The Soul Star ⭐️ The Planet of Algoritmo

Algoritmo

Comfortably seated at the Ramblabar Caffè, Algobrith looked out over the Piazza Grande. He could barely believe that there was a world more wonderful than this. A Fractal Historian, Algobrith relished the moment: he saw around him the gigantic gleaming square, the blue sky above him, with the white clouds drifting slowly in the warm breeze. And yet, in those clouds were entire worlds of speculation. And beneath his feet were all the worlds that had ever been.

It was an understatement to say that Algoritmo was the most intricate and elegant planet in the cosmos. It was the chef d’oeuvre of Algotodo, the most broken and most brilliant master of infraction the Kraslika has ever seen. To those who lived there, it was a planet called Algoritmo; to those who lived outside it, it was a rumour called The Soul Star.

Algoritmo stood motionless at the exact centre of the Kraslika. It was, however, also hurtling through space at over a million kilometres an hour. But no one in the Kraslika felt this movement, and very few beings within the Kraslika understood that it was happening at all. Kraslikans were like the humans in the Bible who thought that the Earth stood still, and that it was the centre of all space. And yet the Earth rotated around its pole, circled the sun, whirled on a spiral arm, etc. If you told the exalted Professor of Vicinese Astrophysics — in his bejewelled study on the 87th floor of the Golden Hill — that the Kraslika was a cog in a greater wheeling machine, he would laugh you out of the room.

Nor could anyone in the Kraslika see Algoritmo, except of course the departed souls who called it home. Literally a microcosm, it was so tiny that a conventional microscope couldn’t detect it, and so vast that it contained, in its fractal depths, a replica of the entire cosmos. This was because the law of proportional infractions held sway at the micro-subatomic level. As a result, the circumference of the planet didn’t seem like a tiny distance measured in units much smaller than an angstrom. Rather, the circumference was 2 trillion kilometres, just as kilometres are understood in the rest of the cosmos.

At their time of death, souls found their way to the planet as if by instinct. They travelled toward the Saraswati Supercluster, and then through the darkness of the Local Void. It was as if they were Arctic tern, voyaging from one icy pole to the next.

Algoritmo had a population of about 60 trillion squared — that’s 60,000,000,000,000 X 60,000,000,000,000, whatever that adds up to. The exact count, and all the data about the population, was kept in City Hall, and also inside a small red diamond on the pinky of the Chief Demographer.

Algoritmo was also a cosmic museum, containing the infracted history of every world in every galaxy of the Kraslika. Within its seemingly hard, impenetrable shell lay sextillions of past worlds, each of which circled in its own solar system at every stage of its existence since one million BC. Travelling downward, one could see whole civilizations morphing from Age to Age, evolving upward in a seamless fabric of space-time toward the surface of the planet. Each world spiralled outward, pulsing from its Alpha to its Omega. The broad strokes of this layering was also layered within the DNA of every citizen who made it to the Soul Star. In this way citizens knew where they came from, and knew how their own world related to every other world in the cosmos.

The best part of Algotodo’s design was that citizens could travel down the blood lines to any space or time, any region or Age. They could see in dramatic detail into the almost infinite worlds of the planet’s depth.

Most citizens were at first curious to revisit their own world, to see all the parts of it they once knew — their neighbourhood, their home and local caffè — and to see all the parts they’d wanted to see when they were alive in their previous lives.

Algorithmians could see in detail the world they came from in every stage of its development. They could see where they grew up, what factors influenced them, what they had done right, what they had done wrong. They could see their husbands and wifes, their grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, acquaintances, old girlfriends and boyfriends… It was, Algotodo said, the only way people were ever going to get peace of mind, and live with themselves forever.

The outer shell of Algoritmo was egg-shaped, like the Kraslika itself. And yet it had none of the fragility of an egg shell. On the contrary, it was harder than any known element. It was even harder than ferridium from the planet Die. And yet it was also infinitely flexible: every moment it grew a fraction larger, as the present expanded outward from the infractions of the past.

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As the caffè hit his bloodstream, Algobrith admitted that in contemplating the complexity of the world beneath him it was helpful to drink several cups of strong caffè. Well, one might call it caffè, but it was really something like a blend of coffee, cocaine, and alcohol, brewed to perfection. It had a lustrous brown shine and a full body that danced all the way from the tongue to the amygdala, like a line of samba dancers in Rio, down from the favelas to the dazzling sands of Ipanema. After two or three caffès, the Piazza expanded even further, folded in on itself, burnishing its sunlit tiles into the corners of the mind.

If the front row of the Ramblabar Caffè was occupied, Algobrith would wander over the brightly-etched stones of the Piazza until the right outdoor table became available. He would be slightly disappointed though, since the Ramblabar was the closest caffè to the centre of the Piazza, which was dominated by the pulsing 80-metre diamond called I Wish You Were Here. The Diamond shone so brightly that it almost seemed to be a sun, yet it never blinded you when you looked at it. It was rumoured to open the mind’s eye to other worlds, even to ones that never got included in the infractions beneath. It was also rumoured to possess occult powers that allowed its viewer to commune with the dead.

