Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 22

Tipi looked at the manuscript and while he recognized the words, the words did not make immediate sense. But he took a shot at it. There was not much else he could do here tied to a chair and with Julian in an even tighter situation.

"Can you even read it?" Vasco said.

"Of course, of course, but you have to understand that you can't simply translate the text word by word."

"Go on then."

Tipi began, haphazardly, to translate piece by piece the first paragraphs of the top page that was put under his eyes. "Number works according to long times," he translated. "You have number one, then you don't cut it to make number two. Then you do it by a lot, or no, probably three. Then do by one extra, and one extra, you stop at the number of two hands. But you should do it backward. The building house eats a smaller self. These are the ticks of a holy period."

"That does not make any sense," Körbl said. "I thought you knew how to translate."

"I do," said Tipi. "This is what it says, I can't help it you can't figure out what it means."

Körbl slashed his knife across Julian's leg, who struggled and howled in anguish. Blood flowed down his leg into his shoes.

"Stop!" Tipi called out.

"Then stop being a wisecrack critic of our abilities. You have now seen what we can do with our limited abilities and I suggest you calculate what that means for your current activities. So explain it to us."

Tipi had no idea himself, but he never not solved a puzzle in the end. "So it is obviously about numbers. Maybe even a math problem, the not-cutting might be the opposite of dividing, so maybe multiplication. It says to multiple one by two and three. So that gives you six. Then it says you should continue until you have both hands? This may refer to ten fingers. If we multiply the six with one extra, four, we already get twenty-four. Or maybe it means to continue with the multiplying until you multiply by ten. So you get one times two times three times four times five times six times seven times eight times nine times ten, which is... large."

"Three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred," Vasco said, who had been typing on his smartphone calculator. "What's so special about this number?"

"The text goes on if you remember," Tipi said. "It says we should in fact do the computation backwards. So ten times nine times eight and so on."

"I'm not a mathematician, but that gives the same result, so what gives?"

"The result is the same, but the process is not. If you start with the number one, how do you decide when to stop? If you start at the number ten, the meaningful end is always one. Multiplying by one less, zero, always gives you zero, so that means the entire process cleans itself up neatly at the end. Have you done no math at all in school, these are factorials. Here the next sentence explains it: the building house eats the smaller self. It talks about recursion. The building house is the function, or factory if you will, the activity of the factory is that it uses a smaller version of itself. The factorial function of ten is ten times the factorial function of nine, and so on. It calls upon itself and needs nothing else."

"Look, that's a marvellous piece of mathematics, but what does the number mean and how is it related to the secret of enlightenment."

Tipi did not know how it related to enlightenment either. It surprised him to find a piece on mathematics written in toki pona even though he, well his body at least, had been the author of this piece of text. As far as he knew, the language was ill suited for conveying complex mathematical or technical ideas.

"The text said it was the tick of the holy period. It has something to do with time."

"Go on."

"It would not kill you to put your own brain cells to work. Don't you like a good puzzle?"