The Soul Star ⭐️ The Planet of Algoritmo
And Yet
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Algotodo was the only remaining sage of Vicinese Antiquity. More than any of the Seven Sages, he was the one who conceived and designed the heavenly planet of Algoritmo, which those who don’t live there call the Soul Star. Algotodo lives there even now, in a cedar-lined suite on the seventh floor of an enormous apartment building called The Vale.
Only about a hundred suites in the Vale face the caffés and ristorantes of the Piazza Grande. About three thousand face in the other direction, toward the enormous park and valley of the Cortile Grande. Algotodo’s apartment overlooks the Cortile, with its cedar forests, rose gardens, meandering streams, and Teardrop Lake. Most days Algotodo can be found sitting at the end of a long dock that leads into its green calm. Often he paddles a small canoe out into the lake, which is about three kilometres in diameter. From somewhere near the centre he looks at the cityscape of lavish apartments, gleaming skyscrapers and lush gardens, and sighs.
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Algotodo was born in 1,001,372 BC. He died in 1,000,001 BC, 320 years after the death of the last of the other Six Sages. He was unique among the Sages in that he came from a different planet. While the others were cosmopolites from Vicino Prossimo, Algotodo came from the small backwood planet of Djàdao, which was about twenty parsecs from the capital.
Djàdao was largely flat, except for its nordern pole, which was dominated by cedar mountains and an enormous fresh water sea. Along the foothills were craggy hills, waterfalls, fresh running streams, and placid green lakes. It was in these cedar foothills that Algotodo spent the first years of his life, running through the fields and back alleys with his first love, Wei. Together they went to university in the soodern city of Changales.
Algotodo had loved Wei from the moment he set eyes on her in grade school. While the teacher droned on about subatomic waves, he stared at her, his eyes mesmerized before his brain could catch up to what she meant to him. She was a practical person, and only talked about things that you could touch. And yet her body curved to the sound of music that only she could hear.
At night in his apartment of cedar and bergamot Algotodo imagined he could detect her sweet elusive scent. In the most sorrowful of his dreams, she sung to him, her voice eventually drowned by the wind that swept between the desolate willow trees, down where the long purples grew and her coronet weeds fell into the stream, incapable of her own distress. Or he sat wide awake, listening, looking out his window at the great vale of tears and 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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Algotodo thought about the catastrophe of his home planet every day, although it had taken place exactly 1,001,001 years ago.
The Great Glacier that sat between the Upper Valley and the High Arctic Sea had warmed, year by year.
And yet the people below were so absorbed by the beauty of their world of garden and courtyard, their reflections in fountain and pool, that they never took notice. They imagined somehow that they were one with Nature, and that Nature would never harm them. Some even took day-trips up into the mountains, and afterwards wrote poems about how Nature was like God. Nature was like the sacred waters of the Arctic Sea, or the Divine Mother: it gave everything and expected nothing in return.
Painting: Guanyin in the Tidal Sound cave at Mt Potala, from "In Celebration of the Amitabha Buddha" (無量壽佛會慶圖冊). She waves a willow branch to sprinkle the water from the vase and reduce the suffering of people. The other figure is Sudhana. Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Source: National Palace Museum, Taipei. Author: Anonymous. Text from Tao Te Ching (Daode Jing) 1.8, translation by D.C. Lau, from Penguin Classics, 1963.
But Mother Nature wasn’t as benevolent as she seemed. The deep waters of the High Arctic Sea took everything with them as they funnelled down from the Upper Valley. The waters covered the entire surface of the planet — except for the barren mountains around the slender peak of Chachange Mountain, with its small aerial station hidden in the clouds.
In their studies, the college professors in Changalese read fearful poems about the wrath of Nature and about the complete indifference of the sages. The professors imagined that the poets were just being alarmists, or sarcastic somehow. As a result, they never read these poems to their students.
