"Have you ever heard of pi?"
There she was again, of course. Sitting on the top bunk, long legs dangling over the edge. In her hand, she held a small earthenware cup of tea. She swirled it, idly, and took a sip. I was tired, and I wanted to go to sleep, and that wasn't going to happen just yet I guess.
"They say that the radius of a circle - you know, from the center to the perimeter - is related to the length of the perimeter by a certain constant. That if you know one, you can find the other very easily. Consider; if you had an equilateral triangle, you know the perimeter is exactly three times as long as one of the sides."
ZERO THREE SEVEN FIVE FIVE TWO FOUR EIGHT SIX
I leaned against the bulkhead, closed my eyes, and pushed my hands tightly over my ears. It was a futile gesture, as always - I couldn't hear the hiss of the pressure differentials shifting, or the groan of the metal distorting as the gravity center shifted, but she was still there, and the numbers were as loud as ever.
"The problem is, of course, that pi is not a simple number like three!" Her hair ruffled slightly as the ventilation coughed into life, and the steam off her tea billowed away from her. "It's a very long decimal. Some say it might be infinite!" Sip. "Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't! But here you are, locked in tight orbit around Sirkumperensiya. The very constant itself!" Sip. "Maybe it isn't infinite at all, but very measurable! Is that what it's trying to tell you?"
FIVE ONE ZERO ONE ONE FIVE SEVEN NINE ONE FIVE
There she wasn't again, of course.
"Are you familiar with numbers stations?"
I was sitting in the cockpit, and she was there again, of course. There wasn't much to do in here, anymore; the touchscreens were sluggish to respond, thanks to the overuse, so I didn't touch them much anymore. Not that they would have done anything. The fuel had been exhausted...
"It's a completely secure way to transmit information, you see. If you keep the message short, an eavesdropped doesn't have enough information to reconstruct the meaning. And because natural language is such high entropy, it could reasonably be reconstructed to mean anything!"
ZERO ONE FOUR ZERO TWO EIGHT NINE NINE ZERO
Was it really a month ago that I'd tried to burn all the fuel and break the orbit? I pinched the bridge of my nose, and tried to concentrate. But her perfume was creeping up my nose, and all around my brain. Perfume, and the stench of a failing oxygen exchange. What a world to live in.
"Maybe there's some code hidden in there, you know?" She waved an elegant hand towards the idiotic speakers. The screwdriver I'd jammed in there… two months? Was it before I tried the perigree burn? I hadn't touched it since then, and the speaker hadn't stopped working either. "Maybe there's something important that Istasyonlari is trying to tell you, and you just don't have the codebook yet to make sense of it."
ZERO TWO ZERO ZERO TWO FIVE EIGHT NINE FOUR
There she wasn't again, of course
"Have you thought about random number generators?"
There she was again, of course. I stared at the scrambled egg substitute spinning gently in front of me. They was growing cold, and to hell with them. I didn't want to eat fucking egg substitute ever again. How could the gravity emulator act so damned irregular inside the event horizon? All there is, is gravity, and it's all pointing right at the star. The hole. The pit? The machine? No, stop. No.
"It's difficult for a machine to generate truly random numbers," she said calmly, sitting crosslegged on the ceiling while her hair hung in a forty-five degree offset field. Her eyebrows, usually hidden by the bangs, were immaculate. "Which makes sense when you think about it. A machine is the very essence of predictability! Each step has to follow from the previous. How could it act ‘unpredictably'?"
FOUR FIVE THREE ONE ONE FOUR FIVE THREE ONE FOUR
If I closed my eyes, the gravity would shift again. Maybe I'd fall into the eggs. Maybe I'd fall into the ceiling. Maybe I'd fall into her. She didn't smell like scrambled fucking egg substitute, the only thing the machine made anymore. She didn't smell like burning capacitors in an overtaxed environmental regulator. She smelled like cinnamon and honey and home. It was worth the risk. I closed my eyes.
"But then you think about it, and we ourselves obey causality, don't we? You and I can do things, and things will surely happen because of it, and consequences will come naturally of that. Our finishing condition is entirely dependent on our starting condition. Are we machines? What does 'random' even mean? Simply unpredictable? Then what makes Aleatoire not a truly random generator? How could you do any better?" I opened my eyes.
