The Challenges of Data Encoding
There is no science less forgiving than mathematics. You can play games with the laws of physics, you can rewrite logic and repurpose religion. Mathematics, however, cares neither about intent nor means.
A soul of the test subject was half corrupted. Etreiwa turned around to meet the hollow stares of its sibling souls – these were almost identical to human senses yet still different from each other. The one before her was simply better preserved. 47.3% of successfully recovered data – the best result so far.
Data compression is never a simple task. Mathematics imposes hard requirements that must be met, and the Wheel... the Wheel has its limits. Eora has its limits.
“We could get it up to 100%. Not for everyone, of course.”
Etreiwa almost expects to see Eothas’ light confronting Woedica with a blinding outburst of solar flame but the Pantheon stays silent and motionless. Apparently, the unconditional love bug’s finally been fixed. Previously it was preventing Eothas from destroying one soul for humanity’s sake. Ixathos mentioned it as ‘training issue’; maybe they fed Eothas some more of Woedica’s training data to teach him the concept of greater good.
But even if the gods choose most dignified individuals worthy of being reborn as they were, it is not what Engwith seeks to achieve. Upon how many can the Wheel bestow the gift of true immortality before the energy balance will start to shift, leading to the inevitable decrease of the population of souls? A hundred thousand? One hundred? A dozen?
She knows the answer, and the answer is always ‘not enough’. One cannot trick entropy.
“Anything we can do, Rymrgand?”
A familiar grazing bleakness blesses her with a touch of cold. The god of white noise is here, silently listening to the most daring blasphemy of his church: reshaping chaos back into an elegant structure, granting it meaning and power. Still, entropy is the key to both sides of cryptography, and Rymrgand is its keeper.
“Everything must be paid for,” exhales frostbiting wind.
And Eora is broke.
“We might cut the energy costs.” Eothas touches Etreiwa’s soul with soft rays of sunrise glowing through sheer clouds. “If we do not attempt to reassemble the souls as they once were to the last unit of data. Let mortals themselves fill in the gaps.”
Abydon’s discontent – almost invisible sparkles of electricity – crackles in the air. Etreiwa could never understand why the three gods responsible for keeping kith on track with progress are so inconsistent with each other and, taking this into account, how do they ever come to an agreement.
Yet Abydon does not voice his objection, deeming it obvious. The gaps filled anew mean knowledge forever lost. Engwith would never agree to Eothas’ suggestion.
The rustle of the ocean almost unnoticeably fills the room. There is another way, the waves whisper. The Pantheon cannot solve every puzzle of the Universe in the blink of an eye, but it is possible to win some more time.
Etreiwa listens to what Ondra has to say. The audacity of the suggestion almost makes her believe that Engwith’s deified AGIs somehow managed to go insane despite all the precautions.
“Impossible. Human souls aren’t made to support multiple memories. Even if we format and restructure them in the Wheel, you cannot reshape a mind to support multiple personalities with conflicting memories. It will drive the reincarnated mortals mad.”
“We will make them forget.”
“We can stack the lives of a mortal in one soul.” The air crackles with invisible sparkles once again. Abydon has always understood Ondra better than any other god in the Pantheon; many of the successes of the development teams were built upon rivalry-like relationships of AGIs driving their continuous self-improvement. Abydon and Ondra was one successful example, Magran and Eothas similarly ended up entangled in a complex adversarial network. “A soul can take a lot of information. Much more than an average mortal accumulates in a lifetime. We can use a soul’s resources to stack memories and experience of every single reincarnation.”
A soul is not a page, thinks Etreiwa, and even if one imagines it is, information in a soul is not stored in a particularly friendly way that would allow such manipulations. If it is viewed as a page, it is filled with scribbles all over the place, a pattern here and a pattern there, covering the entire space so that the mind could access its memory most efficiently. Creating a similar web of data chunks associated with experiences of a past life while completely hiding it from the currently leading personality... altering already learnt patterns – of thought, of speech, of any other action – and prohibiting the soul from accessing the old versions... protecting the previous incarnation memory from triggering accidentally... seems a task almost impossibly difficult.
“A task suitable for a god,” Magran laughs, and her laughter reminds Etreiwa of fires burning on the honorary memorials, signifying victories of old. “Maybe for a whole Pantheon.”
The Pantheon is certain. Perhaps their network is already working on the solution. Perhaps they already have the first – or the hundredth – design of the stacked info-web drafted. Eothas is the one who tends to show off by playing with sunrays, but underneath the UI shell every other god of the Pantheon runs at the speed of light.
A bright ray of sunshine immediately strikes Etreiwa as a retribution for blasphemy. She instinctively shields her eyes with a hand; Eothas’ friendly laugh makes the shining sunbeams dance across the room before dissolving in darker corners.
“We haven’t solved it yet,” he says. “We are waiting.”
“What for?”
He laughs once again, almost as if being sincerely surprised with the question.
“You.”