Prose Header


The Uber-Unicorn

by Sam Kean

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
part 2 of 3

And more than read: he found the text had been seared into his brain. He could recall whole pages verbatim. Yet instead of shouting the world in joy, Julian imagined his colleagues laughing at his fascination with books. He withdrew even further and continued to refine and compress data. The time it took to “read” Crime and Punishment dropped from an hour to 36 minutes, then 13, then 3 minutes 13 seconds.

When the time dropped below three minutes, there was, so to speak, a change of state. After this trial, he had had to take a walk around campus, half-dazed. His eyes fell into an out of focus and he felt dizzy and somewhat nauseous, much like Raskolnikov himself.

When the winter California sky started to rain, students dashed around him, heads covered with newspaper. Julian sat on a bench, unnoticing and would later leave a dry outline of himself on the wood when he got up. In the drizzle, his hands ached as if both of them had been writing for hours at the same time. They curled up, red, like ten boiled shrimp. He had discovered something monumental and entirely by accident, and no one knew better than he not to push the serendipitous ways of science.

Julian began controlled trials, and he soon confirmed what he had intuited that rain-soaked day on the bench. At slow, reading speeds, story and character predominate in the reader’s mind. At the one-hour mark, people flowed around like liquids but were still noticeably human, and there was still a story to follow in outline. Yet he began to suspect — and this was soon confirmed — that these narrative elements are superficial. They distract the mind and obscure the underlying greatness. That is why disputes about taste are rife, because people are examining the works in the wrong way.

Below the “Petrovich threshold” (he had decided on the name instantly), the books gives off a different sort of signal. Once Dostoyevski had dropped below three minutes, Julian began to hear not prose, but discrete clicks like a cicadia: dot or dash, high or low, 10101101110... Sensory patches on his temples picked up the full pattern in his brain.

It was easy to deduce from this that these clicks were simply instructions that controlled his brain, binary code to drive it. He soon understood why his fingers ached: whereas at slower speeds, they had merely twitched or tensed at high-pitched moments in the novel, they now were being controlled by the code. The text had induced his nervous system to make them spasm and they drummed so hard on the table that the nails bent back and the tips of his bones were bruised. When they hurt too much to put on the special goggles, as they did some days, he would check out a copy of the actual book and try culling data directly from the text by skimming the pages as rapidly as possibly. But neither this nor detailed statistical analyses found anything. Like a chemical reaction that needs a catalyst, the texts needed the human brain. He found special padded gloves and continued.

In the weeks after his discovery, Julian devoured Chekhov and Mandelstam and Puskin. And from this comparative analysis he made the outstanding discovery of his career: each time, once he had compressed the literature into small enough packets, he got the exact same string of digits. It was like comparing strings of DNA: beyond a few errata, every work had the exact same underlying structure, for millions upon millions of digits. Each one did the exact same thing to his brain.

By this time, even the government had caught on that what Julian was doing was not normal, and in one of those startlingly quick decisions that sometimes animate a bureaucracy, it cut off his outlays within a single day. His university, who still held out hope that Julian would win a Noble Prize for his earlier — and still fundamental — work, quietly slipped him the money to continue and did not ask questions.

As a good scientist, Julian knew that he had to disprove the contrary case, and he soon secured, with another bribe, three or four pieces of Soviet kitsch from his childhood. Each was awful in its own way — some deficient in plot, some in character, some in simple grammar — and the string of data produced by them, compared with the other texts, was garbled and inconsistent. It was thus proven: inferior texts produced garbage. In the world of literature, they were the mutants.

He tried other, middlebrow texts and found, again, what he expected. That the higher the reputation of the work, the more it conformed to the pattern of the masters. He now had tangible evidence that the great works of the human mind approached a single limit.

Had you divined to the world that all great literature is reducible to a single message, and then asked people to guess what that message was, the most likely, and hoped-for, answers would be “Love others as yourself” or “Seek God” or even “Help me, help me.”

But no. What Julian discovered is that crafted prose and unfathomably deep characters were mere dressing up. Great literature, it turned out, was not a uniquely human concern: it corresponded to fundamental physical facts. Specifically, if you broke down the long string of binary digits into 13 discrete units — and then compared the 13 units to each other — to a particle physicist, trained to reduce the world in this way, the ratios practically leapt out.

There are twelve fundamental particles in the universe — electrons, quarks and so on — each with a specific mass. And he found that his string of binary data had hidden inside it information about those twelve particles, a series of ratios. This number, twelve, had long had superstitious connotations for Julian. He was ashamed of it, but he looked for it in his daily life: a bus that leaves at 12:12 or button-down shirts that cost $12.

Since moving to America, he had comforted himself by breaking up his life into twelve-day “weeks,” arriving sometimes on Sundays and taking weekdays off. Now, in this business with literature, he had found an almost mystical connection to The Twelve. It was like finding a greeting from a higher being inside the unending digits of pi — except this one had apparently been implanted by humans.

Yet science knew of only twelve fundamental particles, and Julian had found thirteen parts. He tried explaining the extra one away in a dozen different ways, but each scheme foundered, aesthetically and mathematically. It was ugly, superfluous, an unnecessary vestige, like a tail. He began to despise the number thirteen. It was unsymmetrical and inexplicable in any known model of the universe.

This vestige stalled Julian, and at first he lacked courage to do it. Only at last (with an illicit thrill at being the first in history to realize something) did he break off the thirteenth piece into a separate entity. And in doing that, he knew he had re-written the universe for all time.

