Root Two - Part 2/9
Probably nothing.
This is Part 2 of “Root Two,” a serialized novella about numbers, love, and the inexorable descent into madness.
OK, maybe a little less of the last thing than the first two, but still.
If you missed Part 1 somehow, find it here.
[Est. reading time: 10 minutes]
I had intended to present my mystery to the whole PokkoDev team, which included myself and two other people. But Bert was working from home, so it ended up just being me and Hemmy.
After I explained what had happened the day before, he gave me a funny look.
“I know,” I said. “But…what do you think?”
He shook his head as he leaned back in his chair, then gave a dismissive little wave. “It’s random.”
He and I had been working together for a long time. He was a really fast developer. Like, amazingly fast. And suh-LOPPY. Which is why I have a job. I'm a slow, lumbering coder and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but you can eat off of whatever I've worked on. Go ahead and call me anal. See if I give a crap. Hardy har.
"Someone wrote a lazy algorithm to dictate candle flicker," he continued. "Probably punched in 42 consecutive numbers without looking."
Hemmy was a reductionist. I think it made him a happier person.
"How did you meet KrisLove, anyway?" I asked, attempting to kickstart his brain by diverting to a tangential topic.
"We met a while back at something. I don't remember."
"And you hit on her."
"I mean...." He shrugged as if to say, Can you blame me?
If I had to guess the rest of the story, it would go like this: Upon discovering that his romantic advancements were woefully misplaced, he regrouped and made friends instead. He'd take what he could get.
"You liked those bird-bone inlays?" I asked.
"Little bit."
"Gross."
"YOU'RE gross."
"I do my best."
"Well, good job,” he said, and then turned to look at the mystery numbers again. “Anyway, if you really want to know which number your mystery brogrammer hit FIRST when he was shortcutting his way around legit RNG--"
"There are only 42 possibilities," I said, cutting him off. "Let's just Google them. One by one. See if anything hits."
"Nothing's gonna hit."
"Probably not, but it would be dumb not to try."
He rolled his eyes. "Fine, I'll write a macro--"
"No," I said, "Don't write a macro. By the time you get it working, we could be done already."
I started with the set that started with 7-6-6-7 because those are the first numbers I noticed repeating in the candle's flicker.
766797379907324784621070388718753769480731
Nothing came back, so we tried the next one, moving the first number in the sequence to the end.
667973799073247846210703887187537694807317
And so on.
679737990732478462107038871875376948073176
797379907324784621070388718753769480731766
973799073247846210703887187537694807317667
I'll admit, I was disappointed when the 7667 quartet didn't turn out to be the beginning or the end of any set. Oh well. We moved on.
737990732478462107038871875376948073176679
379907324784621070388718753769480731766797
799073247846210703887187537694807317667973
990732478462107038871875376948073176679737
907324784621070388718753769480731766797379
073247846210703887187537694807317667973799
732478462107038871875376948073176679737990
324784621070388718753769480731766797379907
247846210703887187537694807317667973799073
478462107038871875376948073176679737990732
784621070388718753769480731766797379907324
846210703887187537694807317667973799073247
462107038871875376948073176679737990732478
621070388718753769480731766797379907324784
210703887187537694807317667973799073247846
107038871875376948073176679737990732478462
070388718753769480731766797379907324784621
703887187537694807317667973799073247846210
038871875376948073176679737990732478462107
388718753769480731766797379907324784621070
887187537694807317667973799073247846210703
871875376948073176679737990732478462107038
718753769480731766797379907324784621070388
"Look at that," Hemmy said.
"You got something?"
He waved me over. And there it was.
"Square root of two. I'll be damned." Hemmy leaned back in his chair. "Weirdly deep, though."
"No it's not," I said, and pointed at the first four decimals.
1._4142_13562373...
"Forty-one, forty-two." And then I highlighted our set on the screen.
1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696_718753769480731766797379907324784621070388_50387534327641572735013846230912297024924836
"Oh," Hemmy said. "Forty-two digits, starting with the forty-first. Forty-second if you count the one."
