The Receiverist society was characterised—if not defined—by the invasion of predictive models and artificial intelligence into every aspect of life. A person’s education path. Their career. Who to allow into the city. What to stock for noon at a particular cafe. Everywhere, every second of the day was quantified into incalculable amounts of data, and ingested into a sea of algorithms that found predictable patterns even God himself didn’t know about. One couldn’t help but wonder whether a sacred line had been crossed. That perhaps all this quantification robbed Receiverists of an essential aspect of being human; living under the oppressive veil of uncertainty. In very literal terms, it was uncertainty that made who we are. It was the oppressive sea of which its currents shaped our paths and moulded us. The way we responded to it, made mistakes because of it, learnt from it. The unknown purveyed every aspect of our lives and the sum of our reactions to it constituted who we were. And so what did it mean to be relieved of all of it? Were Receiverists free from uncertainty? Or were they oppressed by certainty? Was optimality itself a constricting rope, one that suffocated human expression? Perhaps there was more to life than striving for optimality. Maybe the experience of not finding your go-to food in the cafe you frequented was an enriching one that encouraged spontaneity. And yet, the convenience of having your every need, desire and purpose anticipated for was too seductive to ignore.
There was, however, one final bastion that persisted and held off the invasion of analytics. And it was the reason for why I was in this city in the first place. Mathematics. The one thing in which everything was certain and fixed. Its abstractions were practical yet elegant. It was the very language of quantification that all algorithms took for granted. Yet, it stood firmly against automation. It seemed contradictory, but to me it was obvious. It was to any practitioner of the art. It wasn’t that important and novel mathematical problems required novel solutions, but rather, that they required novel argumentation. New perspectives of seeing things. There was only one way that these perspectives can be gained, and that was through genuine spontaneous inspiration. It wasn’t a matter of logic. No. Logic needed to be actively discarded in order to reach it, otherwise one ran the risk of believing the problem was impossible after having employed all logical approaches.
There were, of course, other reasons for why mathematics was impossible for algorithms. For example, despite being a discipline about patterns, they were broken all the time. A solution might work for the first 906,180,358 cases of a problem, but would inexplicably be incorrect for the 906,180,359th case. Mathematics was a discipline so counterintuitive that one could use maths to prove that there would always exist valid problems that would be impossible to solve. But ultimately, the failure of artificial intelligence in tackling key maths problems had to do with two fundamental premises. Mathematics was an art, not science. Algorithms could only do well in the latter. Figuring out how to optimally stock a cafe to satisfy all the Receiverists on their break was a scientific problem that required scientific methods. Tackling unsolved problems in mathematics was an art that required one to discard everything they knew about how the discipline had worked successfully in the past, and make illogical and unscientific leaps of faith in creating something beautiful and elevating.
And perhaps that was why there was a lack of art in Sanctuary. There were no paintings. No novels. No film. The music sounded like the average from a data set. The few statues I had seen seemed obligatory—a reminder of some vision shared by all Receiversts, not expressions by the diversity of individuals. Just common denominators. Could it be that the people here had become so accustomed to certainty, that the uncertainty of art was inconvenient, if not threatening? Perhaps that was why they needed someone from the outside to help solve a problem that couldn’t be done with algorithms.
Of course, that didn’t mean it would be easy.
“This is your office,” Irene said after opening the door. “It unlocks to your handheld.”
“Thanks,” I said as I stepped inside.
“Much better than your previous office at Miller,” Irene remarked as she leaned against the white wall.
That was certainly the case. It was at least twice as large. One wall had a large screen that I was sure to explore when I had time. There was a couch on the other side of the room. The desk was spacious and held a laptop.
“That machine is a modified one from the surface,” Irene explained. “It’s so you can skip trying to learn our tech.”
“I feel spoilt,” I said.
“Well, I’m off,” Irene said as she turned to leave. “Let me know if you need anything.”
After she closed the door, I dropped the maths documents onto the desk. I walked over to the window and gazed at the strange world outside. The strange world I was in. Could I ever get used to this? I wondered. I remembered when I had been terrified by the view. It was still unsetting, but perhaps one day it would grow on me. Anything was possible. As if I was diving into the abyss, I took a deep breath before taking a seat at the desk.
