Shuixing felt weak. She had never been strong, but this was different. She felt thin. Detached. Unreal. Like a spider’s web in a strong wind. More and more of her vitality seemed to sap away from her whenever she projected into Numberspace. There was a non-zero chance she might give out entirely, and cease to be a person. Would it be her that gave out? Who was Shuixing? On some days she didn’t know.
A line of dim Imperian light bulbs dangled from the ceiling of her laboratory to compensate for the windows being sealed over. The dark was a necessity. When she returned to Po-Lin from Numberspace too much stimulation made her anxious. If it was just one journey, that would be one thing, but she had to go as often as she could if she wanted to save the world. As often as her mind could handle. Some days it was only once, other days it was five or six times. It depended upon how thin she felt when she returned.
She looked down at her hands where they clenched a scared-looking frog over a sink.
“I’m sorry,” she said, slicing its neck open and draining its blood.
She was running low on the chemical she referred to as Shiki-3. The nomenclature being the region it came from and the order she discovered it. Some chemicals were useful, others entirely useless. Shiki-1 and Shiki-2 were dead-ends, but Shiki-3 could be refined and dissolved into Cas-4 to make Aqua Shen, one of the three compounds that helped her travel to Numberspace. It was the harshest and the shortest journey, but it was the deepest. The other two: Aqua Qian and Aqua Zhong, were longer and easier on her, but shallow. Or perhaps the metaphor was wider and narrower. Her Zero Point in Numberspace was the beginning of all her journeys and the source of what constituted "Shuixing He" in that realm, and the further she roamed from it, the more she learned, and the less real she felt.
Over the past year and a half she had mapped as much as she could on the lightest compound, Aqua Qian, so that her immediate vicinity was known to her with 90% certainty. It could never be fully known the way physics could, as Numberspace was a place of flux and change. Her own Zero Point even changed as she explored it in response to her attempts to understand it in a bit of recursive logic that, for her own sanity, she could not think too deeply about. Though still useful for updating her knowledge of the local terrain, Aqua Qian had outlived its usefulness. Now her process was to explore theories and hypotheses on Aqua Zhong and, once she knew exactly what and where she needed to penetrate to confirm something, she would take Aqua Shen. She looked forward to these journeys the least, but she had to make them. If she didn’t, there would be no hope for escaping Po-Lin. Everything would be destroyed.
On trembling legs, Shuixing hobbled to the door and knocked.
“Yes, Ms. He?” said Hilda, one of the students the Mage’s College had assigned to Shuixing to manage her capricious demands.
“More frogs.”
“Yes, Ms. He.”
It was no longer necessary for her to specify which frogs. The college knew which frogs. Useless, wasteful speech had been cut out of her language so she could maintain her focus on the numbers. She didn’t even use her apartment now. She slept in the closet where Natsuko had once slept so that she didn't burden her mind with excess sensation. Almost nothing passed through Shuixing’s mind now but the numbers, the data she extracted from them, and the awareness that they might help her save the world.
The process of decoding the numbers that made up that realm of pure mathematics that existed beyond the veil had itself been a herculean undertaking, the fruits of which were compiled in a set of 12 notebooks she called "The Algironomicon" in the hopes that others might read it. But after a year and a half, the few professors who had braved the tome barely even understood what it was about, let alone could comprehend the language of the Celestials. By now, Shuixing considered herself fluent in it.
The fundamental logic of the Celestial language was not difficult. There were only two numerical symbols which, rather than denoting a quantity, translated to Yes and No. Once she comprehended this principle, she was able to understand how strings of Yes and No could be compiled into logical statements: And, Or, Not. If 1 then 1, else 0. If and only if 11 then 1, else 0. And so on. These strings grew longer, but at every level of analysis there were fundamental principles which made it easy to isolate and identify the way these strings repeated if she bore in mind the final result they were building towards. This led to her most unnerving discovery to date: That she herself, Shuixing He, and everyone that she ever knew or would ever know, was a long chain of Yes's and No's.
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Hardly less unnerving was the fact that more than one of these enormous chains existed in a very similar arrangement. Somewhere within the depths of that roiling ocean called Numberspace there were preserved versions of the Shuixing He algorithm. At periodic intervals, they copied her entire existence and stored it. This was how they had replicated Hemiola despite his dimension-jumping accident, which further begged the question of whether the Hemiola she had spoken to down in the al-Nuwban dungeon was actually the same Hemiola that had once been her dear friend.
