Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things Read online

  The General was pacing from table to table, listening to complaints and issuing orders. A crowd of people followed him around, shouting over one another, trying to get his attention. It looked like he barely had time to think.

  Laurie pushed and struggled and wiggled her way to the front of the crowd.

  “Sir? General Euripides? Can you help me?”

  “Eh? Oh, another one. Are you a reader or a writer?”

  “I’m not a reader or a writer. I need you to approve—” Laurie began, but the General had to go break up an argument.

  “Now what was it you wanted? A reader? Which book?” Euripides asked when he came back.

  “No, sir. I need—Sir? Hello, sir?”

  Euripides was off to another corner of the room. Laurie tried to get his attention again, but the crowd kept shoving her out of the way.

  * * *

  Laurie sat on the floor in the hallway and put her head on her knees, exhausted and confused. Mandelbroccoli, fence-posts, Passes, General This, General That . . . where did it all end? She could still hear the fighting over who got to use what book next.

  “Those people are so rude,” she grumbled.

  “Why can’t they take turns and share?”

  “Maybe nobody taught them how,” Xor said. “My cousin Rex never liked to share. Of course, he was forty feet tall and had teeth as long as your arm.”

  “Somebody should teach them. It’s not fair.”

  “Yeah,” Xor said. “Hey, aren’t you Somebody?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah! I’m pretty sure you are Somebody. Otherwise, you’d be Nobody, and that wouldn’t make sense to Anybody.”

  “But I’m just a kid. No one pays attention to kids.”

  “So? No one pays attention to me, either,” he said.

  “But that’s what you want, right? To be invisible.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “What are we going to do, Xor?”

  “I dunno. Think. You’re good at that.”

  “No, I’m not,” Laurie muttered.

  “Really? Tinker thought you are. Winsome does, too.”

  Laurie put her head down again and sighed. “I’m just her delivery girl.”

  “No, you’re her interesting delivery girl,” Xor said.

  “So?”

  “So you figure out how to go where other people can’t. Remember when you were arguing with Ponens and Tollens outside of Symbol? I didn’t think you’d find a way past them. But you did. Same with that scary old lady Jane.”

  “They never caught us, either,” Laurie smiled a little.

  “Not until Custody grabbed you.”

  “And that’s when Winsome saved—oh.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t go back and tell Winsome that I couldn’t even get past the front door!”

  “Why not?” Xor asked.

  “I just . . . I can’t. She gave me a job, and I have to do it myself.”

  So with nothing else she could do, and nowhere else she could go, Laurie started to think.

  She needed an Approval from Euripides so she could get one from Darius. Then, she needed to use that to get an Approval from General Case, and finally, the Form had to be signed and countersigned by Basil and Anton. There was something familiar about this Byzantine chaos. Something Hugh Rustic had told her. Think of an answer, and then look for a problem that fits.

  Euripides was up to his ears with problems. Everyone wanted to do everything at once. Maybe she should start there . . .

  * * *

  A half-hour later, Laurie was back in the Office of Records. She didn’t shout, or shove, or cut in front of anyone. She waited. Eventually one of the books became completely free. Laurie walked over to it and drew a line on the floor.

  A woman came over to write in the book. Laurie stepped aside and let her work. A few moments later, a man came up to read from the book.

  “New policy, sir,” said Laurie. “You have to stand on the line until the first customer is finished.”

  “But I have to look up something on page 1728!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “General’s Orders. But you’re next.”

  “Oh. All right, then.” The man stood carefully on the line. Another person came to read from page 1024.

  “General’s Orders,” said 1728, pointing to the line. “Don’t worry. You’re right after me.”

  Laurie held the line until the pattern looked like it would keep going on its own. Each new person would be told to wait by the others already in line. Then she waited for the next book to open up.

  As the idea spread, people started drawing lines of their own in front of other books. Soon the whole Records Office was calm and organized. After all, it was General’s Orders.

  Euripides almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The readers and writers were following a simple rule and taking turns! He was glad to have a rest, and he signed Laurie’s Pass without a second thought.

  * * *

  “General Darius?”

  “You again. I don’t want to hear about anything else until we’ve sorted out the Broccoli Situation.”

  “I think the mandelbroccoli doesn’t matter, sir,” said Laurie.

  “What? You want the goat to eat it all?”

  “No, I mean the answer is the same even if you had two wolves instead. You can’t leave the goat alone with anything. If you change your point of view, it’s easy. I think.”

  “Go on,” said the General.

  Laurie thought a little more, then wrote down her idea. It looked a bit like the algorithms back at Tinker’s:

  Take the goat over to the other side.

  Come back empty.

  Take the wolf over, but then bring back the goat.

  Leave the goat and take the mandelbroccoli over.

  Come back empty.

  And finally, take the goat over again!

  Darius studied Laurie’s idea for a while, his hands moving this way and that as he thought it through.

  “I believe this will work. The goat won’t like going back and forth so much, but it’s better than getting eaten,” said Darius. “Now what is it you wanted, miss?”

