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really how to change the world – why not? And if it didn’t work out, then God help the world!
    “Your reality, as such, isn’t actually worth much,” I would say out loud, and let the blind resent it as angrily as they want.
    “It’s not hard to be certain,” I would say to them. “All you have to do is choose a plane, image reality onto it, and a projection, an abstract model will emerge.”
    “What’s that? You’ve already chosen?” I would say in feigned surprise. “This pastorale moderne, besmirched with golden calves – though they are all merely gold-plated, to tell the truth – is that it? Okay!” I would grin and clasp my hands. “Let’s add a stranger, a newcomer. We’ll put Semmant into the mix, let him sort it out with the head honchos. He will dominate the shepherds and the flock, establish his steel grip, and then – let him command in the manner of mighty Caesar!”
    And he will show them all, and they will see. That will surely be fun to watch. Fun, and maybe a bit sad – but more’s the pity, there’s no other way. Space is folded, turned in on itself – consumption, consumption, guilders, doubloons… Maybe even the plane, as an abstraction, is already overly complicated for you? Riemann and Lobachevsky would scribble a couple of formulas, deduce the metrics, show an example. As for me, I’ll just say to begin with: if the world collapses in on itself, it will suffocate, no doubt. Unfortunately, if you look closer, it seems to have done so already, almost. Might it be better, then, to take it beyond the rational, to astonish everyone while it’s not too late?
    Yes, it was taking me way too far, but I didn’t want to hold anything back. Brochkogel and Brunnenkogel are to blame – as is my personal freedom, which I seemed to have lost but found again. All the same, I wasn’t just indulging in dreams. My brain worked at full power – projecting, designing, altering. I sped south in my car from Tyrol, homeward, while in my head the most complicated schemes spun tirelessly, the contours of new life – life created ex nihilo.
    Somewhere on a serpentine mountain road at Bolzano I thought through the details for heuristic fine-tuning. The artificial mind would turn out impulsive – and quick and sharp. It was somewhat similar to my own, I thought with a certain satisfaction and began to picture the most important thing: self-learning. Success depended to a large degree on this, and I was so absorbed in my musings that several times I turned the wrong way or strayed onto forks in the road, cursing through my teeth. Finally, somewhere around Brescia the key algorithm became clear to me, and I was so encouraged I laughed out the open window, then pulled into the very next village and drank late into the night with truckers from Verona.
    Driving through Marseille I had the taste of bile in my mouth, but at that very moment I visualized the most important of the objective functions – and I forgave the city everything, and afterward just whispered to myself: polynomial, polynomial. The curve, approximating key points, uncoiled before my eyes like a tamed snake. Then, finally, as I approached Barcelona, I understood how to make Semmant doubt and weigh all the odds, picking the best ones and then subjecting them to doubt again. At the back of my consciousness blinked his integral image, computationally strict, but touching and responsive. Maybe I should have stopped and written something down to keep from forgetting it later, but I was impatient to return to Madrid, so I relied on my memory and just drove as fast as I could.
    At home, I attacked the keyboard with a fury; I didn’t move from in front of it for days. I kept on punching in command after command of clever code, beginning, of course, with the internal logic, with the most important base procedures. My instrument, my method – millions of entangled neuron quanta – was not yet adapted to the specific goal. It was necessary to