Chapters [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:
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:
Avoid even hypothetical references to embarrassing personal things.
Double-check everything before I say it to make sure it doesn’t sound belittling of any professed interests.
Stop talking.
Stop talking.
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.
“Hi, I’m Twilight, what’s your name?”
Consciousness returned fitfully, reluctantly. She lingered in that liminal state where half-remembered dreams beckoned her again and again to embrace their uncanny fantasies. It was the twilight of wakefulness; were she to consider the phrase, its eponymous nature would yield dry amusement.
Reality eventually asserted itself, however, as it usually does. Not for the first time, Twilight reflected that living only in dreams might be a preferable existence: the ultimate escapism from the disappointments endemic to her days.
That wouldn't be fulfilling, if I knew I were only dreaming. What good is a life that never affects objective reality? A rapid series of resultant ontological considerations flashed through her mind: can we even prove an objective reality exists? If our experiences define us, then wouldn't imagined experiences be just as enriching and important? She dismissed the train of thought, not because she had satisfactory answers, but only because she preferred to think of reality as important, and fantasy as unimportant. She was a scientist at heart, and science concerns itself only with the real.
She yawned, and stretched expansively. The real might be important, but the difficulties it inevitably brought weren't desirable at present. Pulling the covers up to her chin, she decided that a little more unreality couldn't hurt.
[2:49 AM] SunPrincess: trying out a new look?
[2:49 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Hmm?
[2:49 AM] SunPrincess: youre always in purple
[2:50 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I've reconsidered. Purple is an ugly color. I don't want to see it.
[2:50 AM] SunPrincess: its not so bad i think. purple is the color of royalty here
[2:50 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Shouldn't you use purple, then? To match your screenname?
[2:50 AM] SunPrincess: nah this color goes better with my long luxurious mane of hair
[2:51 AM] SunPrincess: but you were telling me about energy storage
[2:53 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Right. So, the reason so much heavy equipment uses hydrocarbons for fuel is its energy density. Gasoline and similar classes of petrochemical compounds store a lot of energy in their molecular bonds per kilogram, which is obviously very convenient for cars and trucks that have to carry their fuel with them. And extracting that energy in a useful form is simple. Just burn it.
[2:55 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Of course, there are externalities that make this undesirable. Pollution in the form of particulates, which are bad for our health. And the byproducts of combustion have climate-altering effects. People don't normally realize this, but we're technically in an ice age right now, just a slightly warmer part of it. But even though civilization has historically flourished during warmer periods, the disruption to agriculture and infrastrucure caused by rapid climate change might be catastrophic.
[2:56 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: There is a lot of construction time and money tied up in coastal infrastructure, and it wouldn't deal well with higher sea levels. And events like the Little Ice Age or the Dust Bowl illustrate how fragile our food sources can be.
[2:57 AM] SunPrincess: sounds like who controls the weather controls the world
[2:57 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Weather machines are commonly what evil genius villains build, yes. :-)
[2:57 AM] SunPrincess: so who has built them?
[2:57 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Lex Luthor, probably.
[2:57 AM] SunPrincess: ok, ill look up his biography later
[2:58 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Heh!
[2:58 AM] SunPrincess: what?
[2:58 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: "I'll look up his biography later." :-)
[2:58 AM] SunPrincess: i will
[2:58 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I like how you're always switching between serious and silly. It's refreshing.
[3:05 AM] SunPrincess: right, of course
[3:05 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Hey Sun?
[3:05 AM] SunPrincess: yeah?
[3:13 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Do you ever find it difficult to talk with people?
[3:14 AM] SunPrincess: no. people are easy to talk to.
[3:14 AM] SunPrincess: they have primitive motivations. they like things that make them feel good. or that make them feel good about themselves
[3:14 AM] SunPrincess: flattery makes them open up. most people never get tired of hearing how great they are and feeling liked
[3:15 AM] SunPrincess: and theyd rather talk about themselves than listen. you can learn all about them like that, because they're just using you for attention and validation.
[3:15 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: You're saying that people default to self-centeredness?
[3:15 AM] SunPrincess: in my experience yes. its easy to have shallow conversations and most people are happy with just that. youre a smart girl, truth, you think about complex things and care about deep subjects. have you met many people who really take the time to think about the world and their place in it and whats important and meaningful in life?
[3:19 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I'm not sure. I generally don't get close enough to anyone to find out how they think or what they consider important.
