Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Author:G. Willow Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2012-07-02T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Mercifully, Sheikh Bilal had a DSL line in his office. He ran it into a Toshiba desktop that was several years old and clogged with malware, but had enough RAM to suit Alif ’s purposes. After swearing to back up his Word files and archived emails in the Cloud, Alif convinced the sheikh to let him blank the hard drive, leaving a tabula rasa, a clean void of machine into which Alif could pour himself. He installed a Linux platform off of his netbook, feeling an almost erotic surge of excitement when the familiar home screen loaded, accompanied by a series of energetic clicks from the guts of the CPU. Alif propped the Alf Yeom against a half-empty case of bottled water that sat at the back of the sheikh’s wide, cluttered desk, opening the book to the story of the hind and the hare; the origin point. He took a breath.

“I’m sorry, my boy,” said Sheikh Bilal from the doorway, “I still don’t properly understand what you are attempting to do. You said this censor is trying to build a computer. My computer is not only built, but becoming a little out of date.”

“If I’m right, it shouldn’t matter.” Alif squinted against the pink dawn that flowed slyly inward through the latticed window. “I’m going to teach it how to think all over again. I will give it a second birth.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Alif looked over his shoulder at the old man with a feeling of beneficent tenderness. He shouldn’t be impatient; he was on fire with meaning, with light colder and purer than the ruddy dawn. He could explain anything.

“You remember our conversation about quantum computing?” “Yes, roughly.”

“A quantum computer would theoretically perform data functions using ions—which are difficult to get, control and manipulate. That’s why real quantum computing is still mostly a dream. Not even the Hand has that kind of hardware. But. But.”

“But?”

Alif ’s eyes gleamed. “But you could do almost the same thing if you could get a normal silicon-based computer to think in metaphors.”

The sheikh’s rheumy gaze sharpened. “If each word has layers of meaning—”

“Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature.”

“That sounds very complicated indeed.”

“It should be impossible, but it isn’t.” Alif began typing furiously. “All modern computers are pedants. To them the world divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin-points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect.”

He could hear the sheikh shifting on his feet.

“When we spoke about the Quran, I was only trying to understand what you wanted to tell me about computers,” he said.

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