Complete Stories (111 page)

“Sounds good. Only I forget the number.”

“I’ll write it out for you,” said Jack. He scribbled with his pencil on one of the triangular scraps of paper he always had in his pockets.

So I read the number out loud, and then I said the next one, and the one after that, and then I got into a counting trance for awhile, and then—

“What?” said Jack, who’d been watching me alertly.

“I lost my voice,” I whispered.

Jack poured me a glass of water. “Try again.”

I tried again, but for some reason I couldn’t say the next number. “That’s enough anyway,” I said. “I hiked a good stretch on my own. It really feels like my own personal record now.”

“I want you to try and write that very last number down!” insisted Jack, very excited. “You’ll see that it’s not there!” He handed me his pencil, a yellow #2, made in China.

Just to please him, I tried to write down the number I hadn’t been able to say—but, sure enough, when I got to the last digit, the pencil lead broke.

“This is stupid,” I said. Jack was absolutely thrilled.

He handed me his ballpoint. It ran out of ink on the freaking last digit again.

“I quit.” I tossed the pen aside and shrugged. “What do I care if I count one more step? I’m already immortal. A proud, solitary figure in the endless fields of snow.”

“My life in a nutshell,” crowed Jack. “Until now.”

“Why are you so happy?”

“Because I’m not alone anymore,” he said. “You and me, Bert. I’m not crazy. You found a hole!”

“What hole?”

“A hole in the number line. That number you wanted to say—it’s not there, I tell you. That’s why you couldn’t say it or write it down. The number’s missing, Bert. And now that you’ve come across a big missing number, you’re gonna be able to notice some of the smaller ones.”

“I thought your magic beanie had me count every single number up through base camp Googol.”

“It couldn’t help but hop over the holes. Like a rock skipping across water. Suppose you start counting backward. I’ll jigger my Whortleberry to be sure it flags the numbers you miss.”

“I’m supposed to drag my weary ass all the way home from base camp Googol?” I exclaimed.

“Starting in the foothills is fine,” he said. “It’s the smaller missing numbers that we’re after. Not the Swiss cheese in the peaks.” He handed me the magic beanie. “Suppose you count backwards from your first record. Twelve million, three hundred forty-five thousand, eight hundred ninety-three.”

“How do you remember these things?”

“Mathematicians don’t get senile,” he said.

“They just go nuts,” I muttered. But I did as I was told. I figured I owed Jack one. I pulled on the beanie, and lay back and closed my eyes, and started counting sheep jumping backward over the fence, tail first …

Ever examined a sheep’s tail?

It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. The herd milled around me. We flowed across hilltop pastures, down scrub-filled gullies, and into the cornfields outside of town.

-----

“Wake up,” said Jack.

I woke up. I sat up.

Jack stuck his Whortleberry under my nose. “Voila,” he said.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You found six numbers that don’t exist.”

Jack shook his head. “Three. Our setup logged the numbers on either side of each missing number, since the non-numbers can’t be displayed. You don’t see a hole. You just see the stuff around it. The un-hole.”

“Right,” I said. “Whatever.”

We went to breakfast. The oatmeal was lumpy. Were the lumps the un-oatmeal, I wondered, or was the oatmeal the un-lumps?

While I was thinking about all this, Jack made a few phone calls to mathematician friends—in banking, communications, and government. Mathematicians are everywhere. I listened with half an ear; it sounded like Jack was arguing with everyone he talked to. As usual. After a bit he rang off and summarized the situation for me.

“Those numbers we found missing: they’ve never been used as ID numbers for bank accounts, phone numbers, web addresses—nothing like that. But nobody cares. My so-called colleagues don’t get the point. Instead of wondering why those particular numbers are hard to use, people just skip over them. Nobody wastes time worrying about the missing numbers.”

“But you’ve got the time to waste,” I said. “Right?”

“Wrong,” said Jack, superintense. “Wrong that I’m wasting time. I’m ready to tell you my secret. I hope you won’t think I’m too far gone.”

