The Codeless Code: Case 128 The Prison of Infinite Pleasures 
======

 Winter had come to the Temple in full bitter force, so a
novice of the Clan of Iron Bones chose to spend his leave
time visiting brethren in Phong Province to the south. The
monks of that place worked on the planes of a great render
farm, where the directional light was gloriously warm
regardless of the season.

All morning the novice watched as learned brothers scurried
to and fro, planting random number seeds, building
bounding-boxes, or wrapping wire frames around even the
tiniest model so that its pixels would blossom in just the
right places. Thus were produced succulent scenes of every
shade and hue, to please the tastes of the Imperial Court.

As midday approached, the novice’s stomach began to rumble.
Since he required an escort to venture into the temple
proper, the novice approached a pleasant-looking boy about
his own age, who was rigging artificial light sources above
a grove of small quadtrees. The boy’s clothes were of a
rough sturdy linen, yet as testament to the rigor of his
duties the once-solid hues had been worn down to dithered
bits, both knees were covered with bi-quadratic patches, and
the right cuff showed signs of aliasing.

“Ten thousand pardons,” said the novice (feeling all the
more guilty for his own idleness) “but this miserable body
will gnaw at me until I feed it a bowl of rice. Where is
your master, that I may beg or barter with him?”

“In his chambers, where very soon I must go to bring him his
bowl,” said the boy. “Walk with me as I fetch it and I will
fill your own as well, for at this time of year our buffers
are always full.”

The novice accepted a generous helping of rice, then
followed the boy on his errand up the dim spiralling
staircase which was the temple’s only hallway. It was built
thus, the boy explained, to baffle stray photons.

“For glare is ever our enemy,” said the boy, pushing open
the door to his master’s chamber. “Although there are
greater perils, as my master could certainly tell you, if he
were here.”

The novice followed the boy inside, puzzled. The high
windowless room was lit only by the diffuse glow of a
monitor on a solitary desk. The surface of the wide monitor
could not be seen from this angle, but the glassy stare of
the motionless, drooling old man behind it made the novice’s
hair stand on end as surely as if his scalp had commanded
every follicle to indicate its normal vector.

The boy slowly set the bowl down in front of his master,
then backed away, taking care to avert his eyes from the
screen.

“He is lost,” explained the boy bitterly. “You see, long ago
he devised an ingenious algorithm for rendering any part of
the mandelblob in the wink of an eye...”

“I have heard of this shape,” interrupted the novice, unable
to tear his gaze from the master’s visage. “Rumors, only...
a dread equation so small it may be inscribed on my little
finger, yet describing a fractal sphere of infinite
complexity.”

“Not just a sphere,” continued the boy. “A world; a
worm-eaten world, implicit in the laws of number theory.
Permeated by caves within caves within caves, their walls
scarred by gaping chasms, yawning cracks and belching
crevices. Pick any taffy-twisted tunnel, the smoothest you
like, and if you zoom in far enough you’ll find that the
surface wriggles and blisters and boils like putrid flesh on
the cusp of liquescence, sprouting flaccid stalagmites
a-crawl with mushrooms, mushrooms on mushrooms on mushrooms
too tiny to be imagined, until they vanish into their own
asymptotes, erupting on the other side as spores above
spores above spores; and each spore is its own worm-eaten
world as infinitely complex as its progenitor, yet
perversely different from it too...

“My master had barely begun to explore this shape when by
some accident he zoomed too deep into one particular
nanoscopic nodule, one random spore among billions, and
found—or so he claimed—that it was a verisimilitudinous
image of our own world. Yes! Mathematical mountains exactly
where our mountains lie, bursting with needled protuberances
like ferns or fir-trees—all the same sickly amber hue, like
the virtual cumuloids that hover above, and the simulated
shorelines gritty with picoparticles of amber sand, where
amber waves of graininess stand poised to break but never
do; for this is a three-dimensional world, and for want of
fourth nothing moves, not even the people. Yes, people!
Monochromatic statues grotesque in face and form, yet human
down to the eyelash-hairs, to the pores in their nostrils,
like caves within caves...

“But in his trembling haste to plumb the depths of this
flyspeck world, my master clicked left instead of right. His
cursor jumped sideways and the crucial coordinates were lost
forever. I am told his howls of anguish could be heard in
the surrounding hills. Every monk of the temple rushed to
this chamber, frantic to learn what great disaster had
befallen. And thus did he relate the tale of his discovery.

“The other masters laughed at him, called him a liar or mad.
Even monks of low station shunned him. So he set out to
clear his name by finding those fateful coordinates again.

“Days became weeks, became months, became years, and now see
what he is reduced to: a prisoner of the Unit Sphere,
forever wandering while going nowhere, held captive by his
own obsession.  For a time, perhaps, he believed he had
stumbled onto some Great Truth of the Universe, a calculable
correspondence between the world of flesh and the one of
figures. Now I cannot guess what landscapes he wanders, or
why—nor would I wish to, lest I succumb to some irresistable
fascination and so share his fate.  It is said that
fore-warned is fore-armed, but for me at least...  I fear my
mind. When the real meets the imaginary, their product is
always complex.”

The novice edged forward to peer around the edge of the
screen, but the boy stopped him.

“Take your rice and leave this cursed place,” said the boy.
“And bring this one truth back to your own temple: that the
Render Farm of Phong Province is no better than a poppy
field, where daily we sow the doom of our people.”

“I do not see,” said the novice.

“The Emperor has but to name a pleasure—the thrill of battle
among the stars, the viewing of immodest persons engaged in
lecherous activities—and we will serve it to his private
chambers in six million pixels of sixteen million colors at
sixty frames a second. But do not envy him this. Instead
fear the day that you and I enjoy the same liberty. For
though we have created an eternity of wonders here, none of
us are given an eternity to explore them. How precious is
time; and how empty, ultimately, is any world but our own.”