ONE THREE THREE ONE ONE FIVE ZERO EIGHT SIX
There she wasn't again, of course.
"Do you know what a fractal is?"
There she was again, of course. I could hear her, dimly. The seals were still functioning, somehow, but the hull conducted just enough that I could hear her out here, in the airlock. I popped the seal on the suit, and it wheezed as the pressures equalized. I stood on the ceiling, and waited for the gravity to change so I could reach the airlock unseal button. There was no light outside, just the thing that I'd been orbiting that I'd been orbiting that I'd been orbiting that I'd been orbiting that I'd been
"A fractal is a certain pattern of numbers that has a definite shape when you examine it at one scale, but that shape is preserved as you move down the scales." I could hear her fist hiting the hull to punctuate her sentences. What a delicate little fist, and I could hear it all the way out here. She must be stronger than she looks. "So you might see a shape like an ocean wave, but if you come down to the perimeter to look at it more closely, there's not a smooth curve, but another ocean wave. And again and again, no matter how closely you can examine it, you keep finding waves. It's waves all the way down!"
THREE NINE THREE ONE SEVEN ZERO ZERO SIX SIX FIVE
The gravity shifted, and I slammed into the AIRLOCK RELEASE button. The siren started shrilling, and the red light started flashing. The vocoder started screeching; I could almost recite it by heart anyway, no great loss. Personnel, clear the area, airlock seals releasing-
"The thing is, fractals occur in the natural world too, if you know where to look for them." Five. "For example, coastlines! Did you know that we have no way of knowing how long a country's border is?" Four. "You can zoom down to the coast, but how to deal with the shore? You can zoom to the shore, but how to deal with the rocks? You can zoom to the rocks, but how to deal with the atoms?" Three. "It's all there, all the way down. If you don't see the shape, maybe it's because you're not looking at it the right way." Two. "Maybe, if you can't understand Phrakschan, you just need to step back, and look a little harder. One level up, one level down, it's the same thing." Airlock vent failed; unknown mechanical failure.
SIX SEVEN THREE FIVE EIGHT TWO THREE SIX SEVEN
There she wasn't again, of course.
"Do you want to die?"
FIVE NINE ZERO
"It doesn't matter what I want," I said numbly. I tugged each finger, and heard the pop of the knuckles. "I can't die, can I?"
THREE NINE ZERO
"That's almost correct," she said, and she laid a cool hand across mine. I watched her fine brown fingers move up and down along the back of my hand, almost hypnotically. "This meat shell could, of course. It could fall into a star's furnace, be crushed beneath an ocean, or simply die because it can't breathe liquid helium correctly. But could you die? That's a harder question, I think."
NINE ONE TWO
"You could do it," I whispered. I could feel something wet on my face. A tear?
EIGHT TWO SEVEN
"I couldn't." She drew me tightly into her, and I could feel her warmth against my back. "You're information, and information can only be lost. Here you are, trapped beyond an event horizon. Nobody who didn't know where to look could find you. But you still exist, don't you?"
NINE SEVEN FIVE
"Please," I whispered.
FIVE TWO EIGHT
"Information can't be created or destroyed," she whispered back, hair tickling my ear. "What are we orbiting? A graveyard and a nursery. Calypso herself, the incarnation of what's forgotten and what's unknown. Not what's secret, because secrets are something that people know. Not gone, because things leave a void when they're gone. Information that nobody knows that nobody knows."
TWO ZERO FIVE ONE SEVEN EIGHT
"As long as there's a universe… as long as creation endures, nothing else can end." I could feel her heart beating through our clothes, and I could feel her every breath of the stale air. "As long as creation endures, you'll endure."
ZERO THREE EIGHT SEVEN SIX THREE
And she was gone, again, of course.
There was something sitting on the floor where she must have been. It shone like broken glass, like the sun off of oil, like a hole cut through the world. It pulsed, it breathed, it sat inert like a stupid gemstone.
Scorched into the floor around it was a message.
"do you want to die?"