Indiscrete

First Written    Sun May 17 19:47:04 2020
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

2020-04-16

Sheriff's cylindrical form hovered in the doorway. His electric thrusters, though capable of running silent, whirred in short bursts. He had no hands, but he still felt the obligation to knock.

"Come in," Catherine waved, the lenses of her optics still burying their focal point into the centre of a electronic textbook.

"Good evening, Catherine," Sheriff spoke, his voice emanating from the general direction of his body, then pausing, "I see you've been studying harder lately."

"You know getting in legit matters to me. Accusations of nepotism will not be tolerated by the Republic, and I really don't want to be the topic of one of grandpa's unity speeches. So unless your infallible memory has suddenly taken a turn for the worse, I'm going to guess mom sent you."

"Close. I'm not really asking about the studying. But no, I sent myself."

"Good," Catherine sighed, "I was about to start judging her choice of communication avenues. No offense to you, of course."

"Some taken."

"So if you aren't worried about my studies, then what are you worried about?"

"You wound me, Cat," he joked, "Can't a Mechanical just stop by to say hello?"

"Maxwell maybe. Not you, Sheriff. Now spit it out."

"I've been reading your blog. You haven't written anything in awhile. Is it the studying? It's the physics, isn't it? Universal equations are the bane of fantasy."

Catherine's electric eyes shrunk and dilated lazily, a maneouvre her family had quickly learned was her own equivalent of an eye roll and an introspective upward gaze.

"Discrete math, actually," she admitted, slumping backwards in her chair and letting gravity do the work of rotating her to face Sheriff at an angle.

"Seriously? Don't let your aunt Anna hear about this or she'll call you a rube."

"Let me pass my exams, then I can be a rube. But no, I'm serious."

Sheriff spun in place, his projectors scanning the room as if looking at newsclippings and blackboards detailing the impossible.

"Well, I'm stumped," he said, at least half facetiously, "What was it? Information theory not allowing magic? Set theory disproving god? Graph theory being graph theory?"

"Hating graph theory? Aren't you literally a neural net? I mean, so am I, so touché in advance. No, I'm upset about infinity, and I'm being dumb about it."

"I think I see where this is going," Sheriff noted, "But do elaborate."

"Countable. Fucking. Sets," Catherine spat in exasperation.

"I didn't write just for the hell of it," she continued, "I kind of do now, but I didn't start that way. It was like, maybe this world I made existed somewhere, right? You grow up hearing about the infinite universe and you think that means everything exists somewhere. Maybe it's a trillion trillion lightyears away, but it's still there."

Sheriff hovered in place, the faint glow behind the sheriff's badge graphic that was his "face" pulsing to indicate his mental presence. He was thinking.

"Countable sets," Catherine explained, then exaggerated, "The truth that killed the lie that was my childhood. I take a mathematically explainable pattern, say every binary string, and concatenate them. Zero. One. One-zero, one-one, one-zero-zero. The set goes on forever, and it contains every possible combination of ones and zeroes possible. But it will never contain a two. Or an A or a B. Or a little magic girl in a made-up kingdom of witches. Some realities just don't exist, infinity or otherwise. I guess I have to stop being a baby about it all."

"ASCII," Sheriff answered, "Or UTF-8."

"Conventions," Catherine dismissed, "Just a layer of syntactic and metaphorical sugar over the bitter truth".

"No," Sheriff insisted, "ASCII is beautiful. And I'm not just saying that because I'm a computer. You take a set pattern, a structured, existing set of codes. And by writing your own rules, your own interpretation of the simple, the real, you make your own real. A billion bits are just a flickering a signal, a tingle of static that might tickle a moth's antenna. But build a collection of rules, a mind to interpret that mess, and you can have the internet, an MMO, a flight simulator, or me. The signal is just a tool, the interpreters are the medium. As they say, the mind is a writer's instrument, not the pen, don't they?"

"I think you made that quote up, but I suppose," Catherine spoke, her own pen twirling between her fingers as she listened.

"Hell, sterile Hell, the universe isn't even infinite. The speed of light, limits of observation and all that. But we're just talking about the phyiscal real again. Look at you and I, two piles of signals wrapped in silicon and flesh. Neurons connect in known ways too, but that doesn't preclude the everything they can describe. Write those patterns into a brain and you might have the mind of the man who designed the internet. Or the mind of a angsty teenage hobby writer with four dozen subscribers."

"Five dozen," Catherine corrected, "Thanks Sheriff. I think I get where the analogy is headed. If it's in my head, it's real to me. And that means it's real, period, because I the signal and I the interpreter both are."

"And if you write another post, it'll keep being real to me too."