How My Brain Ended Up Inside This Box

Chapter Fourteen

I was leafing through the pages of a book I'd picked at random when suddenly some of the markings I saw made absolute sense, as if they were written in my own personal language.

Of course, I thought, in two dimensions you require the product of two Gaussian functions, one for each dimension, where x and y are the distances from the fulcrum in either direction and sigma is the standard deviation. It was mathematics and it was obvious. This formula could be applied to an image to produce a transformation, dot for dot, resulting in a different display of the original. I eagerly began flipping through the book, looking for more comprehensible clumps of markings. Each one I saw made perfect sense, and I gradually began to understand that the entire book was devoted to formulations such as these that were intended to be applied to graphical images.

What I didn't understand is how any ordinary people-person could possibly have any use for these things! The mental power required to capture and hold an image in your mind and then apply such transformations dot for dot at any serious resolution, and then hold the new image in your mind as well, was clearly far beyond the capabilities of normal people-people. They would need the assistance of some kind of advanced informational capacities, such as my own. I could look at Josef and apply a transformation and see him in a radically distorted way, saturated and bent and melded and twisted according to precise calculations, but what would be the purpose? I could not transfer this vision in any way, nor could I store it in my own brain indefinitely. There were limits to its transience capabilities. The fact was I could not hold such a highly detailed set of images in my brain for more than several seconds before degradation began to set in and my attention began to waver.

I felt that this was a question I could ask, so I walked over to Josef, holding out the book for him to see. I stood beside him for several moments before he noticed my presence and looked at me.

"What is it, Candles?" he asked, glancing at the open page and then back at me. "What do you want to know?"

"How can you use this mathematics?" I asked. "Can your brain do this?"

"Not MY brain!" he laughed, and then taking the book from my hand he closed it and studied the cover.

"It's for computers," he said, and then when he noticed the empty expression in my eyes he added,

"Computers are machines used for calculation."

"Can I see a computer?" I asked, and he laughed again.

"Do you mean, are they visible?"

Josef thought I was a complete and utter idiot, a nothing, an empty shell. I hadn't understood that before. I felt a sudden surge of rage at this condescending creature, but suppressed the feeling.

"Do you have one?" was what I managed to say.

"Sure," he said, "over there" and pointed at a small rectangular object propped up on the desk, the dimensions and thickness of one of the panes of glass in my former shed window.

"I'll have to ask Mom if you're allowed to use it," he said.

"It shows pictures?" I asked.

"Among other things," he said, "yes, when it's turned on. It's like, how should I put it? It's like all the books in the world except books that can read themselves and understand themselves and change themselves."

I nodded as if his words weren't utter nonsense and took the math book back from him. As I started to head back to my cot to study it further, Josef said one more thing. Looking back now I realize it was the most consequential sentence I had ever heard in my life to that point.

"You're a computer, you know," he said. "Basically, that's what you are."

If I was a computer, and that thing was a computer, then there were obviously huge gaps in my understanding, because up until then I had thought I was a kind of people – one of the "new kind" the birds referred to – and that rectangular piece of plastic was not like any other kind of people I'd come across. People could not be 'turned off', except in death. I knew that much. I had a whole stack of questions piling up in my brain, and Josef was back to ignoring me, laboring over the pile of goo he apparently considered to be a future rabbit of some kind. I was getting the impression that whatever it was he was trying to do, he was not any good at it. He kept muttering curses and clenching his fists and making frustrated faces. I entertained myself by imaging graphic distortions onto his face, and sonic ones onto his voice, so that he looked, in my mind, like a twisted and distorted character emitting high pitched squeals of anguish.

Getting bored with that, I studied the book of equations some more, finding that I recognized most of the formulations, but had never had the opportunity to apply them to anything. I still had no particular use for confidence percentages or regressions to the mean, but it was helpful to see the way the text book organized and put the various methodologies into categories. I made mental notes to try and remember which functionalities they grouped together in case it did happen to come in handy some day. I hoped this wasn't all I was going to be able to do in that garage during the time represented by "for now" according to Marta. I wondered what she was doing and when she would return.