The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Evelyn had one of the first Apple II Plus computers. Her father gave it to her for her birthday. It had a Motorola 6502 processor, 48K of memory, a monochrome monitor and a 128K floppy drive. After school I would go over to her house and we would tinker with the Apple. We wrote our programs in a language called Applesoft Basic. It was a horrible language, but at the time we thought it was wonderful.

  The Apple had a random-number generator. The function RND(1) produced a random number between zero and one. The function RND(26) gave a number between zero and twenty-six and the function INT(RND(26)) made sure that number was an integer. It was easy to write a program where I = A, 2 = B, and so on. We didn’t bother with punctuation marks. We called our program the Motorola Monkey and tested the hypothesis that, typing at random down through the ages, a monkey would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

  It took the Apple about four hours to fill up one floppy disk with what we called “random text.” Once we got the program working Evelyn would start the Monkey on a run before she went to bed at night, change the disk in the morning, and start another run before she left for school. Her mom was worried about the power bill until I told her that turning the Apple on, when there was a lot of whirring and chirping, used more electricity than leaving it running for a week.

  After school we would scan the random text, watching it scroll down the screen, looking for a recognizable word, or even a phrase. After the first run we changed the function to INT(RND(27)) and set 27 equal to a space. Reading a scrolling text with no spaces between the words was impossible.

  Did I say words? A sample line of output would be:

  GMJRDBRKMHDNFWVYNVE OQ FFVH

  After the second run we changed the function to INT(RND(3l)) and made the extra five characters all spaces. That way the string of letters was broken down into word-sized chunks:

  GMJRD BRKMHDNF WVYNVE OQ FFVH

  As you see, inserting more spaces didn’t help all that much.

  Months went by and slowly I realized that looking for meaning in the Apple’s random texts was like looking in the mailbox for a letter from my father.

  You see, in a line of Shakespeare there are about thirty letters. The odds against getting even a single line of Shakespeare are roughly a fifty-digit number to one. But Evelyn and I didn’t figure that out until we were in high school.

  Once we discovered what appeared to be part of the table of contents from a physics text published in the year 2247, but we couldn’t understand it.

  Anyway, that was the first phase of my project, the Applesoft Basic phase, Release 1.0 of the Monkey, so to speak.

  Much later I learned there is no such thing as a random-number generator and that our effort had been completely wasted.

  * * *

  I went to college in Boston, to a sort of technical school by the Charles River. I wasn’t the only student there with 800 on the math SAT. My major was computer science. Evelyn went to study physics somewhere else.

  I never found another friend like Evelyn. I’ve never met anyone else who wondered, seriously, if we were discovering random texts, or creating them. Evelyn and I would argue about this for hours at the Apple’s keyboard. I felt we were discovering them, she was for creation. We did agree that Newton discovered calculus while Shakespeare created Hamlet.

  One day in Boston there was a partial eclipse of the sun. I was walking down a busy street when it happened. Some kids in the street were staring at the sun without eye protection. Some adults didn’t know any better either. I got a sheet of cardboard from the top of a recycling stack waiting on the curb and used my pen to punch a pinhole in the center of the cardboard.

  I held the sheet above my head. In its shadow, projected on the sidewalk through the pinhole, there was a bright image of the chewed-up sun. Everyone gathered around me, staring down at the sidewalk. I climbed some steps to make the image larger. The kids cheered and the adults broke into applause. I started to explain some of the celestial mechanics, but just then everyone in the crowd had to leave, probably because their lunch hour was over.

  * * *

  The next morning, early, my mom called to say my father was dead. “A truck backed over him at the plant. It was a freak accident.”

  I felt numb.

  * * *

  I felt numb.

  Interesting, how we use the same verb to describe sensation—I felt warm—as we use to describe emotion—I felt numb.

  Hidden in our language are truths about ourselves. In this case, Pete, the hidden truth is that the neural circuits that process sensation are the same neural circuits that create emotion. The difference between sensation and emotion is that information flows the other way. Emotion is nothing more than sensation in reverse. You know you are afraid because your heart is pounding, your palms sweaty, and your mouth is dry.

  The word itself—e-motion—means “flowing out.” Emotion is simply sensation we create.

  * * *

  During my first year in college I took a class called Foundations of Mathematics and I learned that building a machine to generate truly random numbers is impossible. I know that you earn your living fixing broken machinery and you probably feel that the universe is not only random, it is perversely so. But serious mathematicians all know that there is no mathematical trick, no equation, capable of producing a truly random series of numbers. Although Evelyn and I hadn’t known it, the Motorola Monkey had been stillborn.

  The universe isn’t a big machine built cunningly by the Cosmic Watchmaker, nor is it a roulette wheel where the atoms rattle around like white balls, settling our fate by chance alone. No. The universe is something else, something in between, something weird, something completely numerical that remains quite unpredictable.

  For example: Pour a glass of water into the ocean and wait a few years for that water to mix with all the other water in the ocean. Go down to the beach again and scoop a glass of water back from the sea. The water you scoop out will contain several molecules of the water you poured in ten years ago.