"I don't think the one counts," I said. "Too rational."
"Too rational," he agreed.
At that point, we both leaned back and chewed on what we were looking at.
"OK," Hemmy said. "So the guy, whoever it was, just copied and pasted a block of numbers from an irrational number. Even lazier."
But it all felt too specific to be some kind of RNG-faking. "Why was it only the one candle?" I asked, more to myself than to Hemmy, but he answered anyway.
"Easy. It was a bug. Failure to propagate."
I shook my head. "There's something else going on here."
"Like what?"
"I don't know."
He leaned forward conspiratorially. "Some kind of message, you think?"
I ignored his taunt. "The problem is, there's no way to figure out what those numbers mean out of context."
"Whataya mean what they mean? They don't MEAN anything!" He flung his hand at the screen. "That might as well be a string of primes. It's just numbers."
"A very specific set of numbers, that someone very specifically coded into one specific candle's flicker pattern."
"So have you already finished with that preFORMA thing? And you’re bored now?"
He was talking about a smart contract we'd been commissioned to review and validate. Our reputation for this sort of thing was solid gold (thanks to me), which meant our sign-off was worth a whole lot of money. Sometimes it pays to be anal.
But that project had come in literally the day before, which meant Hemmy was just being an ass.
"All I'm saying is that this is suspiciously weird."
"Bad code always looks weird," he said with a long-suffering sigh. "That's what makes it bad."
His obduracy cankered my soul. Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than proving him wrong.
"How about this, how about we make a bet. We figure out who wrote the code" -- I started counting on my fingers -- "what they were trying to say, and who they were trying to say it TO."
"OK but the last two things are probably" -- he mimicked my finger counting -- "'nothing,' and 'no one.'"
"If it turns out that way, I buy you lunch for a month."
He sat up a little straighter. "Oh shit okay."
"But if I find out there's something to this, all those lunches are on you."
"Great. Good luck!"
Meaning, of course, that I had given him exactly zero incentive to help. Fine by me.
Listen, I know my behavior the other night was totally unacceptable, but I wanted you to know that the reason I was--
What. The reason I was what. Not paying attention? Casting premature judgement? Seeking distraction and failing to offer the simplest of courtesies? Being a giant, irredeemable asspot?
I deleted it all and started over. But before I could make any progress, my phone rang. I flung my hand in its general direction.
"Yeah," I snapped.
"Yes, hello. Is this--ah--Sin?"
"Cyn,” I said, elongating the ‘y,’ like the word sign. “C-Y-N." It was short for a name I'll never say out loud.
"OK. You called our offices about a...problem?"
I sat up straighter. "Well I actually -- sorry, who is this?"
"I'm Gary from CrossWorlds."
"OK because I'm actually not sure what company I'm looking for. Do you guys handle interior renderings? It was a candle."
"A candle?"
"Yeah."
"What was...wrong with it?"
"Listen, just tell me if I've got the right company, and then maybe I can find the right department."
"Uh...sure, that sounds like, maybe--"
"Different question: Do you know anything at all."
"Um--I--I'm sorry--I...can get you my manager?"
"You know what, do that."
As I waited on hold, that old familiar guilt came around to remind me how bad at all this I was. Which reminded me of KrisLove again. What in the HELL was I thinking? Letting Hemmy set me up. Was I such a pushover? Or was I really so lonely? Or maybe -- and this seemed the most likely -- I was barely even paying attention.
Hemmy says Hey you should meet this person.
I say Sure.
Hemmy sets it up.
Then it's in my calendar.
Then there's a notification.
Then cancelling feels way more awkward than showing up.
And then, like a Judo master, I have turned the situation into an opportunity to feel smugly superior. Which was working fine until the girl got up and left.
Was I working to solve this flickering candle problem in a desperate attempt to salvage a deeply embarrassing experience? After all, a good mystery covers so much regret, and if the mystery is solved, and the solution is magnificent, doesn't that regret just get erased? Those are the rules, aren't they?
"Ma'am?" My head popped up at the sound of a new voice.
"Yes."
