The Soul Star ⭐️ The planet of Jiadao

 And Yet 

Algotodo was the oldest and wisest of the Seven Sages of Vicinese Antiquity. It was in his memory that the planet of Algoritmo was named, for he was the one who conceived and designed it. He lives there even now, deep in a mountain valley. Most days he can be found sitting at the end of a long dock that leads into a calm green lake.

Algotodo was born in 1,001,372 BC, about 350 years before the other Six Sages. He also came from a different planet. While the others were cosmopolites from Vicino Prossimo, Algotodo came from the small backwood planet of Jiadao, which was about twenty parsecs from the capital. Jiadao was full of craggy, mountainous hills, waterfalls, fresh running streams, and placid green lakes. It was here that Algotodo spent the first 300 years of his life, running through the fields and back alleys, building his first house (which was perfectly integrated into the tranquility of the Nature around it), and going to university in the capital city of Change-ling. At the university he met again the beauty he had loved ever since he sat next to her in grade school: the enigmatic Wei. Her body curved to the sound of music that only she could hear. 

Wei still sung to him in the night, between the desolate willow trees, in the most sorrowful of his dreams. Or he sat wide awake, listening, looking out his window at the stars, thinking of the paths he might have taken. It was impossible that she no longer existed. Where could she have gone?

And yet no one ever answered his question, Où subsiste encore ton écho? Where is your echo now?

Where be your glances now? your graces? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set my heartbeat on a roar?

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The Great Glacier that sat between the Upper Valley and the High Sea had warmed, year by year. And yet the people below were so absorbed by the beauty of the reflections in the placid lakes that they never took notice. They imagined somehow that they were one with Nature, and that Nature would never harm them. Some even wrote poems about how Nature was like God, who was like Water and the Divine Mother: it gave everything and expected nothing in return.

But Mother Nature wasn’t as benevolent as she seemed. The water from the High Sea took everything with it, covering the entire surface of the planet — except for the barren mountains around the former lake and the upper range of the Chachange Mountains, with its small aerial station hidden by the clouds. The college professors of Jiadao had read poems from other planets but imagined that the poets were just being alarmists, and therefore they never taught these to their students.

The population of Jiadao was a happy one, and things like murder and suicide were unheard of. No one locked their doors. In fact, their dialect had no word for lock. Yet the ice dam broke open many years too soon, and there was precious little room upon the hill. And yet Algotodo was one of the fortunate ones. He just happened to be wandering among the mountain peaks, looking for balm in the forest, not even his girlfriend could say exactly where. Even he didn’t know where he was, lost in contemplation, in the admiration of the oneness of the human soul and the universe. He flew across golden cubes into the Unknown.

As he descended from the peaks, Algotodo couldn’t believe his eyes — or perhaps it makes more sense to say that he couldn’t believe his feet: the mountain path he trod descended through a bank of mist and then all of a sudden he was wading into steep water. He thought he had somehow blundered upon a mountain lake. So he scrambled quickly back to the land, and then tried to walk around the lake. But the only around was back to where he started. He began to realize what had happened. Heartbroken, he looked out at the submerged world. 

Dejected, he made his way up to the small aerial station at the top of Mount Chachange. He walked into the station house. Three pilots sat at a table, staring into the few scattered dregs of tea in their cups. Silent, they looked up at him, haunted by everything they’d lost. They shook their heads to clear their senses, and asked how he managed to survive. Was anyone with him? No. They weren’t surprised. They invited him to sit down and have a drink, and together they waited for the Vicinese ships to arrive. After several minutes, their station master, an old man of over five thousand years, joined them in their communal stupor of grief. The station master was a scientist, yet he was also a wizard and alchemist of sorts. Realizing the insane potency of the moment, he went into the kitchen and brewed a pot of tea whose delicate pungency could be the equal of the hour.

Revived somewhat by the subtle textures of the brisk, woody tea, Algotodo asked the station master if he had some sort of paper or book he could write in, to try to get a mental grip on what had happened. He told the old man that he needed to come to terms with the fact that among the millions of drowned bodies below was the body of Mei, who wasn’t just the love, but was also the very meaning of his life. He mumbled something, although the station could just barely make it out, about “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

The station master saw how distraught he was, so he went into the supply room. He took a key from his chain and opened a locked box. From the box he took out an empty notebook, made from the leaves of the Jiadao hawthorn tree. This type of hawthorn tree only grew on the planet of Jiadao, and had leaves which were immune to the depradations of time. The leaves were the most durable natural substance known in the Vicinese universe. Because the tree only grew at low elevations, however, the only remaining leaves of the tree were those in the hawthorn notebooks. The trees themselves were of course dead and buried beneath the waters. To the old station master, these dead and buried trees represented all the thoughts, poems, novels, sketches, and biographies that might have been.

Algotodo felt his soul had been fractured, and that the only way to bring himself together was to write and write, until somehow the memory — and perhaps the essnce — of Wei came alive again. Sipping his tea and writing in his native Francino dialect, he etched his pain into the first leaf of the book:

Mort à jamais? C’était possible. Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci, et un second hasard, celui de notre mort, souvent ne nous permet pas d’attendre longtemps les faveurs du premier.

