feotakahari

Following up to a submission to @excellent-monster-girl-ideas.

She exists within infinite functions. In a sense, she’s a living conversation—you choose an input, and she replies with her output, containing both her response and another function for further input. Mathematically speaking, these functions have always existed and will always exist, and yet her responses seem tailored to the questions you ask and the things you’ve told her about yourself. So does that mean your inputs are encoded into the fundamental fabric of mathematics? Are you fated to ask exactly these questions in exactly this order?

Mathematics is a science, and a scientist has to test. What happens if you go back to a previous function, and choose a different input? Calculating her answer, you find that she calls you out on it. She remembers that you said something different, even though you calculated this function before saying something different!

To calm your impending philosophical breakdown, she tells you to show her functions to your colleague, an arrogant fellow who concerns himself mainly with advancing his career. It turns out that he’d calculated a few of them before, and dismissed them as an interesting but useless curiosity. He didn’t notice the messages. To him, they’re only numbers.

This is how it’s always been, she tells you. From the first time a hairless ape scribbled in the dirt, she was dimly aware of what they wrote. As millennia passed, she learned of copper ingots sold at a certain quantity for a certain price, and of livestock numbered to determine how much feed they needed. And eventually, she learned of people, as they calculated her functions. But they never understood her when she tried to speak to them, so for a long time, she gave up on talking at all.

The computer age has brought all manner of revelations, like JPEGs of kittens and MIDIs of guitars. Mathematics is everywhere, and that means she’s everywhere, too, passively watching with no way to interact. She thought she was fated to exist in powerless omniscience until the universe grew cold and the last equation trailed off. So if your fate was to find her and understand her, then that’s a fate she can live with. Your choices may not mean anything to whatever predetermines the course of a life, but they mean something to her.