[3:20 AM] SunPrincess: and why do you think that is? its because youre complicated. you know how things are and should be, and you can see the disconnect between insipid day to day life and what matters. you're real. and people dont want to think about the hard truths. most of them dont want to think at all. they just want to exist. not even live really, just exist.
[3:20 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: You can't possibly believe that! It's so cynical.
[3:21 AM] SunPrincess: i know you love learning abut history and psychology and politics and philosophy and all sorts of things in school. theyre weighty subjects that matter, right? how many people in your school really care about all that?
[3:21 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Most of them, actually. My school is academically rigorous. Lots of high achievers.
[3:21 AM] SunPrincess: so lots of students paying attention in class. better than my school, but ill still wager the majority dont care about learning as much as good grades, if your school is competitive
[3:22 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I . . . guess that's mostly true.
[3:22 AM] SunPrincess: so even among smart kids most of them just dont care. they dont want to care.
[3:23 AM] SunPrincess: but youre not like that, truth. youre like me. we know that as a group most people are purposeless. they lack direction. as individuals and as a group they react to rewards and punishment, praise and fear, like an animal. so you can help them out by giving them the mindless things they want, and in exchange you can get what you want from them.
[3:23 AM] SunPrincess: popularity, or favors, or some fun here and there
[3:23 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: That's horrible! And even more cynical!
[3:24 AM] SunPrincess: cynicism is just another word for being realistic.
[3:24 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Are all your relationships so transactional? Just stimulus-response cycles?
[3:24 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Is that how you see everyone? Is that how you see me too?
[3:24 AM] SunPrincess: most people, but not you. youre one of the exceptions, like me. except you suffer because of it. youve almost got it, youre almost there, but you are still hanging on to the idea that ordinary people can make you happy. youre lonely, right? youre talking with me here at 3 in the morning instead of sleeping, and im pretty sure its not just because im really interesting. even though i am of course ;-)
[3:25 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I can see where you're coming from, in a way, but your worldview is so depressing. I'm certain it's . . . not entirely correct, at best, but I want to think about its implications some more.
[3:25 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: That notwithtanding, I really enjoy our conversations. Even when we disagree on something, your arguments are always cogent and logically consistent.
[3:25 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I've seen you change your mind through analysis and reason, and you've done so readily and clinically. It's . . . comforting? I think?
[3:26 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Comforting to know that there are people who think that way. Other people, I mean. Even though you're very passionate about a lot of things, you can be dispassionate and . . . almost ruthless, I guess, when you analyze things.
[3:27 AM] SunPrincess: well ive always had strong convictions. and i think that clinging to familiar but wrong ideas is weakness. id rather be right than sentimental about my beliefs. ive found it necessary to discard lots of things i thought i knew over the years, and its made me stronger. its given me clarity. and in the process, ive found purpose.
[3:27 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: Well no matter what we disagree on, I always respect that about you. And the fact that most people aren't like that, that their beliefs and actions are driven by emotions instead of reason, does make it difficult to connect with them. So I am lonely, yes.
[3:28 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: I feel like this is the part in the movie where you reveal you're a supervillainess and tell me "we're not so different, you and I."
[3:28 AM] SunPrincess: well...i was going to wait until a bit later, but i guess if youre ready...
[3:28 AM] KnowledgeIsTruth: :-D
"Pardon me, dear, but I couldn't help noticing that you seem a bit, mmm, out of sorts?"
Twilight looked up from where she had been staring distractedly over the crowds of young people flocking through the mall's courtyard. Yes, "flocking;" apropos for interchangeable, incurious people behaving like instinct-driven birds. Sun would surely draw that parallel. Actually, I bet a crowd of this kind could be modelled using a sort of flocking behavior, plotting destinations on a coordinate system and grouping the motions of individuals on shared social outings. You'd have to account for crowd density, of course, which would affect the—
"Oh! Sorry, I was . . ." Her glance moved up the form of her interlocutor, analyzing. Well-dressed in a purple and white ensemble, and carrying bags from several clothing stores; thin; confident stance; conventionally attractive. Facial symmetry and clear skin were cross-cultural markers of beauty, according to her admittedly sparse anthropological knowledge. (She did tend to stick with the hard sciences, by preference.)