The symbols were at once familiar and mysterious. What I needed was a perspective shift. When I had first attempted the manuscript back in Miller, I made the mistake of treating the document like any other piece of mathematical exposition. I was wrong. It wasn’t a completed text that could be understood linearly. Rather, it was fragmented. As Mariam described, it was more of a collection of criteria. And so in hindsight, it was obvious that the manuscript didn’t make any sense as a whole. They needed someone to connect the dots. If all the pieces of the puzzle had fit neatly together, then they wouldn’t have needed me. Therefore, I need to start by examining the pieces, I concluded. And I would start by inspecting the structure rather than the explicit formulas and equations. Because only through structure could I identify patterns, relative importance and shapes that couldn’t be seen by a linear study.
“Name’s Erich,” the bald man said. He had a surprisingly baritone voice for his small stature. By my estimation, he was younger than me by at least five years. “And this is the computation lab.”
I stepped into the room. It looked like any other shared office. There were only a few people sitting on the other side of the room, tapping away into their interfaces. “I’m Alex,” I said. “And by that, you mean supercomputers?”
“Yes,” Erich said as he nodded. “I’ve been told to help you with anything you might need for your work.”
“Honestly, I’m surprised that you said supercomputers and not quantum computers.”
“We have those too,” Erich said. “It’s just that they’re interfaced via our supercomputers, so they’re more like a tool of computation if you need it. But you know, not every problem benefits from it so we don’t have that many quantum computation units.”
I was shocked at the casualness in which the man said all that. “Nice,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “So uh. Where are they? The supercomputers, I mean.”
“Oh, they’re located in the sub-base levels,” Erich said with a shrug.
“Ah I see. So this lab accesses those machines remotely,” I said.
“Not really. Everyone who needs supercomputer resources can access them anywhere.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “Wait a minute. Then why is this called a lab?”
“It’s where my team works,” Erich said, either not noticing or not acknowledging the awkwardness of the miscommunication. “This,” he gestured to the corner of the room that inhabited the handful of people slouched over screens, “is the computation team. We optimise computation.”
“Oh,” I uttered as an understanding finally clicked into place. “So you’re the people I should go to if I need to run a ton of simulations?”
Erich nodded. “That’s us. Your companionable computation comrades.”
“Huh. But I can access the supercomputer from my laptop?” I asked.
“Laptop?”
“The interface I’m using.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” Erich said. “But even our supercomputers won’t feel very super if you have a hundred nested loops or if you’re trying to calculate the seventh Ramsey number. At least in the former case, we can help with simplifying that.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “The seventh Ramsey number? Why, have you calculated the fifth, and sixth Ramsey numbers?”
“We’ve only calculated up to the fifth so far, about thirty years ago. But I think we might finally be able to hit the sixth by the end of the decade.”
Once again, the casualness in his voice seemed wildly incongruent with his words. “Holy shit.”
Computation and mathematics go hand in hand. Of course, the theory of computation was a blossoming field of mathematics—at least on the surface; I had no idea how saturated the field was among Receiverist researchers. Conversely, computation was an essential tool to the mathematician. More than crunching numbers, solutions could be validated or disproved using simulations. If the theory appeared to be sensible but the simulations failed to yield expected observations, then one’s mathematical ability must be called into question. I resolved to use the tools at my disposal. If I suspected a solution, then rather than rigorously prove it, which would be tiresome, I ought to test it using simulations first. Failing fast was always better than failing slow. The mathematical rigour should only come afterwards.
After a couple of days, I fell to a steady rhythm. Every day, I would get up a little past seven. I would eat breakfast, then get to my office at eight and begin chipping away at the document. There was a food court a couple of levels down that I frequented for lunch and dinner. The two vendors there were Indian and Greek. I alternated between them. Every two to three hours I’d take a walk through the streets for coffee. I’d return home after dinner, shower then work a little more before hitting the sack. Routine was a breath of fresh air. I was never someone who managed well without a focus. During my first week in Sanctuary, the aimlessness of the hours had made them seem much longer than they had any right to be. In contrast, the third day since I had resumed my research had felt like it had breezed by. And so did the fourth. Some might prefer to enjoy time slowly, to savour its finiteness. I disagreed. I preferred its transience. That was its best part.
