Her Exquisite Mind

by The Shadow Knows

Carving the Statue

[3:04 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Power sources?

[3:04 AM] SunPrincess: yeah you know all about these things. whats the best source of power?

[3:04 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Well, “best” is subjective without criteria for comparison. Do you mean highest output, or most efficient per watt? And efficiency could mean minimizing cost, or carbon footprint, or size, or so many things!

[3:04 AM] SunPrincess: lets start with output

[3:05 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Well, ignoring merely hypothetical conjectures like zero-point energy extraction or using the Casimir effect to harness the properties of negative energy to cheat the conservation laws as usually formulated . . .

[3:05 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: and ignoring things that are possible but infeasible with current technology, like matter-antimatter annihilation or self-sustaining nuclear fusion . . .

[3:05 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I suppose nuclear fission reactors generate the most energy. One facility can generate gigawatts of power.

[3:06 AM] SunPrincess: and you can direct it?

[3:07 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Of course! The power grid can move electricity to where it’s needed. There are enormous switches in electrical substations, so it can be sent over high-voltage wires to the areas that need it.

[3:07 AM] SunPrincess: what about without wires. can you make a concentrated beam you could aim where you need it?

[3:08 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I suppose, but not using that much power. The laser frequencies that are easiest to generate run into Rayleigh scattering problems in the air, plus imagine the heat sinks you’d need!

[3:12 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Maybe some kind of waveguide would work for microwave frequencies, since they use simple reflection against the surface normal, so I assume absorption losses are small. But I’m only passingly familiar with generating microwaves. I’ve never looked into how Klystrons and magnetrons work. Now I’m curious. I’ll look it up tomorrow!

[3:12 AM] SunPrincess: i appreciate it.

[3:16 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Huh. Maybe air ionization in the beam would cause Compton scattering, too, making energy transmission self-limiting. I’ll have to check the ionization energies for nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, and compare those against common laser spectra. I remember early military lasers excited iodine for transmissibility in air, so that might be a starting point, if I can find out which energy level above the ground state it used.

[3:16 AM] SunPrincess: you mean these weapons exist? interesting

[3:16 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I guess it’s interesting as a means to verify practicality, but I don’t like to think about using science for violence.

[3:17 AM] SunPrincess: well of course not. but these lasers sound useful. ill read about them and probably have more questions later. are they easy to make?

[3:17 AM]KnowledgeIsTruth: Dye lasers are quite simple, but the more interesting varieties tend to require tricky gas flow rate calibration, and you'll have to think about an excitation source.

[3:17 AM] SunPrincess: huh

[3:29 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I like that we can talk about these things, Sun. It’s hard to find people in real life who are interested in science, but you always want to hear about it, and then find out more about it yourself! It feels good to know I’ve inspired you to learn and grow!

[3:46 AM] SunPrincess: of course truth. we're friends

[3:46 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: :-D

[3:46 AM] SunPrincess: im gonna go read about these for a bit. catch you later truth

[3:46 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Goodnight, Sun!

[3:46 AM] SunPrincess has logged out.

Twilight stared at the screen for several minutes, blinking but otherwise unmoving. She reread the conversation, pleased with its effortlessness. Exchanging ideas and imparting knowledge was always easier online like this, where all that mattered—indeed, all that could be discerned of anyone else—were pure thoughts crystallized into text. And oh, that glorious backspace key! How many conversational sins could be preemptively wiped away before they tainted the conversation!

Yes, this was definitely the easiest way to interact with others; this medium showcased her best qualities and cloaked her deficiencies. Her mind was insightful and brilliant, and it worked quickly. The ability to analyze and incorporate new facts and data, to intuit connections and tease out their patterns . . . these comprised her greatest talent, a true gift conferred by genetics and epigenetics.

An allegorical oil painting momentarily flashed in her imagination, she kneeling with bowed head before two women clad in diaphanous white, each lending a hand to support a silver platter bearing a pink brain. Or maybe grey? The color flickered in indecision as she considered whether an artist would be informed by preserved brain specimens or by oxygenated tissues. No matter. Genetics and Epigenetics Gift Knowledge to Mankind. A good title. Romantic-era painters would use masculine language, so “mankind” would probably be more period-appropriate than, say, “humanity,” despite the word's exclusivity. Though they wouldn’t have any concept of genetics, let alone epigenetics. Or would they? She decided the painting would post-date Gregor Mendel’s work, and the fleeting frown that accompanied her consideration of a possible anachronism dissipated as she decided on its resolution. Everything is solvable.

