St. Barbara-Glass.
Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.
A weblog by Hao Lian.
A journey into the soft of night.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.
Joshua watched as Moses collapsed on the stage. The desert’s blinding heat grew angry around him. It is well-known that climate will change to mark historical events. And, like Moses, it came and went.
Joshua stared at Moses. Joshua stared at the nothingness. He stared at it as he walked back to his tent. He stared at it when the desert turned cold, then very cold, then deathly cold. He stared at it when he closed his eyes.
He knelt down to pray. The Ten Commandments, he thought. Words from God himself, and not just any God. A decimalized, metric, proper God. To give structure to life, to give hope and beauty and meaning and—Joshua couldn’t stop shaking. The pictures of Moses, splayed dead before a crowd that, now, barely could remember him bubbled above the murk in his head, only to be viciously stuffed down by everything else. His hand twitched.
“Joshua?” A divine voice boomed into Joshua’s head. His hand began to really twitch.
Moses had warned Joshua about this. When Moses first heard the voice of God, he had to wash not only his britches but his socks, his shirts, and even his hat. It had been shocking—explosively shocking. Still, God’s voice came as a surprise to Joshua, whose most religious experience had been watching the execution of a man and then vomiting in a nearby toilet. In the face staring back at him on the porcelain bowl, he gave up, passed out, and saw a shining light.
Joshua stammered.
“Joshua, this is your Lord.”
“Yes, my Lord. What …” Joshua paused. He doubted the English language had the proper words, so he took a random stab. “What can I do for you?” He cringed; the English language cringed; several nearby animals felt the necessity to cringe. One of the continually-starved and therefore incredibly cynical desert lions blushed.
“Joshua, in a few days time, those awful people outside will choose you as your leader.”
“Why me, O Lord?”
“Moses chose you. You’re in his will, you know,” God said. If God had a Face, Joshua imagined that He would be smirking triumphantly in some sense of Cosmic Irony that He knew Joshua could not fully appreciate.
Joshua had reached for the shining light in his moment of depression, but a larger, more suffuse green light had overcome the white light. The light of doubt. He had snapped out of his slumber on the toilet seat, flushed it, and staggered outside. The mob, returning from the execution of the innocent man—the innocent men? Did it matter?—, rushed past him, drunk and happy and ignorant and cruel and happy.
Damn that old man, Joshua secretly thought. I just wanted to say hello. Then he goes and nominates me for some idio—
“I can hear your thoughts, you know.” Joshua stopped, feeling an unsettling combination between embarrassment, shame, and the fear that he might spend eternity in Hell with his soul constantly flambéed by spirits of infinite evil.
“If you have any doubts, Joshua, of the ineffability of it all, please—”
Joshua interrupted, “No. I am a servant of the Lord.”
“Aren’t we all?” God boomed, impassively.
Joshua waited.
“Ha ha,” God laughed, impassively.
Joshua sat, silent.
“It’s funny because I Am Completely Omnipotent.”
Adam bent on his knees and asked God for fruit for the coming winter. God frowned, spiritually speaking.
“Fruit. Again?”
“Well, o Lord, it is just that vitamins seem to be especially important in the winter. To fight off colds, flus, you know.”
“Are you saying this is my fault?”
“I’m not saying that you created viruses to hurt me,” Adam hurriedly injected.
“But you know that I created them, right?”
“Yes, yes, yes. It’s just, you’re benevolent and such, and this makes my brain hurt, so could I just have some fruit?”
“I shall think.” And God went away, spiritually speaking.
And Adam sat down and twiddled his thumbs because there wasn’t much to do in Paradise after you talked to all the incredibly horny animals for the umpteenth time.
Then Adam fell back in a paroxysm of intense chest pain. Painfully slowly, the cells of his rib began to agitate and devolve into stem cells at a biologically impossible speed before regressing to a single zygote.
A pause. Adam kept shaking, hoping the eventual shock would render him unconsciousness.
Then the pain elevated as the zygote divided and divided and specialized and divided until a very tiny human (the word “baby”—through all the pain—passed through Adam’s mind) laid still on his chest before transgressing rapidly into childhood, then puberty, and then adulthood.
A very confused woman stood on Adam’s chest, breaking some of his remaining ribs.
A loud voice boomed into Adam’s mind. “Er,”
“I think that went quite well,” God said.
“could somebody heal my chest; maybe an omnipotent being or something” Adam wheezed.
“Oh fine.” And it was so.
