE;
p = offset + bh->b_data;
offset = 0;
block++;
*pos += chars;
read += chars;
count -= chars;
while (chars-->0)
put_fs_byte(*(p++),buf++);
bh->b_dirt = 1;
brelse(bh);
}
return read;
}
extern void rw_hd(int rw, struct buffer_head * bh);
typedef void (*blk_fn)(int rw, struct buffer_head * bh);