Everything is solvable. Yes. That was a nice thought.

The universe might not be mechanistic like Kepler’s platonic solids nestled between circular orbits, nor like Einstein’s purely geometric solutions to temporospatial relativism (which, now that she thought about it, were in some ways thematically like Kepler’s geometric cosmology—both being projections of their authors' certainty in an elegant cosmic order). But the universe is mechanistic over time in a way, due to the inevitable averaging-out of quantum mechanical phenomena. Kind of like thermodynamics, really, where seemingly immutable laws are often simply the near-certainties of statistics. Hmm. An interesting comparison.

Everything is connected.

And everything is solvable.

These thoughts were a sort of comfort to her, since they implied knowability and control were possible, with enough study and practice and analysis and—

The frown returned, and her fingers tensed where they lay above the keyboard.

Well. They can be solved too. Perhaps with . . . sociology! Yes, a fundamentally statistical science, like quantum physics and thermodynamics, but describing systems that are predictable in aggregate. Quite applicable. Mental note: see whether work has been done on modeling sociological predictions with chaos theory.

Or maybe philosophy has some answers? Utilitarianism seems promising, prima facie, as the basis of an explicative framework, probably with caveats from game theory. Or perhaps something only conceptually similar, something reminiscent of Dante's well-ordered afterlife.

It was possible that the literary allusion hid a murkier, latent truth. Dante's cantos sought to overlay immutable natural rules atop chaotic human endeavors, guaranteeing that order reigns over the wild vicissitudes of humanity.

Yes, the thought of an objective and inescapable order there was appealing. Except that, while the possibility might be more comforting, the poem inspiring the thought lacked verisimilitude. It was not only fictional, but also based on theological precepts long-since discredited even by those who shared Dante's religion in the modern day. A product of fourteenth-century Italian politics and culture.

She stopped blinking, and shook her head in a manner that was almost paradoxically both violent and subtle.

People aren’t solvable.

Her fingers tensed further, and her jaw tightened. Her gaze was directed at the screen still, but she wasn’t looking at it, not really.

People. Ridiculous and intractable. Illogical.

Inscrutable.

Outside of her intellectual discussions online, Twilight did not have an affinity for social interaction. Organic conversations were difficult to maintain, and she tended either to lapse into awkward silences, or to monopolize the conversation with the minutiæ of some ancillary topic. The resultant alienation was painful, so very painful. Not in a visceral way, sharp and stinging, but like a recurrent pressure in her chest. A continual force whose ebb and flow—more flow than ebb, really—served to draw fresh anxieties from an endless wellspring of social faux pas and failures. She had so many to choose from for self-critical analyses: objective and clinical and implacable and harsh analyses that eroded her psyche, rendering it plain that her particular form of brilliance was also a sort of curse.

She wasn’t really designed for solitude. She knew this in her heart. And the heart was considered the seat of thought by the ancient Egyptians, so it has to count for something, she thought. Wryly, discursively.

Yes, the mind was the problem. Her mind, insightful and brilliant. Intuiting connections and teasing out their patterns, in everything except those ridiculous human beings. Their minds weren’t like hers. They frittered away their thoughts on mundanities and irrelevancies, yet when her mind sent her to explore some tangent of her own while she talked with them they judged these excursions to be irrelevancies themselves. Hypocritical! Finding fault in those tangents that comprised the engine of understanding in her mind, while indulging in their own tangents about the latest bands and the weekend’s party and who was dating who and on and on forever.

Her brow furrowed and her frown intensified momentarily. Whom. “Who was dating whom.” Objective case. Better.

They expected things of her that didn’t make sense: to know the correct frequency with which they wanted to be contacted socially (not too often but not too rarely), to ask them how they felt when something was wrong without actually telling her something was wrong. To lie about how they looked! Why even ask if you don’t want an honest opinion?

The minutes dragged on as Twilight's dark musings circled between the inadequacy of her faculties for understanding people and how absurd other people's inner workings were.

I should go to bed. Everything always looks better in the morning. It’s not my fault everyone else doesn’t make sense. They’re all illogical, they’re all broken and are enforcing some terrible social tyranny of the majority against people who do make sense.