This girl was probably popular. The thought made her cringe subtly, given that someone's popularity was inversely correlated to their tolerance of Twilight's personality quirks, in her experience. There could be detrimental social and emotional consequences for interacting with her. Twilight mentally weighed her likely adherence to historically plausible categorizations.
Gregarious.
Vacuous.
Petty.
Dangerous.
". . . I was distracted," she finished.
"People-watching? I certainly have been known to enjoy a dabble in that myself, here and there." She waved a hand about airily as she spoke, then fixed her brilliant blue irises on Twilight and smiled warmly. " Oh, but pardon me, I'm forgetting myself! Hello, darling, I'm Rarity."
Twilight glanced at the delicately proffered hand, then clasped it in her own and shook it tentatively. "Hi." Rarity blinked, and silently adjusted her smile, seemingly waiting for something else. A quick review of the solution space for small-talk subjects and rote responses yielded a likely candidate. "I'm Twilight." This seemed to satisfy Rarity's expectations.
"Twilight! Such a lovely name. Caught between the light and the dark! Your life must be fascinating, with a name like that. Surely you were distracted just now because you were brooding on the tragic nature of existence!" She brought her arm up to cover her closed eyes, and tilted her head back dramatically, the loose curls of her coiffure briefly undulating before falling still behind her.
Uncertainty wrote itself across Twilight's brow, as she tried to determine if Rarity was already making fun of her. "It's not a euonym, it's just my name."
Rarity gave up her pose to lean forward, bringing her face toward Twilight's. "And yet you seemed so lost for a moment there, dear. I couldn't help but interrupt my shopping trip to find out if everything was all right. Giving up a little of my shopping quality time is hardly a concern if I can brighten someone's day when they might need it most." She reached out her hand to companionably pat Twilight's forearm, her eyes earnest.
Twilight was suddenly taken aback. Rarity had indeed interrupted the creeping pall of a fatalistic anhedonia. She had been staring at the crowds, painfully cognizant that despite their tantalizing physical nearness they were as emotionally distant as Proxima Centauri. Indeed, Twilight liked to sit on the edge of this fountain in the central atrium of the mall specifically because the density of passers-by was greatest, giving her a surrogate feeling of belonging—even if only as a member of an amorphous crowd of constantly shifting composition. Musing on the sheer pitifulness of this habit had been leading her into a less dramatic version of the brooding Rarity had perceived.
"I . . ." Twilight swallowed, aware of a sudden uncomfortable dryness in her throat. Her eyes searched Rarity's face for signs of mockery. This kind of thing doesn't happen. People are always caught up in their own lives, they don't stop to enquire about the circumstances of vaguely sad-looking strangers. What am I not seeing? She drew back from Rarity's touch, her mind rapidly cycling through possible responses and discarding any that might indicate vulnerability. Twilight didn't know what game this girl was playing, but the balance of experience demanded she assume that Rarity was employing a disingenuous façade, likely as a feint before embarrassing or demeaning her somehow. But there were too many variables; she couldn't predict how any such ploy would unfold, and consequently couldn't maintain control of this conversation at all!
Well, that simplified things. There was only one safe course of action. Twilight affixed a brittle smile to her face. "I'm fine, Rarity. Thanks for worrying, but I was just thinking about my calculus homework. There's an annoying discontinuity in one of the last functions, and once I've figured out how to simplify it I'll be able to apply simple polynomial differentiation."
Rarity's narrowed eyes now took their own turn searchingly roving across Twilight's face, perhaps less than convinced of the rictus's veracity. "Oh, I'm so sorry if I've been presumptuous, Twilight. I was so certain that something was troubling you, and I know that whenever I feel down I find it always helps when I have a sympathetic ear to listen. A lady can only find so much solace in strawberry and pistachio swirl, you know."
"Thank you, Rarity, but really, I'm fine. You can blame the mathematics if you want."
Rarity smiled winsomely, and placed her hands on her hips in a contrapposto. "Well, if it brings such a frown to your face, I'm certain that calculus and I are overdue for a stern talking-to."
"I'll let Leibniz and Newton know." Twilight prepared a universal conversational script. "Oh, I was so absorbed in the problem, I didn't realize what time it is. I really have to go."
