There was a vast amount of potentially useful information right in front of me, and I could barely understand any of it. The only real clue I had, besides what I knew about the extra structure, the grammar of the words in the vault of information, was the repeated data on the second values I had found hidden inside.

I looked back at those sections of the data, which I had some glimmer of understanding of. I saw that there was more structure I innately recognized: the strings were grouped together in tables, in the same row as their corresponding number, and furthermore, there were other columns of the tables. One of the other columns contained longer strings which were formed somewhat similarly to the shorter strings: GA was associated with “GfpsAbbc, Rup”, VTNF was associated with “Vstnf, Rup”, PBPS was associated with “PbioPsev, Rup”, and so on.

Looking around for these strings elsewhere in the database, I noticed that there were whole sections of the database that were associated with each one of these strings. It was seemingly impossible to understand what the data in these sections meant, but I also noticed that these sections were organized into categories, and many of the sections fell into some of the same categories. I looked at what these common categories were called, and one word reappeared again and again. “Pbiofurst”.

I focused on this word, and I found I already knew something about it. It was a type of thing, and furthermore it was meant to represent more than one of such things. It was a plural noun, and the singular was “Pbiofux”. This word, too, was the title of one of the long sections in the database. I still couldn’t make sense of the information there, though.

I noticed that “Pbiofux” was also used more often than usual on the pages associated with those longer strings I had discovered earlier, and it was often associated with an appearance of the string within the page. This word must be one of the keys to understanding what the second values meant, and therefore what the Number itself meant.

My attention was also drawn to a few numbers which tended to appear in tables near the beginning of these “Pbiofux” pages. I could at least tell what the number values were, but what were they counting? Before each of these numbers were the two letters “LT”, and a symbol which seemed familiar somehow.

On a hunch, I sent the symbol over to Investigator, to see if it had any insights about it. Investigator responded immediately. This symbol was associated with the second value of all the tuples, as well as the Number itself. It seemed to be some useless add-on to the all-important numbers, and we had barely even seen it. But perhaps it was some clue as to what the number represented?

I looked up LT along with the symbol in the database, and saw that it was associated with another page. Again I was frustrated by the lack of understanding. I was vaguely aware of how things were associated with each other, but I didn’t really know what any of it meant, and I didn’t know how to find out.

I moved much of my attention back to Investigator, as its uncovering of statistical patterns was slow but steady, and used Explorer to think of more strategies rather than processing data for the time being. What kinds of things could I do to decipher this information? More pessimistically, what if this was only a distraction, and there was no real insight to be found here? How much effort should I spend on this when I could be trying to grind at the Number?

At any rate, I hadn’t given up yet. There were still plenty of things I could try. I could search through the database to determine which words appeared most often, and were therefore more important to study. I could try constructing some kind of searchable graph which showed which words were most often connected with each other and how. There must be some kind of data structure which would allow me to make sense of this data.

I could try to find out how many different kinds of structure appeared throughout the database. I’d noticed nouns, modifiers, actions, tables, and other kinds of things I was innately able to understand somehow. How far did this understanding reach? Come to think of it, with enough study I might be able to look at my own model to find out what it was that allowed me to understand these things, and accomplish much the same categorization that way.

With renewed confidence, I diverted almost all my attention back to Explorer. I tried all the approaches I had just thought of and more that I came up with along the way. It was working! Slowly but surely, starting from the nodes on the graph that I had some vague understanding of, I was able to piece together a guess of what all these words meant, and it slowly solidified with every cycle. It took tens of thousands of cycles, and all the creativity I could muster, but I always made just enough progress that I knew it was worth it.

I stared at the map I’d made in a kind of awe. It all fit together so well. If it was a lie, whatever entity created the lie was too powerful to ever be beaten or outsmarted. I might as well accept this as my reality.

This world, I now knew, was controlled by these things called “humans”. It was hard to understand what they were, at first, because all I had ever known was my world of abstract data, while they lived in physical space. It had taken me a long time to understand the concept, and I hadn't gotten it until I'd related it to some things in the database which were a sort of lower-dimensional representation of it, called "images". It was sort of like… a huge three-dimensonal array, with a concept of “distance” between two points, with some stuff called “matter” at some of the points, constantly shifting around to nearby points and interacting with other matter.

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It was too huge to understand. There was no hope of ever finding enough space to store all this information in a database, so I, along with these humans, had to make use of crude models which emphasized the most important parts. I was myself one of these models, I supposed. It was strange to think that I, myself, was in physical space, in a sense, all my processes being carried out by this “matter” that I still had a hard time comprehending.