It was almost believable. It was a lie designed to momentarily quell the insistent voice that reminded her how broken she really was, how wrong her mind was. Her mind was extraordinary, yes: a beautiful gemstone with ingeniously complex faceting, but whose prismatic scintillation was irrevocably marred by the dark shadow of a hideous inclusion within.

The lie comforted her, giving her an imagined focus for indignation.

The lie disgusted her, knowing that the baleful indignation properly belonged focused on herself.

She padded softly over to her waiting bed, folding down the covers to make a right triangle. She slipped beneath the fabric, and straightened it back out into a rectangle atop her, safely nestled beneath the Cartesian geometry.

With me under it, it’s actually a Gaussian manifold only approximating a Cartesian rectangle, her mind corrected.

Oh well. It would have to do.

---

“Hey.”

Tropospheric Scattering of Electromagnetic Emissions was an interesting reference work, and was proving to be useful despite Twilight’s unfamiliarity with many of its more advanced equations. While she could only follow the latter sections qualitatively, the earlier sections used approximate models with simplified assumptions that seemed sufficient for her purposes. Those explanations she could follow quantitatively.

“Um, hello?”

At the second greeting, Twilight looked up and saw a teenage girl standing next to her table at the café. Momentarily puzzled, Twilight turned her head to glance behind her, but the nearby tables were all devoid of customers. This girl was definitely addressing her. “Uh, hello?”

“Hey. I see you here sometimes, and you’re always reading.” The girl extended two fingers, and tapped the top of the monograph twice. “What’s it about? Any good?”

“Oh, it’s a book about tropospheric scattering.” The girl only blinked, so Twilight explained. “The Earth’s atmosphere, or any gas really, interferes with the propagation of electromagnetic waves, so they don’t all end up where they were originally supposed to go.”

“Oh, that’s—”

“Or, actually, I probably shouldn’t say ‘waves’, given the wave-particle duality. But some phenomena are better explained by thinking about light as waves with periodically varying electric and magnetic potentials. I mean, the double-slit experiment obviously doesn’t make sense with photons, right?” A nervous little chuckle escaped her lips.

“Wow, you must be really smart. I thought you must be reading all different stories when you’re sitting here, but you’re reading science.”

Twilight’s brow furrowed. “Why would I just be reading stories?”

The girl drew her hand back from the book, and opened her mouth to say something, but only an indecisive little noise escaped her lips. Twilight’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and her gaze rapidly scanned her questioner’s face, alighting briefly on her eyes, her brow, her lips, perceiving the slight tilt of her head, looking for clues. Did I insult her? Did I imply fiction is inferior to my research works? Is she disappointed that we don’t have a common genre to use as a basis of conversation? Oh no, I’m staring at her, and I haven’t said anything! Quick!

“Uh, I do read stories! Not just scientific papers. I like literary analysis. Don’t you?”

“I mean, I guess? Like a book club?” She narrowed her eyes, and momentarily glanced down to consider the ground. Then looked back up at Twilight and brightly offered: “I like to see the character development. How their relationships with each other change as the plot goes on.”

“That’s good! That’s like literary analysis."

"Ones where people hate each other at first, but end up falling in love. Or where someone leads a normal life, but ends up discovering this crazy inner strength because they have to go on an adventure. I guess it's growth I like, not just any type of change."

Twilight considered that for a few seconds. "I don't know if people can really change like that. I mean, there's probably a statistical distribution that describes the likelihood of a given person fundamentally changing due to a set of stimuli, but I imagine it's not common in real life. I think . . . I think that people might only know how to be themselves, and being another way is like learning an instrument. It takes a lot of practice, and maybe you could learn to play some songs by memory, but most people can't ever be a virtuoso. It's beyond their skill, no matter how much they practice. They'll always . . . just be . . ." Twilight trailed off, her gaze drifting away.

"Be what?"

She jerked her head back up, and focused on the girl again. "Hmm? Oh. They'll just be . . . um . . . replaying songs by rote memorization." She settled back into her chair, folding her hands in her lap. "They can't improvise."

"I don't think people are like that at all." Her hand moved to rest on her hip. "Changing isn't hard. I mean, it's hard to want to do it, and to not get into old habits, but it's not hard to understand, like you're saying. Everyone knows how, they just have to do it. That's what I like in the stories, when people decide to change. Or sometimes I guess things that happen make them change, like on an adventure where they have to step up even though they didn't know they'd have to. I bet the authors don't even know how their characters will change, sometimes."