Dead forever? That was possible. There’s a great deal of chance in all this, and also a latter chance, death, which often doesn’t allow us to wait long enough for the favours of the former.

He knew that he would have to be very patient if he was to recover the flavour of Wei. He would wait a million years if necessary. Or, if possible, he would wait forever — if, that is, he could figure out a way to make that happen.

What he wrote that afternoon, as he tried to understand the meaning of the sunken world beneath him, were the first short paragraphs in the hawthorn notebook that would later be called The Book of Fractures. This book chronicled the pain which almost obliterated his soul. It also chronicled his journey through the reconstruction of memory to the optimism of his second notebook, which would later be called The Book of Fractals.

The station master poured everyone another cup of tea, although the three rangers at the table could hardly see the cups he had set before them, having decided to obliterate their senses with mescahol. Thinking of his own family beneath him in the watery grave, the station master took pity on Algotodo, who was clearly heart-broken because of the loss of one woman. The focus of Algotodo’s grief, on this one woman called Wei, focused the station master’s more general grief. He didn’t have children of his own, yet he thought of each one of his brothers and sisters, and of each one of the friends he’d known. Then he thought of his parents, who had arrived in that vast watery world long before the others. It all came down to the same thing in the end.

There were precious few luxuries on the station, yet the station master went back to the kitchen, opened a cupboard that was hidden at the back of a cupboard that stored old tea pots, funnels, filters, and distillers. From behind all these, he brought out two little, hard, shell-shaped pastries, and put them on a little plate. He had been saving these pastries for a special occasion, knowing how potently they combined with the tea. When Algotodo saw them, their shell shape reminded him of picking sea shells by what used to be the ocean, which was now mixed with the greater underwater world.

When Algotodo bit into the little shells, it was like scooping his teeth into the soft earth, and from there into a well, and from there into the world of waters that lay beneath his feet. When one moment all he could think about was Wei, her smile, her smell, her bright eyes with their kind mischief, now he thought of her family, their friends, the city, and the entire world. Then he saw it spinning in the solar system, gyrating in the local cluster of systems, and finally he saw everything swimming and swirling in the vast universe of the Purple Pulse. This wider vision gave him the strength to write a second paragraph and to return to the black hole within him that pulled him back to Wei. How could he negotiate betwen her esence and the essence of all the other things that he held in his memory?

The tea on the tip of his tongue disssolved the sugar and butter of the pastry. Each drop of tea was super-charged with bits of energy that went straight from his tongue into his brain. This allowed him to take a great leap: perhaps memory wasn’t just capable of grasping the best in life — the essnce of Wei — but also of carrying the entire architecture of memory, without giving way to despair, into the future.

Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.

But when nothing exists of the longago past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, alone, more frail but more vivid, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the scent and the flavour still remain for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruin of everything else, to carry without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Whatever Algotodo might do to eternalize the memory of Wei, he still couldn’t understand why Nature took her away in the first place. Why had Nature done this? How could it take an innocent creature like Wei with it in the general flood of time and emotion, which flowed ever further from him, lost in a meaningless sea?

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Years later, angered by Nature’s complete indifference to his pain, he traveled to the universities of Vicino Prossimo. He wanted to figure out if there was any way to prevent such tragedies from occurring. And, if possible, to recreate the beauty of his lost home. He didn’t just want to remember things past; he wanted to make them real again.

People told him to mourn her and try to forget about her. Try to leave it all behind. And yet there wasn’t enough water in the ocean to wash his hands of it.

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Algotodo didn’t believe in luck, and yet as luck would have it he found a group of scholars who were interested in exactly the same thing. For the next 800 years, they worked together on equations that could imitate the pulse and rhythm of life itself. They aimed to control the mechanics of sentient existence in a way that Nature refused to do, so that those who lived might be free from existential terror and from the death sentence that Nature had meted out for the last eighty billion years. They wanted their equations to be integrated into the very workings of the DNA and mind, so that they could dance and drift in concord and at the behest of the self, whether it was swaying to a steady samba rhythm or taking the odd and unpredictable turns of the tango.

The formulas they developed were so complex and powerful that they were tantamount to magic. Yet they were equations, ones that could work as engines on the very substances of life: waves, fields, atoms, subatomic particles, and also on the particles and waves beneath the known subatomic particles. Nanotechtonics at 10 to the minus 60 metres.

The Seven Sages found a way to mine beneath all the mines that all the other species could conceive. When they broke the barrier of what everyone said was utterly impossible, plummeting from 10 to the power of minus 60 meters, they set the Star in motion, as well as all the machinery that connected the Star to every single particle in the cosmos. In order for their creation to remain invulnerable, they then destroyed the technology that allowed them to mine beneath what soon became inconceivable, incredible, and finally outright magic.

Since Algotodo was the one who lead this research, the other Six insisted that these formulas they created, these incantations that could almost control life itself, be named after their creator. So they called them algorithms.

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Next: Tales: 🧚🏽 The Ancient Mariner

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