The Algorithm of Chaos

His hand stretched casually along the top of the backrest, stroking with his fingertips the leather of the color of… well, the leather in the upholstery perfectly matched the spirit of the interior.

Fortunately for those who’s too quick to get tired with following the casual flow of thoughts on any subject whatsoever, in the manner which they had flowed in during the opening passage, Lex's plump figure appeared thru the entrance. Good timing…

The awe-inspiring asset of ‘Mr. Ears of the Year’ left no place for doubts… However, enough of friendly teasing, the guy had other features too.

His double chin bulged languidly over the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. His jacket, removed, was thrown over, or rather hung from his left shoulder, draping the left side of his slowly approaching torso.

One might say it was hanging over provocatively – without a lunge or any support, even though Lex's rounded shoulder had no hooks to catch a hold. Not every jacket would dare strike such a relaxed, yet at the same time, risky pose.

On the other hand, hanging from that extremely unorthodox point gave the garment an air of dashing recklessness, if viewed from the side. Hanging like this, the jacket imparted to Lex's ample bulk a hint of the possibility of standing upright at full height, if need be to hide his stoop… if need be.

Overall, Vit's buddy looked dashing, reminiscent of a hussar from the Tsarist army in the dress uniform, into which the shock troops could only slip one arm through one sleeve, the other had to hang loose. (Can you visualize? The entire personnel of this branch of the military, every single one of them, wearing their uniform the same way, even the lefties… And what the hell could you do? These are elite troops in the service of the Emperor Magesty, dammit, and violating dress code is unacceptable.

And that half-put-on piece of crap was called ‘mentik’ (apologies to the undersize police officers in Russia, but the term wasn’t invented by me).

Yet, look at Lex! This daredevil even outdid the hussars, leaving both sleeves hanging empty! Notwithstanding that he doesn't have a mustache, so dear to the hearts of true cavalrymen and pedestrians with bandit bent in their subconscious…

‘Tell me, my friend,’ Lex said, finally finishing his ceremonial parade and throwing his jacket over the back of the long two-seater seat opposite Vit, to plop down wearily next to it (the gutsy jacket, if you like).

‘Why are Messrs. Pretty Boys so predictable? Half a block before the Cabin, I knew you'd be sitting in the corner. It doesn't matter if it's right or left: a corner is a corner. But why?’

‘To give the rabble a chance to admire a truly cool guy, I guess,’ Vit suggested.

‘O, really? And here I thought you valued the corner as a vantage point, to immediately thwart the arrival of a new cool guy. Some upstart who showed up to conduct a timing exercise – are you really that quick to draw your gun? Could that be the reason?’

‘The question “why” opens the floodgates to at least two zettabytes of all sorts of assumptions, and each of them is perfectly acceptable,’ Vit replied gloomily, like a teacher tired of treading water for the idiots.

‘O, my! A nightmare! A good news, there’s no shooting on the premises… However, let's get back to the file I grabbed, a bit, abusing my official position. Essentially, the file is something like a receipt book…’

‘Shut up! Was there a brick landing on your head? Are you out of your mind? Or a barking mad of no return? You're smashed, my friend! Loaded to the brim, personal protection gone with the wind! What if I’m wired? A sensitive microphone in my pocket? For your information: anything you say can be used against you and your doomed ass!’

Lex shook his head contemptuously:

‘Forget that bullshit, dude, it's outdated. No records count anymore, not even the confessions of the scumbag. The world moves on. Thanks to the constant science progress, my lawyer will easily prove that you simply fell for my prank. After all, your clueing in is just empty words, and even with my authentic voice, you cannot prove the malicious intent.

Rise and shine, buddy! This is the age of two-factor authentication! No court will consider a case based on words, without well-documented thoughts where I plan to pull this off. Or thoughts popping up later, as the crime unfolds. No, my dear, mere actions – in absence of two-factor authentication thereof – are no longer evidence. Even when you’re caught with a smoking gun over a riddled body, or with your pants down in front of a kindergarten class. It doesn't matter. You were the victim of manipulation, framed through retroactively falsifying causality. Yes, sir. A mocking trick perpetrated by your own sister's great-grandchildren. In revenge for not giving that idiot, that sister, candy at the age of three. And she went and cried on a video which those buggers, her future descendants, will find in the attic of their great-grandmother's house. Now, what? Have you got the drift? A crime is only what's confirmed through 2FA; anything else eschews punishment.’

‘So, if they hack my email inbox with your proposal to assassinate the president, but there's no recording of your wild thought: "Why not sendimg this crap to Vit?", they can't find fault with you?’

‘Exactly! In that scenario, I'm as clean as a 22-year-old baby of a multinational corporation owner! And let the hackers fuck each other in your inbox. Pardon my Etruscan.’

‘So that's why you didn't send me the file?’

‘The file in your inbox, plus the recording of my thought, when I was sending it, will completely incriminate me. Is so hard to grasp what 1 + 1 is?

‘Recording thoughts? Do you ever get rid of a hangover, at least occasionally?’