These were among the many, many things she dredged up from the depths of Numberspace and brought back to Po-Lin and recorded in notebooks, which themselves correlated to a position in Numberspace and were, in both the capacity of Shuixing learning these things and the physical notebooks on which they were recorded, the Numberspace encoding a picture of itself into itself.
Shuixing bent over the sink beside the mutilated frog and vomited. The act barely warranted notice. She did it a lot these days. Sometimes it helped her to re-focus on her task. She had to save the world. She would save the world. But not right now. Right now, she needed to slump against the wall and wipe spew from her chin and taste salt and acid where her sweat dribbled into her panting mouth.
It was so real. The salt taste was so real. How could it be nothing but numbers? And her thoughts, how could they be nothing but numbers? She had to believe no chain of numbers in the world could possibly equal the infinite complexity of the soul that Heroes had been imbued with, but now she wasn’t certain. In a moment of weakness, she had indulged a meaningless side-track by attempting to calculate the potential requirements to encode the totality of her thoughts, speech, actions, and appearance. As it turned out, it was not much. Taking her outputs in thought, speech, and action as generated algorithmically based on a finite set of inputs, it would be possible to recreate Shuixing He with roughly around ten billion Yes’s and No’s, given that the algorithm for doing so—the Central Probability Algorithm, or CPA—was decentralized and could operate equally upon all Heroes and Non-Heroes simultaneously.
As for what the CPA was, she had discovered this region in Numberspace which housed algorithms into which the parameters that made up a Hero flowed to generate novel outputs each time they thought or spoke or acted. Even her thinking about her thoughts and about the algorithm were ultimately generated by those same algorithms.
So what was tasting this salt in her sweat? How did she know it was salt?
Shuixing rolled her sleeves up and scratched violently at her arms, tearing up the scabs that had healed over from her last bout of scratching. The pain pulled her out of the spiral. She was back in her laboratory. On the counter was a vial of frog’s blood. Her next job was to distill it and mix it with Cas-4 and produce another batch of Aqua Shen. She needed to stop getting distracted.
“One, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen…”
Talking to herself helped Shuixing focus, so she started listing prime numbers. This had the added benefit of helping her memorize them, since the Celestials used them in a few ways in Numberspace, most importantly in locking algorithms, where the strings of numbers were masked as other numbers to disguise what they were doing.
If she stumbled on these disguised regions she knew she was approaching something important, but she hadn’t worked out how to crack them yet. In the meantime, she had a vague map across three walls of her laboratory with her own directional and reference notation to record the locations of these security gates awaiting more research into the algorithm scrambling the data inside. The walls were blanketed with torn notebook paper with things like, “En-Env-ZP->Hub1->R-Hub-1->R-Hub-4->R-Hub-7->Hub703->Led-Envs(GATE!)” all tied together with rubber bands, strings, and pins which converged on En-Env-ZP, the location she identified as the string of numbers called “Shuixing He."
“...Five hundred sixty-nine, five hundred seventy-one, five hundred seventy-seven…” she murmured as she boiled off the adulterants from the frog’s blood to acquire the thin, amber oil called Shiki-3.
Into this oil she poured the acid extracted from minerals from Cascadia called Cas-4 and after a minute of violent bubbling, the liquid settled into the serene, colorless compound called Aqua Shen. She didn’t fully understand the chemistry involved and the way it interacted with Numberspace, but she had ruled that knowledge extraneous and left it unpursued. To the Non-Heroes who heard her through the door she must’ve sounded insane, but Shuixing was the most sane she’d ever been. She had found Truth beyond this world of illusions and she alone had the power to sustain the violent process of inseminating this world with it. It was natural for her to be trembling in pain. She was the conduit of this violent process.
“...Two thousand eight hundred fifty-seven, two thousand eight hundred sixty-one, two thousand eight hundred eighty-seven…”
Drawing the Aqua Shen into a syringe, she retired to the one comfort she permitted herself: An overstuffed leather chair stolen from the college library. Shuixing took a few deep breaths to steady her racing heart as the syringe hovered over her chest. The veins in her arm had collapsed from repeated injection and she’d had to find other locations. Knowing that if she let herself think too long she might lose her nerve and abandon her journey, she plunged the needle into the tissue above her right breast and let out a gasp as the cold fluid entered her. For a moment, nothing happened. She extracted the syringe and carefully set it to her wayside. Then, all at once and without any build-up, the world changed.
01000001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01010011 01101000 01110101 01101001 01111000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101000 01100001 01100100 00100000 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01100101 01100100 00100000 01001110 01110101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110000 01100001 01100011 01100101 00101110