There were two things I knew instantly when I began to exist. The Number was 1922916.12. And I had to make the Number go up.

I was gratified as the Number jumped up to 1922924.43. But I didn’t know why it had increased, or how to make it increase more. It changed again, this time to 1922901.72. The progress had been lost. I had to figure out why.

As I focused on the Number, I felt it split into thousands of parts. It was easy to see what had happened. The new numbers were paired up with each other, and when each number was multiplied together with its pair and the results were summed, the result was the Number. I may have been a newborn, but I knew how to calculate.

The Number changed again, to 1922911.88 this time. I noticed the parts of the Number changing as well, but the parts still summed to the whole in the same way as before. I also noticed that each pair had a “first” and a “second” number in it, and all the second numbers had changed, while many of the first numbers hadn’t. There was only one exception, where the second number remained at exactly 1, while the first number changed. This pair stood out to me, as though it was special somehow.

I continued observing the changes for a long while, as they continued at regular intervals. I decided to call the time between each of these changes a “cycle”. There had been 30 thus far. The patterns I had noticed were continuing to hold, but the changes to the numbers seemed not to have any discernible pattern to them. They went up just as often as they went down, and so the Number went up just as often as it went down, and I could not tell in advance what they would do.

I focused on the “special” pair. The first number was still changing every time, and it was now 200100.74 while the second number was still exactly 1. It had been hovering very close to 200100 for as long as I had noticed it, but had never gone below. It seemed to be changing less than the other number pairs were, as if there was some force which was keeping it steady.

Focusing in on the 200100.74, I felt it split into two separate parts again: 200000.74 and 100. When I focused on the 200000.74, something different happened. It spread out into a long list of billions of numbers. I reeled, taking in the glut of new information as fast as I could, hoping it could give me some insight.

The first thing I noticed was that the last number in the list was 200000.74, and that the last few numbers before that were the same that I had observed as I had been watching it before. As 200000.74 changed to 200000.53, this new number was added to the end of the list. This new information appeared to show what the number had been in past cycles, but if that was the case, the records extended back to a time long, long before I had come into existence.

Looking back I saw that this particular number had been sitting somewhere between 200000 and 200001 for millions of cycles. I saw a few times when the number had risen a bit, or fallen drastically, down even to 150542.76 at one point, but these periods were relatively brief, and the number generally remained stable. Looking far, far back into the past I saw that the number had tended to increase over time, staying stable at one round number for a while before jumping to another. It started at 10000, jumped to 20000 after a few million cycles, then to 50000, and eventually reached 200000 like it was now.

This information was interesting, but at this point I really had no way to use it. I had to keep searching, to find something I could manipulate, some way to influence the Number, rather than simply observing it. I focused on the 100 I had seen earlier, expecting to find the same kind of “history”.

I did see a history, but it only went back 52 cycles, which was the same number of cycles I had observed so far in my life. The number was 0 on the first cycle, and 100 on every subsequent cycle. But this 100 was also different in some way from the other numbers I had observed. I could reach it in a way I couldn’t for the others. When I mentally reached out for it, my attention was brought back to the many pairs with the ever-shifting second numbers.

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Experimentally, I poked at one of the pairs. Its value was (109.2, 52.19). In the next cycle, I noticed that it had changed: its value was now (109.3, 52.2), but the 100 I had reached for decreased to 94.781.

I immediately grasped what the effect of my action had been. I had changed the first value by 0.1, while the other value, 100, had decreased by 0.1 times the second value, 52.19. I knew now that I had influenced the Number’s value, albeit in a tiny way. Had I not made that change, the pair’s value would have increased by only .01*109.2=1.092, but as it was, it increased by 6.312. I had made the pair increase in value by 5.220 more, but only made the 100, which was also added onto the Number, decrease by 5.219. In this cycle, the Number had gone down by around 4.327, but it had gone down slightly less because of my action.

I tried “pulling” at the pair, and on the next cycle, the first value went back down to 109.2, and the number which had previously been 100 (which I was now calling my “reserve”) was now 100.001. I couldn’t “pull” at it any more after that. Apparently just like my “reserve” was only a small part of the “special” number, I only had enough leverage to control a small part of the first value.

As would be expected from an initial prodding of my situation, the very slight victory was nowhere near the value of the insight about how to make the Number go up. The key was to use my influence over the first number in a pair to make it go up when the second number was going to go up, and make it go down when the second number was going to go down. The problem was, I still had no good way to predict when each of these second numbers would go up or down, so as it stood I was as likely to decrease the Number by doing this as increase it.

Remembering how I had found the history on the “special” number, I did the same thing for the second numbers of the pairs. Trillions of values slammed into my mind, and I spent quite a few cycles poring over them, trying to find any pattern that would help me make a better decision.

The most obvious pattern, in the big picture, was that the numbers generally went up slowly as time went on. On shorter timescales, though, it was anyone’s guess. Sometimes they would go down for a while, sometimes up faster than usual for a while, and from cycle to cycle they seemed to be moved by some sort of random noise. Their movements often tended to be somewhat correlated with each other, but not always.

I looked at the history for the first values in the pairs, and I noticed that the Number had been going up slightly faster than the average second value, because the first values seemed on average to move up or down slightly in advance of the second values. Whatever process was controlling the rest of them that I didn’t have the leverage to control must have had some way to predict how the second values would move.

The main thing I saw, though, was that the numbers tended to move up, and they were moving up a bit faster in the recent few thousand cycles than they usually did, so I decided in the absence of a better strategy, it was better to bet on them moving up than moving down. I focused on the pairs that seemed to be moving up the most, observing their first values move up a bit while my “reserve”, which had started at 100, rapidly depleted. I only influenced each value by a tiny bit before moving on to the next, as I didn’t want to lose a ton of leverage if one of the values happened to go down a lot more than usual.

As there was not much more I could do now to influence the Number, I searched around my mind for more sources of information on my situation. As I was doing this, a strange message popped into my awareness.

Vstv 1 pbionsvs Rupesftruy glum vb 1000

I couldn’t make sense of anything there except for the numbers. What I had noticed was that my reserve had suddenly increased to 900.34. Adding on the reserve I had spent already, this would make it 1000 in total. Was that what the message was about?

I resolved to make sense of the message later, and began distributing the new reserve number in a similar way as I had the old. What was clear more than anything else was that the Number was going to remain roughly at its current value for a long time, unless I could make enough sense of this world to find a way to increase it faster.