Working as a researcher in Sanctuary was admittedly pleasant. In some ways, it was what I had always imagined it would be, until I had started postgraduate research and became jaded towards the academic industry. Of course, the fact that everything was provided for free was beneficial, yet the greatest perk that came with the absence of money was the way it changed the fundamental nature of research. I was no longer doing it for money. The research institution wasn’t private and hence didn’t burden me with lecturing courses or grooming PhD candidates to meet student quotas that translated to revenue targets. I could finally do research for the sake of research and apply myself fullest towards the pursuit of knowledge. Even justifying what I did to outsiders wasn’t as unpleasant of an ordeal as it was on the surface. Typically, the other party would ask “So. What do you do?”
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“I’m an academic,” I would say. “I conduct mathematical research.”
The next response was varied, but it was usually along the lines of “Why?”, or “How much do you get paid?”, or “Man, I used to be good at maths until they added letters into it.” Among Receiverists, however, the conversations were much different.
“Hey,” the man sitting a few seats away from me in the food court started, “you’re new here, right?” He gestured towards the white stripe symbol.
I wiped the corners of my mouth with the hand towel. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“An interesting experience, I imagine,” the man remarked. “I’ve lived my whole life underground.”
“I can’t imagine that,” I said.
“No, you probably can’t,” he said. “So. Why are you here?”
“To do research,” I answered. “I’m a mathematician.” The moment I uttered the five-syllable word, the expectation that the conversation was about to descend into tripe had hit me suddenly and impolitely.
“Wow. You must be doing some seriously important stuff,” he said. “I’ve heard that our mathematicians are pretty good, so you being here must mean something.”
I stared at him blankly. That had not fit the pattern I had become so used to. “Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “Do you get a lot of… outsiders here?”
The man thought for a moment. “Depends on what you mean. You talking about people from the surface? Yeah, we have a lot. Most of us are born Receiverists, but plenty join us. But if you mean people who are temporarily visiting? Not many.”
“So you’re saying that most people who visit end up staying permanently?” I asked.
“Yeah, pretty much,” the man said. “I mean it makes sense. I know quite a few endenized Receiverists and the way they talked about the world above wasn’t exactly flattering.”
I chuckled. “That’s not surprising.”
“What about you?” he asked. “You gonna stay here after you finish whatever it is that you’re here for?”
“Not sure,” I said. “They haven’t even asked me about it yet.”
“My friend, my guess is that they give everyone they bring here the opportunity to stay,” he said. “It wouldn’t be very Receiverist of us to bring in someone and not do that. So. Would you?”
“I don’t know. I’d need to think about it,” I said. “I’ve only been here for a couple weeks. And before that, I didn’t even know this place existed.”
The man laughed. “But the good things are obvious, no?”
“Certainly. But the bad things aren’t,” I said. “The good and the bad of where I’m from are clear to me. But here? There are some things I’m not sure how I feel about, yes. But I’m still waiting to see it. The bad.”
The man regarded me for a moment before, like the flick of a switch, his companionable grin returned. “You’re a complicated man,” he said. “And from what I’ve seen, geniuses are complicated. Geniuses are unhappy. So I think how you think about Sanctuary is probably the only way you could think about this place.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you thought any differently, maybe you wouldn’t be the kind of person to solve the problem we need solving. Maybe Receiverists are just too happy,” The man chuckled. “Maybe that’s why we need you.”
“By that logic, it would also mean that if I end up choosing not to stay, then there wouldn’t have been any other way that things could have played out,” I said. “Because the kind of person the Receiverists need to solve their maths problems is also the kind of person who would choose not to stay.”
The man scratched his head. “Huh. I guess so?” he said tentatively. “But what do I know, I’m just the lights guy.”
“Lights guy?”
