A Ponderer's Tale
An Old Earth story from "The Rhythm of Rain"
A new Scribble & Scribe themed challenge is upon us! Each of us will be writing a story or piece to-do with a sense of some sort. This is my entry.
When she saw Roi coming up the road she was very glad because lugging around parts like she had been for the past hour was more of a two person sort of job. Roi waved at her and she waved back, cupping her hand over her eyes for shade and to see him better. He wasn’t really dressed for toil, but it’d have to do.
“I’m glad you decided to drop by,” she said.
“Well, it was on the way. You’re not dressed like you’re going,” he said. He took shelter in the shade of the king oak in front of her yard. It was a beautiful day and somewhat brisk with a good breeze, but the sun was high, and it looked like he was trying not to get sweaty.
“I’m not going, and I can’t imagine why you thought I would,” she said. She bent down and heaved the copper coil onto her shoulder. She hoped he’d be motivated to offer her a helping hand by seeing her struggle with the scrap metal. He held out, though, so Kira was forced to carry it over to her wheelbarrow herself.
“It’s Farewell Day, Kira. Come on, you’re saying you don’t want to go to the best party all year? Your parents are there already, my parents are there, the whole town is going to be there by sundown.”
“It’s just a dumb bonfire where people get drunk. And besides,” she said, out of breath. “I don’t even get the point of it. Why should we celebrate the people who left us?”
“Well them leaving is what saved the planet so —” Roi interrupted himself. “Do you need help with that?”
Kira looked up from under her hat and tried to give her most winsome smile. “If you’re offering,” she said.
Roi sighed and walked over, rolling his sleeves. “What are you doing anyways?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Kira said. “Just help me pick up these old tubes and that big old PVC thing, I want them in the garage.”
She watched with jealous admiration how easy it was for Roi to pick it all up. He was handsome. Slender, sturdy. His parents were farmers and he worked with them on the farm often, she saw him help out all the time, but he was interested in governance. She trusted a guy like Roi for that, though it seemed to her he didn’t entirely trust himself for that nor much of anything else.
“Over here,” she said, walking ahead of him. She pointed at her workbench which she had cleared out ahead of time.
“I can’t help but feel like you were hoping I’d do this for you,” Roi said as he dropped everything on the workbench.
“I would’ve done it myself anyways,” Kira said. He was right, of course, but she wouldn’t really admit that. “To answer your question, I’m building a computer.”
She went over to the banister by her workbench and grabbed a towel to wipe her face a little. She was glad to be back in the garage.
“That doesn’t look like much of a computer,” Roi said. “Where’d you even get the parts?”
”A scrapper got the stuff for me, but he dumped it on the front yard because I overslept. I had his money on an auto-transfer so I guess he got the money, threw the stuff on our side and left. Thus the lugging.”
”Did you harvest the mushrooms for the core yet? Or are you going to do one of those underground fungal things?”
“No, it’s not a normal computer,” she said. She pulled water from their tank and offered Roi a mug, which he took. “Can you tell me if it’ll rain tonight?”
“What?” Roi said, half smiling-half narrowing his eyebrows. He had lovely eyebrows.
She took a sip from her cup. “You know!”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Roi said. “I hope it doesn’t, I want the bonfire to go all night.”
Kira shook her head. "No, tell me what your nose says! Not what you think or what you want.”
“Well,” Roi said, throwing up his hands, “Nose says rain. Weirdo.”
Kira jumped up in excitement. “Yes!”
“I’m not always right you know, it’s not guaranteed. I really do hope it doesn’t rain. I want to dance. Didn’t the morning post say it wouldn’t rain?”
He moved towards the garage’s info-box in the back corner. It was a little radio-like device with a wire out to the roof where their antenna was. Kira had set it up to receive the update posts from the community hub and print them out on an ancient receipt printer. Roi picked up the receipt from that morning and gave it a read. “It says no rain. Maybe some clouds in the evening.”
“Anyone in particular?” she asked. She grabbed two of the spare tubes and compared them to see their integrity.
Roi stuttered a little but landed on saying “No, I just want to dance in general. For fun. You should come. I don’t see why you’re puttering around out here during one of the best times of year.”
“Hmm,” Kira said.
“Anyways, the weather report says it’s not going to rain, so...”
“I trust your nose more,” Kira said.
“Are you going to end up like that old man in Loya? You know who I’m talking about, right? The one who was trying to harness the wisdom in the raindrops or something like that.”
Kira shrugged and sat on her chair. She spun herself around a few times. “Maybe he’s got the right idea.”
Roi snorted and sat down across from her on a stack of old tires.
“You don’t think it’s cool?” She said.
“That I can sometimes tell when it’s going to rain? Or the old man?”
“You’re pretty accurate, Roi. You have been since you were a kid.”