  * * *

  At last, Laurie arrived back at the Office of Perimeter Security. “General Case, sir? General Darius signed my Pass.”

  “Hmm,” Case hmmed, scribbling a signature below Darius’s.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Sir? One more thing,” Laurie said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I don’t think anyone is stealing your fenceposts. It’s just that you need eleven posts. Like this.”

  “Hmm!”

  * * *

  “Welcome back, miss,” said Anton. Laurie handed over the paperwork she’d collected from the Byzantine Generals.

  “It looks like everything is in order,” said Basil, examining the list of signatures. “These approvals go all the way to the top!”

  “Have you anything to declare, miss?” asked Anton.

  “Declare?”

  “What Lieutenant Anton means is,” said Basil, “is there anything we should know about?”

  “Oh. Well, I think Anton is right. Zero is even.”

  “No!” said Basil.

  “Yes. Zero can’t be odd because one is odd, and you can’t have two odd numbers in a row, right?”

  “Right!” said Anton.

  “I suppose not,” Basil grumped. “But that doesn’t prove it’s even.”

  “Well, if you add an odd number and an even number together, you always get an odd number,” said Laurie.

  “Um,” Basil ummed, thinking about it. “One plus two is three, two plus three is five . . . yes.”

  “So I can prove whether zero is even or odd. Add it to an odd number and see what you get. Zero plus one is one, and one is odd. So zero must be even,” said Laurie.

  “I’m still not convinced,” said Basil.

  “Okay,” Laurie said. “If y
ou add two even numbers together, you always get an even number, right? Zero plus two is two, which is even. Zero is even again!”

  “Exactly!” Anton said.

  “Hrmph,” Basil hrmphed. “So zero is even. How do I keep Anton from being Senior two days in a row?”

  “That’s the easy part,” Laurie said. “The problem is that yesterday, the Thirtieth, and today, the Zeroth, are both even. Anton was the Senior yesterday. So Basil, you can be the Senior Officer of the Watch today.”

  “Now hang on a minute—” said Anton.

  “—but only until lunchtime,” said Laurie. “After lunch today, Anton is Senior. That way it’s fair.”

  “Brilliant!” said Senior Officer Basil. “Junior Officer Anton, sign this young lady’s Pass!”

  Approved, approved, approved, signed, and countersigned. Laurie was finally through the turnstile.

  “I’m glad that’s over,” said Xor. “Now, where the heck is that Byzantine Process?”

  Chapter 16. A Change of Plan

  SECOND, the package’s directions read, DELIVER TO BRUTO FUERZA, LOOKOUT HILL LIGHTHOUSE. Laurie and Xor couldn’t see any lighthouse, but there was a cloud of dust rising from the hill.

  “You work for Winsome, eh? Right on time,” said Bruto when they arrived. “I’m sorry to say we’re behind schedule. Our lighthouse isn’t finished. We’ve been working double-time, day and night.”

  “Are you going to put the lighthouse on top of that castle?” Laurie asked.

  “Castle?” asked Bruto. “That is the lighthouse.”

  Dozens of Green-Shelled Round machines were busy all around the enormous structure. They looked just like Tinker’s turtle, but they were the size of a large truck. Instead of drawing dots on paper, these turtles were laying bricks on top of bricks, making WALLs, STAIRs, and WINDOWs right before Laurie’s eyes.

  “What are all those things coming out from the wall?” she asked, pointing to a forest of supports and buttresses on one side of the tower.

  “We’ve had no end of problems,” said Bruto, shaking his head and spitting. “The south wall was falling outward. So we had to shore it up. Then it started falling inward.”

  “Is that why you’re behind schedule?” she asked. There was something about the scene that bothered Laurie, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It looked . . . messy.

  “Things are always going wrong,” Bruto said. “Big ideas come with big risks. But we can fix any problem with more power and hard work!”

  “You certainly have a lot of both,” Laurie said, with just a teensy tiny bit of envy. The things she could do with all those turtles! “How do you teach the turtles to build a tower?”

  “Here, let me show you.” Bruto led her to a tent nearby. A small army of people was working around a table. “First we write the plans on paper.”

  BRICK-LINE:

  Lay a brick,

  move forward,

  lay a brick,

  move forward,

  lay a brick,

  move forward,

  . . .

  “That part makes a LINE of bricks. We stack a bunch of BRICK-LINES on top of each other, and that’s how a wall gets built. To make the wall thicker, we just add more commands.”

  BRICK-LINE-VERSION-TWO:

  Lay a brick,

  lay a brick,

  move forward,

  lay a brick,

  lay a brick,

  move forward,

  lay a brick,

  lay a brick,

  move forward,

  lay a brick,

  lay a brick,

  . . .

  “Wow, it just goes on and on and on,” said Laurie, flipping through the pages. “It must have taken forever to write all of this.”

  “Big buildings need big plans. Big plans need big teams. It’s only logical,” Bruto said. “Writing the plans wasn’t the worst part, though. We’re running out of bricks!”

  “Really? But why?”

  “The first version wasn’t strong enough, and it fell down. So now I’m making a tower twice as big, twice as thick, and twice as tall. Two times two times two is eight.”