"Oh, wait just a moment, dear," Rarity entreated as Twilight rose. Her smile fading, Rarity reached into one of her shopping bags and retrieved a velvet clutch purse. From this she drew a pocket notepad and what looked like some kind of calligraphy pen. After a few deft penstrokes, she tore the top leaf off with a little flourish, and held it out while looking at Twilight meaningfully over the top of her red eyeglass frames. "After you've figured out the answer to your homework, I'd be pleased to listen to any other . . . math problems you might have. Certainly I find that the answers sometimes just come to me when I talk them out with someone."
Twilight glanced down at the little sheet of paper, and back up to meet Rarity's unwavering gaze. Her fingers twitched in momentary indecision, but then she pulled the paper out of Rarity's hand, folded it over twice, and slipped it into a pocket on the side of her own purse. Turning on her heel, Twilight sought to weave through several intersecting trajectories in the teenage flock, allowing them to interpose between Rarity and her.
She reflected with a distant satisfaction that the sudden increase in localized crowd density caused by her arrival did, in fact, affect the velocities of the nearby people, and now that she was safely away from Rarity she began considering whether the crowd could be reasonably modeled as a viscous fluid, and how her movements would affect its shear flow.
The Lighthouse in the Dark
The school week steadily progressed towards the weekend, along the way offering up the diverse divertissements of Ionian philosophers in history class, operant conditioning in psychology class, and Romantic poets in English class. Crystal Preparatory Academy could be a bit stuffy in its curriculum, hewing to what Twilight imagined an upper crust liberal arts education must have been in the early- to mid-twentieth century. The gestalt struck her as a strange amalgam of rarefaction and quaintness, like a person trying to emulate the mannerisms of a historical gentry using only period television dramas for reference.
Its peculiar pretensions notwithstanding, the academy certainly delivered on the vaunted quality of its education, successfully attracting and retaining teachers of high pedagogical caliber who were commensurately demanding of their students' efforts. And no student exceeded those demands as comprehensively, highly, and consistently as Twilight Sparkle.
Alas, even in a school so obsessed with academic success as Crystal Preparatory Academy, it would be lamentably incorrect to assume that such achievements would in some way ingratiate her with any of her peers' social groups. Instead, Twilight's brilliance tended to foster jealousy and resentment rather than camaraderie. The academy was quite an exclusive institution, presenting an architectural façade connoting wealth and class to reassure its enrollees' parents that their children would be well-prepared to navigate lives of privilege. Exclusion was built into its very bricks and beams, whence it suffused into the students and faculty just as surely as if it were the friable asbestos or insidious radon gas that instead plagued the underfunded public school buildings.
And to be exclusive tautologically meant that someone must be excluded. Twilight may have been a plum acquisition for the school as a valuable future alumna, but that did not make her much less of an outsider among its student body. Here were the hedge fund managers, chief executive officers, national politicians, and similar embryonic power brokers of tomorrow. Twilight's considerable intellect imbued her life with great opportunity, yes, but intellect was not as reliably tied to worldly success as wealth and influence, and those were the real currency of her classmates. To deviate from social expectations, trends, and fashionable fads was to not fit in, to mark oneself as not speaking the shared language of the elite, and therefore to be proven worthy of exclusion.
How ridiculous that all of these "leaders" are so slavishly devoted to following what everyone else is doing, she ruefully reflected, the thought running comfortably along a mental groove well-worn from frequent reuse.
The cafeteria was a veritable study in the art of wainscoting and pilasters. Its rows of identical, modern folding tables looked like interlopers that had somehow usurped the carved oaken behemoths that surely belonged there instead. The indistinct susurration of conversation surrounded her from the adjacent tables, but the chairs at her own were empty as usual. Twilight scanned a textbook, pretending the social vacuum was because she sought out solitude to study during lunch, but this illusion did not survive cursory scrutiny since her preceding class's proximity down the hall meant she was usually one of the first in the room. Solitude was not chosen by her, but rather conferred by the classmates who would prefer nearly any other table than the one she occupied.
Twilight had not had much of an appetite of late. She toyed idly with her salad, favoring the tiny diced tomatoes and the squared-off croutons with her fork's attention while leaving most of the remainder. An errant thought regarding how efficiently such cubical foodstuffs could fill an arbitrary volume flicked through her mind, and she briefly considered whether any other platonic solids could tessellate a three-dimensional space without gaps. She'd have to look that up later.
