OBSERVATION 034
Press the picture and the points thin out. There are four rungs —
forty thousand, six hundred, forty, one. The equation running underneath does not change.
Only the shape goes.
“Listen” is the same bundle of relations, thrown to the ear instead of the eye.
No sound was added; the same equation is put out through another sense.
Two thousand small fish have become one sphere.
Nobody designed the sphere.
Each fish only rides the current beside it.
There is a fast layer and a slow one, and the ball swells and shrinks as if breathing.
From time to time the school splits open.
The fish at the opening run outward, and when something has passed, it closes again.
What is in there is not recorded here.
Every one of the forty thousand points belongs to the side that fled.
The shape of what is not recorded remains only in the way they avoided it.
Reduce the points and the fish go first, leaving the shell of the sphere.
At forty the shell comes apart into short drifting curls.
At one, what is left is a single path circling where the sphere was.
You cannot avoid something that is not there.
That something was avoided — the way of avoiding remembers that.
Fingerprint of this equation
sha256:fcb39ebae71f0fade7b815c843af9f6b7ec1af5e17815d02a9c9b5e441020ca8
Run at any time, by anyone, it appears in the same form.
No randomness, no clock, nothing from the environment.
The button above takes the equation out as it is. To count it again yourself:
pbpaste > f.txt && printf %s "$(cat f.txt)" | shasum -a 256
Take it and run it. No randomness and no clock are used, so the same creature appears on your screen too. The equation belongs to no one.