Adam pushed Eve to one side and sat up, coughing and reeling from the intense biologically impossible trauma he had just experienced. Eve’s fall was broken by her head because That Was Physics And This Is A Consistent Universe.
And thus God revealed unto Adam and Eve to be kind of a jerk.
Here’s a normal day for in: I show up at the Central Toybox Station—which by the way has the architectural aesthetic of a pig on fire. I clock in and go to my assigned stage. Then I follow orders: Up-B, Down Tap-A, Held R then A. I knock the living stuffing out of my friends. Sure we’re so doped up on anesthesia that none of us feel anything physically. But that poison latches onto more adverbs: emotionally, romantically. I can’t even make love to my wife anymore. I feel nothing when I look at my children. Sure I’m a tough guy; I’m nothing like my loser Fluid Lizard. I try not to cry. But what’s the point of it all? Am I just here to smash into people. These “characters” are my friends. Do you have any idea how traumatizing it is to violently pummel your friends all day long? We tried unionizing. We tried striking. We tried petty vandalism. None of it worked. I’m making below-minimum wage doing this job to which the government has turned a blind eye. I’m not even winning first place anymore ever since the guy turned the CPU level up to five. I feel like a prostitute, and I can’t keep this up anymore. It’s just me and this gun. Does God even exist anymore?; what’s life after death: more of this? This gun is all I have. This gun is all I have. Give me the courage to kill myself.
Because God gave us this biological Turing machine of a body, we can run all of the algorithms our primordial field of computer science has discovered. This is to say, not many: Quicksort, but that’s O(n log n), which is terribly inefficient; A*, which the brain used for neural pathways until the version 59.32 in the 14th century that prompted the Southern Renaissance; and—most importantly—the Mersenne Twister, a psuedorandom number generator.
Why a PRNG and not skip right to RNG? Stochastic brains were tried in 59.34 but the resulting administrative messes in Heaven led to a series of organizational disasters. These culminated in the Cold War. Imagine it from God’s perspective: Decades of completely irrational behavior that you can’t “divinely tamper.” It was with great angelic relief when humans became deterministic again. Sure the output of PRNGs are notoriously difficult for humans to calculate, but it’s a walk in the park for God because God also invented parks and walking. In the end, it was the illusion that mattered.
Wikipedia, the largest sentient being we know, has this to say about the Mersenne Twister: Matsumoto and Nishimura developed it in 1997 with Monte Carlo simulations in mind. Of course, you can’t summarize years of research in one sentence any more than you can say World War II happened because of three rabbits and a bonfire—even if it is true—because while you’ve addressed the primary cause, you’ve eviscerated the story of all its supporting cast. Matsumoto met Nishimura on a bicycling expedition down the Japura River in the Amazon. Nishimura was drowning in the heady vapors of the Amazon, which would settle on and bite your hand like ferociously emotional mosquitoes. Like you and me, they developed a friendship on the banks of a majestic river yards away from horny alligators. They were never supposed to have met, but that’s what happens when you let loose stochastic humans and the butterfly effect in the same universe. Their two brains, two halves of a quine, colluded to reveal a commented-out Mersenne Twister in a pure and beautiful language no man has ever understood before or after that divine revelation. That language was Haskell, and their algorithm did indeed influence the tiny field of Monte Carlo simulations, but isn’t this story much nicer?
J. stood outside his room, staring at the faux oak paneling. He nestled his toes in the brittle gray carpet, which was last cleaned—by accident—back when the only hole the Antarctic had was The Sinkhole. The Sinkhole was and perhaps is still a grungy bar where rugged marine biologists, made cynics by the twin demons of academia and government, chugged down a few beers in between tackling polar bears and ice demons, both external and internal. J. knew none of this. If he had, his thoughts would’ve been quickly drowned out by the thumping bass music playing in the room across the hallway from the time J. tried to fall asleep to the time J. tried to fall awake. To understand J., we must first understand the brain.
The brain is a large biological machine run by God’s chemicals, things with a bunch of carbon in them usually. God likes carbon because he likes the number 12. Jesus once petitioned the people of Aramaia to convert to base 12 with no luck. The mathematic world, faced with this vacuum, chose base 10. By sheer coincidence, base 10 is Satan’s favorite number. Base 10 is Satan’s greatest achievement.
- Ethane: the diarrhea’s in the details
- Ethane: that’s the saying, right?
- Me: Sure, I pray to Diarrhea all the time.
“Wipe us, O Diarrhea, and these, Thy Shits, which we are about to receive from Thy bowels. Through Nausea, our succubus. Achoo.”