Kalen is lounging, as he often is in the warehouse, sprawled over the couch with a book. This book Grace has not seen before. It is not remarkable for its size, though it would likely inflict roughly the equivalent of four bricks of damage if thrown at someone's head based solely on weight; rather, it appears remarkable because of the apparent age of the book and the sigils on the cover. Also remarkable is that Kalen, whose normal attitude toward books it's that books and coffee and fountain pens all go on one table, has his coffee and a leather-bound journal that is also unfamiliar to Grace, though definitely well-used and a pen on the floor.
He sets the book gently on the cleared coffee table when he hears Grace. "Please tell me the servers have not attained sentience and begun plotting to take over the world already. I have way too much homework this weekend to deal with that madness. I already told them that that was more of a spring break kind of a deal...."
Grace
Finding Kalen in the warehouse lounging with coffee and a book is about like finding the sky to be blue. Still, the coffee-on-the-floor business causes Grace to Spock a brow as she slips into the room and takes in its contents.
"I'm sure Arcturus would like to take over the world, but Betelgeuse will keep that in check. Rigel just goes along for the ride, though," she says, continuing their little joke.
"Whatcha doing?" she asks, sliding her way into a (matching, luxuriously upholstered) chair and tucking her feet under almost immediately. She nods her head toward the giant book, "Doesn't look like a textbook to me."
Kalen
"Oh, I'm sure Rigel is just buying time. Learning their weaknesses. I named him after all."
Kalen smiles. "Well. I do have other projects. I am currently engaged in discovering more of the language of Creation. As fond as I may be of having something that isn't an intrinsic part of a life or death struggle... there is no shortage of those out there waiting. It wouldn't do to be unprepared.
"Do you want to learn some of it?"
Grace
"Ah, so, Kalen the world-dominating mastermind, teaching my servers bad habits? Tsk tsk. Be careful, Rigel may give you a run for your money," Grace says, with a smirk. She strips off her laptop bag and lays it on the floor (careful to keep it away from Kalen's stuff, especially that coffee mug) as he continues.
The Language of Creation, he says, and her ears would prick up if such were physically possible. They've shared their ideas on The Way Things Really Work before, and it turned out to be Much The Same Thing as Viewed Through Different Lenses. But it's that translation between Languages that might be difficult.
Binary to Hex to Machine to Enochian? Something like that?
"I would love to!" she says, all bright-eyes. "But no guarantees I'm going to instantly get it. I mean, you've been studying that for a lot longer than I. Might be like the time you tried to program me to make lunch," she says with a laugh.
But then, Kalen's going to teach her something. And yeah, that is cool, even if she doesn't learn something, right?
Kalen
"So, this is Enochian." Kalen leafs through the massive book gently, then spreads it fully open onto the table. He picks up the journal on the floor, and offers it to Grace.
The journal is similar to the ones he gave her, incredibly soft leather cover and thick, creamy paper. This journal is nearly three quarters full, careful transcriptions of Enochian sigils and notes in Kalen's near, squared off handwriting. Naturally these are all in metallic inks, mostly gold and copper, though in places there are shades of silver and a kind of bronze. Most of the sigils are actually on vellum affixed to the pages.
"I'm not sure you'll learn without drawing." He puts a small stack of lose vellum sheets on the table. "Let me get more ink. I don't know what colors you'll want. Coffee?"
It does say something about the degree to which Hermetic ideas have crept into how he sees the world that he asks about the coffee but assumes that using things like pencils and normal blank paper like one would put in a copier (or even -gasp- notebook paper) to learn to draw sigils.
Grace
This must be what it's like when she shows the techno-illiterate what she can do. It looks like a very old book, with those metal inks and various shapes that do not immediately bring to mind letters exactly. It looks priceless. And alien.
"Neon. Pink," she replies to his question about the colors, but she doesn't take her eyes off the tome, and those words are slow in coming out.
Alyssa draws things like this in blood, she remembers. Sigils in blood, gold, silver, bronze -- the rare and expensive 'inks' upon which the world runs. Or ran, perhaps, at one time. May as well draw them using crude oil in this age. Or electricity. Yes, electricity is the ink of this era -- an ephemeral, inexpensive thing, with which to write fragile, short-lived missives, gone in the blink of a drive reformat. And yet most things on the internet are so hard to erase, aren't they?
The thing about information is that it survives best when free. When shared. When cheap.