For a paranoid instant, I saw his eyes as glowing portholes; his head as a vessel with an alien within. But I couldn’t shut him out. I had to let him in. Who else did I have? “You can tell me,” I said. “We’ll still be friends.”

“I don’t ask to be famous anymore,” said Jack with a sigh. “It’ll be enough if I can convince just one person. That would be you, Bert. My secret concerns a certain very small number. It’s. Not. Fucking. There.”

“Never mind all that,” I said, feeling uneasy. “I didn’t sleep well.”

Jack stared down at the tabletop. He squinted his left eye closed and stared one-eyed at his fingertip. “Do this, Bert. There’s a hole in your field of vision where the optic nerve connects into the eyeball. But you never see the hole. You see around it.” He waggled his hand. “Pick a spot on the tabletop and stare fixedly at it, and move your fingertip from the right side toward the center. At a certain point your fingertip disappears. It’s around two o’clock, halfway out to the right edge of your visual field.”

I got going on this, and it worked. Hell, I could wedge two whole knuckles into the hole. Funny I’d never noticed this before, a hole right in front of my nose for going on eighty years.

Hector sidled up to our table, checking us out. “All done breakfast, Señors?”

“We’re fine,” I said, staring down at my un-finger. “You can clear the table if you like.”

Jack and I wandered onto the patio behind Journey’s End and sat down side by side in rocking chairs, gazing out at the cornfield behind our rest home.

“The holes make the world,” said Jack. “The world’s the figure, the holes are the ground. Phenomenologically speaking, the illusions of space, time, and matter—they all result from the psychic work we perform to avoid noticing the missing numbers.”

I was digging this. I felt smart. “What’s the lowest hole, do you think?”

Jack beamed at me, happy and sly.

“Four,” he said finally. “It’s not there. That word, it’s only a sound. A belch, a fart, a
flatus vocis
. There is no four.”

Somehow I knew he was right. “Four, four, four,” I said testing it out. “Four, four, four, four, four.”

“Just a sound,” repeated Jack. Out in the cornfield, three or maybe five crows were talking to each other. “Caw caw caw,” said Jack, echoing them. “God’s voice. Around the holes.”

“You knew this all along?” I said, savoring his wisdom.

“That’s why I told my business-math students that two plus two equals five,” said Jack. “And that’s why they fired me. You weren’t ready to hear me before. But now you are. The holes are everywhere.”

We sat there, rocking and smiling, and later we went in to watch TV. It was more fun than usual, knowing the walls and the ceiling and the TV screen weren’t really rectangles. They were squashed pentagons maybe, or googolgons, or, hell, nodes in the all-but-endless web of human language.

One thing for sure, nothing is square.

============

Written in May, 2006, with Terry Bisson.

Interzone
, Summer 2006.

Terry and I are both from Kentucky—he from Owensboro, I from Louisville. Terry’s novel
Pirates of the Universe
(Tor Books, 1996) has some especially wonderful evocations of growing up in Kentucky.

Terry lived in New York City for many years, and he was active in organizing a wonderful monthly reading series at the KGB bar in the East Village. Recently he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and has turned his organizational skills to starting up a monthly series of readings at the New College in the Mission District in San Francisco: “SF in SF.” It’s great to have Terry out here.

Terry is a master of the short story form; he’s won the Hugo and the Nebula, and he even sells to
Playboy
. Last year he published his mind-boggling collection
Greetings
(Tachyon, 2005), as well as a book of linked mathematical tales,
Numbers Don’t Lie
(Tachyon, 2005), which includes some creditable mad mathematician equations that Terry made up. For much more Terry, see his Web site www.terrybisson.com.

This year Terry has been writing a series of deceptively simple fables, cast as children’s stories about a boy named Billy. After hearing him perform “Billy and the Unicorn” at a hipster dive called The Make-Out Room, I was so impressed by the Zenlike purity of his phrasing that I began insisting he write a story with me.