He spent hours in the dark, staring at the stark digits on his computer screen that represented this new being. Like a sacred text, he was afraid to touch or manipulate them in any way. His imagination, like a child’s, ran off to phantasmagorical shapes, imagining what this new, dark particle must look like. Where in the universe did it live? He had nyet a notion, but, also like a child, he believed in what his imagination told him.

* * *

“Professor, excuse me.”

I was so startled that I jumped. My stool rattled and I must have looked spooked, too, because Lizabeth Makens jumped back from me. She had come to the front of the lecture hall, around the long countertop where I sat, and had touched my shoulder with her hand. There was half an hour left for the test.

“We’re out of blue books,” she said, softly, as if I were delicate and had to be treated carefully. The whole auditorium was looking at me.

“Oh, right, right,” I said. I found my bag, still a little unsteady.

I was required by university policy to carry an extra packet of 100 with me. I had mine hidden away and hadn’t planned to get them out unless the students threatened to bring me to the dean. They must have sent Lizabeth up on purpose; they knew I couldn’t refuse her.

Had I just flung them toward the middle rows of the lecture hall, they would have fallen on them like wolves on a lamb, crawling like jackals over the rows and each other. But Lizabeth, blonde and cool, took them from me with nod and began to distribute them row by row. I watched her take each step, all the way to the top.

Coming back down, her hands empty, she called out so that everyone could hear: “Professor Scott?” Scott was my first name. “Because of this unaccountable delay, we’ll get an extra fifteen minutes to finish, won’t we? I mean, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”

She drew her sentences out perfectly, and had timed the moment of her finishing so that she was standing right next to me again. Close.

“Of course, Lizabeth. Of course.” It was all I could think to say. She turned and skipped.

To get my mind off of what I had just done — this was a flagrant violation of university policy — I delved back into the essay. Like Julian trying to ignore Maria Bellini, though, it wasn’t hard to lose myself in it. There was something higher calling me.

* * *

Were Julian interested in business or literature, he might have developed a system to judge the accuracy of any translation in precise decimal terms. Were he interested in Knowledge and Wisdom, he could have ferreted out textual corruption in the Koran or Bhagavad-Gita, and this effort might have ended humanity’s nearly unbroken string of religious wars trailing back through all recorded time.

But beyond what the Bible told him about particle physics, Julian was unmoved. He had discovered that the great Russian masters had — consciously? unconsciously? — tapped into the fundamental structure of the universe. And not only that: they pointed to a higher, more exact truth than science could dream of. In short, he, Julian, was going to be famous — more famous than any of his colleagues had ever even hoped to be.

Yet the ecstasy of discovering the thirteenth particle soon deteriorated. When he examined the data more carefully, he found an uneasy fact: in no two works did the thirteenth ratios match up. Even when the first twelve ratios matched precisely, digit after digit, the thirteenth diverged, often wildly. They were like toy soldiers on the shaking battlefield he had been forced to play with as a child: he lined them up to make a sortie in one direction, and for few moments it seemed that they would reach the hated American dummy soldiers intact. But a second later they were rattling in random directions and had made a mess of the board.

He scoured physics books for transcendental numbers, but none of them matched the digits he had found. He began dividing and squaring pi and e like a crank mathematician, and, like an alchemist, the world he constructed began to absorb him. But what those great men of literature knew about the thirteenth was not easily forthcoming.

He told himself that it was a good thing that the solution was complex — all the more glory for he who discovered it. But he also began to hear echoes: he had never quite gotten over his failure to live up to early promise. It haunted him that if he revealed his findings before he could explain everything that someone else, younger and brasher, would swoop in like a falcon and tear the truth and honor away from him. His life would be reduced from a book to a chapter, from a chapter to a footnote. He refused to consider publishing or even mentioning his work until he had every last decimal nailed down.

In order to keep track of his scattered and admittedly incoherent thoughts, he began to develop a chart. Often, you could hear him muttering: “We are not longer competitors, Mendeleev. We are countrymen, and we collaborate.”

Julian’s was to be a periodic table for the new millennium. He pasted a prototype of it on the back of his office door, arranging what he knew. During rare visits to Julian’s office, colleagues sometimes asked about the strange Cyrillic lettering in trapezoidal boxes. It reminded one of a medieval chart of angel hierarchies. Julian smiled and said it was nothing. But he said it cryptically, staring at them, to let them know that he thought it something great indeed.

Other physicists grew uncomfortable, especially those who could remember what Julian had once been. It was a purposeful trick, however: Julian wanted each one to remember the chart, so they would know how close they had been to genius. How close they had been — and yet unable to grasp it.

But no matter how many trials he ran, no matter how authoritative a text he consulted, he could not get the thirteenth ratios to mesh. They were maddeningly independent. Reluctantly deciding that he needed more data, Julian had turned to work outside of Russian. He tried to translate the Divine Comedy, it being the shortest undisputed masterpiece he could find.

Only at length did he accept that his Italian would never be sharp enough. Even if he learned the words — and he had learned a remarkable amount of the language for a middle-aged man, even taking his genius into account — he still could not grasp all of the allusions; too many overtones were lost on him. And without that extra-textual understanding, the ratios remained a jumble and a mess.

Maria Bellini had been nothing but a Dante expert at first. She was one of many he planned to enroll: male professors of Greek, an Olde English expert, and so on. With none did he plan to tell them what he was doing: merely seeming to take an interest in whatever obscure tome they had devoted their lives to would be flattery enough for most. He tired to woo Maria Bellini only because she seemed more resistant and independent.


Proceed to part 3...

Copyright © 2006 by Sam Kean

Home Page