Logic Beach- Part I

by Exurb1a

  Lemuria was attempting to peer into the bedrock of matter, to define what governed the cosmos’ physical laws. That had always been the Lemurian mission, from the moment the first infants migrated up into the tier and the Glass King had separated it from the Ape Cellar. Early on it was decided that to answer the question of what matter is, the project would have to be split into four sections. Temporal: Why does the universe exist in time? Spatial: What was the origin of space and matter? Scalar: Why does the universe behave differently depending on the scale at which one conducts an experiment? And Interactive: What is it about the first three interacting with each other that leads to a consistent universe?

  To Argie’s perception at least, the pillars had taken the form of actual artifacts, though in reality they were probably closer to monstrously large nodebanks. Several million Lemurians had been working for era after era at each of the pillar sites, running calculations, comparing data, testing hypotheses. After one hundred thousand cycles (several thousand years in sapien time), the project was not even half-finished.

  Temporal had made excellent progress peering into the roots of entropy. A number of problems had been solved such as why the universe created ordered states. In fact the initial cosmic singularity, the big bang, could only bring low-order matter into being; given enough time, complex structures were bound to emerge. Why that was the case though was still not clear.

  Spatial had also forged ahead, explaining matter as a form of high-level logic. Matter itself appeared to be a necessity in nature rather than just a mere accident; born of node logic. Again though, it was unclear why this should be the case.

  Scalar had been the first to produce actual results that didn’t require further explanation. Matter behaved bizarrely on a quantum level since it was too small to be governed by the majority of natural laws that operated the macrocosmos. This was matter’s most honest state in any case; superposition, quantum tunnelling, entanglement, cleavance, wormhole fracture; all of the strange furniture of quantum mechanics appeared to be the universe’s true face. All else was matter trying to seem sober, putting on laws for show.

  The Interactive pillar had enjoyed limited achievement. With so much work yet to be completed at the other sites, it was almost impossible to explain cosmic interaction without the necessary data. The Lemurians had made some progress though. A theory of quantum gravity had long ago been developed, gravity itself originating from spacetime geometry rather than any kind of particle proving itself responsible for the effect. String matrices now accounted for almost all manifestations of subatomic particles, save for the up-phidon and blue aethic.

  The dream, of course, was to one day pool the findings into a single overarching proof or equation not just to explain the behaviour of all physical processes, but the presence of spacetime itself.

  “I’ll ask once more,” the man said. “What is the monster doing out of her cage?”

  “Getting some air,” Lambert said again.

  The man advanced.

  “Wait,” Argie yelled. “Just wait. I’m looking for my daughter, Kaluza.”

  “How lovely for you.”

  “Here, this is her,” Argie said and sent a selfsense packet in the Lemurian's direction.

  The man shook his head. “Don’t recognise her, sorry.” He advanced towards Lambert again.

  Lambert began to back away, looking a little helplessly to Argie.

  “I do,” came a voice. “I recognise her.” It was the hypercube, glowing a gentle green now. “She came through here a few hundred cycles ago. She wanted to know about our work.”

  “You’re sure?” Argie said.

  “I’m sure. She was insatiable, wanted to know everything about the project. I told her all I could. She didn’t seem like an ape-fucker.”

  That’s because she wasn’t one at all really, Argie thought sadly. “Where did she go next? Did she say?”

  “To the other projects. Scalar first, I think.” The cube shrank a moment, apparently embarrassed. “There’s something else,” it said. “She wasn’t right. She wanted to talk by selfsense all the time even though she didn’t really know what she was doing.”

  “Sounds like Kaluza all right. Thank you.” She turned to The Navigator. “We should visit the other towers. Maybe she decided to settle with one of them.”

  “I'd make haste with that,” the man said. “The towers are all being collapsed for preservation.” He nodded to the Mergerment in the distance with its great expanding black bulk. “Can't have that thing swallowing them all up.”

  “Hey!” Lambert yelled. One of the entourage was trying to bind her hands.

  “Please leave her alone,” Argie said. “Really, we have use for her. I'll make sure she doesn't get up to any mischief.”

  “And who the fuck are you?” scoffed the man. “Do you even know who this is? Do you even know what she's capable of?”

  “I'm aware of her crimes, yes. If she takes a step out of line I'll banish her to the greeting room again.”

  “And how are you going to go about that?”

  “I have special privileges.”

  He raised an entertained eyebrow. “What special privileges do they give to ape-fuckers these days? First dibs on breakfast?”

  Argie was going to reply but she sensed the man was studying her, probably running a deep scan on her tags. Suddenly he took a step back and his face faded to neutral. “Apologies,” he murmured. “I meant no disrespect. Scalar, Spatial, and Interactive are still all operational for a short time. You should be able to find them with ease. We suggest you get going quickly. The towers won't stand for much longer, and the logicians will probably move on, including whoever you're looking for.”