  Surprised?

  The explanation’s simple. There are far more water molecules in a single glass of water than there are glasses of water in the ocean. What you can do with numbers is amazing. Particularly large numbers.

  Using the same idea, you can see that every glass of water you drink contains molecules of water that once were in the body of Jesus Christ. There’s a mathematical proof of the Holy Communion.

  Not that I ever bothered with Jesus Christ. My style was more mystical. Experience God directly, that sort of thing, a Communion of Big Numbers.

  You’ll see what I mean.

  * * *

  After the death of my father I entered the white-noise phase of my lifelong project.

  The white-noise period really began when the guy across the hall got a new TV and gave his old twelve-inch black-and-white to me. There was no cable in the dorm so reception was poor, just a couple of channels with a weak picture and nothing but a lot of snow on the other stations.

  It was the snow that gave me the idea.

  When you see snow on a dead channel your TV is picking up cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Strange, yet wonderful. Every night, in your own home, you can watch the Creation.

  At Radio Shack I bought twenty dollars’ worth of electronics parts. You’ve seen the rows of stuff in pale blue blister packs hanging at the back of the store where only guys go? I got one IC analog-to-digital converter complete with pin-out diagram, an assortment of loose resistors and capacitors, a twelve-volt power supply, and a blank printed-circuit board for breadboarding the circuit I was going to build.

  The input was amplified RF from the tuner of the TV. I ripped the set out of its case and mounted the tuner on the PC board. The RF output from the tuner was fed through six inches of coax cable into the analog-to-digital converter. I tuned to a dead channel and the output from the A/D converter on the breadboard was a random string of digits. Truly random.

&nbs
p; The computer I owned at that time was a PC-AT, 12-megahertz Intel 286 processor, 40-MB hard drive, two floppies. A state-of-the-art machine back then. I rewrote the Motorola Monkey in Borland’s Turbo Pascal so the Monkey would run on the IBM. Release 2.0.

  I had a lot of trouble getting the hookup from the breadboard to the computer’s serial port to work, but in the end I got it right.

  So, Pete, do you understand what I was doing?

  White noise from the random hiss of the Big Bang, left over from the beginning of time, was captured and amplified by the TV tuner, converted into a string of bits in the A/D converter, fed into the PC, turned into a string of letters, and the final product, random text, was stored on the hard drive.

  Release 2.0 of the Monkey had some successes. I still remember the most surprising random text I discovered, or as Evelyn would say, created:

  One of the greatest surprises in the history of science is that the end of the twentieth century marked the end of the age of reason and the death of the four-hundred-year-old dream of the rationalists of the Enlightenment. Those closing years saw reason’s demarcation of the boundaries of reason. Thoughtful men saw that the universe contains limits on reason which cannot be broken. Speeds faster than the speed of light are not possible and, in the same way, some of the workings of the universe are simply not accessible to reason.

  This idea was not new. In the middle of the century the far-sighted philosopher Wittgenstein had written:

  When I have exhausted my justifications I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned.

  Through the twentieth century science stumbled upon a series of fundamental, cunningly constructed unresolvable enigmas. Slowly, the truth of Wittgenstein’s remark became apparent to all.

  Another text, as I remember, read something like this:

  Another canvas of size thirty. Here color is to do everything. This time is just simply my bedroom. The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter and pillows very light lemon green. The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac. When I saw my canvases after my illness the one that seemed best to me was the Bedroom.

  After some research I discovered this was a series of fragments from letters by van Gogh to his brother Theo. This text made Evelyn realize we might have rediscovered the same content in the original Dutch and then we wondered how many secrets the Monkey was printing in languages we didn’t know, in languages long dead, or languages yet to be created. But that was all we could do: wonder.

  Van Gogh killed himself a few months after painting his bedroom. The Apple had a monochrome display but the IBM had a crude color graphics capability, 640 X 480 pixels. Sixteen colors, I think. That made us think about programming a pixel-based Monkey to paint the screen with random dots of colors. We knew we might create, or discover, a van Gogh that van Gogh would have painted, had he not killed himself, but we never got the pixel-Monkey project off the ground.

  I have always been surprised at how you can stumble upon the same idea from different viewpoints, as if the idea were out there, somewhere, waiting to be found. Herman Hesse, in his great novel The Glass Bead Game, describes an imaginary country whose culture centers around a game in which the players juxtapose fragments of ideas from many disciplines of human thought. Masters of the game are adept at placing ideas to reveal new beauty and new truths. The interpretation of random texts required a similar facility with the whole realm of human thought and what Hesse imagined Evelyn and I rediscovered from a surprising and totally different direction—random texts. Random texts are a variation of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

  I should mention one other text that may help you understand my story. It is probably from a philosophy text but it’s impossible to date. This one could be from the past, or from the future, or from nowhere:

  In those dark years, when more and more effort was required to discover less and less knowledge, an unknown genius asked the question: Why struggle to discover facts through experiments? Why not look for texts from the future that already contain those facts? Ideas have always come from nowhere. Creativity is an eternal enigma. Random texts are nothing but a device for creating ideas from nothing.

