I’d never seen him look so angry, and instinctively backed away. He made a beeline towards the mess of spilled paper and started organizing them with rapid speed, barely glancing at the contents. Yet despite his demeanor, his frightening expression softened the more he flipped through the dwindling mess until everything was rightfully divided in their proper places. The task finished, he no longer had a hostile look, but still wore a stern face.
“You did well considering the circumstances.”
“Thank goodness you’re back! What happened to you?”
“Nothing.”
“If you can’t talk about it, because it’s a secret - ”
“NOTHING!” he roared, then started rambling as if he hadn’t heard me at all. “There were dazzling computations found among the stars, algorithms that would make a mathematician weep. But all they were interested in were in was absolutely nothing! Spots of dead zones where no activity was taking place. I saw diamond coffers, but they wanted me to sift among the coal bins.”
He continued on. “They weren’t interested in my ability to calculate and combine variables into new interesting patterns. They just wanted me to find a single colour among a field of multicoloured static images. And once I found the numbers, they only said ‘Interesting’, then let me go without any explanation. That’s what really rankles me - not knowing what it was all about. Do you have any idea how BORING it is looking for a single number out of dozens of more potentially interesting ones? I much more prefer to work here.”
“If you hate it so much, why don’t you refuse?”
“Hah! They’re not the kind of people you can say ‘no’ to. Either you comply or they... well, I don’t know what they’d do, but I’m sure it’s pretty bad.”
It was obvious to me, even though it didn’t occur to him. It was retribution. They knew they couldn’t touch him without getting affected in return, so they forced him into doing menial tasks.
“I’m sorry - ”
“It’s fine, I’m fine now,” he said, pinching his fingers between his closed eyes. “I just needed to vent a little.”
“I’m afraid I left the place a bit of a mess in your absence.”
“Don’t be. The extra unsolved problems were something of a release valve for me. All that pent-up nervous energy needed to go somewhere.”
These were reassuring words to hear. I was reminded of something the Accountant first told me when trying to explain his methods of calculation. I didn’t fully understand them at the time, but they made more sense now:
“After all, you’re afflicted with synaesthesia too.”
“I am? I don’t - ”
“You’ve been doing it for so long that you’re unaware that you’ve even doing it. When you look at these numbers, what do you see?”
“The numbers.”
“But how do you know they’re numbers?? You didn’t register them as numbers at first. They were just blotches of lines on paper. It took time before you could reduce the concept of additive figures to simple abstract concepts. Same for understanding that spoken words can be converted into text. The very act of reading is a form of synaesthesia itself.”
I wanted to argue against this reactionary statement, but sheer fatigue stopped me. The more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. Moving your eyes from side to side across a printed page hallucinating vividly had no evolutionary equivalence in nature. It was only when the printing press spread wordwide that it became mandatory, coercing the populace into a form of spreading knowledge through extremely limited means. If an alternate method had been established, would it have become as popular?
There was one other incident. Just before the Accountant returned, the most remarkable thing happened. For a brief instant, when the numbers were rapidly changing faster than I could comprehend them, I was able to see them in shades of colours. I now better understood what it was like seeing the world through the Accountant’s eyes.
Though I still have trouble remembering that yellow and blue make green.
No comments:
Post a Comment