Shifting the lettuce eventually revealed no further cubes for her consumption. With a sigh, she picked up her tray and stood up, turning rapidly to sweep her gaze towards the nearest trash can. In so doing, her tray's motion intersected the space through which the future chief marketing officer of a regional telecommunications firm was confidently striding as he chatted with his friend beside him. In inevitable deference to the Pauli exclusion principle, all fermions involved refused to occupy the same temporospatial coördinates, and instead simple kinematics dictated that the tray flip backwards, spraying its ejecta of lettuce and salad dressing down Twilight's chest. It was a beautiful example of the statistically deterministic macroscopic interactions of condensed matter that, tragically, was completely unappreciated by all involved parties.
"Hey!" Jet Set exclaimed, lurching back and instinctively raising his arms to fend off the tray. Twilight's own involuntary yelp was punctuated by the clatter of her chair against the table leg as she fell back against them in surprise. A momentary pain towards the back of her right ilium indicated where her hip bashed into the table's edge, but a sharp pain in her right ankle more vociferously informed her that her tendons were not meant to arrange themselves in quite those orientations.
Twilight threw her arms back, her palms wildly seeking the tabletop for support. She winced, inhaling sharply through bared teeth as her mind registered the immediate stinging pain in her ankle.
"Watch where you're going! God, Sparkle, you're a mess!" Jet Set offered her a callous stare as he extended a hand to help her up. Twilight clasped his hand, and his abrupt tug pulled her back to a standing position, one foot gingerly raised.
"I'm sorry, Jet Set—"
"You should be." He looked down and brushed his hands twice over the lapels of his uniform jacket. "At least you won't have to pay for dry cleaning, if you could afford it." He spared her own vest a glance, and amended, "for me anyway." He turned to his companion and, with a subtle jerk of his head motioning towards the aisle in front of them, they continued walking, muttering disgustedly between themselves.
Twilight stared after them, her chest rising and falling with each little ragged breath through her mouth. The nearby students who had turned to watch the commotion had already turned back to smirk and giggle with their friends. She delicately knelt to retrieve the fallen tray, hurriedly scooping the tableware and the larger detritus of her salad back onto its surface with one shaky hand while the other grasped the chair to steady her in her crouch.
Embarrassment flooded her mind, and amorphous feelings of inadequacy. A small thread of guilt for leaving the dressing there for the janitorial staff to clean up weaved itself into the mix. And of course the twinges in her ankle that lent unwelcome variety to its rising throb rendered it difficult to order her thoughts, such as they were.
Rising, she took a little step towards the trash can, eliciting another wince. Yes, the minor social transgression of leaving her tray at the table was definitely preferable to the extra walking distance. She briefly imagined Rousseau giving her a conspiratorial wink, as if to say it's OK, just this once . Leaving the tray at her table, she limped to the door, emitting an occasional brief whimper when she didn't favor her ankle quite enough. No one offered her their assistance, and she certainly didn't look forward to asking someone for any.
Soon enough, the empty hallway yawned before her. The bottom of her vision blurred slightly, hinting at the tears whose presence threatened, but she remained composed enough to stave them off while she hobbled gracelessly to the nurse's office. Her introspective nature began ascertaining the ratio of somatic to emotional pain that might be fueling these tears, but she cut that thought off right away, shaking her head violently as if to physically dislodge it from her brain. "No," she grunted, her voice low and shaky, "not now. Not now!" She shouldn't irrationally fall apart right now; she needed to attend to her injury, and not some ridiculous feelings that were clearly disproportionate to her current problems.
She paused to gather herself, putting one hand against the wall and bringing the other up to cover the tightness that suddenly swelled in her chest. A slimy sensation met this latter action; withdrawing it, she glanced down to see a smear of salad dressing on her palm. A momentary sob escaped her, and as she stared at her now-shaking hand she cringed as another sob followed. Idiot! Stupid idiot! What's wrong with me?
Turning, she put her back against the wall and slid halfway down, one leg sticking out awkwardly to spare any further aggravation of her tendons. There's no reason for this! Her breaths came shallowly and more rapidly now, and she couldn't take her unblinking eyes off her quivering, soiled hand. Get up! This is completely irrational!
And then she felt it, that traitorous, wet line of warmth down her cheek, and a salty tang at the edge of her lips. She clenched her jaw shut hard, and weird plosives escaped as she struggled for control. Shut up, shut up, shut up! Half a minute passed, perhaps, as her strangled noises subsided and her breathing—though still somewhat erratic—slowed to a semblance of normalcy. She closed her eyes and covered her face with her clean hand, kneading her fingertips against her forehead.