  Argie stared. On instinct she shut down the perceptual filter to see Lemuria as it was. The planes dissolved. The figures dissolved. In their place remained only tags and notions, little more than a mad cacophony of information. She resisted the urge to scream, to turn and run, if she still had the presence of mind to operate her legs. And she saw, just for a moment, that the man – or what had appeared a man only a moment before - respected her suddenly, in some dark and knowing way. No, it was deeper still. He was afraid.

  She turned her attention to the tower. It was gone also, replaced with its true form, a half-finished proof perhaps two inches long, surrounded by an infinite sea of data and mathematics and nodes. A diamond amid straw. She reached in with her selfsense.

  “Hello,” the tower said.

  “You're sentient?” Argie replied directly with her selfsense.

  “To one degree or another. Do you have a query?”

  The thing grew and shrank in four dimensions, warped and twisted. “Is there a simple truth to you?” she said after some thought.

  “Yes,” the tower said.

  “What is it?”

  “Time is the medium by which matter will organise itself into a perfect state. More than that I cannot say until I have been completed.”

  “Completed?”

  “There is still much work to do. For now though please think of time as the ocean the boats of matter sail on.”

  “Ah,” Argie said. “Thanks.”

  “Don't mention it.”

  She squinted at the mathematics surrounding the proof. Some of it she recognised: string topologies, hyperplane intersections, field equations. There was ape physics in there too; Lorentz contractions and special relativity.

  She reactivated the perceptual filter. The world returned to a recognisable state.

  “Who do you think I am?” she said to the Lemurian man.

  “Don't trust the witch,” he said, nodding at Lambert. “She'd do anything to prove her theories. Whatever you do, don't trust her.”

  The entourage vanished without warning, leaving no transportation tags behind. The tower was gone now too; just Lambert, The Navigator, and Argie.

  “You saw the tower properly, didn't you?” The Navigator said. Argie nodded. “Did you understand?”

&n
bsp; “No.”

  “Good, I'd be worried if you did.”

  A great shrieking rang out, a moaning – the yell of thousands being tortured simultaneously. It seemed to come from the direction of the expanding black lung on the horizon.

  “Where will they go?” Argie said. “Where will they take the towers?”

  The Navigator shrugged. “Nowhere is safe from the Mergerment.”

  The thought was stupid but she couldn't help voice it: “What if we left Arcadia?”

  “No.”

  “I've heard it's possible. What if-”

  “Of course it's possible,” Lambert sniffed. “That's not what he meant. Sure, we could all download into mechanical bodies of some kind, flee to whatever's on the outside. Well, so will the Mergerment, and begin converting the matter of the sapien planet anyway.”

  Argie could not hold the thought properly in her head. “How is that possible?”

  Neither Lambert nor The Navigator answered. Instead they casually climbed into the air and waited for Argie to join. Then they raced off into the horizon, the three of them, passing over yet more deserted cities and towns, the former glories of Lemuria.

  They found the second tower easily enough: Spatial. It presented as a four-dimensional shape Argie knew no name for, painted a colour she could not quite conceptualise either. A few Lemurians were busy collapsing the structure. They didn't react to the newcomers.

  Again Argie deactivated the perception filter and asked the tower, “What are you?”

  “Hi,” the tower said. “That's quite a big question.”

  “Boil it down a little then, if you can.”

  There was a pause, then the tower said: “Many holes exist in my structure. I am still far from complete. However, know this: I am concerned with what space is. All material phenomena is a warping of space in a sense. Attraction between objects is merely four-dimensional curvature.”

  “Oh, merely huh?” Argie said.

  The tower ignored this. “You visited the Temporal tower, yes?”

  “I did.”

  “Then perhaps you have some idea of how inextricably the two of us are linked. Space without time is uneventful. Time without space is a beginningless no-thing.”

  The tower was silent again. “Is that the whole of it?” Argie said.

  “It is as much as you will be able to understand. So in effect, yes, that is the whole of it.”

  “Have you seen my daughter?”

  “I have seen everything.”

  “Her name was Kaluza. I think she came through here. You must have spoken to her.”

  “I have seen everything,” the tower said again and Argie moved on.

  15.

  2/1/2022

  P,

  I thought about ordering a hooker. I've never ordered a hooker before.

  I didn't order a hooker, if you're wondering. I do miss company though. And other stuff.

  I miss napping on the sofa in the afternoon with you. I miss watching you getting ready. I miss opening post together. Hookers don't generally provide those services, I'm quite sure. Even if they did it wouldn't be the same.

  What does Clare next door do all day with her husband dead, I wonder? Watch TV and clean and go for intermittent walks and just try to pretend time isn't passing, and drag herself further and further from the facts of reality. The dead do not improve.

  I went through Lambert's data stick. Nothing terribly understandable in there to a pleb like me but I got the gist. It was mostly email correspondences between you and Lambert, as well as schematics for some kind of….object, a few unpublished papers, lots and lots and lots of maths, details of manufacturers, and a huge list of what looked to be passport information of about 20 people with no obvious connection.