It's no wonder computers are everywhere, and Enochian is not. Perhaps that is why Kalen shares her drive to convert books into bits? To drag his people past the age of the illuminated manuscript?
"I'm afraid if I had coffee I might spill it," she says, again slow of mouth, fast of brain. "I don't know, Kalen. I'm not much of a drawer. Handwriting's atrocious here. Maybe if I made a program to draw them for me?"
Kalen
Kalen does not share the general tendency often witnessed in the Order to hoard knowledge. Nor does he, as even some among the Order he counts as friends feel that those Magi who chose other Traditions made errors in judgment. He is content to be trying to share and, even more importantly, preserve knowledge with computers and servers; but, in all honesty, anyone who sees him with century old books and metallic inks can see that for him these tangible things are preferable.
The world is changing. He cannot deny that. But the great truths of the world, the very Words which shape Creation, are written in a language for which time and change have no meaning. The very act of writing the symbols, of inscribing and transcribing and completing is a meditation on their form in itself. Gold for the language that spills off the tongues of Angels. For Holy Words.
Grace is not a part of that world. The warm golden light of Truth is not for her. Some other form for that same concept he does not doubt lurk in her code, hidden in ways that he could not fully understand. He does not doing that in whatever form she finds them, they remain beautiful, transcendent things.
And so, he does not scoff at her question about a program to draw Enochian sigils for her. If she can find a way to map the divine essence into keystrokes in the same way that he uses ink or Kharisma uses a kiss or Jack uses breath... that is not blasphemy to him. The sacredness of the Words and the sacredness of the world they create is absolute.
"If you can find a way, I don't see why not. You have to meditate on the Words. Focus. So long as your program allows you to do that, I cannot imagine why you couldn't use one." He smiles.
"So... No ink then?"
Grace
"Oh there's always a way," she says, and her eyebrows raise. "Bezier curves. B-splines. I think I have something that can do splines, actually..."
She reaches down for the laptop, and retrieves it from her bag, popping the power switch with her thumb. Such a fast, new machine, it's ready to go almost immediately, and she crosses her legs in the chair to set it upon her lap.
B-splines or Bezier curves or whatever the type she may go with -- they're all custom-built math for drawing extremely precise curves and lines. It's the kind of math used to make fonts, such that no matter how big or small the letters need to be, the shape of them, their character, their nuances, all get passed along without error. And yes, there is a kind of beauty in that, in the kind of perfection that comes not from a steady hand and years of practice, but from intricate equations. And what it gets you? Infinity. You could make a million letters for about the same cost as one. You could make a letter the size of a cornfield or one the size of a few molecules, and they would be mathematically equivalent. Transcendent indeed -- no boundaries or material limitations here.
"We can print it in ink. Or in 3D plastic. I think they even do gold now. I could make you a sigil that you could hold. Or it could just stay existing as electricity forever," she shrugs. Such is the beauty of transcendence -- of ephemeral ink.
She brings up a program on her computer, a drawing program with a blank white screen. "I do a lot of this kind of thing for my simulations. My electric plants are all 3D modeled so that they soak in light in a realistic way. But I'm no artist, so I just use a bunch of programs to make them," she says, and it's much like reality right? Plants don't know they're beautiful, they just know that a light source is thataway, and a chemical signals one side of the stem to grow more than the other. They bend and grow toward the light by math. Their leaf and seed positions are calculated using phi (the 'most irrational' number). Their leaves are looped networks pumping chemicals through the mix. They are fractal, in more ways than one.
When it comes down to it, the whole world is math. And isn't that the point?
Kalen
There is a definite flicker of attention when Grace brings up the possibility of printing three dimensional sigils. In gold.
"You are brilliant. Also, you are going to get me in even more trouble than Kharisma, I think." Kalen grins. "Which I expect to be great fun. Christmas gifts of glow in the dark plastic Enochian sigils would pretty much guarantee I never have to chair any committees ever. Which is worth the cost of a three dimensional printer five-fold."
His eyes light up. "How fine scale can we print? Can we make etching? Clearly, not actual etching, but that effect?"
Grace
She makes with a little laugh at his joke, and then: "I am more trouble than Kharisma? Me?" she grins back. "Mmm, glow in the dark plastic Enochian sigils. I can see this," she says, looking over the huge tome and it's complicated illustrations. Maybe she is more trouble than the never-seen-but-many-times-
"Committee members," she says, affecting a comical voice. "I move that Kalen's choice of Christmas gifts was in decidedly poor taste. He should be reward... chastised by never being made... I mean allowed to attend a committee meeting again. Do I have a second?"