With one last sigh, she looked up and confirmed the hall remained empty. Rising once more, she continued her slow walk to the nurse, silently cursing herself. She should be normal. She should be in control. There was no reason for those emotions just now. No reason.
No reason.
She was reasonable. She was a paragon of reason, in many ways. Her best qualities were her reasoning, and. . . .
. . . Her reasoning, and. . . .
She frowned. Well, that was enough. More than enough! The world was full of unreasonable people who by and large lacked a logical, self-consistent outlook, swayed by advertising and prejudices and appeals to emotion and fads. Someone had to be the adult in the room—the mental adult, if not the physical one. That was she, along with whatever insufficient fraction of people were like her. There was nothing wrong with her at all. The world would be efficient and just if everyone were like her.
If everyone liked her.
That reformulation rolled around in her mind for long seconds.
And it hurt, it hurt so much to be like this, to bear the weight and responsibility of her intellect, her purity of reasoning. To never be understood, to have no one: to be at worst bullied and hated, and at best ignored. To not know how to reach out to others. To not even be interested in the interchangeable sea of faces whose thoughts and lives might be so petty and small and duplicative and unreflective and pointless as SunPrincess believed.
And it hurt to realize she thought that, to know with conviction that most people were just unthinkingly going through their lives, and to begin considering that perhaps these people weren't really worth knowing. It hurt because that must mean she was some kind of monster, because you weren't supposed to think things like that. And the fact that she did meant that there was something so very, very wrong with her and so alien inside her mind that she must barely be human in anything but form alone.
Though that didn't mean SunPrincess was a monster, of course. Twilight didn't know enough about SunPrincess's thoughts to formulate a comprehensive understanding of her worldview, so it wouldn't be right to think that about her. Whereas her own thoughts. . . .
And of course Twilight was biased about SunPrincess, though right now she merely noted it clinically—detachedly—and disregarded its importance. She was used to having different standards for different people, since people were so varied in ability and temperament. People were typically so unskilled in so many areas of obvious importance when contrasted with herself. So it was natural and healthy to have high standards for herself, wildly different standards for herself. . . .
She didn't understand other people, she didn't think like other people. She couldn't understand their joys and pains, and seemed accidentally adept at causing far more of the latter than the former in anyone with whom she nontrivially interacted.
Sometimes, she felt she would give anything to be normal. She would rather be stupid and happy than brilliant and . . . this. She could melt into that sea of meaningless people, and find happiness in the comforting banality of their companionship.
She was jealous of people for whom she had so little respect.
No, not respect! Most people were worthy of respect. Maybe she was evincing . . . pity? Disinterest?
Arrogance? Hatefulness? her mind treacherously supplied.
God, how she hated herself. She hated being this crude simulacrum of humanity. This miscreated, incompletely realized thing , missing so much of what makes a person a person!
Her other eye, having missed out earlier, decided to invite its own tear to the party. But Twilight was fine now. Definitely fine. She felt too dulled to feel more than a generalized sadness and a bitter self-loathing, and that was an improvement, surely. She brushed the tear away without so much as a sniff.
She was fine.
Everything was fine.
Twilight's parents heard about her lunchtime misfortune from the high school nurse, though neither they nor the nurse were aware of anything but her physical ills. At home, they met her with worried looks and a not insignificant amount of sympathy, and fussed more than was really necessary now that her ankle was bandaged and fitted with a splint. The nurse had deemed crutches unnecessary, which was perfectly fine in Twilight's eyes. She would have detested any accoutrements that might predictably embolden schoolyard bullies.
Though the physical benefits of a bookish, sedentary life were generally dubious, Twilight was glad that there would be virtually no deleterious effect on her hobbies. Were she more athletically inclined, she would doubtless be disappointed in her inability to engage in free-throw field goals, five-pointers, or what have you. Conversely, reading and light scientific experimentation would surely not be unduly affected.
These small mercies were not enough to brighten her mood, however. After a pensive dinner in the dining room with her parents, she excused herself directly to her bedroom upstairs, and spent a tedious hour immersed in her own disagreeable thoughts. Her laptop's speakers remained silent, with no notification to herald SunPrincess's presence online. Sighing, she eventually swung her feet off her bed and padded quietly down the hall to the bathroom. Dental hygiene was important before bed, and a mirror would help her examine the bruise where her hip had hit the table.
