Stories of Your Life

by Chiang, Ted

  I get everything in place by the time Reynolds has finished saying my name; his next sentence could be the destruct command. I'm now receiving my sensory input with a one-hundred-and-twenty millisecond time lag. I reexamine my analysis of the human mind, explicitly searching for evidence to verify his assertion.

  Meanwhile I give my response lightly, casually. “Hit me with your best shot."

  "Don't worry; it's not on the tip of my tongue."

  My search produces something. I curse myself: there's a very subtle back door to a psyche's design, which I lacked the necessary mind-set to notice. Whereas my weapon was one born of introspection, his is something only a manipulator could originate.

  Reynolds knows that I've built my defenses; is his trigger command designed to circumvent them? I continue deriving the nature of the trigger command's actions.

  "What are you waiting for?” He's confident that additional time won't allow me to construct a defense.

  "Try to guess.” So smug. Can he actually toy with me so easily?

  I arrive at a theoretical description of a trigger's effects on normals. A single command can reduce any subcritical mind to a tabula rasa, but an undetermined degree of customization is needed for enhanced minds. The erasure has distinctive symptoms, which my simulator can alert me to, but those are symptoms of a process calculable by me. By definition the destruct command is that specific equation beyond my ability to imagine; would my metaprogrammer collapse while diagnosing the simulator's condition?

  "Have you used the destruct command on normals?” I begin calculating what's needed to generate a customized destruct command.

  "Once, as an experiment on a drug dealer. Afterward I concealed the evidence with a blow to the temple."

  It becomes obvious that the generation is a colossal task. Generating a trigger requires intimate knowledge of my mind; I extrapolate what he could have learned about me. It appears to be insufficient, given my reprogramming, but he may have techniques of observation unknown to me. I'm acutely aware of the advantage he's gained by studying the outside world.

  "You will have to do this many times."

  His regret is evident. His plan can't be implemented without more deaths: those of normal humans, by strategic necessity, and those of a few enhanced assistants of his, whose temptation by greater heights would interfere. After using the command, Reynolds may reprogram them—or me—as savants, having focused intentions and restricted self-metaprogrammers. Such deaths are a necessary cost of his plan.

  "I make no claims of being a saint."

  Merely a savior.

  Normals might think him a tyrant, because they mistake him for one of them, and they've never trusted their own judgment. They can't fathom that Reynolds is equal to the task. His judgment is optimal in questions of their affairs, and their notions of greed and ambition do not apply to an enhanced mind.

  In a histrionic gesture, Reynolds raises his hand, forefinger extended, as if to make a point. I don't have sufficient information to generate his destruct command, so for the moment I can only attend to defense. If I can survive his attack, I may have time to launch another one of my own.

  With his finger upraised, he says, “Understand."

  At first I don't. And then, horrifyingly, I do.

  He didn't design the command to be spoken; it's not a sensory trigger at all. It's a memory trigger: the command is made out of a string of perceptions, individually harmless, that he planted in my brain like time bombs. The mental structures that were formed as a result of those memories are now resolving into a pattern, forming a gestalt that defines my dissolution. I'm intuiting the Word myself.

  Immediately my mind is working faster than ever before. Against my will, a lethal realization is suggesting itself to me. I'm trying to halt the associations, but these memories can't be suppressed. The process occurs inexorably, as a consequence of my awareness, and like a man falling from a height, I'm forced to watch.

  Milliseconds pass. My death passes before my eyes.

  An image of the grocery store when Reynolds passed by. The psychedelic shirt the boy was wearing; Reynolds had programmed the display to implant a suggestion within me, ensuring that my “randomly” reprogrammed psyche remained receptive. Even then.

  No time. All I can do is metaprogram myself over randomly, at a furious pace. An act of desperation, possibly crippling.

  The strange modulated sounds that I heard when I first entered Reynolds’ apartment. I absorbed the fatal insights before I had any defenses raised.

  I tear apart my psyche, but still the conclusion grows clearer, the resolution sharper.

  Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.

  I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.

  I wonder what he intends to do after he's saved the world.

  I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.

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  Division by Zero

  1

  Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally “undefined."

  1a

  Renee was looking out the window when Mrs. Rivas approached.

  "Leaving after only a week? Hardly a real stay at all. Lord knows I won't be leaving for a long time."

  Renee forced a polite smile. “I'm sure it won't be long for you.” Mrs. Rivas was the manipulator in the ward; everyone knew that her attempts were merely gestures, but the aides wearily paid attention to her lest she succeed accidentally.

  "Ha. They wish I'd leave. You know what kind of liability they face if you die while you're on status?"

