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Ch. 7 pt. II

He handled the security recorder with a line of code that gives him fifteen moments of every cycle to work on the reader without it being discovered. A few more characters and things come easier. Maybe this is his why. The something to finish his existence with. He will implement Thoughts on Connectivity and Maths of Everything and Soya will live and work again, and all will be as it should.

Uh’ punishes the input device with pink fingertips flying over the glossy keys inside the augmented reality. On the wall green numbers scroll up like soldiers off to war . His fifteen moments are almost up, but he is close and he will finish in time, but he must hurry. This is it. If he is indeed correct then it is possible he and Soya will be together again soon. The shaggy white fur of his arms flies in the air as he codes. His huge, dome-shaped ears swivel with excitement. He adds new data into the code he has worked on every single moment he could for a decade and it doesn’t break. His pace is furious, yet still, it has been forever working this incomplete thought. He is not completely certain this solution will work, time haunts, but soon he will know.

He has thought he was close before, and failed. This time it was Soya herself who gave him the answer. She came up with the solution in a dream.

In the dream, Shuhp was writing code for the equation, like he does fifteen moments out of every collection of moments in a glimpse. He was working within the parameters of Spatial Folding he set up in a black box with one of the cooks atom-variators in which to store his work. The black box existed and did not exist within the University’s server complex. Quantum mechanics at work. He was working within the quantum and aided him much leeway in which reality he worked with-in.

He made liquid bone in a very similar fashion. Except then it was all he did. Now he shared his efforts with mourning and wishing he had done more to stop what he knew was a mistake. It got his love killed and nothing was going to stop him from fixing that. But like everything else dealing with spatial folding and the quantum and liquid bone, it existed because it was theorized to exist and therefore did not exist at the same time. So he spent time in the quantum searching for the one aspect that limited him from bringing Soya back. What held him up was establishing a Unitary Operator. A Unitary Operator that both existed and did not exist at the same time. Designed for faster than light travel, the code organizes and reassembles data instantaneously within itself. It's not an accelerative push to achieve destination, more that the math can jumble and pull information together by folding specific physicality to it. The quantum equation of both here and not. In the dream, the data he inputs is hers. It’s everything she ever did, thoughts, images, messages, books, even the childhood poetry that he found once in an old stone-hewn toy chest. He works from memory. He improvises. He knows in his hurry to be done with the work, he is putting more of himself into the process than he had originally counted on. At the end of things, his goal ready to turn all this into concrete, mechanical, making numbers real applied-maths he wakes poised to activate that which he made.

But with each disappointed breath he realizes the answer was simple and right in front of him all along.

And now with the hard work done, he can finish it. His fingers fly over the input board. He makes several mistakes and has to go back and fix them. He is excited. Sloppiness can be expected but not tolerated. His fingers search for keys they normally find without a glance. He struggles but forward momentum is gained, and just before it is time to quit, he is ready to execute the function.

This is it.

He pauses.

Dust floats above the air his finger dances within their augmented reality. The dust sparkles prettily in the purple light of dusk streaming in from the window. From that window, he can look down on Majt. Somewhere in the bowels, so much death and nightmares. Can she fix it? Does he care?

He scrolls back up, checks his work, and decides it’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen in his long life. These numbers represent the soul of his dead owner. Maybe an effigy, maybe nothing more than busy work, but mixed with spatial folding this might be a life returned.

In this penthouse cell, as light from the monitor pours over him, he feels her ghost sharing the moment with him. He can smell her flowery perfume and the sharp stench of the alliums she would have had for lunch. Throughout the morning, as he feverishly worked, it has felt like the old glimpses of her standing over his shoulder barking numbers at him to try in the solutions to the problems they tested.

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They wiped Nahtdo clean in the same way, eventually coming up with using liquid-bone and changing the very atoms of the Naht-do world.

He used some of her numbers now also, numbers that made up the history of her life. He can intimately remember so many of these moments, so many connected silently to him he wonders if maybe he just made a clone of himself. A clone that’ll share the silence of his involvement with her work for eternity.

Poised, he thinks of his olution. Simple, or as simple as all complicated things are when stripped down to their bare parts. Showing up, the pieces were personality, thought, action, desire and finding a way to represent them through maths.

The theory needs endless space and limitless speed to write and read new data for eternity. That’s where the spatial folding comes into play, as infinity, the only thing that could work.

His formula asks the machine to read-rate-record-repeat, to study change, calculate all new information and use the already collected database to make better decisions. Then rebuild itself into a database of branch mechanics from which the action can pull and add to instantaneously. The new information will inform the old in the database he made, filled with every single word, image, and video available of Soya. Everything built into a hive that will flavor each new action with memory.

Memory.

A source to learn from and grow independent, the original programming never gets redundant, instead it is used as a base, an ever growing and sturdy thing that can never break.

He knows he is not resurrecting Soya, just returning to life her voice. Maybe even just from her past. What follows that, he is unsure.

Nothing more than a toy to play with until he dies, maybe.

The programming includes over eighty-million fractals worth of materials Soya created during her lifetime. She wrote about biology, chemistry, and math. Every lecture uploaded, every word readable at the University of Yee, three quarters of which she lectured to both a live audience of students while recording for those who would watch later. He included every speech she gave to the ruling council, every interview. He even devised hive searches to find every single image of her captured on other Upu systems and fractions of security recordings, and even her voice as recorded by any government snooping. He made codebots that scrolled for her every thought, opinion, and mention, anything she or anyone else ever jotted down about her work. Her time on the chancellery was available for public consumption, all in all, he gathered over three hundred million terabytes of data and he dumped it all into the equation.

...if then, if then, if then, if then…

A loop, an endless loop of perfect self-development and exploration based on an actual history. Not a new start, but a continuation.

What he wants is for the code to mimic computer A, his dead owner and lover Soya Yee, and then become better than computer A, but never deviate from the course of being the individual computer defined as A.

A better functioning computer A overwriting its fallacies by aiming for supremacy.

His brain hurts with the simplicity of it.

He scrolls up through the seemingly endless field of beautiful numbers and equations and code. Miles and miles of his life, decades of his work that was finished in a dream.

Then he scrolls back down to the green cursor blinking at the bottom of the monitor, waiting in a sea of black for him to execute his equation. This is it. His life’s work. Everything he has worked for. If this fails, he is too tired to try again. He’ll tinker, sure, but he has no other creative bursts left in him. And then his end will come. The only question that remains is whether Braso will do the deed himself or not. Or will someone buy him and keep him as a treasure once owned by the great Soya Yee.

Uh’ doubts it and isn’t ready to find out. Death is going to hurt and if nothing else he has accomplish one thing in his long life, avoiding pain. And as he points his finger at the execute key, he curls it back in doubt. Is that all I am doing? He debates with himself.

What could happen?

If he is right, then something different. If wrong, the world will go about its business as if nothing happened for the rest of time.

And Soya is dead forever and one day he will join her.

Maybe either is fine, he decides and bored with his waffling hits, execute function. The code disappears, and the screen blinks black, and his useless wings flutter with excitement as if they were still able to lift him into the air.

The system beeps, and the code begins to rewrite itself out in yellow 0s and 1s looking for a reason to stop working. The hum throughout his body is magnificent.

He has done this before, countless times, but each time he hit execute Soya never materialized from the numbers before the code broke.

This time his heart flutters with excitement as he estimates the function is going better than it has ever before.

This might be it.

Then he is sure.