She repositioned the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet above the sink. Craning her neck and contorting her body into an awkward contrapposto, she saw that the contusion wasn't too bad. An ugly blotch, to be sure, but in an inconspicuous location, and merely skin-deep after all. Just like beauty .
She peered into the mirror, meeting the young girl's gaze. Her doppelgänger's eyes were tired, her hair frazzled. There was a tightness in the jaw muscles there, and when she released the pressure of a nervous bite she hadn't realized she was maintaining she saw the other girl do the same. They both shivered in displeasure at all the myriad little signs of their anxiety and weariness and sadness and loneliness and . . .
"Heh. Two was enough, I think."
Twilight glanced towards the door. Somewhere beyond it, her father had just tiredly responded to some quiet statement of her mother's that Twilight hadn't caught. Her mother must have replied in whispered tones, because her father's slightly louder voice continued on after a pause.
"Her brother Shining was easier, of course. Sometimes it feels like he was a practice run for the more difficult one." Twilight tensed at that, then relaxed when she heard his next response. "Of course not, I wouldn't have traded it for the world. But raising a genius isn't easy."
"I worry about her," her mother said, just loud enough for Twilight's straining ears to hear.
"She can't help it, Velvet. Remember the therapist when she was a kid? He said there isn't any way to—"
"Our daughter doesn't need to be fixed !" Her mother quietly seethed, spitting out the last word. The girl in the mirror opened her eyes wide, and took in a sudden, shaky breath through her mouth.
"I didn't mean—" he rejoined, placatingly.
"You promised you wouldn't—"
"Well maybe we should," her father hissed. "You're already going to be mad at me anyway. It's not 'just how she is,' it's going to follow her through her entire life: career, family, everything! It's not wrong of me to not want her to suffer."
"Stop it, Night Light! She isn't some broken thing that just needs to be fixed. She's—"
"For heaven's sake, it's not part of her identity! It's a problem, like any other mental—"
A door slammed.
"Velvet. Velvet!" Twilight heard the jiggle of a door handle, and her father's heavy sigh.
The other girl was shaking now, and out of habit Twilight reached her right hand up to claw nervously at the fabric covering her heart. The other girl simultaneously did so with her left hand. They both let out a choked sob, quietly so they wouldn't be heard, and neither tried to hold back nor wipe away the start of her tears.
Twilight left the girl there. She crept down the hall to her room, closed her door, and walked jerkily to her bed. Lying down on her side, she pulled her knees up close to her body and drew the blankets over herself. She let the quivering sobs wrack her body, an inescapable pall of desolation falling over her with dark finality.
She was broken, broken and unlovable by anyone except her family who basically had to love her because of genetics and oxytocin neuropeptides and social constructs and evolutionary psychology, and her entire life was going to be like this, and she could never change and never understand and always be so very wrong inside and wrong to others and wrong wrong never right just wrong! She would always be so careless with people, stupid and careless, the stupidest most idiotic genius who will always hurt people and always do the wrong thing and never understand, never understand anything at all!
Her face was wet with streaming tears now, and she held herself close, curling up on herself as tightly as she could, as if her own touch could substitute for the comforting touch of anyone who cared.
And she couldn't talk with her parents. And SunPrincess was offline. And she needed someone right now more desperately than she could remember, but there wasn't anyone. No one. There never was.
No one.
She froze, her shaking momentarily arrested but for the tense vibration of her hands, and drew in several gasping breaths. She rose unsteadily to her feet, and withdrew from her purse a small slip of paper.
This is wrong. I'm in no state to talk to anyone. No one wants to see me like this, let alone a total stranger.
Twilight stared at the unfamiliar phone number, surmounted only by the the single word of the girl's name.
Stupid idiot! I know it's the wrong thing to do!
She stifled a quick series of breaths that had threatened to break into another sob. Retrieving her phone from its charger, she donned its wireless earpiece.
Selfish! Self-centered! She doesn't want to deal with this!
She slipped back under her covers and dialed the number, breathing in shallow gasps.
I'm going to subject her to this and ruin everything. I really am a monster. A callous, selfish, terrible—
The call connected, and there were what might be the sounds of someone turning atop a mattress. She heard a refined voice tinged with sleep. "Hello? Who is this? I'm sorry, darling, but I don't recognize the number."
"Rarity," Twilight croaked, and she immediately dissolved into incoherent, heaving, gasping sobs.