  In our time, rational science has assumed its rightful place as one of many tools in the toolbox of human thought. Random texts are an infinite flood of ideas, each of which can be tested against other ideas. Selecting those random texts that describe the universe most accurately is the task of the human mind for the rest of eternity. And in this task we join ourselves with God, for this is His eternal task.

  Enigmatic, for sure. Could be a sixteenth-century text by Sir Francis Bacon, perhaps a gloss on his Novum Organum, but it could also be a fragment from a religious text that will be written in the future. But, Pete, I tell you these things so you can see that we weren’t just fooling around.

  In fact, we gave a lot of thought to the fact that random texts may be from the future or the past or from nowhere, and in each case may be true or false. So how do you decide if they are true or false? There are two ways, Pete.

  Internal consistency: Does the text make sense with itself? If it contradicts itself, it can’t be true.

  External consistency: does it agree with other truths?

  The first text passes on both criteria. Of course, there could be a little more internal consistency, but at least there is no inconsistency. The second passes also. The third—who knows?

  Later, I realized that these texts, although appealing in many ways, were nothing but random noise. Listening to fading echoes from the Big Bang was as likely to reveal truth as was a newborn babe likely to articulate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.

  You see, when the universe was young, God knew nothing.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * *

  Although my major was computer science I took a lot of math and physics classes and for an easy credit I registered for Professor Kuhl’s Epistemology of Science: Fundamental Problems. We met for two hours every Thursday afternoon in the spring semester in a classroom that was an old amphitheater with oak paneling and tall leaded windows facing west. Sloping beams of light fell on the shoulders of the students and the sunlight lay in pools at the feet of Professor Kuhl.

  The professor was a tiny white-haired old man who always wore the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He smelled of pipe tobacco and spoke slowly, with a thick East European accent. There was a sadness in his voice, a mourning for something lost and irreplaceable.

  The course was an overview of mathematical physics and the philosophy of science. In the first class, when the trees by the river were still bare, Professor Kuhl proved mathematically that time and space were relative, unique for each observer. That’s Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  Later in the semester Kuhl showed that we could never measure the exact position and the exact momentum of a particle at the same time. That’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

  As the days grew longer the Professor proved that the ultimate building blocks of matter are both particles and waves, depending on what experiment you perform, and that random fluctuation of these enigmatic entities is the basis of all that exists. That’s quantum mechanics.

  When the trees were covered with new leaves, Professor Kuhl deduced on the blackboard the existence of statements that are true, but unprovable. That’s Godel’s Theorem. Think about that idea applied to the whole universe, Pete. Godel’s Theorem is itself such a statement. See what I mean about weird?

  Finally, as summer began, he showed that the behavior of all but the simplest systems cannot be predicted. Two pendulums, one hanging from the other, and all our mathematics fails. Two pieces of string and two lead weights stump the finest human minds, and always will. That’s chaos theory.

  What Professor Kuhl taught me was that the Cartesian idea of a complicated but predictable clockwork universe is impossible.
Even theoretically, the future is totally unknowable. Not unknown, but unknowable. Sure, reason works to fix a leaking faucet, but most of the universe is simply not accessible to reason.

  * * *

  Reason. The most elegant function of the human brain.

  When we reason we are using the same circuits in our brains that we use to process sensation and emotion because those are the only circuits we have inside our heads. At the neural level, there is no difference between thinking and feeling.

  We only like to think there is because thinking makes us feel good.

  Inside our mammalian brains, which are the only ones we’ll ever have, incoming sensation, outgoing emotion, and the internal activity we call thought are jumbled joyously.

  * * *

  You’re following all this, Pete? I hope your beeper doesn’t go off, just as I’m getting to the interesting part. It’s a full moon tonight and some crazy’s probably stuffing ten rolls of toilet paper down the john over in Building T, half a mile away.

  I know how you just love those kinds of calls, how you look on them as a punishment.

  * * *

  The mathematician Gauss was punished once, when he was a schoolboy. His class was kept in late for some misdemeanor, and each boy was to add up all the numbers from one to one hundred. The eight-year-old Gauss, who would grow up to be the greatest mathematician of his century, turned in the correct answer after a few seconds’ work.

  You see, you can write down all the numbers and add them up, or you can get an answer quickly by using the formula n(n+1)/2, which Gauss discovered in those first few seconds of his detention.

  Adding all the numbers from one to one hundred is a problem that mathematicians say is algorithmically compressible. It can be reduced to a formula.

  As I listened to Professor Kuhl’s final lecture I realized that God has crafted an algorithmically incompressible universe so that even He cannot know the future. Sure, the universe is computable, but the computation of the universe is algorithmically incompressible. There are no shortcuts, no quick method that will give an answer.