Algobrith wanted to be as close as possible to the Diamond, because perhaps in this way he might be closer to his brother Claret, who died on a planet in the Aatari universe thirty years before Algobrith’s death. Algobrith hoped to communicate with his brother, who for some reason never made it to the Soul Star. There were rumours that a Fallarian priest had committed a unique form of genocide on the Ataari planet, yet all the details about this had been snuffed out by the Aatari Security Agency, which was notorious for keeping information even from its own people.

Algobrith wore thin-soled shoes, so that his feet felt the planet’s shell beneath him. The closer he got to the shell the closer he felt to the cosmos outside Algoritmo. He could almost intuit what was happening in the Kraslika by feeling what was happening in its continual infraction beneath him. He could feel it in his blood, his bones, his very DNA. He felt the rhythm of the spiral energies of time as they shot up from the centre, infusing him with a living connection to the past. 

Algobrith directed all the energy in his loins downward toward the Aatari planet, Tarry Doom. At the same time he focused his caffè-drenched eyes on the centre of the pulsing incandescent Diamond. And yet he couldn’t hear or see Claret, who was once a great lover of caffè, caffè tables, and poetic dreams.

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Dimensions

Algobrith conceded that it was always a tricky business trying to navigate the world below. Talking to its shades was even trickier. So he turned his mind instead to the beauty and miracle of its present construction. If he were to graph even the tiniest fraction of the algorithmic propulsions beneath him, it might look something like this:

Above Algoritmo’s shell was the world of the Algorithmians, which was the most complex world in the cosmos. It incorporated every species from every world of the Kraslika, from 1 million BC to the present.

On the distant plains or cities of Algoritmo, the diverse populations reworked the dynamics they had known during their lives in the Kraslika. None of these dynamics, however, involved war or violence. Algotodo had seen to that. Algotodo had aimed all of his algorithms toward eclecticism and fusion, toward unity in diversity. Those who lived in the countryside did so peacefully, without ever thinking to steal from their neighbour. Why would they steal? They had everything they needed. Those who lived in the capital city, Algodad, were encouraged to ponder the fundamental unity in the cosmos, and to explore the endless manifestations of science and art.

As a result, the Algorithmians didn’t spend their time fighting, or scheming how to fight. True, they spent decades, and sometimes even centuries, working out the conflicts they once thought so important. Yet over time these conflicts looked more and more like the disagreements of senile inmates in an asylum. Once the Algorithmians had worked through these conflicts, they were free to pursue the things that made life worth living — connection to family and friends, art, literature, sports, design, cuisine, blue-green martini parties, theatre, car racing, music, and golf. 

Looking out over the Piazza Grande in the centre of Algodad, Algobrith shook his head at the things he had read about in the daily papers of the Kraslika. 

Instead of that senseless carnage and intrigue, he saw artists and philosophers next to him in the caffès. Or he imagined them up in their garrets and penthouses, writing, drawing, thinking, experimenting.

Algobrith was especially fond of the Algorithmian philosophers, who discussed everything from the spin of an atom to the curl of a hair. They were like the philosophers of the Middle Ages on Earth, who wondered how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Such a description wouldn’t insult the Algorithmian philosophers at all. Instead, they would wonder what the angels were wearing and what music they listened to. They would suggest that perhaps it wasn’t only harp music, but a symphony of the spheres, with guitar and gittern, timbrel and tambourine, pandeiro and psalterium, fiddle and flute, zither and viol, crumhorn and citole, naker and zampogna. Perhaps these unearthly, sensual melodies blended into greater harmonies and were unified by the background drone of bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy — who knew for sure? 

The thinkers in the capital city Algobad had a particularly well-developed sense of poetry. They could stare for hours at the curl of hair as it danced in the breeze. Hypnotized, they wondered if all of their philosophizing wasn’t just another way of not getting entirely lost in beauty, the beauty of the dark-eyed Algobadian nymphs who winked at them from the other side of a caffè or bar, or who looked down at them from their tree-house suites, or who looked across at them from a side-street, longing for an afternoon in their cot or on their carpet, with the soft winds of Algoritmo swaying through the trees outside, and the soft light of the sun filtering through the window and onto the face of their lover. 

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The Layers Beneath

Immediately beneath the shell of Algoritmo was an immense infraction of the present Kraslika, while each layer beneath that was a continuous series of infractions of the past. For practical purposes, the Algorithmians split up the continuous infractions into decades, so that a “time traveller” could specify which of the layers from 1 to 100,000 he might like to visit. 

Yet the planet also had two other layers, one deep within it, beneath the hundred thousand decades, and the other far above it, reaching into the exosphere. The inner layer was the core of the planet, and its depth was incalculable. This hidden, internal layer consisted of projected, hypothetical infractions, starting one million years ago, and going deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, into the mists of Creation. This layer was called Al-Principio, and contained not only the origin of the planets of the Kraslika, but also the origin of the stars and the great clouds of ether that preceded them.

A million years ago, Algotodo had built this layer because he was an ardent philosopher and couldn’t stop thinking about such things as eternity and first causes. He also hoped that by building this layer into the planet, he might one day discover how to infract a very particular person who had lived just centuries before the planet was born.

