Aptitude

by Cooper Shrivastava

  She redrew the triangles so that the ratio of their sides was equivalent to the ratio of their sum over the longest side, which made them glow golden. She overlaid these on the rhombuses, which she sorted into thick and thin shapes. The golden half of each thin rhombus could be laid next to the golden half of each thick rhombus so that their sides were aligned left to right. The shapes reformed themselves along this matching rule, which allowed unbounded expansion.

  She let it spill out across his whole universe, changing the regular tiling to the aperiodic one as it churned along following her set of rules.

  His shortcut had relied on its underlying periodicity. If he tried to use the matrix to apply changes to the whole universe, he would never be able to reach all of it. That is to say, while any segment he chose could be found in the complete pattern an infinite number of times, the whole pattern itself could not be shifted to produce the same tiling. She had sabotaged its translational symmetry.

  The Ancient Mathematician continued playing with the galaxy cluster. He made an adjustment and applied it to a local part of space overlaid on her new grid, but this time his change wasn’t instantaneous across the universe. It spread out infinitely far, yes, just like the pattern, but was unable to cover his entire infinite plane.

  The Ancient Mathematician frowned. He chose a bigger area and applied the same changes. Again it spread out to infinite identical areas, and again he failed to apply the changes to the entire universe. He zoomed outwards and selected a larger area. And then a larger area again.

  He could tell that something wasn’t right and checked back with the underpinning grid. But when he pulled one out, it was still the basic set of shapes he had started with.

  The universe might be infinite, Alena thought as she watched him struggle. The more he expanded his range, the more of his own work he destroyed. The universe might be infinite, but the human mind is apparently not.

  That left her with just over seventeen minutes of time in the simulation, and there was still one candidate she couldn’t crack. But high on the elation of knowing she had destroyed enough of them to advance to the next stage, Alena turned toward the garden.

  The Beautiful Gardener was as good as her word, or at least her outfit. The space around her was nothing like the work of the other candidates. It didn’t look like an array matter spread out through the void, it looked like she was on her knees in the dirt.

  Alena even imagined she could smell it, something earthy with a pollen-like sweetness. The last time she had smelled something so clearly organic it had been a cup of real peach juice she had drank celebrating her mother’s promotion to Assistant Director. That had been about eight years ago, in the very last moments before they fell out of contact with other motherships.

  The two of them had sat on the observation deck at the ship equator to drink and contemplate the view. It was just possible to see the last remnants of the Plancius star cluster smeared across the empty dark as it fell into the black hole. In a ship traveling near the speed of light, away from the black hole, they would watch that majestic sight for all of Alena’s natural life.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” Alena’s mother had said.

  “Congrats, Mom,” Alena said. “I knew they’d give it to you.” She put a hand on her mother’s head like she was the older woman and her mother was the child.

  Actually, she had just been glad her mother still cared enough to celebrate. As the end became clearer and clearer, just generations away now, many people on the ship lost interest in pursuing anything at all. There was no means of thinking about the future, no possibility of having a legacy or preserving their past. When Alena was a child, caring for her had provided some outlet for those feelings, but now that she was a grown adult with no future, even her mother was slipping farther and farther into this anhedonia.

  Before she found the Board of Cosmogamy’s application guide booklet, Alena too had sleep-walked through each day of work, breaking down the debris that flashed past the ship on its way into the black hole.

  Finding that test prep booklet had changed everything. She couldn’t escape the black hole, couldn’t save her universe, but finally there was someone to ask, someone to hold to account. Participating in this exam could be her chance to meet that secretive cabal responsible for putting things together the way they are.

  Unlike the other candidates, the Beautiful Gardener turned her head when Alena stepped into her simulation. She looked pointedly down at Alena’s feet.

  Alena thought she was just on the “ground,” the sandy soil that had sprung up at a few strokes of the Beautiful Gardener’s pen, but looking closer she saw that a shrub with wide coin-shaped leaves was beginning to sprout under her feet.

  “Sorry,” Alena said. But the shrub didn’t seem affected by her intrusion until, intrigued by its presence, she squatted down near the thing and the simulation offered up more information about its true nature. The shrub was a type of information map, growing out of the sandy basin of foundational theories. When she picked up a handful of the soil, she could see that it was made up of facts, and the roots were soaking up parts of the soil to form a coherent body of physics.

  Alena moved forward to her hands and knees. She held the test booklet up behind the leaf, where it clarified into what at first she thought was an deterministic algorithm, then quickly realized was actually a stochastic process. It was gene mutation and expression, played out on the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

  The plant died. Alena stood up and whipped the test booklet behind her back, but the Beautiful Gardener didn’t chastise her; she was entirely wrapped up in what could only be called weeding.

  The Beautiful Gardener pulled out plants by their roots and flung them at a young tree with smooth pale bark and wide, deeply lobed leaves. As they landed, the weeds decomposed into their component parts, which Alena could grasp through the interface momentarily before they melted into the ground.

