A Momentary Lapse of Reason - 04
A Novella
4. 重蹈覆辙[i]
(Chóng dǎo fù zhé)
“I’ll be watching you.”[ii]
It took a moment for her eyes to rise from her book about the Dragon’s Defense. They were not amused. She was at a bamboo table and seated. He was
Lo and behold, the person’s name was known to her.
Unfortunately, the name was not welcome.
Can't Get You Out Of My Head.[iii]
A-ha, take on me![iv]
Synchronicity. It used to be that factories belch filth into the sky.[v]
I don’t want to see him, and he wants whatever he wants.
“Don’t you know my name?” His body was back as if he was being cool, or like that.
She went back to looking at the Dragon Defense. She wondered for the odd moment if Chinese Dragons would know it.
“Yes, I recall.” Turn the page. She wondered if the book had a P or NP and then realized size it had a finite table of contents, it must therefore be in P. It would be a sin.[vi] She believes this in her heart. He would never be the one. Ever. Do you believe in life before love?[vii] She looked up. He is impossible.[viii]
He then tried to pump up the volume.[ix]
“Once in a Lifetime, you will have the chance…”[x]
This enough. She shut the book. Then she stared at him.
“I cannot make it any clearer to you. I have no concern who cares. Who cares? It makes no difference. Go away.” It was that her face finally told Lucas that she was serious. But what it did not do was make him go away. Because he wanted to reach her and begin to manipulate the wirings that he thought she possessed. And if that didn’t work, he would go on to the next person and try her. This meant, to him, he had one last chance.
“I will make you say ‘Boy, your loving is all I think about. [xi]’ I’m on a mission of mercy.”[xii]
“We’re closed.”[xiii] This was the last straw she picked up her book, folded it in her plastic grocery, two the books, and left. An imminent destination cold her dreams and she rumbled down into a way to get there. She was walking away because she had to be free.[xiv]
Sailing through the skyscrapers which looked like masts, she knew the way to Kowloon. She could picture Lok Fu where she would get off and then take a bus. This was an important step because the ride allowed her to decompress from the nasty encounter and let her mind float free. She then called out their book, but it was not chess instead it was a vast and deep tome labeled Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. It was written by someone she had not heard of called Hofstadter. To was of course reading the section on Gödel, who she had first learned of from Tal. She could remember the conversation between games of chess. She pointed out the book and asked what it was about and he grew contemplative.
“It is a work that wrestles with the problem of recursion, in mathematics, drawing, and art. Would you like to read it?” while in truth the answer was no he had already slipped it into her shopping bag with a wink. Because he had recommended that she do it, she started on it immediately when she came home because her parents were not there yet.
The bus arrived at the entrance of the park. She had heard a long time ago that this place was out of a dystopian cinema and darkly claustrophobic by its narrow alleys and highly stacked cubes in which the denizens lived. But now there was nothing like that only floods of green in a myriad of shades and shadows dotted with pink and white flowers of different species. But out of the corner of her eye, she thought there were gray slats and tiny always dreamt with oily ooze and fluorescent lights. But when she turned her full gaze there were no characters or paint slabs only the arbor of lush deciduous trees and palm flats. She was disturbed but opened our eyes as she looked, again, at the crescent of nature protected by the only city that she knew.
After a while, she sat on a marble bench and continued to read the printed words. About random variables and entropy about mutual information and channel capacity. She read of Alice in Wonderland and Zeno of Elea. All things foreign to her and thus meaningless. But as she read the pages on isomorphism and symmetry the words began to form meaningful relationships and she realized she had a deeper form of cognition out of the random pieces. It was a stranger loop than any that she had recognized even in the permutations of the Dragon Sicilian.
But she also saw Russian. It was proof that a Turing Complete Machine could not have a quantum random number, but any Oracle would have two have one. And then used as a lemma that whatever axioms that the Oracle used one of them would have to be an axiom which allowed for the quantum gate computer. She rated it several times, but still, she did not understand what it meant.[xv]
She looked with other eyes but the to did not hold any meaning. It was as if the dragons slept waiting for a chance to build again. She looked back to the book because the natural world was infinitely more terrifying than the structure of recursion. She remembered that once Tal had said that he programmed computers and for a short time made a great deal of money. She did not ask why he stopped or why he did not go back. She sensed it had something to do with his wife, a subject which he did not talk about.
Tal’s wife was dead of this she was certain. As certain as an Oracle talking to a Turing complete machine.
There was the human scampering to trees and water, flowers and vines. It was a paradise. But she did not see that.
[i] Repeat the same mistakes.
[ii] Police, “Every Breath You Take”
[iii] Reference to Kylie Minogue, “Can't Get You Out Of My Head”
[iv] A-ha, “Take on Me”
[v] Reference to Police, “Synchronicity II”
[vi] Pet Shop Boys, “It is a Sin”
[vii] Reference to Cher, “Believe”
[viii] King Crimson, “Three of a Perfect Pair”
[ix] Reference to M|A|R|R|S, “Pump Up The Volume”
[x] Talking Heads, “Once in a Lift Time”
[xi] Reference to Kylie Minogue, “Can't Get You Out Of My Head”
[xii] David Mamet. Glengarry Glen Ross
[xiii] Orson Welles, Touch of Evil
[xiv] Reference to Styx, “Come Sail Away”
[xv] This is for and why P != NP. No Turing Complete Computer can have the ability to store quantum information, only the ability to approximate quantum randomness. But all oracles will have this as an axiom or some other axiom which amounts to the same thing. This means that an Oracle can tell whether or not it is speaking to a digital machine or a quantum machine if it asks the question enough times so that Shannon minimum can tell whether or not the machine can do quantum computing.