Text from Tao Te Ching (Daode Jing) 1.6, translation by D.C. Lau, from Penguin Classics, 1963.
The population of Djàdao was a happy one, and things like murder and suicide were unheard of. No one locked their doors. In fact, their languages 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 who survived the catastrophe. He just happened to be wandering among the mountain peaks, looking for balm in the forest, not even his fiancée could say 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.
“Question and Answer Among the Mountains,” poem by Li Po, translated by Robert Cotewall and Norman Smith, from The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, 1962.
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 find somewhere to walk around and down from 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.
“To Wang Lun,” poem by Li Po, translated by Robert Cotewall and Norman Smith, from The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, 1962.
Distraught, 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 two 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 Wei, 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. From a box in the corner he took out an empty notebook, made from the leaves of the Djàdao hawthorn tree. This type of hawthorn tree only grew on the planet of Djàdao, and had leaves which were immune to the depredations 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 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 essence — of Wei came alive again. Sipping his tea and writing in his native Francino, 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 even a hint of the essence 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 Remembered. 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 his fiancée.
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 gone to 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 where he stored old tea pots, funnels, filters, and distillers. 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 now covered all the beaches the Jiadese would ever know.
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. While previously 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 between her and all the other things that he held in his memory?
The tea on the tip of his tongue dissolved the sugar and butter of the pastry. Each drop of tea was charged with bits of energy that went straight from his tongue into his brain. This allowed him to take a great leap. Perhaps, he thought, he hoped to himself, memory wasn’t just capable of grasping the best in life, that is, the essence 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 would do. Yet he would never 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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Angered by Nature’s complete indifference to his pain, he traveled to the universities of Vicino Prossimo. He wanted to figure out a 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.
I remember / All those moments / Lost in wonder / That we’ll never / Find again
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After seeing with his own eyes the watery grave of an entire planet, Algotodo could never again believe in luck. And yet as luck would have it he found a group of scholars who were interested in exactly the same thing he was: to fight back against Time itself, to throw our our fragile and expendable existences back in the face of an indifferent universe.
It was the only revenge he could think of.
For the next 700 years, he and six other scientists worked on the microphysics 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. And yet they were equations, ones that could work as engines on the very substances of life, between and beneath the deepest subatomic particles, waves, and fields. They took nanotechnology beyond the wildest speculation, creating subatomic plates and structures at 10 to the minus 60 metres. Combining their knowledge of microphysics and fractology, which took everything in the unified realm of chemistry, physics, and biology, and threw it all into an open field, an Infinity in which it was possible to build entire worlds, galaxies, and universes.
The Seven Sages had found a way to mine beneath all the mines that all the other species could conceive. They broke the barrier of what everyone said was utterly impossible, plummeting beneath 10 to the power of minus 60 meters.
Then, after Six of the Seven Sages died off one by one, Algotodo was left to set their greater project in motion: the creation of an eternal and infinite planet, one which would last forever and which could contain everything in the entire cosmos.
Algotodo was the only Sage alive to witness his detonation of the algorithmic bomb. In one subatomic blast it infracted every single particle and subatomic particle in the cosmos into the planet of Algoritmo.
In order for the planet to remain invulnerable, he then destroyed the technology that allowed them to mine beneath 10 to the power of minus 60 meters, beneath what soon became inconceivable, incredible, and finally outright magic. A finger stretched across Time itself.
And yet, a million years later, Algotodo was left with the same deep feeling of loss. He thought of Wei and her simple smile. This singular being had loved him, no matter how distracted he was, no matter how strangely he saw the universe through the double lens of poetry and physics. She would just smile at him, lift up her gentle head, and kiss him on the lips.
He was reminded of the recent Christian parable about Jesus being offered dominion over the world. As he sat on the end of the dock staring out into the green waters of Teardrop Lake, he asked himself, What good is power over all the atoms and all the things in the cosmos if you can’t bring back the person you love? What’s the point of life, even eternal life, without love?