  “So it needs eight times as many bricks?” Laurie asked.

  “It’s just a matter of supplies.”

  “How do you know this version of the plan will work?”

  “We’re not a bunch of amateurs, girlie. We do extensive testing of our algorithms,” Bruto said. “Take a look at this!” Off to the side was a table covered with tiny turtles and tiny bricks.

  “Hey, they’re building a tower, too!” Laurie exclaimed. Sure enough, the turtles were following the same plan as their bigger cousins.

  “We test new plans by building a scale model,” Bruto explained.

  “But, Bruto, the model doesn’t have the same extra stuff keeping the walls from falling down.”

  “Some problems only show up in the full size. When that happens, we have to adapt.”

  “Oh,” Laurie said. “But if the model is not the same as the real thing, how can you be sure that—”

  They turned around just in time to see the full-size tower collapse into a big pile of bricks. Bruto stood still for a long time, watching the dust settle as the turtles got to work cleaning up the mess.

  “Are you going to make it even bigger now?” Laurie asked.

  “No. What we need . . . what we need . . . is a radical change of plan! All right, everyone,” Bruto said to no one in particular. “Clear the decks! Empty your minds! Brainstorm! I want new ideas!”

  “Let’s make the walls four times as thick, but the tower only three times as high,” said one worker.

  “More supports inside and out!” shouted another.

  “Use bigger bricks!”

  “Make bricks out of steel!”

  “Steel is too expensive. How about iron?”

  “Are you crazy? Iron will rust!”

  “I told you we should have used a triangle.”

  “Make the outside steel, but the inside brick.”

  “Good! This is good! Keep them coming. We’re thinking outside the box. Anyone else?” Bruto asked.

  “Why not a circle, like the lighthouse on Abstract Island?” Laurie suggested. She thought about it for a minute, then wrote out a pair of little poems.

  BRICK-CIRCLE:

  Lay a brick,

  turn right one degree,

  move forward,

  repeat three hundred sixty times.

  TOWER-CIRCLE (how-high?):

  Make a BRICK-CIRCLE,

  repeat how-high? times.

  “See? You make a circle of bricks, then put a circle on top of that, all the way to the top!” Laurie explained.

  “Ha ha ha, cute idea, girlie! But that can’t possibly work,” Bruto replied.

  “Why not?” Laurie asked.

  “It’s too small!” Bruto said. “How do you expect to make a great big tower out of a teeny little plan like this?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurie said. It seemed sensible to her, but maybe they knew something she didn’t. They were professionals, after all. “I . . . I think it will work.”

  “Hmph,” Bruto hmphed. “Even if it were big enough, it has a major flaw.”

  “What flaw?”

  “Our first plan was a hollow square, and it fell down,” Bruto said. “The second plan was a hollow square, twice as big, and it also fell down. Your plan is a hollow circle.”

  “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t a circle be stronger?”

  “Obviously, the problem isn’t shape or size—the problem is that they are hollow inside!” said Bruto. “We need to fill up the insides with brick, too. It’s only logical.”

  “You’re right, Bruto!” said one worker.

  “That’s why you’re the boss,” said another.

  “But I’ve seen hollow towers,” said Laurie. “They’ve been built before.”

  “How do you know they won’t fall down eventually? The evidence is very clear,” said Bruto.<
br />
  “Yes, very clear,” the other workers agreed, nodding to each other.

  “But I—”

  “No, I’ve made up my mind,” Bruto said. “The tower must be solid. In fact,” he said, looking at the pile, “we’re going to build a pyramid.”

  “A pyramid?!”

  “A pyramid can’t fall down. It’s already fallen down,” explained Bruto. “It’s one of the perfect solids!”

  “Yes, that’s right!” agreed one worker.

  “Genius!”

  “It’s just a matter of more work and more materials.”

  “Okay! We have a plan,” said Bruto. “Everyone, let’s get to work! Send Winsome my apologies, girlie, and tell her that we need more time to get it right.”

  Some people can’t be argued with. As Laurie and Xor set out for the Doppelganger, Bruto and his team were busy writing out the instructions for his PYRAMID, brick by brick by brick.

  Chapter 17. Chasing Elegants

  “Right,” said Winsome, ticking off Fuerza’s package on her list.

  “Elegant Island is next. Now where’s that special package?”

  “Wow, what kind of animals are those?” Laurie asked. Along the shore, little gray animals with long gray trunks were playing with each other and napping in the sun.

  “Those are the Elegants. The island is full of them,” Winsome replied.

  “They’re so small and graceful! It’s like they’re dancing.”

  “Yeah. Package, package . . .” Winsome muttered to herself.

  “Don’t they have Elegants where you come from?”

  “No. We have elephants, but they are all big and clumsy. Are Elegants friendly?”

  “Only as much as they need to be,” Winsome said. “Found it! Okay, this package is for Fresnel Goodglass.”

  “The address just says UNDER THE RED BALLOON,” said Laurie. “I guess that means he’s over there.” She pointed to a red globe floating above the trees.