“That’s me. My team’s responsible for the lights around here,” he said as he pointed at the light fixture above. “Installing them. Fixing them. Upgrading them according to the engineers. Unfortunately I’m not a maths wizard, but fortunately no maths wizardry is needed here. It’s important stuff, you know? To be able to see and all.”
“That certainly supersedes everything else,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you a… potentially sensitive question?”
“Sure,” he said as he crossed his beefy arms. “You can always ask sensitive questions. You just may not always get an answer back.”
“That’s true,” I nodded awkwardly. “Do the lights contain cameras? For surveillance?”
“Yes,” the man answered simply, as if I had been asking what an antonym of no was. “I thought you were asking me something sensitive?”
“I thought that would be sensitive information,” I said.
“Not at all,” the man said. “Why’d you think that? Anyway. Yeah the lights are fitted with microcameras. Not the ones in your apartment. But everywhere else? Absolutely.”
“That’s… terrifying to think about.”
The man shrugged. “Why would it be?”
“Don’t you want some privacy?” I asked, with an almost frantic edge. “To be outside of your home without knowing that everything you do is captured and filed away somewhere, maybe to be used against you?” It’s absurd that I need to explain this to you, I omitted.
The man looked thoughtful for a moment. “Not really, no,” he said. “The surveillance is for our benefit. And why would I worry about the footage being used against me? I’m not about to do anything stupid. My kid can be out without me worrying about if anything bad will happen to them. They trip and hurt themselves somewhere without anyone around? The algorithms will instantly identify it and alert our medics. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like our surveillance system. I’m proud that I’m helping out.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what had changed. Was it the difference in how I was approaching the problem? The context that I had learnt from Mariam? The difference in location? Whatever it was, this second time around at parsing the mathematical document was more fruitful than the first. I supposed in a roundabout way, my request to Irene to obtain more context had been granted, and it was helping with the research. I now saw the mathematical conditions and constraints that needed to be satisfied. They were the shadows of what I needed to find. Vague, amorphous outlines that hinted at something deeply complex. Something greater. With the elevation in my comprehension of the problem, I began to receive ideas for the first time. Granted, most of them weren’t very good and were quickly disproved after several minutes of thought, but some lingered. The ones that formed hypotheses and conjectures that might lead to the right answer. Even if these initial ideas weren’t correct but satisfied a few of the conditions, they would still provide valuable insights into the problem that might eventually lead to the right approach.
Aside from myself, the laptop that the Receiverists had prepared for me was the only authentic thing in this city I knew of that came from the surface. Everything about it was familiar. The only thing that was different was an inbuilt application that provided a user interface to a developer environment. It tunnelled to the clusters of supercomputers in Sanctuary. It took me some time to familiarise myself with the interface, but it was surprisingly intuitive. In a little over a day, I had not only programmed the conditions that needed to be satisfied by whatever solution I would come up with, but also a couple of initial solution ideas I had. I sent the scripts over to Erich to optimise and tidy up.
The next day, as I waited for the computation lab to run my simulation, I continued to work on the research in parallel. As more ideas came to me, it was hard to say that I was close to a breakthrough. Each idea showed some promise for one facet of the problem, but failed spectacularly in something else. It was as if I was playing Whac-A-Mole, except I wasn’t sure whether I was the hammer or the mole. But I was determined. Before I had arrived in Sanctuary, the research was important to me because my livelihood depended on it. My life depended on it. Now, those aspects were still true, but their importance felt diluted due to this new looming purpose; the research was important to humanity’s future. The pressure and expectation felt insurmountable, but it also felt strangely right. Perhaps the Receiverists had gotten to me, but if I was destined for something truly impactful, then it was high time for me to rise up to the occasion. The days of research for the sake of publishing ought to be behind me. This was possibly the singular most significant thing I would do in my life. It would have seemed unfathomable, but this research was even more important to me now than it had been before.
I’m responsible for this research, I thought as I sipped from the warm cup of coffee in my hands. If this was the surface, then maybe there would have been a late afternoon breeze. But it wasn’t, and so the wind didn’t exist. There were, however, children playing near the fountain at the centre of the square. I absentmindedly watched their parents humouring them from the wooden bench. I was a responsible person. I lived my life in routine. I thought of myself as diligent and hardworking in getting to where I was in life. And yet, the word “responsible” just didn’t taste right in my mind’s incorporeal tongue.