  Alena stared upwards. Above them should be void, waiting to be filled according to the candidate’s rules, but here there was only blue. It was, according to the information the simulation offered, a sky. Alena, like all of the human beings left in the universe she came from, had never seen a sky in person before.

  She clenched the cold hydrogen marble in her fist and turned her attention back to her competition. This was only a simulation, she reminded herself. She still had never seen a real sky.

  “What are you doing?” Alena asked. Maybe she didn’t need to break it; it seemed that the Beautiful Gardener hadn’t managed a full universe at all. This was the top candidate that the proctors had been eyeing?

  “I’m taking advantage of a process called cosmic orthogenesis. Or more metaphorically”—the Beautiful Gardener waved a spade at the small tree— “I’m waiting for this tree to fruit.”

  That was more information than Alena had expected, or even felt she deserved, considering they were competitors. Not to mention that if she was really so smart, surely the Beautiful Gardener knew what Alena had done to the other candidates.

  Alena looked around almost hesitantly for any weaknesses in the system; it would be pleasurable to break the favored candidate, but to be honest, the creation was rich and deep, all encompassing in a way that the others hadn’t been.

  And anyway, unless someone could live in this garden of random walks, she wasn’t going to score in any of the five categories.

  * * *

  1:00–2:00: Lunch

  Without any jarring motion, they were back in the reception room. The number of candidates was less than half of what it had been during the meet and greet. The Ancient Mathematician looked dizzy.

  The Beautiful Gardener was back to being beautiful again. Even though she hadn’t produced anything as far as Alena could tell, she looked extremely content.

  There were plenty of empty chairs, and the Ancient Mathematician was doing the complicated calculus of where to sit that was close enough to show enthusias
m but also wasn’t awkwardly in the front row, near enough to his competitors that he wasn’t being antisocial, but still far enough that they wouldn’t have to necessarily speak to each other.

  The Beautiful Gardener returned to where she had been seated earlier in the morning, and as if remembering that this problem was reduced to one that had been previously solved, the Ancient Mathematician collapsed into the same row, two seats down. Alena remained standing.

  There was something touching her hip. Alena reached down and felt around in her pocket. It was hard, and cold, and shaped like a marble. She rubbed her thumb against it, tried to dig in with her nail, but it was solid and almost frictionless.

  The Proctor returned to tell them to help themselves to lunch and that they would be pulled out one at a time for individual interviews.

  This was it then. Finally she could sit down face-to-face with one of these so-called gods and demand to know. Were all universes destined to end horribly, or had hers just pulled the unlucky straw? The simple marble in her hand seemed to prove otherwise; she didn’t think that the application of any amount of time would be able to break it. But then, anything complex enough to be livable had been beyond Alena’s abilities to create.

  She clenched the marble in her fist. If only she had been able to create a universe as complex as the Ancient Mathematician’s or as detailed as the Beautiful Gardener’s. Or at least something that could score a single point for habitability. She didn’t have a smoking gun, proof that they should have done better for her universe. She couldn’t use this to demand answers, only to beg for an explanation. And if they admitted it to her and told her it was all just a big mistake? Or that it wasn’t, and for whatever arcane reasons the Builders had chosen her universe for death, what was she going to do about it anyway? Alena didn’t know. She was just angry.

  Her plan had only extended as far as preparing herself for the test by connecting to the mothership’s resources. Once she had figured out how to do it (breaking dual pole low-phase encryption, and smashing a deadbolt with a hammer), she lay back in the warm pocket of the ship testing out her new mental functions. The next thing she knew she was here.

  Alena inspected the room-temperature lunch spread thoroughly, but her stomach felt high and tight, like a fist under her ribcage, and she didn’t want to put anything in it. She hadn’t noticed feeling nervous during the exam, but now she felt the sensation of coming down from nervousness, like air being let out of a balloon leaving her deflated and gummy. She would have liked to drink something hot, but the coffee from earlier was nowhere in sight.

  The Beautiful Gardener interviewed first; somehow it seemed she was still the favorite.

  Across from Alena, the Ancient Mathematician was devouring a sandwich. She didn’t lean over and say something like, I hope they didn’t find your performance disappointing but she could have and not felt bad about it one bit.

  * * *

  2:00–3:00: Individual interview

  “Alenagundarsunurassttir?” the Proctor called, horribly mispronouncing Alena’s name.

  Alena raised her hand.

  “Please follow me for the individual interview portion,” the Proctor said, redundantly, because they were in a beige office with a wide desk. One empty chair sat across from a severe woman with a gridded score sheet.

  The Proctor closed the door on her way out, but not before Alena caught a glimpse of someone else passing down the hallway to who knows where.

  The Interviewer cleared her throat to let Alena know how hideously unprofessional she had been to take her eyes off the interviewer for even one second. Alena sat down.

  “Hello. I’m an associate coordinator, and I’m on the training and selection committee. If you’re approved by the Board of Cosmogamy, I’ll be your supervisor for the first training session. Thanks for coming in today, I know this can be a pretty long and grueling process. Do you have any questions about the process so far?”