I got the idea for this story just as the narrator describes it in the opening paragraphs, that is, from an overheard conversation between two barristas—although in Los Gatos, California, not in Harrods Creek, Kentucky. Harrods Creek is actually the name of the small town near Louisville where my parents initially lived.

While I was planning the story, I was walking around the Mission district, and I actually saw “2+2=5” stenciled on the sidewalk. You could say this tale is thought experiment exploring how to actually get to a point where this phrase is literally true.

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as
orphids
. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields.

The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first; fortunately, they’d been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth’s surface. This meant there were one or two orphids affixed to every square millimeter of every object on the planet. Something like fifty thousand orphids blanketed, say, any given chair or any particular person’s body. The orphids were like ubiquitous smart lice, not that you could directly feel them, for an individual orphid was little more than a knotty long-chain molecule.

Thanks to the power of quantum computing, an individual orphid was roughly as smart as a talking dog, possessing a good understanding of natural language and a large amount of extra memory. Each orphid knew at all times its precise position and velocity, indeed the name “orphid” was a pun on the early twenty-first-century technology of RFID or “Radio Frequency Identification” chips. Rather than radio waves, orphids used quantum entanglement to network themselves into their world-spanning
orphidnet
.

The accommodating orphids set up a human-orphidnet interface via gentle electromagnetic fields that probed though the scalps of their hosts. Two big wins: by accessing the positional meshes of the orphids, people could now effectively see anything anywhere; and by accessing the orphids’ instantaneous velocities, people could hear the sounds at any location as well. Earth’s ongoing physical reality could be as readily linked and searched as the Internet.

Like eddies in a flowing steam, artificially intelligent agents emerged within the orphidnet. In an ongoing upward cascade, still higher-level agents emerged from swarms of the lower-level ones. By and large, the agents were human-friendly; people spoke of them as
beezies
.

By interfacing with beezies, a person could parcel out intellectual tasks and store vast amounts of information within the extra memory space that the orphids bore. Those who did this experienced a vast effective increase in intelligence. They called themselves
kiqqies
, short for kilo-IQ.

New and enhanced forms of art arose among the kiqqies, among these was the multimedia
metanovel
.

In considering the metanovel, think of how Northwest Native American art changed when the European traders introduced steel axes. Until then, the Native American totems had been handheld items, carved of black stone. But once the tribes had axes, they set to work making totems from whole trees. Of course with the ax came alcohol and smallpox; the era of totem poles would prove to be pitifully short.

There were also some dangers associated with the orphidnet. The overarching highest-level-of-them-all agent at the apex of the virtual world was known as the Big Pig. The Big Pig was an outrageously rich and intricate virtual mind stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory—
aha
! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig could make a kiqqie feel like a genius. The down side was that kiqqies were unable to remember or implement insights obtained from a Big Pig session. The more fortunate kiqqies were able to limit their Big Pig usage in the same way that earlier people might have limited their use of powerful psychoactive drugs.

If the Big Pig was like alcohol, the analogy to smallpox was the threat of runaway, planet-eating nanomachines called
nants
—but I won’t get into the nants here.

-----

Although the postsingular metanovelist Thuy Nguyen had some trouble with Big Pig addiction, she eventually recovered and began work on her remarkable metanovel
Wheenk
. Thuy wanted
Wheenk
to be a transreal lifebox, meaning that her metanovel was to capture the waking dream of her life as she experienced it—while sufficiently bending the truth to allow for a fortuitously emerging dramatic plot. Thuy wanted
Wheenk
to incorporate not only the interesting things she saw and heard, but also the things that she thought and felt. Rather than coding her inner life into words and real-world images alone, Thuy included beezie-built graphic constructs and—this was a special arrow in her quiver—music. The effect was compelling; in later years users would say that accessing Thuy’s work was like becoming Thuy herself.

Among Thuy’s metanovelist friends during the time she worked upon
Wheenk
were Gerry Gurken, Carla Standard, John Medford, and Linda Loca. Each of them had their own distinctive approaches to creating a metanovel.