Shuixing felt the flow of numbers trying to draw her into another self-referential orbit and she pushed back. She would not get waylaid this time. She raced through the nesting doll of Envelopes, beelining for the ones she knew contained top-order functions. These were massive complexes replicated over several identical Envelopes which dictated how all the other numbers were to be read, organized, executed, deleted, or otherwise utilized. Instinct told her the key to the locking algorithms had to be stored somewhere in here since they referred only to other operational functions and not to Po-Lin. The trouble was that the patterns weren't obvious when she didn’t know what the end result was supposed to be. She could reverse-engineer Vermögenburgh because she knew she needed to find patterns corresponding to Non-Heroes, buildings, weather, and so forth. But what was a key algorithm supposed to look like?
One clue was that it utilized prime numbers, something she only recently discovered when trying to make sense of some enormous prime numbers which seemed to serve no purpose. The trouble was that when she plugged them into the operation to unscramble the Envelopes, it just produced more gibberish.
What she needed was chaos. Her own algorithm was calcifying, her logic becoming circular and self-referential. She could not find a solution because she had not found a solution, and she had not because she could not. Randomness. Chaos. Entropy. Difference. That’s what she needed. In pursuit of difference, she returned home to Entity Envelope Zero Point. Rather than examining her own string of numbers, however, she went to Natsuko’s.
After her own, this was the second most familiar location in Numberspace for Shuixing. She had spent hours pouring over it, trying to understand not only the nature of Numberspace, but the nature of her friend. There was quite a bit that Shuixing still did not understand. For one, Natsuko had a number of contradictory operations in her personality. More than anyone else Shuixing had explored, Natsuko had cases where two dimensions of her personality could execute in a way that either canceled each other out or twisted into some weird half-baked execution. One example was that Natsuko possessed both a sincere loyalty to the Yishang and a cynical irony towards them. Another was that she was repelled by her former teammates, but her attraction parameters were still referent to her former teammates. In more plain language, Natsuko did not want to see Shuixing but was constantly looking for Shuixing elsewhere. So too for Pechorin, Sofiane, and Daisy.
These contradictory operations meant that Natsuko had the exact opposite problem as Shuixing: Her mental state was too volatile and erratic. Shuixing’s was stable to the point of stagnation. Were it advisable (or even possible) to directly edit her own parameters, Shuixing might have tried to recreate Natsuko’s paradoxes in her own personality. There were times when her research benefited from the exhaustive deductive reasoning from her hard-coded rationality, but when she needed to make a logical leap by intuition, it was a detriment.
Moving on from Natsuko, she found Pechorin, whose mental state was perhaps as close to the ideal balance between deduction and induction as possible but he had no aptitude for quantitative problem-solving. She could see where his mind actively refused to look for quantitative solutions. He simply did not want to find them. Stranger still, after checking the backlogged versions of all of them, Shuixing learned this was a later development and not a hardcoded one. At a point in time that Shuixing deduced to be contemporaneous with an argument with Natsuko shortly after fighting Völsunga, Pechorin had gained a repugnance for numbers which he never shed. As Shui recalled, the argument had been about Pechorin’s over-interest in stats and numbers for EXP-farming, something Natsuko said was a waste of time.
“1, 2, 3,” Shuixing thought.
She examined Daisy next. In a lot of ways, Daisy was similar to Natsuko, especially regarding the density of paradoxical operations. But whereas Natsuko’s paradoxes tended to paralyze her into inaction, Daisy’s would fire one or the other side at random. She had an intensely self-interested streak with a propensity for spontaneous altruism and nothing seemed to indicate which was more likely to trigger. Meanwhile, her competitiveness dropped precipitously shortly before Hemiola’s defeat while feelings of inadequacy rose. Shuixing attributed this to a combination of Pechorin’s influence in the former case and Natsuko’s in the latter.
“5, 7, 11…”
As for the string of numbers that might broadly be called “contentment,” Sofiane had fared far better than the rest of them. His well-being rose and fell in a wave function running from a zenith on Tuesday to a nadir on Friday, though his baseline happiness was still the highest even then. Shuixing had watched from her disembodied vantage point as his parameters changed to become closer to Gomiko’s, including making him mellower and more patient. She hadn’t examined Gomiko closely enough to determine in what way Sofiane was influencing her in return.
“13, 17, 19… 20,” her thoughts took a sharp turn. “The prime factors of which are 2 times 2 times 5.”
