The next day I woke up to a hundred messages from Anton, regarding the phenomenon and its possible causes and meanings, and I convinced myself again that Anton wasn’t as lazy as most people thought. His strength was like the electrical energy stored in lightning, which could solve all the world’s energy problems, but was so powerful and untamed that no one has the resources to harness it. When an idea possessed him, Anton was able to handle a hammer and nails as well as the computer. He built entire mountains in seconds, as if every detail had been planned in his head, regardless of the knowledge and skills required to create it. And when he didn’t have that knowledge, he flipped through the pages of books like money-counting machines flip through banknotes, and processed huge amounts of information in seconds.
The myth of his laziness was probably a consequence of the wrong idea about him that his mother, his relatives, and so on had. Here’s what they reasoned: “A person with Anton’s abilities could, with minimal effort, complete higher education, start a serious job, and in general do all those things that are expected of him. But he didn’t do it despite that; therefore he must have been very lazy.” And here’s what they missed: a person with great abilities (and hence with great self-confidence) also needed great stimuli. And as a result, Anton couldn’t do something just because it was expected of him. On some days, he didn’t even have the strength to get out of bed if he didn’t find a good enough reason to do so. For him, those reasons were few and in most cases fleeting.
That’s why my friend led this self-destructive lifestyle that I’ve been describing so far. This was the lifestyle that corresponded to the side of his character that most people knew. The loud, angry side, the drinking and staying-up-late side, which filled its time with aimless loafing. Anton himself didn’t like it and to overcome it, he went through all sorts of sciences, arts, and philosophies, in search of things that would engage his restless mind. And for some reason, such a thing in this case was the Phenomenon.
I understood Anton well because I also felt sad most of the time, although we were quite different in how we handled our situation: my misery was hard to bear but never crushing; it was dark but never pitch black, and I was always able to look away and distract myself, to escape the constraints that my feelings imposed upon me. In short, my world was not a world of DARKNESS but one of FOG. For that reason, my desire to get away was strong but formless; I constantly kept losing my way; I was often amid two or three different things, never without a path, but also never actually following one.
I traveled to the office on autopilot. When I entered the room, I noticed my boss smiling at me, but I excused myself, preferring not to talk, and hid behind my monitors and started answering my messages. I decided to call Anton, because reading everything he had written would take too long. He was much more enthusiastic than I was, although he surely hadn’t slept:
“I combed through half the Internet while looking for witness accounts of the other beam.” He spoke with an inflamed tone, as if deliberately wanting to hide how excited the events had made him. “When I didn’t find anything, I started interrogating all acquaintances and strangers in the city. I spent hours nonstop communicating with people, half of whom decided I was completely crazy… In the end, an old girlfriend wrote to me. She claimed that some neighbor of hers had experienced something similar to what you did. Now we’ll check if that’s really true…”
I promised them we would do that sometime and moved on to my work messages: the CEO of the company had written a memo on the importance of artificial intelligence and of the task that I had tried to solve yesterday, saying that everyone should take a look at it and give suggestions on how we can solve it.
I opened my code from yesterday. There was nothing there but the “X”. X is the symbol I often use as the sign of the unknown; the X-rays were marked with it because their discoverer didn’t know what the hell they were. But this is due to René Descartes who used the first letters of the alphabet (a, b, c) to signify known quantities and the last letters (x, y, z) to signify unknowns. Unknown. But wasn’t I there, though? In a human brain. With its essence in front of me. If I tried to describe it in a programming language… Maybe I could…
As I said, I was always in the middle of many conflicting things, and this morning was no exception—there were two cases, two PLOTS, if you will—the investigation of the phenomenon and my ambition to become financially independent. But none of this was being resolved anytime soon. I didn’t even know which should be the main one.
“Or perhaps there needn’t be a main plot.” Yes, perhaps I ought to find time to both look at Anton’s messages and do something at work. But then I quickly realized that I couldn’t do both of these things.
“So, I guess THE PHENOMENON was the main plot?” That was certainly right, according to Anton’s viewpoint, and would make a better book. But would it take me to where I want to go? Or was chasing the phenomenon an extension of the road that I had always been following, the same one which took me to where I was then: tired, miserable, and essentially roadless…
Or was this about my future CAREER, which would allow me to get away from the situation with my parents… and give me something to do? Was this the point where I was done chasing ephemeral things and I decided to dedicate my life to the art, craft, and science of programming?
Or perhaps—this is really solid book material—the two were CONNECTED?
My thoughts suddenly returned to my encounter with the Phenomenon, and my fingers touched the keyboard. The pain returned, but this time it was so slight I felt it almost like an itch, which didn’t bother me; it even helped me concentrate. I didn’t fully understand what I was writing. The meaning of the individual lines escaped me, and the standard brain processes that traditionally accompanied work had taken a back seat. With them, the fear of failure also disappeared. I was already sure that this day would end in an interesting way.
My hands moved faster and faster, until I couldn’t even follow which keys I was pressing. I got more and more confused in my attempts to follow my own logic, until finally I lost it completely. All that remained was to wait until the work was finished.
After about an hour, I gradually began to regain control. It became more and more difficult to translate my thoughts, and I began to miss words and entire commands, but by the time I started thinking consciously and consequently making mistakes, the main work was already done. All that remained was to write a few additional things, which were elementary compared to what I had done so far. I leaned back and reviewed my work from beginning to end. The code was written in my style; there was no doubt about that, but it was many times more perfect than the junk that usually came out of my hands. For twenty minutes, I browsed aimlessly through it to see where I could add something. There was nothing. I took a breath and loaded the code into the test environment. It immediately made an infinite loop that crashed my machine. The whole environment also crashed and stopped the work of several hundred people working with us.
Did I mention that I forgot to save?