The outer layer started about ten kilometres above the surface of the planet. It looked like a clear blue sky, a bank of clouds, a series of indeterminate mists, ocean currents, overlapping auras, or a latticework of crystals, depending on how you looked at it. Referred to as Al-Futuro, this layer started in the stratosphere and projected itself beyond the exosphere. It contained future projections, infracted into the billowing clouds.

At the edge of the exosphere infractions became as dense as those in the Al-Principio. The emptier the space became, the greater the fractal density, until, reaching the planet’s outer shell, the outer limit in fact had no limit. Algotodo called this outer line or shell the extended point of paradox, for each point on the outer shell contained infinite infractions, which created a continuous event horizon surrounding Algoritmo.

It was at this point in his algorithmic speculations that Algotodo hypothesized that all of outer space, which appeared so empty, may be the fullest of all. During the late afternoon, he would often sit on the veranda of his friend Algobrith. As they looked out over the local market, he etched lines and patterns into a hawthorn scroll, working like the old Arabic geometers with the vertices of mathematics and philosophy. He also wrote poems about the relation between the tenderness of a dimple dancing in and out of existence beneath dark eyes and the densely-infracted emptiness of outer space.

Within the meteorological grammar of Al-Futuro, Algotodo had woven a conditional tense. This allowed the Algorithmians to roam up into the clouds and from there to go wherever they wanted. They could go into something so deeply that it were as if they had entered a black hole. Or they could take flight from one galaxy to the next, without passport and without fear, as if they’d entered a worm hole. All of these worlds were within Al-Futuro, wrapped and deeply layered with infractions that expanded and contracted, all according to the arcane calculations of Algotodo, the god of all algorithms.

The Algorithmians roamed freely in this marvellous ether, without ever fearing that some fallen angel might hook them with its spear or drag them down to some boiling lake or icy dungeon. Yet in this the Algorithmians were naive. Because their afterlife was so perfectly constructed, it seemed more real than the Kraslika they came from. Many of them even believed that they’d arrived at the end of history. They felt that everything that could once hurt them was now just a mirage, just an echo of the bad old days when they knew war and scarcity, enmity and rage. They were completely blind to the possibility of these things ever returning. They told themselves they had nothing to fear, that heaven was a place where nothing dangerous ever happens. They had within them the entire history of their cosmos, and felt that they had learned all the lessons they needed to learn.

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The Algorithmians always felt at home, largely by virtue of the positive algorithms that permeated the atmosphere of Algoritmo, and floated into every cell and every DNA molecule of their beings. These algorithms encouraged them to appreciate everything and to explore beyond who they once were.

This was the ultimate gift of the ancient sage of Vicino Prossimo: Algorithmians not only got to live an afterlife with all the memories they could possibly want, but they also got to go off in new directions, making new memories and finding new ways of being. 

Paradoxically, the same luxury didn’t apply to Algotodo himself. Although he was a citizen of Algoritmo and had a deluxe condo on the seventh floor of the Vale, he remained fundamentally unhappy. In the last several hundred years he had taken to reading nostalgic Chinese poetry and parsing the lines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Algotodo had lived on Algoritmo for a million years, and it had taken him almost as long to find the perfect articulation of his grief. Was it mere chance, or was it serendipity, that Earth was so close to what other people called the Soul Star? Or did the Star itself cast a spell on humans, so that they were the only ones who managed to guess its heavenly nature? In any case, their poets had managed to express with precision the deep longing he had for the woman he had lost so many years ago:

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul, that, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her.

Just as the Soul Star didn’t move, neither did the melancholy that persisted in Algotodo’s heart for a million years.

On his wall Algotodo had a giant plasmic screen of a mountain landscape. At times it dripped with the rain that hid his tears, and at other times it was shrouded by the mists that drifted this way and that within him. Wei walked up from the path that circled the lake and walked toward him. She spoke the words he felt, and the words he imagined she would feel if she still existed, somewhere in the sorrowful dimension of lost time:

… indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man; how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

While Algotodo gave his fellow Kraslikans everything, he lacked the one thing he needed. Although almost infinite in faculty, he had an empty hole at his centre. He was living proof that mind doesn’t matter if the heart is empty.

The exact reason for his predicament was that his brilliant construction, fretted as it was with golden fire, could infract anything except whatever came before it. There was no way he could infract a person before he discovered the technology that made such an infraction possible. No matter how deeply Algotodo went into his algorithms to mine what she once was, and no matter how high he went into the clouds to find what she might have been, he still couldn’t bring her back to life. 

Looking down from his library on the seventh floor, Algotodo was relieved to see that he couldn’t make out the taut ankles of the girls walking down the cedar-lined path in their light summer clothes. Still, he closed the blinds and tried to think of something else.

What came to his mind were two other things he couldn’t do: fathom the craft of the Fallarians, and tame the pride of the Vicinese. And yet he knew somehow, as sure as he knew that he would never see Wei again: they were coming for his sunken realm.

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Next: ⭐️ Nothing in Damascus

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