Reconfigure (6 page)
Roisin looked at the two objects to her right and typed.
“Examine Cap”
RC delivered.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Cap
Static Chemical Compound Object
Contents Components
C10H8O4
Absolute Attachments
Coin
Fractal Location - <3800.29,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
She typed another command.
“Examine Coin”
RC replied.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Coin
Static Composite Object
Contents
Cu 75%
Ni 25%
Parent
Cap
Relative Location <0.07,0,0>
She nodded, agreeing with whoever designed this as she saw the descriptions of the parental relationship on the coin, and the absolute attachments section of the cap. She put everything back as it should be typing.
“Detach Coin Cap”
RC confirmed.
@rayKonfigure
Detached Coin Cap
Time for some relativity, or whatever this option gave. She tried.
“Attach Cap Coin -relative”
She read the response.
@rayKonfigure
Attached Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0> relative
She checked the Cap, typing.
“Examine Cap”
RC provided.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Cap
Static Chemical Compound Object
Contents Components
C10H8O4
Relative Attachments
Coin
Fractal Location - <3800.29,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
She typed the command to look deeper at the Coin.
“Examine Coin”
It was a similar response to the previous Join.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Coin
Static Composite Object
Contents
Cu 75%
Ni 25%
Parent
Cap
Fractal Location - <3800.36,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
What was she doing! She felt herself being sucked into the CLI paradigm. There she was messing with the fabric of space and time, or something very close to that, and instead of observing the ‘real’ world objects she was querying the command line. It was an easy thing to get suckered into as a programmer. Unless you worked on robots or 3d printing or automotive and alike, most of your code was hidden. Everything you did was not ‘real’ in the sense of atoms and their connections. Roisin mentally gave herself a kick and looked at the cap and the coin. A push of the cap, then of the coin, showed things behaving as per normal. This was just a symbolic link of some kind.
Roisin had another test to check this relationship. She first of all decided to be a little safer. She typed.
“Save slot2”
She was happy to see a response.
@rayKonfigure
Current zone saved to slot2
Then she tried to make the Cap go away, just like the shards before, typing.
“rm Cap”
RC replied dutifully.
@rayKonfigure
Cap
She didn’t really notice the subtle twinkle of light but she did notice the complete absence of the Cap on her desk and the fact she had seemingly removed ten whole pennies of the realm from existence too. She had un-minted a coin, practiced whatever the opposite of quantitative easing was?
She hoped that she would get the items back, typing.
“Load slot2”
RC confirmed the request.
@rayKonfigure
Loading slot2
Hey Presto, and back in the room. One useless bit of plastic and one round metal token of value. If nothing else she would have a career in magic now. Not ideal, not a great profession to pick. Whilst fascinating how the human mind can be distracted by misdirection, magic is just weird she thought. She always felt a slight embarrassment for the performers too, with their perfectly practiced and timed routines. What happened if it went wrong and they dropped a card, sat on a dove or walked straight into a non-fake wall? No matter, she wasn’t really going into magic, and if she did it would be real science anyway, so there!
Just Join and Split to try? She mentally noted. Given the freaky nature of the absolute Attach this might get a bit messy. She best just get on with it, she thought, so she typed.
“Join Cap Coin”
RC responded needing more information.
@rayKonfigure
Join Cap Coin - specify orientation ,offset, level
Roisin added some numbers to the command.
“Join Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0>”
RC replied
@rayKonfigure
Joining Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0> <2709>
The coin was now perfectly cemented in the plastic of the cap. Right across the main body. There were no scorch marks or melted areas, that might indicate a struggle to merge the two items. It was a 10p and Cap perfectly engaged together.
She typed to reverse the process.
“Split”
RC came back with.
@rayKonfigure
Split - No parameters specify object, start, end, direction, level
Oh dear! Roisin realised this was now going to be a bit like mixing PlayDoh. It is easy to roll two colours together, she had done enough messy play at school to know that. If you wanted just the red PlayDoh back out of the marbled mess you were pretty much out of luck. There could be a mathematical solution to the problem. Who would ever apply that sort of compute power to some weird branch of fluid dynamics, with a semi solid mush? So, no coin out of the cap by a simple split then!
It was still worth her typing.
“Split Cap”
RC replied.
@rayKonfigure
Cap not found
Ah! She guessed that would have happened but had to check. She ran a file listing command, to recheck what was in the Zone, looking for any sort of cap named objects.
“ls Cap*”
The reply answered the question.
@rayKonfigure
Cap1
The Join had created a new instance of an object, it was still a cap of sorts, but like a good file system it had made a new name for it. She went for it with some almost random numbers.
“Split Cap1 <0,-0.3,0> <0,0.3,0> <0,1,0>”
RC confirmed the operation
@rayKonfigure
Splitting Cap1 <0,-0.3,0> <0,0.3,0> <0,1,0> <2709>
She looked at the 10p fused cap and saw a precise thin crack running from top to bottom. She performed her delicate pincer grab again. As she lifted the ‘capncoin’ it broke into two. The pieces would have been a perfect mirror image of one another if it were not for the Queen’s head on the coin. It was like a perfect slice of cake on the Great British Bake Off. Mary Berry would have been proud of the layers. “Lovely laaairs.” Roisin said out loud in a countrified accent. She now had two 5p caps, sort of.
