Afterwards, past midnight, Daisy lay on her bed, sleepless. With the radio playing Frank Scenario’s latest single, his voice laden with molasses and wine and the weight of years.
Rolling and tumbling along the domino,
Hoping for a full cast, landing with an all alone.
One of these days I’m gonna be an only know,
With sweet Heaven’s breath on my bone.
It should’ve been the best day of her life, with Max asking her for help, and Jazir and that. And that and that and that and that. Rolling and tumbling. Twisting and turning. Good things, bad things. Numbers, falling. Jazir’s wound. The temptations. Blurbflies hovering. Play to win! Play to win! The song. The hot smell of his flesh. Heaven’s breath. The spices. The numbers…
Numbers! That was it. She would do some work. She would open the folder that Max had given her. She would start to read…
Play to win
Pages of handwritten workings, equations galore, scribbled ravings, copies of magazines. Number Gumbo: A Mathemagical Grimoire. Launch date, October 1968. She started with that.
Psychedelic typography, its overabundance of flowers and drugs and cartoons of Jimi Hendrix, alive with six strings of fire. There was even an article containing a mathematical analysis of the guitarist’s solo in a song called ‘Purple Haze’. It claimed that Hendrix was a shamanic figure, whose music was a virus designed to infect the establishment with love. Each ragged chord was a ragged equation of love, apparently. Daisy skipped through it lightly, mainly because she had never heard a Jimi Hendrix recording, not for the life of her.
Instead she focused on an article written by Hackle: ‘Love Labyrinths: A Guide for the Active Wanderer in Nymphomation’. It was hard-going, to be sure. Lots of the equations were beyond her control, but she persevered.
Knowledge gathered: a love labyrinth was a computer- generated maze in which the wanderers could actively find the centre by falling in love with the pathways. This was called playing to win.
Some wanderers had a better chance of winning. These were the Casanovas. They had more love for the maze.
The wanderer could also fall out of love with the pathways, thereby forever losing his way. These were called the Backsliders. This was playing to lose.
The wanderers of these labyrinths were only packages of information let loose in the computer’s world. The more they wandered the maze, the more they learned about it. They could then change their behaviour accordingly.
Hackle seemed to view these wanderers as being almost alive. He gave the different types names – Chancer, Casanova, Warrior, Seducer, Cartographer, Jester, Sheep, Shepherd, Builder, Backslider – according to how they tackled the pathways of love. Special Informants patrolled the mazes, collecting knowledge and position. The more you loved the maze, the more it moulded to your desires. The more you hated the maze, the more it got you lost. But sometimes getting lost seemed good. Too many complications for Daisy to untangle, but loving the tangle anyway.
All this and more was nymphomation.
All this activity taking place inside a computer’s memory. It must have been a struggle to fit it all inside the dumb, clunky machines of those days. Of course, there was no reality application, not in 1968, and this fact seemed to inform Hackle’s equations with an element of loss. The professor was crying into his numbers.
The telephone rang; her father’s lost voice. ‘Leave me alone!’ she said, slamming down connections.
She looked through some of the papers then. Most of them were merely the workings-out for magazine articles. Some were maps of Hackle Mazes, printouts with various wanderers in position. Others were number, pure number; dazzling displays of abstract maths. There was no way that Daisy could follow the various pathways.
She went back to the magazines; issues of the Number Gumbo, six in all, dated from 1968 to 1979. The further in time they went, the more they lost their hippy trappings. These she skimmed for Max’s work, adding to her knowledge. There certainly seemed to be connections between the nymphomation and the dominoes. For instance, perhaps the Casanovas were related to today’s lucky bleeders. The Informants were maybe the precursors of the blurbs. The Trickster virus was obviously related to the Joker Bone. No, don’t say obviously, keep your distance, Daisy. Stay objective, don’t get dragged in.
The last mag was a glossy affair. They were obviously getting money from somewhere. It contained an article by Max called ‘Maze Dynamics and DNA Coding, a Special Theory of Nymphomation’. This was the juice, basically. It detailed how recent explorations of the Hackle Mazes (on the latest computers) had discovered an interesting anomaly. Some of the wanderers were actually having sex, or so it appeared. In previous games, the wanderers had reproduced by making exact copies of themselves. Now they were making inexact copies. Two of them would get together, merge, and a ‘babydata’ would be produced, with attributes from both parents. Already mutants had been observed, wanderers with bits missing, or bits added on. These were either killed instantly, Backsliders, or else became Warriors. Evolution was taking place.