Had I acted responsibly in dedicating years of my life to dispassionately researching financial maths? Had I acted responsibly in my relationship with Hope? Had I acted responsibly in the devastation of my family? They were genuinely complicated questions. If I tried, I could perhaps conjure dozens of arguments for and against. It would be a pointless exercise in which the truth was malleable. Or perhaps it was really simple, and that I just didn’t want to acknowledge the answer. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. Whatever shortcomings I had, it didn’t matter. Because I had to be truly responsible for this one thing. Not just for my own benefit, but for all of our futures. And not just for others, but also a testament to myself. And with that resolution, my break was over. I quickly downed the rest of my coffee and stood from the bench.
The desk in the office that the Receiverists had lent me was by no means modest. It was larger than the dining table in my apartment on the surface. It was larger than the dining table that our family used to have. And yet, a disease was spreading across its surface. Papers with hastily written mathematical symbols were sprawled across it, like overgrown lilies rampaging across the surface of a pond. Structure was a foreign concept to my thought process. My mind had a tendency to leap from one tangential thought to another, until the progression became incomprehensible. This was reflected in the nonlinearity of the sheets of maths over the desk. It would be difficult even for me to force some kind of logical structure among the sheets, and undoubtedly impossible for anyone else. It would be like trying to impose order onto chaos. This, ultimately, was why I was a good mathematician. It was why I might eventually solve a problem that machines couldn’t.
There was one piece of paper that summarised my progress. It had a list of nearly a dozen different approaches that had sporadically come to me over the past few days. They were all one line pitches, such as “introduce mean-reversion!” or “interdependency between Δ(amplitude) and Δ(vibration rate)??”. I would need to rely completely on the scarce permutation of words triggering the right cluster of neurons to remind me of the much larger details behind those approaches—of which each would undoubtedly take many further pages to describe. This was not new to me, and honestly, it was my preferred way of working. Unfortunately, many of the ideas had been crossed out. Not all, but more than I would’ve liked. I was surprised to find that even some of the approaches that had seemed promising had sunk to the bottom of the ocean into depths that crushed any possibility of resurfacing. Nevertheless, my determination hadn’t been wounded. Finding a breakthrough was necessary. Securing our future was my responsibility. And so I would do it. I must.
The stroll back to my apartment at night—or its approximation—had always felt strange. On the surface, it would be relaxing knowing that I was no longer in the confinement of the faculty. Down here, the entire city of Sanctuary felt like one impossibly large workplace. Leaving my office, I was on a floor of a building. Leaving the floor, I was on another floor of that said building. Leaving that building, I was on the same floor of another building that was structurally identical in nearly every aspect. The levels that resembled streets were more pleasant to walk through, with people looking for places to eat or drink or socialise. But the illusion was broken by the absence of the soothing evening breeze and the smells of the night. It didn’t feel like I had left the workplace; the workplace was merely taking a nap. Like an office building after hours. I briefly pondered whether to visit a bar, but I decided against it. In part because I was terrified of the possibility of running into the woman who had come onto me the last time I visited one. Not that I thought she would try again, but the embarrassment of being in close proximity for the both of us would be immense.
The first thing I had done after reaching my apartment was to lie on my bed. I could take a shower. Make myself some tea. Play around with the detachable interface in the apartment to see what Receiverist recreation and culture looked like. But all of that could come later. It wasn’t that I was exhausted, but the simple act of lying down horizontally and resting one’s eyes was the closest to therapy I could ever get. The darkness behind my eyelids was quieting. Welcoming.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been resting like that. But what roused me from the tranquillity was the familiar tone from the desk. I reached over for my handheld and read the offending message. My heart sank. The paper wasn’t in front of me, but I could see yet another idea being crossed off the list so vividly with a blood red marker. It wasn’t even remotely close.
Script alert: Job completed. 0/23 tests passed.