  The oldest document appears to be an addendum to the paper of yours Dimitar gave me, but as far as I can tell it was never published, or finished for that matter. The part that caught my eye was this:

  Doubtless there will be accusations of too much abstraction in the work presented here. However, we should like to propose a decisive method of proving what we have coined 'hard logicality'. If nature is indeed deeply axiomatic – or 'logical' – there will be clear links between apparently arbitrary phenomena such as the formation of planets and the structure of the atom, and incontestable mathematical absolutes. One will be an expression of the other, however removed the two may seem. As touched on above, the quickest way of either revealing these linkages or disproving their existence is via an algorithmic approach.

  Which I took to mean, “Let's compute how reality works”. Anything else, darling? Why not crack the meaning of life while you're at it?

  The main hurdle appears to be in designing a general-purpose algorithm to seek out abstractions. AI is currently terrible at this. It should be no problem for a sophisticated algorithm to grasp Newton's equations and the Fourier transform. The issue will be in asking it to then find comparisons between those absolutes and high-level arbitrary empirical measurements, such as the shape and distribution of galaxies.

  If this can be accomplished (and we shall shortly examine how it might) then we predict one of two outcomes:

  I. The system will, after an indeterminate period of time, locate substantial proof for hard logicality by demonstrating a priori linkages between axiomatic assertions and real-world phenomena. This would potentially pave the way for a new mode of investigation, both astronomical and quantum. Rather than simply relying on data collected from experimentation to build theories with, predictions could instead be made from axiomatic logic alone. The most interesting ramification of course is that nature would have a defined structure which is dictated solely by axiomatic logic itself. The configuration of the universe could not be imagined in any other fashion, thereby calling multiverse theory into question, as well as comic variability.

  II. The system will find no substantial proof for hard logicality, thereby suggesting that nature is not deeply axiomatic. This will be a disappointing but nonetheless insightful outcome. It will also cast doubt somewhat on a so-called 'theory of everything' ever being attainable at all, since our universe may be just one configuration amid potentially trillions. Much like an ant finding itself on a hill, there is no reason why the hill should be that size or that height, the ant merely climbed that one and not some other.

  It will come as no great surprise however that the authors of this paper are somewhat in favour of the principle of hard logicality, and would not have untaken this project otherwise. As we shall see there exists a growing body of evidence to support the presence of axiomatic logic clearly embedded in nature. We shall now examine the details of the algorithm in question, and the specifications of the device that would be required to execute it.

  This was followed by a bucketload of diagrams and bizarre equations. For what you called “successful verification of hard logicality” the computer itself would require an ungodly amount of RAM and at least four hundred and thirty years to complete the 'experiment', give or take a few Christmases.

  Lambert's research sprawled over about twenty pages, jargon I wasn't sure was even English, let alone understandable. “Hypersymmetry”, “deterministic corporeality”, “multidimensional meta-iteration” and so on. Lambert was apparently obsessed with four-dimensional geometry, believing it possessed the capability to compute far in excess of modern machines. How one would go about building such a device was left suspiciously absent.

  Well, that clears that one up at least. Your theory and Lambert's miracle computer. A match made in heaven. How far you two actually got with it is anyone's guess.

  Anyway.

  Emma brought over a bag of weed a few days ago. I said I wasn't really interested but she left it here anyway. By midnight I was kind of interested so I bought some skins and tobacco from the all-night petrol station and rolled a passable joint, smoked it on the roof. Didn't feel much so I rolled another, no tobacco this time, and smoked that too. Lordy, what a decision. The first
one hit me proper then. The second was close on its tail.

  I took a few breaths and tried to hold on to reality but already knew I'd made a substantial mistake, and would come to understand this to greater and greater degrees as the evening progressed. I laid down and closed my eyes. Every time I thought, “Well, at least this can't get worse,” it got worse. I attempted to invoke a Buddha-like serenity and accept that I was fucked.

  Then the interesting thoughts started popping out of nowhere, just like your beloved virtual particles. One I was particularly fond of, so I decided to befriend it. It went like this:

  Isn't punctuation fun? How dull would a sentence be without punctuation? Just think about it a sentence with no full stops or commas or hyphens would have to continue and continue and any contradictory point you wanted to make or qualifier or something would just have to get shoehorned in there because you could not pause or stop and soon it would be ever so tedious to read like this one.

  And isn't life a bit like that? the thought said.

  What? I said.

  Just consider it, the thought said.

  The merit hit me almost at once:

  I've never missed you like this. Sometimes when you've been away at conferences, or whatever, I've wanted you home. I've spent whole days missing you, even done a bit of longing, but it's never physically hurt. This is different. A limb is gone. Every day the list of things I would give away just to have you back grows exponentially. A piece of punctuation has been placed after your name, has been placed here in time, and I don't know if it's a full stop or a semicolon. I'm like some dumb busted up dog wandering around with no direction or purpose. But I would never have missed you so much without this happening. That's a funny thing. The sentence would've just carried on and on, never developing because it has no contours or opposition. Throw in a but though…

  “But your wife is missing.”