As the actual journey itself was entirely numerical, ex post facto abstraction was necessary to make sense of it in a way cogent to anyone but Shuixing and the coldly unfeeling algorithms through which she coursed.
The first of these abstractions was the physical sensation. This entirely depended upon which compound she ingested: Qian, Zhong, or Shen. The former was characterized by a low-grade euphoria and slight decrease in mental faculties. The experience was almost a pleasant one, as the referent point of “Real” remained Po-Lin as though the numbers were an overlay or a quilt laid over the “eyes” of the traveler of Numberspace (“eyes” too was not an accurate description of sense perception in Numberspace, but for lack of a better one, it might be said that Shuixing “saw” the numbers).
Aqua Zhong was the first level at which this expeditious falsehood could no longer be entertained. The reference point swapped, and the journeyer was made aware that Po-Lin, not Numberspace, was the false projection, existing entirely as the confluence of innumerable mathematical processes. Euphoria and terror intermixed without beginning or end. The physical toll of the compound also exerted itself, and a feeling of sickness sometimes penetrated into the otherwise disembodied journey.
Aqua Shen made one forget Po-Lin entirely. Numberspace became all that was real and Po-Lin a distant memory or a fractured dream which seemed impossible to return to. Only a gathering up of willpower and intent within the self-analyzing section of code referred to as “Shuixing” safeguarded any pre-decided animus. And to the extent that there was a psychological dimension to the journey, it would be accurate to characterize it as gulfs of numb derealization punctuated by episodes of seizing horror which halted any attempts to penetrate further into the pure realm of numbers. But as the algorithms were ever in flux, these episodes were mercifully temporary.
“Traveling” through the numbers was like traveling through a dream. Only with practice and deliberate intention did it become possible to follow the internal logic. To penetrate beyond the vicinity of the Shuixing Zero Point was not to carve into an animal, but to find the lines and contours of its tendons so that the knife was doing no cutting at all.
As to scale, it mattered not at all. In one instant it was possible to examine each Yes and each No of the tens of billions that were the Shuixing Zero Point, and in the next to be gazing at the disquieting totality. This was how Shuixing was able to see and make sense of such an enormous amount of data. At each layer of complexity the patterns repeated so that she could tell at a glance the piece of data she wanted: The 01010011 that made up the S in her name. The long strings of characters that represented a function like print{“Shuixing He”}, the lines of these functions which executed an action like “Shuixing injects chemicals,” and the qualitative summation of these actions that might be summarized by such broad terms as intellectual, soft-spoken, obsessive, self-harming.
Entities, as she had taken to calling them, were the easiest to parse. These consisted of all Heroes, Non-Heroes, and Monsters in Po-Lin. She’d had the most practice with deciphering them having begun with herself. Their composite parts were essentially as described above with the addition that at a specific interval, every Entity was fed into a central algorithm of probability models and an amount of noise and chaos was introduced to them so that their thoughts and actions were not entirely deterministic (as Hemiola had said the Yishang’s other worlds were) but probabilistically influenced by their inputs.
This interval was referred to as “10ms,” which she later learned meant one-hundredth of a Celestial second, but which made no experiential difference to Shuixing for whom it was the smallest unit of time possible, and thus utterly unnoticeable.
An order of complexity above these Entities were what she called Envelopes, or a set of unbreachable ordering instructions for where one Entity ended and another began and the rest of existence was stored. To her knowledge, all Heroes existed within En-Env-ZP, or Entity Envelope Zero Point.
All the other envelopes had some other logic to what they contained, including En-Env-1 which contained all human Non-Heroes with quest relevance (something which took a deeper penetration to discover), En-Env-2 which contained all human Non-Heroes of no quest relevance (which Shuixing had initially thought was overflow of En-Env-1 and had predicted Envelope memory limits which had later been disproven), En-Env-3 which contained hostile Non-Hero monsters, and so on down the line to En-Env-9 which was comparatively tiny and contained only non-hostile Non-Hero monsters which were not otherwise used. This was where she found the tiny string of numbers which constituted Charles and which, in a moment of rare levity for Shuixing, she noticed had been influenced by Natsuko to actually be renamed Charles.
This was how she discovered that the discrete Entities outlined by the logic of the Envelope did, in fact, influence each other in indirect ways. Some numbers could be altered directly from Po-Lin such as renaming an Entity “Charles,” some few could be altered only from Numberspace such as Shuixing’s Cognition stat which, to her surprise, actually influenced non-combat-related outcomes such as her own intelligence. Towards that end she increased it as far as she dared.
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She supposed the same must be true of the other five stats, though she had not attempted to experiment with this for fear of causing a sudden rise in her Use-Number which the Yishang might take notice of. There was safety in obscurity. Since Cognition was not a particularly useful stat, the small uptick in her Use-Numbers had gone unnoticed (assuming as she did that the Yishang would make their displeasure with her prying immediately known).