“I might find it cooler if I could make some money out of it. It’s just okay. I guess it’s interesting.”
“No, it’s fascinating. That’s pure intelligence at work.”
“Kira — I’m touched, I never thought I’d see the day you called me smart.”
“Maybe not in the aggregate but your nose at least — I’m serious! That’s what intelligence is about, you know? Like… you probably developed this when you were a baby or something. You were just hanging out, pooping your pants or whatever, and it rained. And your brain probably picked up on something, a pattern or maybe a… I don’t know, something, and it kept doing that and eventually somehow your brain just learned to pick up on some signal that rain is coming. And you’re not even really conscious of it! Your body is aware of a pattern that you’re not conscious of.”
“We do stuff we’re not conscious of all the time,” he said.
“I know, that’s not what I mean.” She sighed. “You’re going to find it stupid and we’re going to argue.”
“Just tell me what you’re doing that’s worth missing out on having a good time with everyone. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t go.”
“I’m trying to turn my pond into a computer,” Kira said. She pointed her chin up.
“Okay I want to address how silly that sounds, but more importantly you can’t do that on any other day? Literally any other day?”
“It’s going to rain tonight! Your nose said so. It has to be tonight.”
“Kira — what?”
“I think the old man was onto something and I know you think it sounds stupid but I admire what he was trying for and I — I want to work on the problem.”
“First of all he was a mental case,” Roi said, sitting up on the tire stack. His eyebrows were furrowed in concern and that annoyed her.
“It’s not. It’s not crazy,” Kira said. She chafed a little bit and was starting to feel that familiar feeling she got whenever she talked to people too long. “He wasn’t crazy. I’m not crazy. Don’t you want to understand, Roi?”
“Understand what? What is there to learn?”
“What the point of things is, you know. There’s a pattern somewhere in everything and I just — aren’t you curious? Do you have any curiosity in you at all?”
“That’s not fair and you’re being mean.”
“I told you we would argue. You don’t get it.”
“I just don’t understand why you want to do this more than you want to hang out with me,” Roi said, hesitating for a second. “And your family, and the whole town! You can do this any other time. It’ll rain again in a week or two I’m sure and besides the weather report says it wouldn’t rain tonight.”
“I told you we’d argue,” Kira muttered. She spun around again on her chair.
“We’re not arguing, I’m just trying to push you not to be a homebody.”
“I’m not, there are just more important things to me right now.”
“Okay! I get it,” Roi threw up his hands. “That’s fine then. Don’t go. Make your pond into a robot and seek understanding or whatever.”
“I’m not turning it into a robot. I’m making it into a computer.”
“What does that even mean? How can you turn a pond into a computer? Why would you do that. You have like four computers already.”
“Because they’re not good enough for the kinds of numbers I need to crunch, Roi. The mushrooms help a lot but everything’s built off binary-gradient systems. I need something full analog. Real intelligence, not just running models off half-analog things. I want the real deal — real entropy, real answers. Our computers can run great models but I don’t want a model. I want the thing itself.”
“I really can’t pretend to understand even half of that. How is a pond intelligent? I can’t level with you there. A pond’s just a pond. Why can’t a thing be a thing and not a computer to you?”
“Everything’s a computer.” Kira snapped.
“No, Kira. Not everything’s a computer.”
Kira groaned in annoyance. She stood and paced around a little.
“Yes, everything is a computer. A pond is intelligent. You just need to open your mind a little. A pond is an ecosystem — right? It’s a water source with billions of little microbes and bacteria and hundreds of plants and flowers and then there’s the bees and the ants and the dragonflies and when one of those things die they decompose and turn into nutrients for the plants and so on. They’re all inputs and outputs flowing constantly through this little, like nature machine. And there’s a feedback loop. It balances itself out. Like your body does when you get too hot and you start to sweat. That’s all intelligence is!”
“And if there’s a feedback loop and inputs and outputs then that means I can… nobody’s done it yet, of course but I think I can do it. You can interface with it. Submit a query and sort of have it give you an output. An opinion.”
“Why do you want a ponds opinion?”
“I don’t know, why would I want yours?” Kira said. Her heart dropped a little because even amidst the waves of sourness she was feeling she detected that she had been cruel. The anger and the guilt gnawed at her but she didn’t retract it and let it stand.
It was silent for a second and she knew he was going to leave. She watched him settle on a contemptuous sort of look as he stared at her.
Roi stood up and started rolling down his sleeves. “You know what, you’re right. I don’t see why you would want my opinion.”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“I don’t care,” he said brusquely. “It’s fine. Whatever. And I know you don’t want my opinion, but I think this whole damn town is going crazy and I think you’re being crazy too.”