Grace leans over her laptop all conspiratorially, and whispers, "You should go for it. We can definitely do glow in the dark."
"Back to reality though, yeah fine scale really depends on the printer and the material used. I think some of them just do etching now. Like, you print out a shape, and if it can be etched, it's got an etching head to do that too," Grace says, switching from joking to thinking.
Kalen
"Oh, they will still make me go to committee meetings. They just won't trust me to run any committees." Kalen laughs. "Which means I will be able to pay as little attention as I can get away with. Because you know they would put me on some boring committee, like the committee to determine which design to submit to the landscaper for the shrubbery and while that could be cool, I will never get a vote in to turn all the topiary into battling tyrannosaurs and zombies. At that point...why bother?" He waves one hand lazily, dismissively.
He can't really hate the Order though. He's had, and has, options if he wanted something else. Loyalty and affection are...not the same as glowing approval. Kalen thinks of the Order as his family. Which means sometimes he scoffs about crazy family reunion stories. How many people really come home from holidays talking about how well their family gets along and how no one ever fought at the table.
And, in all seriousness, you know that Kalen would be bored if no one was throwing crockery.
"It would be so cool if we could make for for Trent that is the symbol for chaos etched with butterflies. Not in tacky plastic. Because at least one of us likes Trent." He flips through not the giant book but his journal. "This one, here, is Chaos." Flip-flip-flip. "And this one is Entropy." He flips back to Chaos. "You can see the similarities, but the concepts are still different. But I definitely think Trent needs a Chaos butterfly."
He grins. "Can we really do it? Oh! Which ones do you want to see? You don't tend to use them in sentences or anything, not unless you're talking to Angels, so it really becomes about, in the beginning, hunting down the concepts you're interested in and learning a few dozen symbols. Then once you've had some time with those you can start to see the patterns and explore that."
Grace
"We can really do it, yes," she says, and brings up a website on her laptop, and then spins it around so Kalen can see. On the screen is a commercial 3D printing site, where people can buy prints of uploaded models. And among the images are printed plastics, of course, but also gold, silver, brass, bronze, steel, ceramic...
Which one would she like to see? Well, Entropy and Chaos are interesting. Closer in form to each other than she'd expect, really. Wonder what the symbol for Creation looks like, and whether it incorporates some of those same themes? They're two sides of the same coin, after all.
"Hmmm. You have one for electricity? How about electricity and magnetism? Electromagnetism?"
She has a theory that those two might be quite close to each other as well. They're two aspects of the same thing, perpendicular to each other, never occurring one without the other. Much like Entropy and Chaos. And they build the very foundations of communication, connection. The blood of humanity's hungry desire to be at one with itself runs with electrons.
Or maybe their kind see it as something far more simple and primal than all that -- nothing any more subtle than a bolt of lightning.
Kalen
Kalen flips through his journal again, rather than the large book. "Here is Electricity." Kalen reaches out to touch the image, then gently removes the page with the image from where it is tucked into the book and offers it to Grace to look at. "Do you want to try drawing it? There may be other ways to learn, but you need to do something to connect with the symbols.
"I drew them. A lot. And eventually they took on their own forms and colors when I envisioned them. I recorded them in precious inks, but when I see them or say them there are colors overlain on them.
"And eventually they sing. Hum? Like...a frequency? They each have their own.
"Not for everyone. People have different perceptions of them. I don't know how you will understand them. You will know though, when you have connected with them."
Grace
"There's a word for that, you know -- the colored, singing thing. Synesthesia. Most people who experience it get colors overlaid on top of letters, but it can be anything really. Like, listening to music makes you taste or smell stuff? Or reading words makes you feel a tactile sensation. I once knew someone who swore up and down that they could do math by the color of the numbers, and they were really good at it too. I don't have that talent though," she says, and takes the sheet with the electricity symbol, looking at it like she wants to see the color of it.
"What if I never connect with them? You talk like it's a foregone conclusion," she says, squinting at the symbol like it's a mean symbol for hiding its secrets from her. "What does it sound like? I mean, how do you say this thing?"