  She cocked her head as if she were listening for an answer. Alena was about to respond but the Interviewer continued on, unheeding: “I’m not one myself, I wouldn’t even know where to begin! I’m part of the support staff, but if you’re selected, you’ll have the opportunity to meet some Builders after the simulation ends. They always like to approve new people personally.”

  Alena’s posture crumpled. There was no way she would make it through the second round. The Interviewer was already talking again.

  “Alright. This interview is not meant to be a recitation of your background and skill set, we feel the information we’ve already collected on you, along with your exam results, give us a good picture of your abilities. We’re more interested in whether you’re a good ‘cultural fit’ with our organization.”

  People always said things like that to cover the fact that they had already made up their minds about you. What does “cultural fit” even mean? What culture? Was this woman just here to decide whether or not she liked her? Alena wished she had eaten something earlier.

  “‘Cultural fit’ in this context means we’re looking for someone who embodies the values of consistency, completeness, resolution, determinism, transitivity, and habitability in their approach to problems.”

  Those were mostly mathematical properties. How was someone supposed to embody the values of say, transitivity, in their everyday life?

  The Interviewer’s brows dropped. “Surely you knew this and came prepared for this interview,” she said.

  Alena opened her mouth to claim that yes, surely she had, but the Interviewer raised a hand to stop her and continued,

  “Well, that’s disappointing but not altogether unexpected.”

  Alena’s head jerked back in surprise. She and the Interviewer regarded each other with equally displeased expressions.

  “No, I’m not reading your mind. This is a temporary pocket of spacetime we call a ‘sandbox’ that was constructed with specific parameters in mind. One of which is that I, as the creator, have near-simultaneous knowledge of all of the contents of the sandbox, including whatever goes through your mind, as you are right now a construct of the sandbox. Yes, sort of like reading your mind. No, nothing so extreme. Yes, you are. Well you knew that much when you signed up,” the Interviewer said in rapid response.

  All that just fucking added up, didn’t it? Sure. Fine. Whatever. Sandwiches, danishes, the ability to read foreign names and mysterious professions on the sign-in sheet. Alena immediately started brainstorming all of the things she shouldn’t think about.

  For example, she probably shouldn’t think about how she had just cheated her way through the first round of simulations. Wouldn’t they know about that already with their so-called near simultaneous knowledge? Definitely she shouldn’t think about how she had been studying from a stolen test preparation book, or how she had been taking neuroplasticity-enhancing drugs for the last year in preparation.

  “Yes, that was not ideal behavior, nor fitting with the type of character we are looking for in Builders, but there are some special dispensations. You know most of the other people here are from places and time periods where human life is flourishing, and have been born and bred to excel at cosmostatic reasoning. We can occasionally turn a blind eye to someone playing neurophysical catch-up.”

  “I’ve never heard of cosmostatic reasoning,” Alena said, and it came out of her mouth because she said it before she thought it.

  “You’ve been thinking of it as ‘modeling,’ because you never studied it formally. That’s all right, we’re trying to be more welcoming of candidates from … underprivileged backgrounds.”

  Even though this was an unembodied space beyond time, and her real body was lying in a nest of connective tissues deep in the belly of her mothership, Alena’s face heated up. So that was why she had made it this far, despite struggling with every element of the exam. She was the diversity candidate.

  The Interviewer’s smile faltered. Maybe she had expected Alena to be happy about that news and was put out now tha
t she wasn’t. Maybe she thought Alena should feel privileged to hear a tidbit from behind the curtain, to have her time wasted by the august Board in this moment outside of time and space.

  Joke’s on you, Alena wanted to say, I never thought I had any chance of passing. She didn’t have to say it of course, since thinking was enough.

  The Interviewer pursed her lips. The rest of the interview consisted of tedious mathematical problems Alena did not know how to answer.

  * * *

  3:30–5:00: 2nd simulation session

  They were back in the simulation. Alena was steaming. She was gripping the ball of universe so tightly it was probably going to lose a dimension.

  The application of time apparently required a different user interface, because the back of her mind now contained a switch and a dial. The switch moved in two directions, forward and reverse. The dial was shaped like an infinite double cone with the apex at the origin of an n-dimensional space. She toyed with the dial first without touching the switch.

  It was pretty fucking cool actually, but didn’t fit the aesthetic or the goals of her lump universe. Alena reluctantly collapsed the double cone into its projection on the xy-plane and labeled the clockwise direction with an unbounded sequence of speeds.

  She tossed the grey marble up and down a few times. The switch only had two directions, forwards and backwards. Once she turned time on, there wouldn’t be any stopping.

  Alena flipped the switch to “forward” and cranked the dial clockwise one full turn. The grey lump didn’t seem to show any effects whatsoever.

  Alena rolled it between her palms a few times. Time was certainly passing in the model universe; she could tell from the interface. Time was also probably passing in the simulation. The simulation was built in a sandbox, and that sandbox existed somewhere inside a universe subject to some measure of time, forwards or backwards at some speed, somewhere.