"Can I help you with something?"
Probably not.
"Yeah, I'm just looking for whoever built a specific interior rendering in one of the simulations that I BELIEVE your company owns."
"Oh." He seemed surprised that the question was so cogent. He was probably expecting some raving malcontent. Instead, I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Because I did.
"Um," he continued, helpfully. "Well, most of our products are collections of--"
"I know. I just need to talk to someone who can trace the actual pedigree of a specific component. Can you please point me to the right department?"
He couldn't, but I was persistent, and after getting transferred three more times, someone asked me to send them the visual recording I'd made, which I was more than happy to do.
And then I called it a day, because I would have eaten a sock full of batteries before making another phonecall.
Instead, I cranked up the K-pop to ear-damaging levels and dug into the damn preFORMA contract.
A few hours later, a message from CrossWorlds pinged me. Apparently, my little video had gotten around, and now some executive wanted to see me in person.
I had to blink a few times to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. Then I tapped out a confirmation that I could be there in an hour.
I tried to make Hemmy come with me, thought he might even enjoy himself, but he was really weird about it. Something about the oppressive and subtle insanity of global conglomerates. Best guess was he just bought a new Digi-Doll and had very solitary plans for the next 24 to 48 hours. Work was slow, so I guess I couldn't blame him. To each his lizard-brained own.
So I brought Bert, the human equivalent of a walking stick. I really didn't want to face this corporate overlord alone, and Bert was a guy you could pick up and set down kind of wherever. No one knew what (if anything) went on behind his blank frown, but he was never definitively unpleasant, and that was more than good enough a shocking majority of the time.
"Hemmy told me to ask you about preForma," Bert said as he climbed into the Uber.
"What about it?"
"He's worried you'll miss the deadline."
"I don't miss deadlines," I said.
"OK," he said. I doubted Bert knew or cared that this had nothing to do with the preForma contract, and everything to do with free lunches for a month. I wondered if Hemmy would stick to mild harassment, or if he'd eventually resort to full psychological warfare. Time would tell.
Meanwhile, I had Bert look over some of my notes on the ride over to get up to speed.
Bert was a math guy. Not the intuitive sort, but more of the brute force variety. If math skills were a martial art, he would be a heavyweight champion who simply couldn't be worn out. When it was Bert vs Math, Bert had a perfect record. He would just keep pounding until the problem went to pieces. Just for shits one day we ran a neural scan while he worked, and it turns out Bert uses the movement part of his brain for mathematical problem-solving. It's like running a blender with a rocket engine.
He frowned all the way through my notes, then looked up at me and asked, "Can I see the recording?"
"It's on my drive at home," I said.
He nodded once and handed my phone back to me.
"Well what do you think?" I prodded.
But he was looking out the window, and I realized we'd arrived. The car stopped, we got out, and it drove away.
It was just us and the yawning concrete entrance. "We need more information," Bert said, then shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking toward the door. Well duh, Bert.
Inside the building, we were greeted by dark wood, soft steel, and sumptuous lighting. The place smelled like the best looking man alive. As soon as the person behind the desk saw us, he gave a little start, fumbled the phone into his hand, and spilled something quiet and urgent into the receiver.
Then, before we even reached the desk, he stood up and said, "Allow me to show you to Bao Lee's office."
Bao Lee?
Bert and I shared a look as we followed along through the surprisingly labyrinthine building.
CrossWorlds owned an enormous percentage of the world's VR products, and Bao Lee owned an enormous percentage of Crossworlds. He was born into one of the wealthiest families on Earth, got bored early, and then discovered an inexhaustible energy for acquiring tech companies. Most of his net worth was now tied up in this one company. Not a bad deal, considering Crossworlds had surpassed Amazon last year in annual revenue.
Which meant Bert and I were just about to meet the richest man in the world. About a virtual candle flicker.
But you’re right, I imagined myself saying to Hemmy. It’s probably nothing.
If you’re enjoying this story so far, how about inviting a friend to read along with you?
The fantasy in my head about the time it took to do all of this number work is delightful - super fun so far!