Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so happy to bring your story “A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, With Two Lemmas” to our readers. Can you tell us what inspired this story and how it came about?
This story was first written as a story-within-a-story in an unpublished novel, entitled One & Zero; Zero & One, which is set in an entirely digitized “post-singularity” society and is exploring what it means to have a society in which, in some sense, every person is also a number. Although the primary characters of the book are probably not Jewish, there is an undercurrent of Judaism in the book (and a Jewish subculture within the society), and I wrote this story to show some of the ways that Jewish lore (in this case, the Talmud) had been adapted to this very different society.
To me, this reads like a story AIs might tell, especially given the way that Lemmas Zero and One echo binary code. How did this structure speak to you in the writing?
It is exactly that! This story is “hidden lore” inside the aforementioned novel’s text—the society of algorithms hides its historical connections to Judaism, in much the same way that Christian society obfuscates and oppresses Jewish narratives. So this is a Jewish story, but at the same time, the algorithms have retold it in a way that makes sense to them.
(For the curious, the two lemmas of the story are drawn directly from the Talmud, with minor alterations. So my assumption is that the Talmud must still be around in this future society, but of course the dominant culture is adapting it in their own ways.)
The story’s recursive frame struck me as an awesome choice for the telling, and it left me with the sense that it ties the whole thing around the concept of singularity, especially when you consider the way singularities work in black holes. What led you to unfold the story like this?
Since the core premise of the framing novel is “what does it mean if a person is an algorithm or an algorithm is a person?” it’s playing with that. To an algorithmic consciousness, maybe the basic unit of meaning is inherently a recursive loop, in the way that we as concrete beings start our reason with concrete “objects,” “ideas,” and “rules.” So when algorithms tell stories, perhaps instead of starting with introducing the characters or the setting (the “objects”) they would start with the cycles and the loops.
I found the algorithm’s character comforting in the way it was depicted—so often synthetic life is depicted as emotionless—and almost angelic in its faintly weird, detached manner. Was there anything in particular that led you to include the algorithm in this way?
Since in its original context the story is something that is told by algorithms, to algorithms, I thought it was important to retell the story in such a way that it centers the algorithm and its experience. To them, “foxes” and “fishes” are mythical creatures, like dragons or fairies, and to them, of course what these benighted creatures from the dark ages need is for a right-thinking algorithm to come and explain to them how math works.
To someone who isn’t in the privileged class of algorithms, this might come off as grating or frustrating, of course. But they’re not really the intended audience.
Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
I have a bunch of novel-length and longer projects that I can’t talk too much about because they haven’t sold yet! (Although I did cheat a bit and talk about one of them above.) I also have a short story “How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Destroyed the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly” coming out with Tor.com at some point, and two flash stories coming out with Lightspeed at some probably-slightly-sooner point.