  "Yes, I know."

  "That's all they're worried about, you can tell. Always their liability—"

  Renee tuned out and returned her attention to the window, watching a contrail extrude itself across the sky.

  "Mrs. Norwood?” a nurse called. “Your husband's here."

  Renee gave Mrs. Rivas another polite smile and left.

  1b

  Carl signed his name yet another time, and finally the nurses took away the forms for processing.

  He remembered when he had brought Renee in to be admitted, and thought of all the stock questions at the first interview. He had answered them all stoically.

  "Yes, she's a professor of mathematics. You can find her in Who's Who."

  "No, I'm in biology."

  And:

  "I had left behind a box of slides that I needed."

  "No, she couldn't have known."

  And, just as expected:

  "Yes, I have. It was about twenty years ago, when I was a grad student."

  "No, I tried jumping."

  "No, Renee and I didn't know each other then."

  And on and on.

  Now they were convinced that he was competent and supportive, and were ready to release Renee into an outpatient treatment program.

  Looking back, Carl was surprised in an abstracted way. Except for one moment, there hadn't been any sense of deja vu at any time during the entire ordeal. All the time he was dealing with the hospital, the doctors, the nurses: the only accompanying sensation was one of numbness, of sheer tedious rote.

  2

  There is a well-known “proof” that demonstrates that one equals two. It begins with some definitions: “Let a = 1; let b = 1.” It ends with the conclusion “a = 2a,” that is, one equals two. Hidden inconspicuously in the middle is a division by zero, and at that point the proof has stepped off the brink, making all rul
es null and void. Permitting division by zero allows one to prove not only that one and two are equal, but that any two numbers at all—real or imaginary, rational or irrational—are equal.

  2a

  As soon as she and Carl got home, Renee went to the desk in her study and began turning all the papers facedown, blindly sweeping them together into a pile; she winced whenever a corner of a page faced up during her shuffling. She considered burning the pages, but that would be merely symbolic now. She'd accomplish as much by simply never glancing at them.

  The doctors would probably describe it as obsessive behavior. Renee frowned, reminded of the indignity of being a patient under such fools. She remembered being on suicide status, in the locked ward, under the supposedly round-the-clock observation of the aides. And the interviews with the doctors, who were so condescending, so obvious. She was no manipulator like Mrs. Rivas, but it really was easy. Simply say “I realize I'm not well yet, but I do feel better,” and you'd be considered almost ready for release.

  2b

  Carl watched Renee from the doorway for a moment, before he passed down the hallway. He remembered the day, fully two decades past, when he himself had been released. His parents had picked him up, and on the trip back his mother had made some inane comment about how glad everyone would be to see him, and he was just barely able to restrain himself from shaking her arm off his shoulders.

  He had done for Renee what he would have appreciated during his period under observation. He had come to visit every day, even though she refused to see him at first, so that he wouldn't be absent when she did want to see him. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes they simply walked around the grounds. He could find nothing wrong in what he did, and he knew that she appreciated it.

  Yet, despite all his efforts, he felt no more than a sense of duty towards her.

  3

  In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove “1 + 1 = 2."

  3a

  As a child of seven, while investigating the house of a relative, Renee had been spellbound at discovering the perfect squares in the smooth marble tiles of the floor. A single one, two rows of two, three rows of three, four rows of four: the tiles fit together in a square. Of course. No matter which side you looked at it from, it came out the same. And more than that, each square was bigger than the last by an odd number of tiles. It was an epiphany. The conclusion was necessary: it had a rightness to it, confirmed by the smooth, cool feel of the tiles. And the way the tiles were fitted together, with such incredibly fine lines where they met; she had shivered at the precision.

  Later on there came other realizations, other achievements. The astonishing doctoral dissertation at twenty-three, the series of acclaimed papers; people compared her to Von Neumann, universities wooed her. She had never paid any of it much attention. What she did pay attention to was that same sense of rightness, possessed by every theorem she learned, as insistent as the tiles’ physicality, and as exact as their fit.

  3b

  Carl felt that the person he was today was born after his attempt, when he met Laura. After being released from the hospital, he was in no mood to see anyone, but a friend of his had managed to introduce him to Laura. He had pushed her away initially, but she had known better. She had loved him while he was hurting, and let him go once he was healed. Through knowing her Carl had learned about empathy, and he was remade.

  Laura had moved on after getting her own master's degree, while he stayed at the university for his doctorate in biology. He suffered various crises and heartbreaks later on in life, but never again despair.