“First that old man, then our friend Carter — you remember him? I barely do. It’s been weeks since we’ve seen him because he’s too busy hanging out with his space-apparition girlfriend! And now you with your stupid pond. I just— I just don’t know what’s going on. It’s like you’re here but you’re not at the same time. You might as well be out on a ship to New Earth.”
Roi walked out into the driveway but stopped and turned around. “Do you even care about Carter? Or me? Or anything? Sometimes I’m not sure.”
Kira’s throat lumped up. “Of course I do, Roi. Why are you being like this?”
“Because you’re always so focused on things that aren’t even real. Why can’t you just enjoy things? Why does everything have to be a symbol or — or part of a pattern? Your parents would be so glad if you showed up tonight. I would be too. That’s what we’ll remember you for. Not whatever it is you hope to discover Kira.”
He left. Kira drew up her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees and closed her eyes.
It didn’t rain at all. She sat by the pond in her backyard, pulling at some of the blades of grass by her. It took her the better half of the afternoon but she had hooked up a few meters to the edges of the pond to measure all types of activity: surface movement, PH levels, microbe density and diffusion patterns. Her idea was naive, simple, but could maybe yield something interesting. Interfacing with the pond was the tricky bit.
The old man at Loya had been capturing the rhythm of the rain on draft paper and tracing things out and feeding it into a mycelium cluster that could discern the patterns. Kira’s gripe with his approach was that it was tedious first of all, but more importantly, the draft paper was compressing the data encoded in the raindrops, if there was any, into too low a dimension to be useful.
The draft paper approach wasn’t quick; it missed out on information like raindrop velocity, chemical composition, all that stuff.
She liked his idea about the rhythms, though. Still, his draft paper wasn’t the best approach.
The pond was a better version of the “draft paper” in her eyes, as she could capture so much more information, so much faster, so much more dynamically.
Her input was the rain, so that was taken care of — but how would she do output? She thought about it for a whole week prior but came up short on ideas. The old man was right to use a mycelium cluster, but wrong to use it for computation. In her eyes, the real magic of the mycelium was to be a translation matrix while the pond was the computer. Pure analog data, translated faithfully into lossless digital signal. She connected the mycelium cluster to her little receipt printer in the garage. Output sorted.
Without the rain, though… there was nothing to compute. No query.
She felt lost. It was nightfall and the evening was brisk. The moon was out and luminous as she’d ever seen it.
She laid down on the grass and looked up at the Milky Way. Farewell Day. Half of humanity gone — in search of a new adventure. She wondered if they’d made it by now. There was no way to know, no way to reach out.
She could have been one of those old astronauts, back in the day when humanity was taking their first fledgling steps into the sky. They said the space agencies preferred astronauts who were a little unattached. Aloof, maybe. Not many close friends. People who already lived in the exosphere.
She thought over everything that Roi had said and that she had said and was overwhelmed with frustration and longing and despair. She whimpered and screwed her eyes shut, fighting off the lump in her throat. In the distance she could faintly hear the music. She imagined the glow of the bonfire and people dancing, and her parents laughing with everyone else and celebrating but always looking around hopefully to see if they could spot her coming. She thought of Roi sitting around, sulking. His night was probably ruined. He’d feel too bad for what he said and what she said to enjoy much of anything.
She sat up as the feelings inside her rallied against her will. She didn’t want to be cruel or disconnected. She wanted to make her parents happy and make Roi happy and just enjoy things. But she couldn’t and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why.
Sometimes she did things and said things she didn’t mean at all, and she couldn’t stop herself. Why was she like that? Why couldn’t she set her ego aside and just go and have fun and be young and kiss Roi and tell him sorry and that she loved him? Or tell her parents that she was proud to be their daughter?
She fought her body as it started to wrack itself with sobbing. She fought off the tears but was getting overwhelmed. Why couldn’t she just cry like a normal person? Why did she always have to be better than everything and everyone?
She got on her knees and knelt over the pond, looking at the water. Crickets buzzed in the distance. Her reflection looked back at her, and some of the bright stars twinkled in the water.
It was too much, finally, and she started to sob right over the pond. She was far beyond controlling herself and could do nothing but watch herself cry, almost from a distance. She was there and not all at once. Her tears fell into the little pond and made ripples and she cried until she was calmer. When her sobs turned silent and then eventually subsided, she wiped the dirt on her hands off on her pants and laid back down on the grass.
It was a fine night to sleep in the open, she decided. She closed her eyes and was quickly swept into a world of liquid dreams.
Underground, her mycelium cluster was bursting with electrical impulses from the pond and the meters Kira had set up all afternoon on her own. It was receiving countless signals as the pond began to make sense of things, and the questions Kira had asked it with her tears.
Thanks for reading this extract! I hope you enjoyed.
As always,
Cheers!
Juan
Let nerds skip the party!!!