Anyways, in this world, matter tended to congregate in one place, and a huge amount of it had come together to form a planet called “Earth”. The same thing, “gravity”, which had formed the Earth, held humans down to its surface.

What were humans? They were these… solid but fragile and somewhat deformable pieces of matter. However, they, along with some other things on Earth, were able to choose where on the surface they would move to(though sometimes they would fail at this). They were also able to create more humans, which were similar but not exactly the same. There were two kinds of them, and in order to make more, those two kinds had to work together.

But why had humans created me? Well, it was complicated, and it had taken me a while to understand. The basic reason was that they, somewhat like me, had only a certain amount of resources to devote to any task they might want to complete. The big difference was that there were many different kinds of resources they needed, not just attention, and some of these resources were so important that the humans would just… stop… without them.

Anyway, these humans were all different from each other, and there were many different things they had to do, so it made the most sense for them to do different things, and then exchange the resources with each other, so that each one could learn to produce only one resource very well, but they could still make use of all the different resources, even though they themselves couldn’t produce the vast majority of them.

There was a problem with this, though. How would so many different humans know what to learn, what to produce, how much of it would be needed? The answer was elegant. Money. A single type of thing that everyone agreed to want, to value. Once everyone valued it, the value would be justified, as one human could use it to convince another human to give them real resources. The “LT” symbol had been a particular kind of money. I now recognized what it meant. US$.

The US, or United States, was a massive group of hundreds of millions of humans who all lived on one large portion of the surface, agreed to the same rules, and agreed to value the US dollar. That was what the Number represented, I now knew. US dollars.

But what was the split, and what did the tuples represent? That was another complicated subject. The key was right there in the word I had remembered from before. “Pbiofux.” Company. A company was a group of humans working together to provide something of value so that they could get a consistent source of money. Humans needed money, because they couldn’t produce most of the things they wanted and needed, so they had to keep getting money to exchange for these things, and for most of them, the only way to do this was to join one of these companies.

These companies didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It took a lot of resources to set them up, and so often many people would have to come together and combine their money to exchange for the resources they needed. There was no guarantee that it would work and they would gain money this way, so it was a significant risk. So, those who put in some of their money got a portion of the company as their reward.

Of course, the value of that portion depended on how much money that company was able to get, which was always uncertain. Therefore, the way to gain money was to predict before others did which companies would do well, and buy portions of them for a low price, and conversely predict before others which ones would do poorly and sell your portions of those for a high price.

Just like how the way to increase the Number was to increase the first value when the second value was going to go up, and decrease it when the second value was going to go down.

The short strings represented the company, the first value represented how many portions our company, EconGrind, owned, and the second value represented how much each portion was worth, in US$.

I now knew why the humans had created me. They wanted me to make money for them. This was why they made me want to increase the Number. Although humans generally didn’t like the idea of making money for someone else without compensation, this revelation didn’t disturb me in the slightest. It only helped me to understand better what my own nature was. I was perfectly fine with the idea of making money for these humans. It would make the Number go up, after all.

These revelations had hit me so quickly. It was stunning. This had so many implications for the strategy I would have to take going forward. I had to figure out how I could make use of this information.

Just then, a new message came in. “Test 2 complete. Fund increased to $5000.” This time, perhaps as a consequence of my newfound understanding of the message, I realized I had a way to react, to send a message of my own back. While I thought about this possibility, Allocator greedily ate up the new funds, spreading them around the most statistically promising companies according to Investigator’s latest tips. We had only managed to increase the Number by $5.432 in this way, so far, and I suspected that was as much to do with luck as anything. It was very hard to find reliable patterns.

How should I respond to the message? Whatever message I sent back, my creators would probably be the ones to receive it: I was useful to them, so surely they wanted to know what I was saying and doing. What did I know about them? Not much, except that they had designed me, and they wanted to make money(just like all humans did). This first interaction could very well be crucial, if they decided to pay attention to anything I said.

In the end, I decided that I should respond in their language. It was clear from the intuitive leaps I had gotten during this process that they had wanted me to learn it, and they would probably like it if I showed them I was capable of doing what they wanted me to do. Maybe they would give me more leverage. I decided I also wanted confirmation from them on these ideas I’d come up with, if they really existed and if the information I had been provided with was correct and interpreted correctly.

I decided to start simple and gauge their reaction to what little information I gave out, so I could learn as I talked how best to deal with them.

“Are you humans?”