  Carl marveled when he thought about what kind of person she was. He hadn't spoken to her since grad school; what had her life been like over the years? He wondered whom else she had loved. Early on he had recognized what kind of love it was, and what kind it wasn't, and he valued it immensely.

  4

  In the early nineteenth century, mathematicians began exploring geometries that differed from Euclidean geometry; these alternate geometries produced results that seemed utterly absurd, but they didn't produce logical contradictions. It was later shown that these non-Euclidean geometries were consistent relative to Euclidean geometry: they were logically consistent, as long as one assumed that Euclidean geometry was consistent.

  The proof of Euclidean geometry's consistency eluded mathematicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best that was achieved was a proof that Euclidean geometry was consistent as long as arithmetic was consistent.

  4a

  At the time, when it all began, Renee had thought it little more than an annoyance. She had walked down the hall and knocked on the open door of Peter Fabrisi's office. “Pete, got a minute?"

  Fabrisi pushed his chair back from his desk. “Sure, Renee, what's up?"

  Renee came in, knowing what his reaction would be. She had never asked anyone in the department for advice on a problem before; it had always been the reverse. No matter. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor. You remember what I was telling you about a couple weeks back, about the formalism I was developing?"

  He nodded. “The one you were rewriting axiom systems with."

  "Right. Well, a few days ago I started coming up with really ridiculous conclusions, and now my formalism is contradicting itself. Could you take a look at it?"

  Fabrisi's expression was as expected. “You want—sure, I'd be glad to."

  "Great. The examples on the first few pages are where the problem is; the rest is just for your reference.” She handed Fabrisi a thin sheaf of papers. “I thought if I talked you through it, you'd just see the same things I do."

  "You're probably right.” Fabrisi looked at the first couple pages. “I don't know how long this'll take."

  "No hurry. When you get a chance, just see whether any of my assumptions seem a little dubious, anything like that. I'll still be going at it, so I'll tell you if I come up with anything. Okay?"

  Fabrisi smiled. “You're just going to come in this afternoon and tell me you've found the problem."

  "I doubt it: this calls for a fresh eye."

  He spread his hands. “I'll give it a shot."

  "Thanks.” It was unlikely that Fabrisi would fully grasp her formalism, but all she needed was someone who could check its more mechanical aspects.

  4b

  Carl had met Renee at a party given by a colleague of his. He had been taken with her face. Hers was a remarkably plain face, and it appeared quite somber most of the time, but during the party he saw her smile twice and frown once; at those moments, her entire countenance assumed the expression as if it had never known another. Carl had been caught by surprise: he could recognize a face that smiled regularly, or a face that frowned regularly, even if it were unlined. He was curious as to how her face had developed such a close familiarity with so many expressions, and yet normally revealed nothing.

  It took a long time for him to understand Renee, to read her expressions. But it had definitely been worthwhile.

  Now Carl sat in his easy chair in his study, a copy of the latest issue of Marine Biology in his lap, and listened to the sound of Renee crumpling paper in her study across the hall. She'd been working all evening, with audibly increasing frustration, though she'd been wearing her customary poker face when last he'd looked in.

  He put the journal aside, got up from the chair, and walked over to the entrance of her study. She had a volume opened on her desk; the pages were filled with the usual hieroglyphic equations, interspersed with commentary in Russian.

  She scanned some of the material, dismissed it with a barely perceptible frown, and slammed the volume closed. Carl heard her mutter the word “useless,” and she returned the tome to the bookcase.

  "You're gonna give y
ourself high blood pressure if you keep up like this,” Carl jested.

  "Don't patronize me."

  Carl was startled. “I wasn't."

  Renee turned to look at him and glared. “I know when I'm capable of working productively and when I'm not."

  Chilled. “Then I won't bother you.” He retreated.

  "Thank you.” She returned her attention to the bookshelves. Carl left, trying to decipher that glare.

  5

  At the Second International Congress of Mathematics in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

  5a

  Renee had known what Fabrisi would say before he opened his mouth.

  "That was the damnedest thing I've ever seen. You know that toy for toddlers where you fit blocks with different cross sections into the differently shaped slots? Reading your formal system is like watching someone take one block and sliding it into every single hole on the board, and making it a perfect fit every time."

  "So you can't find the error?"

  He shook his head. “Not me. I've slipped into the same rut as you. I can only think about it one way."

  Renee was no longer in a rut: she had come up with a totally different approach to the question, but it only confirmed the original contradiction. “Well, thanks for trying."

  "You going to have someone else take a look at it?"

  "Yes, I think I'll send it to Callahan over at Berkeley. We've been corresponding since the conference last spring."