An electric surge of newness coursed through her as she finally made the connection. The key was not in the prime numbers themselves, but in their factorization. The prime numbers were meant to be multiplied together and the composite number that resulted was the key.
Praying she got in under the time remaining on her current journey, she rushed back to the operations Envelope and quickly did some calculations in her head. The resulting key was an enormous 512 alpha-numerical characters long, but this was no issue at all because the entire key had been safely copied to Shuixing’s location in Numberspace along with the table of operations to make the scrambled numbers legible. The calculations occurred in the 10ms span of her thought process rendering the translation instantaneous. The first thing she learned was that “Program Files” was the true name of the Envelope she was peering into, though Shuixing preferred her own nomenclature of Hub201.
Stolen novel; please report.
It was, as she suspected, full of operations which affected the entirety of Numberspace. These would have been fascinating to explore if she had had more time, but the minutiae of computation was not as eminently critical as the Yishang’s communication and financial statements. Knowing the location of the latter, Shuixing began there. The unscrambled data was fairly intuitive and didn’t require much interpretation to figure out how it was used: Each Envelope contained a 3xN matrix with columns for Credit, Debit, and Date and a variable number of rows outlining the name of a credit/debit source and a sum at the bottom for all credit and debit in a given period.
CREDIT
DEBIT
DATE
Bi-Weekly Payroll
-¥38,633,510.76
2047-11-01
Daily Revenue
¥2,111,352.89
2047-11-01
Monthly Overhead
-¥19,890,720.92
2047-11-01
Daily Revenue
¥2,360,781.90
2047-11-02
It went on like this for another two days of accounting. Shuixing believed the ¥ symbol to denote a currency, though the sums meant nothing in a vacuum. The only thing that mattered was that the positive number at the end of each weekly ledger went up in proportion to the magnitude of the expenses. How poetic, she thought, that the Yishang’s numbers had to go up too. She wondered if they had their own equivalent of the Yishang above them who would wipe them out if their numbers ever went down.
Unfortunately, the couple of weekly ledgers she checked did not give her the information she was looking for. They appeared to be high-level accountancy for all of the Yishang’s enterprises and lacked the granularity to determine whether Po-Lin itself was profitable. For that she had to keep looking. Her search through another table was ended abruptly as she was pulled back into that strange, overwhelming space called her laboratory.
Shuixing’s entire body shuddered violently. Cold pricks of sweat beaded along her neck and arms. Nausea rolled in her chest and stomach. As she stood up, the room tilted sideways, the after-images of the walls and furniture strumming in her vision. She needed to stop for the day, but she needed to go back. Panting to relieve the nausea creeping into her quivering throat muscles, she reached for a new syringe and filled it with more Aqua Shen. When she came out again, it would have to be for the final time that day. Her body couldn’t take another Aqua Shen journey she thought as she slipped the thin metal spike into her sternum.
She was back again. Compared to the painful, sick reality her body inhabited, even the rough journey that Aqua Shen provided felt preferable. But she cut the thought short. Even small reflections wasted precious milliseconds.
Diving through an ocean of financial documents, she finally found one that could plausibly be for Po-Lin, though this was not the name the Yishang used for it. Instead, Shuixing learned that the true name of the universe she inhabited—as opposed to the arbitrary name for the planet—was “Flux Aeternum.” On most days, that alone could have been the most important discovery, but it was overshadowed by the contents of the table itself:
CREDIT
DEBIT
DATE
Bi-Weekly Payroll
-¥7,432,702.98
2047-11-01
Monthly Generative Intelligence Overhead
-¥6,760,225.25
2047-11-01
Daily Revenue
¥561,202.81
2047-11-01
…
…
…
…
WEEKLY NET
¥20,114.05
She did not need to know the value of the Yishang’s currency to gauge the grave severity of its contents. For a moment, she calmed herself by noting that one week’s worth of data was insufficient to gauge long-term profitability. To test her hypothesis, she had to pour over data going back at least a year. However, the weekly net at the same time in year 2046 had been ¥1,002,612.04. The year before that, at the height of the permanent death crisis, it had been ¥6,550,291.50. And even a cursory glance at the months in-between told her that this downward trend was exponential. The difference in margins told her all she needed to know: Po-Lin, the only world she had ever known, the one that contained all of the people she loved, was teetering on unprofitability.