Based on extremely careful experimentation, Shuixing had discovered that the vast majority of numbers were unalterable with the tools currently at her disposal. This meant, for instance, that while she could wade through the endless layers of Envelopes for information about the Yishang directly, the data would be scrambled through some lock algorithm which she could not alter to revert the data to a readable form.
Her holy grail, and the purpose of her current journey through Numberspace, was to decipher some kind of key which would unlock the vast majority of Envelopes which had nothing to do with Po-Lin. It was likely she herself and everything in Po-Lin were also under the effects of such a lock algorithm, but since the key was the same for all of them, everything appeared “unlocked” from her relativistic perspective.
There were several things she hoped to find in these locked Envelopes. The first was communication between the members of the Yishang and with the world of Celestials that existed outside, which would give her a better picture of their world.
The second thing was something akin to financial statements. She highly suspected these to be located in Hub Envelopes 701 through 709, as the Sub-Envelopes inside were titled in unscrambled date format while the contents were illegible. Deciphering these would tell her how long she had before the world of Po-Lin became unprofitable and was wiped out.
These envelopes were incidentally how she had discovered the span of time the Yishang had been in existence. Assuming time passed in Po-Lin more or less how it did in the realm of the Yishang, the first financial Envelope was entitled 20210430, or the 2021st year of their world’s existence, the fourth month, and the 30th day, and the latest financial Envelope was entitled 20471101 and had metadata appended to it which stated it was created 245376s prior to Shuixing accessing it. Working backwards to figure out what “s” meant, she was able to deduce that the present period of time in the Celestials’ world was the 2047th year, 11th month, and 4th day, and that the Yishang had been in existence in their current form for 26 years, 6 months, and 26 days.
The third and final thing she hoped to find by the discovery of a key algorithm was an exit.
Shuixing knew there must be a path. After all, millions of Celestials regularly interfaced with the Yishang’s Numberspace, and it seemed astronomically unlikely that the Yishang ruled the only region of Numberspace in existence if all Celestials had similar capabilities. Without knowing the greater significance of the Yishang and their enterprise within the Celestials’ world, it was probable that there were innumerable other Numberspaces of greater and lesser size beyond the confines of the Yishang’s domain. And if the Celestials entered the Yishang’s domain from outside, there must be an exit.
However, this presented several philosophical problems which she had put out of her mind until such a time as the prospect of escaping Po-Lin became realizable. For one, she did not know how to uproot her own data and extricate it from its Envelope. If she were unable to do so, escape would be, quite literally, nothing but a dream. She would remain a prisoner.
Even more vexing was her relationship with the Central Probability Algorithm. As far as she could tell, it was the only thing that made her more than just a static line of numbers. Perhaps she was nothing but a series of snapshots given the illusion of continuity by the rapidity with which they succeeded one another at a rate of a hundred per second, but she was quite attached to this illusion of continuity. Without it, there was no Shuixing. Just a line of lifeless numbers. Yet she had no way of knowing if any such algorithm existed outside the Yishang’s domain. If there was none, escape was no different than permanent death, or the jettisoning of her numbers into a hostile environment in which it again reverted to a series of lifeless numbers.
And supposing she not only found a way to transplant her string of numbers to an outer realm which also contained a central probability algorithm to sustain a dynamic continuity of existence, in what form would she even exist when there was no Po-Lin to project a physical form into? Would she and everyone she knew and loved exist forever adrift in this horrifying chaos of pure numbers? That might be a worse fate than simply being wiped out by the Yishang.
Shuixing gasped and shot forward in her chair.
Walls.
Table.
Lights.
Vials.
Syringe.
Notebook.
Tears.
She was crying.
Her fingers pressed into the arms of the overstuffed chair until her muscles ached and the pressure hurt her fingertips. She was back in Po-Lin, and she was crying. She felt sicker than when she left, but she had nothing to show for it. Her willpower had failed her. She had wasted the journey on a self-reflective circling of things she already knew. In the fifteen minutes that she had been exploring Numberspace, she’d gained nothing useful.
Shuixing wasted another precious five minutes waiting for her hiccuping sobs to die down. What was wrong with her? The world needed her and she was wasting time crying. Scratching at her arms didn’t help to stop the tears. It only spilled fresh streaks of blood to stain her filthy robes which were no longer blue but dyed with blood, mucus, sweat, and chemicals.
She had hoped to return from Numberspace with critical data she could spend the rest of the day interpreting and analyzing back in Po-Lin, but since she had failed, she would have to go back in. Wasting no time out of fear she would lose her nerve, she refilled the syringe and jammed it into her chest once again.