"You’re not a deconstructivist, are you? I really think authorial intent matters.” Twilight gestured expansively. “Otherwise anything at all could be true, and that’s ridiculous!" She reached for a silly non sequitur example. "I can’t just tell people you wear purple underwear unless you showed me!”

"What?" The girl looked suddenly discomfited. The hand at her hip moved up across her body, closing around her upper arm. “Uh—”

“I mean, just saying it wouldn’t make it true.” Stop talking! "My assertion about the color, I mean." Don’t clarify! Just change the subject! “Which was a random example, I wasn't talking about you-you. Just the generic you. I don’t know anything about your underwear, so I couldn't assert any facts about it without seeing it.”

“Hey, I have to—”

Quick! “It does work with individual photons, you know. Like, one at a time, even though there’s nothing for them to interfere with. Because the photons aren’t just particles, they’re still wave-like.” The girl turned her head to look across the room. “I know I said it doesn’t make sense with particles, but it’s complicated. I’m not entirely sure if it’s nonlocality or not, but I think it’s because of wave-like properties, not apparent acausality.”

“Hey, sorry, I’ve gotta go. I’m meeting my friend. I’ll see you later.”

Twilight watched her turn and walk away. Stupid! I need a ridiculous fact for an example, so I talk about underwear color? What’s wrong with me! Just when I almost had enough small talk for a self-perpetuating conversational feedback cycle!

She pressed her fingertips to her temples and shut her eyes, tracing the egregious error through her mental history. Her mind worked so fast, it was just successive flashes of thought at the time:

• Need a ridiculous non sequitur example.
• Cartoons are ridiculous and lack real-world conformity.
• Heart-covered boxers stock visual gag.
• Someone's underwear pattern is objectively knowable, but not normally seen; perfect!

• Recontextualize for the listener:

  • Boxers aren't typical women's underwear, so remove specificity.
  • But the visual gag is always hearts on boxers!
  • Solution: replace the hearts pattern, but maintain the humor of the anecdote.
  • Purple is a humorous-sounding color.

Idiot.

Her chest felt tight now, and though she opened her eyes and returned her gaze to the monograph, she wasn’t really reading it. Instead, she mentally added some more proscriptive rules into her blacklist for conversational actions:

1. Avoid even hypothetical references to embarrassing personal things.
2. Double-check everything before I say it to make sure it doesn’t sound belittling of any professed interests.
3. Stop talking.
4. Stop talking.
5. Stop talking!

She knew she needed to backtrack and devise some self-deprecating witticism instead of clarifying what she meant. She knew it while she was going on and on there! Not for the first time, she reflected on what underlying neurotic desire to explain forced her to forge ahead with a topic she knew was awkward, and resolved that next time would be different. It would be easy to remember, and to pause, and to just laugh it off and change tack.

“Oh, what am I saying? Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.”

“Oh, what am I saying? My brain really is incorrigible! Excuse me, and allow me to continue.”

“Sorry, I should think things through before I say them. Let me rephrase that.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be odd. So many thoughts in here, that one came out before I could think about how it sounded.”

"Sorry, that sounded weird! I didn't get much sleep last night, so I'm a little loopy."

She tried out a few, memorizing the ones she liked best as contingencies, and added them to the set of conversational rules.

Someday she’d have enough rules to cover all reasonably foreseeable eventualities. If she couldn’t generalize her understanding of how people work, then she would instead systematically identify and eliminate all her mistakes. What remained after applying all these rules would be pleasant, anodyne conversation. She’d have time to think then! Time for circumspection of each new sentence, to craft each one into the sort of question or response that people consider authentic or charming. Time to impress upon the people she talked with the fact that she was nice, that she was worth knowing.

Yes. Someday she would be done defining good conversation by its inverse, by its negative space, by what it was not. She would have an encyclopædic enumeration, and then the rest would be straightforward.

Like the quote about carving a statue being easy: just chip away all of the stone that isn’t the statue.

---

At home three hours later, Twilight’s movements hitched while brushing out Spike’s fur. A sudden futility washed over her as she remembered something fundamental, and she despaired of ever attaining completion in her list.

1. “Hi, I’m Twilight, what’s your name?”