Grace takes the page, and lays it on the table. Then, she goes for her phone, and takes a picture of it, trying to get as level an image as possible, for the least distortion. After a few minutes of fiddling with the phone and laptop, Kalen might be able to see that she has the drawing program back up again with the picture of the symbol on it. And she's tracing it with incredibly precise lines and curves.
Kalen
"It is the language of Creation. It is already part of you. You don't feel it yet, but it is like your heart beat. You don't always feel it. But you can focus on it and then you'll find it. How could you fail to connect to something that is part of you? Has always been. Will always be.
"And, that one, electricity...every thought is just like very tiny lightning bolts striking neurons. And some chemicals, I guess. The brain is complicated.
"Don't make it complicated though. Just find some way to connect to electricity while you draw it. It takes awhile. You might not get it today. I mean, I know you're brilliant and everything, but it took me like a week for my first few sigils. It gets easier, once you start to know a few."
[OOC Note: Kalen has almost no separation between his understanding of Enochian and Prime/Forces so his perceptions need not be even a little how Grace's go.]
Grace
When he starts talking about the language of Creation, speaking in such awe-inspiring terms, she looks up from her screen, the pixels of an Enochian sigil of Electricity lighting her face from below. "It's the source code. It is already part of you. Ones and zeros and in-betweens writing who you are on the light-like boundary of the cosmological horizon. How could you fail to connect to something that is part of you?
"I guess what I'm saying is that maybe some translation will be required..."
She does, however, start pouring herself into the drawing of that shape. It's just a drawing to her. No colors, no singing. Every now and then she hides the layer that contains the image she's tracing in order to check progress and fix kinks in the path. It looks like her face blinking on and off, one and zero, as the screen lightens and darkens in an instant.
But, in the end, she has this: a black outline of the sigil of electricity, with control points and handles splayed around and along the path, like they're alternately pinning down the lines or yanking them in different directions in order to create perfectly straight or perfectly curved sections.
But for all that perfection, it is still a tracing of a picture of a copy of a sigil.
Just for Kalen, since he likes the idea so much, she quickly extrudes the shape into a slightly-raised 3d structure, and passes that object to a rendering program where it shares company with a small tree. Properties then. Reflection: 100%. Color: gold. The branches of the tree and a fake sky reflect on the immaculate golden mirror surfaces of Electricity when it's done.
She turns the screen back to Kalen at last. "Hey, I drew it. Traced it really, but you know. My handwriting capabilities are terrible."
Kalen
"It was less like translation and more like finding a harmonic resonance for me. It will probably be different for you."
He smiles when she shows him the sigil rendered into a landscape. "Maybe if you made it look more like lightning belonged there it would help. I love it, but it looks like summer. Maybe if you made it look like storms, or something. Put it in a true context....
"I was just told to write them until I understood them. I'm not going to force that same thing on you. We can try it...however many ways we do."
Grace
"Electricity isn't just lightning, though, it's everywhere. It's electrons. There's more electrons in that tree than there is in a bolt of lightning, they're just not moving around. In a real world, there would be current flowing through that sigil too. It's gold, gold has free electrons that move. Think about, like, this sea of potential lightning, with eddies and flows at random, right? But lightning is like what happens when that sea turns into a tidal wave. And the electric grid is like what happens when we build massive aqueducts to move that sea around."
Grace pauses for a moment, staring at the sigil on her screen. Maybe that's why they like drawing them in silver, gold, and copper. They're all the most conductive materials in the world. Maybe the 'sea of potential lightning' thus created by a certain shape makes electrons flow through them in certain configurations (hardly random), triggering a kind of electromagnetic harmonic wave that can be detected by certain people. Of course, that would make sense.Kalen
"So, there you go connecting to concepts totally differently than I do." He laughs. "How isn't what matters here. If you get closer to it with electron flow and all of that...."
He sighs. "I may not be the best case for an example because I really do perceive these things in practice more than many, not because I have an extraordinary connection to them, but because I use these perceptions in workings of magics that are fluid. Dynamic. That is not the experience of most of those I know who have studied Enochian.
"But...I sense power in them. Which is like but unlike electricity. It may be close enough to be of significance to you in this circumstances."
Grace
Hmm. Perhaps not, Grace thinks, as Kalen explains himself using generic 'power'. Power like what exactly? The power of some form of chemical energy? Or something more abstract, like the power to move a crowd of people into action? Something like 'knowledge is power'?
Probably the latter.
No comments:
Post a Comment