The human brain latches on to patterns to make sense of the World. It needs something that it can understand. If it can’t then it either ignores it and tells its owner something different (as in magic) or it obsesses until a solution is reached. Roisin tended to the latter. What was this level number? The 2709 seemed consistent across all the ‘Examines’ and seemed to be a default on Join and Split. What about fractal level? Roisin loved fractals. They made sense and are all around us. Whatever level you look at things, there is a pattern that is both complex and simple at the same time. This was very pleasing to Roisin. She still had a part of a zoomed in Mandelbrot set on her phone wallpaper. It displayed the beauty of numeric iterations over a formula, creating a stunning terrain map. The black parts showing the formula in that area resolved to zero, the other parts coloured to indicate how many iterations were required to reach an answer. In an infinite bounded space the maths can zoom in on a section and perform the iterations again at a different level of precision. It displayed boundaries and coastlines of great complexity, in a repeating pattern on the edge of the zero space. You change the bounding box of the coordinates… The Zone! Things were starting to match her understanding of the World. You dive deeper into the Zone by setting the level of iteration. RC worked like a Mandelbrot set might, she suggested to herself.
Yes. Yes. Yes! This must be part of what is going on here. A Zone of interest and I am at a certain level of abstraction, 2709. I see the patterns and the objects, I see their simplicity and complexity. Roisin was cooking. We can’t see individual atoms with the naked eye, but we can zoom in with an electron microscope to see incredible detail. It is the same incredible detail and complexity we see looking at a mountain range with all its crevices and trees.
“I mean that detail Slarty Bartfast put on those Fjords, all those squiggly bits.” She mused, quoting a famous character. She was drifting again, but she let herself go with it. Her subconscious was searching multiple levels looking for an answer. It didn’t take long for the machine to go ping either.
She retyped.
“Load slot2”
RC produced a DM back.
@rayKonfigure
Loading slot2
The cap and the 10p piece sat next door to one another as if their weird inter species mating had never occurred. Normality, but not for long as she had a hunch. She typed her most daring request yet to RC.
“Join Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0><2710>”
One level difference, she was not sure if that was the right direction. This fractal level directive was going to be a lot more complex than figuring out which direction y operated in on the Translate. Her earlier incorrect guess on direction that caused ‘MugShards’.
RC replied with what seemed an appropriate confirmation to Roisin.
@rayKonfigure
Joining Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0> <2710>
A few medieval alchemists would have just turned in their graves, Roisin thought. The orange plastic cap was now a slightly dull silver colour. As Roisin’s thumb and forefinger grabbed it she felt the cold shiny surface, and as she lifted it up it felt a lot more solid than before. It was not totally ‘coiny’ though. It had a bit of a rubbery give to it, a sort of plastic metal. It felt like a shiny version of Sugru putty after it had set. She interrogated RC typing.
“Examine Cap1”
She guessed the designation, after the reload things should have been back to normal. Using Join, the file system would have renamed the object as before.
She got what she expected, and a bit extra.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Cap1
Static Chemical Compound Object
Contents
Cu 60%
Polyethylene terephthalate 20%
Ni 20%
Fractal Location - <3800.29,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
The object had smashed together as different materials. It was not some chemical formula as the cap had been before. Instead it was a mixture. It was red, blue and now yellow PlayDoh? A multitude of possibilities blasted out in front of Roisin’s imagination. She had no idea the exact path she was taking, but there were a lot of paths and they were all gut wrenchingly exciting. She figured her burbling stomach was a geek vertigo. She had only scratched the surface, and created a few new ones too!
She needed to set things back to initial start conditions. If this was fractal then messing with those start conditions would be causing all sorts of weirdness on any further tests. She typed her reload.
“Load slot2”
RC confirmed it was happy with that request.
@rayKonfigure
Loading slot2
“Coin, Cap, Cap, Coin just like that, eh hum!” She said in her best fake magicians voice.
Roisin took a moment to reflect on the breaking of the mug. It had been a Split command? The mug and its shards had mathematically broken along lines in keeping with expectations. Big pieces and small pieces were created. The pattern of dispersal had looked complex and simple at the same time, close up or far away. It was not an infinite fractal but it had fractal properties. She scrolled back through the now very long set of interactions with RC. She re-read the warning message. It said.
@rayKonfigure
Applying Translate Mug 0,-0.15,0 Physics engine multiple split initiated
So, yes! A ‘physics engine multiple split.’ It meant there were meta routines, or maybe just the forces of nature, that applied the same sort of commands she could. They may not be DM’ing them to RC but the outcomes were the same. That meant some of what nature could do she could recreate in code. The right iterations could rebuild, or destroy, real objects. She could, with a bit of effort, be able to reconfigure anything! She thought back to fractal code to generate a fern leaf, one of her college pieces of work on the history of computer graphics. Trees and leaves with their branching and re-branching made ideal subjects for code to create them. It was why file systems were often tree structures. Levels upon levels, bifurcating down to an ever deeper level from the roots. Pathways, choices, all with a beauty in their simplicity but gathering a massive complexity into one bundle. How can something be in two states at the same time, simple and complex? Yet they are! Roisin was in a great place. Her mind was alive, her hunger for exploration was being fed. She wanted more, she needed more. The varying degrees of OCD that make up the average tech geek latches onto these things. It is not a bad thing to obsess. Most of the great discoveries that have helped us evolve happened by accident. They are generally because of an obsessive behaviour by a human, she had read that somewhere. Either one trying to stop something or one trying to find something. Being obsessed, not taking no for an answer, had got her a long way, and all those great scientists too. She was feeling liberated. A vast expanse of land to explore and colonise spread out before her. She had put herself through RC survival boot camp. The training levels were over and she wanted to get on with the free roaming problem solving missions now. Again she stopped herself, this is not a game? She felt a tinge of guilt still for the Marmite, but she would sort that out and see them right eventually. She was foraging this new wilderness and just needed to take something from the environment in order to be able to give back. Yes, the Marmite was justifiable. She had her moral compass. It was hard to deviate from doing the right thing, as she always tried to do. If she started on some sort of evil destructive path now all those years of levelling up as a good person would be for nothing. She would keep herself focussed and made the decision to not be evil.