‘Dude, that's exactly what I do at my job. Not about the hangover though, but in regard to the thought records. Ever heard of the noosphere?’

‘?’ Shrugged Vit’s shoulders.

‘As it turns out, besides the atmosphere and/or stratosphere, they've already dug up another one – the noosphere. The thing consists of the thoughts of everyone who can think. Any thoughts, even the most secret, float openly within it, like radio waves.

But the analogy is flawed, since radio signals tend to fade, while our thoughts become part of the noosphere forever. Inextinguishable, indelible, open. True, the technology isn't perfect yet, but the threshold has been passed over, and the rest is just a matter of time. Theoretically, you could tune in and read the thoughts of, say, Leonardo when he was painting his Mona Lisa.’

‘What about your daddy's thoughts when he ejaculated you from his balls with a horde of sperm identical to you, but not as nimble?’

‘That'll be a real challenge. We need to isolate his thoughts from those of other men in the identical process. Subtract the large apes in zoos around the world and in the wild. The dodgers ignored evolution so as not to get cinched to the mutual slaving. The countless twins-like thoughts that accompany orgasm over the past five million years have covered the earth in layers – from sea level to the heights of Mount Everest. We'll need to bring in Artificial Intelligence for a proper analysis, but in principle, the task is solvable.’

‘That's crazy! Legends, myths, and the fairy-tales by the Alcoholics Anonymous group in Ward Number Six!’

‘I understand, the idea should seem as unfamiliar as mobile communications if you showed it to Genghis Khan's great-grandmother. But folks quickly get the hang of things. What? The noosphere? Just another wrapping around the same okd globe. Packed with thoughts, like the atmosphere with oxygen atoms.

Have you ever seen a sole oxygen atom? No, but you breathe them in.

A flood of thoughts: clearly formulated, unfinished, lost halfway thru, picked up anew – thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.

‘Isn't it over-crammed there?’

‘In your head?’

‘No, in that noosphere. The starting pistol shot was obviously served by the incantation 'Let there be light!', and since then they've managed to think and rethink so many things that all the dumps, warehouses, and storage facilities have been since long left under the immense surface of the swelling flood.’

‘Looks like you're beginning to see the light, my dear friend, which is a good omen. However, you're still using the naive square-nest approach.

From that perspective – yes, it must be crammed, for all the thoughts that have emerged over the course of even a single individual's evolution, from 'Where's Mom? I want a tit and pee-pee!' up to 'Fucking nurse! I need the bedpan! Where’s she? Now, I'll just pee in my pajamas to spite her!’

They are born, but they don't disappear – millions, billions, gazillions of thoughts. Every moment. Malthus's grim admonition works on them like a stop sign on a hare, no better. Moreover, there are well-founded suspicions that all living things think – from single-celled organisms to stalagmites. Add those to the pile…

But! They're intangible, flowing through each other, one within another, no matter whose. Thought within thought! Deep, nulti-repeated implantation. More powerful than radio waves, stray quanta, and all that crap that normal dudes can't even fathom. Gettimg the idea, student? Start cramming for the test now.’

‘Well, if they're so intangible, I'm not really bothered by their Gulf Streams and Maelstroms, nested like nested dolls, one within the other, or wherever else they choose to cluster.’

‘Everywhere, buddy! In you, in me, in this very table. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts…’

‘You've distorted the quote. In the original, Hamlet says: "…words, words… " and so on.’

‘Words can't be stored. They're too fragile, often misquoted, broken, forgotten, lost forever. Thoughts are quite different matter; they're always there. As part of the noosphere.’

‘Thanks for the fascinating story, but as a seasoned country bumpkin, I only believe in what I can touch.’

‘And how many times have you touched a radio wave?’

‘Never had the chance. But I can turn on the radio my dad made back in the last millennium and listen to the weather forecast.’

‘The announcers read, and you, your mouth a-gaping, believe in the movement of clouds you can't touch. By the way, there are guys who make a good living reading thoughts.’

‘Oh, come on! Not a single psychic has ever managed to fool the commission from the Institute of Paranormal Phenomena.’

‘What do psychics have to do with this? I'm talking about the guys who work with me at the same lab. You just turn the dial to tune to thoughts in the noosphere, that's all.’

‘Like a radio?’

‘Kind of.’

Vit looked at his friend more closely.

To pull off such an elaborate rigmarole, you'd need a serious boost. But no – the eyes were still there, without that inspired glassy glare. And no circles, from blue to purple-red… And no nose sniffling out of inertia…

(Well, my friend, this all is not performed on drugs, he's doing it in real life. And he's doing it better than Newton himself, can you believe it? Or is it really Sir Isaac?)

‘Okay… Let's say…’ Vit began thoughtfully, ‘that this isn't a scam, planted by hostile aliens from Tau Ceti, like a trivial Trojan Horse trick. But I can't even remotely imagine…’

‘Are you willing to give up twenty years of your precious life,’ Lex interrupted, ‘to even remotely comprehend this crap? It's a pretty damn complex area of science to grasp. And underneath all this fundamental brain-twiddling, they've slapped on some kind of immutable Chaos Algorithm.’