Beyond the Great Horizon WallBy Kenny Kuhn
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“…and as we counted and catalogued the pillars of the earth, so too did we divine the course of events, both of the past and of those yet to come. As each drop of water in a river will flow invariably to the ocean, so too is every act inevitable and lucid.” - The Rune-Carved Tree, Oscar Brighton
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If you are reading this, my dear friend, know that you are a walking miracle. The world has contorted itself in the most obscene ways to produce someone who bears your name and has lived your life. Your very existence is an affront to nature, yet it is my greatest joy that you have found your way here, of all places. By the time you read this letter, I will be long gone, but I have a request whose importance no span of time will decay: never leave these cold, dead halls. Expel your last breath here and perish before divulging the secrets that you find in this hallowed prison. There is still time yet, and before you make your decision, I will relate to you how I have come to be here, so that you may understand my intent.
The Earth speaks. Not in a petty language of tongues, lips, and lungs, but one of stone, trees, and smoke. It is our great inheritance that we may speak this language, as it is our forebears’ labor whose fruits we enjoy. It was nearly four thousand years ago when our ancestors on the banks of the Yellow River heard the quiet whispers from the Labyrinth. It did not come in the form of a prophet, nor of a mythical beast. Rather, it came to them in the humblest of ways: in the remains of their fires.
As anyone may readily observe, many materials—such as the bones from livestock or wild game—crack when exposed to a fire of sufficient intensity. Contrary to the impression that a cursory investigation might yield, these cracks are anything but random. The spreading of these tiny fissures is a natural record of the context under which the bone was burnt: the type of wood that was used as fuel, the intensity of the fire, the direction and speed of the wind, the time passed since the last rainfall, the phase of the moon. The bones are eager to tell their stories, and everything is recorded in the twists and turns of the marks they produce. With sufficient experience and patience, one can tease out the subtlest of signs. An anxious subject may cast bones into the fire with greater velocity, predisposing them to crack about the medial ring upon impact. Bones burnt by a bereaved mother have a particular twist in the thirty-second radial position, which, by no coincidence, is a mirror image of that observed in those burnt by a woman shortly after giving birth.
Through no small effort, our ancestors began to assemble a lexicon of symbols produced by the bones, which they took to calling “runes”. In addition to being indispensable tools for ascertaining a subject’s true nature, an understanding of the runic language became a sign of great erudition in a time when written language was still being developed.[1] Those who took it upon themselves to discover new variants constituted a highly respected class of society. Once the lower-hanging fruit was harvested, as it were, these researchers gained a reputation not just for intellect, but also for intrepitude, and were required to perform increasingly daring and unusual tasks to further their field. Bones were burnt on boats far at sea, at the mouths of volcanoes, on blood-stained battlefields in the midst of war.[2] As a result of these efforts, we could not only read any naturally occurring rune, but also create runes of our own that described scenarios of arbitrary complexity, including those wholly separated from the act of burning.
This research was accelerated by the discovery that the runic language is derivative and can be subjected to structural decomposition. All runes are made up of smaller modular components called radicals, which can be endlessly combined to produce new meanings. The radical describing granite, for example, is made up of sub-radicals representing “firm”, “archaic”, and “granulated”. Of these, “archaic” is considered a core radical (no further productive components can be extracted from it). On the other hand, “granulated” is considered a seventh order radical as it can be decomposed into “seed” and “many”, both of which can then be decomposed in turn for six cycles further until only core radicals remain.
This was all very fine in its own right, but the language of the runes was far too complex to be of any practical everyday use. Even the most cumbersome of man-made languages was preferable to the runes’ endless bends and sharp angles. A brief narrative of a man going to the market to sell a pig could be easily contained within a single carving, but it would take an expert over an hour to plan and sketch such a symbol.
Fortunately, the language had greater utility than serving as a simple record keeping system, or for pavonine displays of intellect. As you are certainly aware, the runes betray not only the present but also the future. This was an early discovery, one made by the sorcerer and oracle Xu Fu, at a time when our understanding of the runic language was still in its infancy. I relate here his story as it is recorded in the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian’s Shiji. Xu Fu was a carver in the coastal region of Langya in the third century B.C. At the start of his career, while he was but a minor provincial scholar, he devoted himself to the discovery of the radical for millet. To this end, he organized a trip to several neighboring farms and requested that the families there burn several bone samples for his study. Having returned home with his findings, he found himself short on the bamboo he commonly used to record his notes, and so instead etched the runes he discovered onto the spare animal bones that remained from his excursion. After he had finished, he discarded several of these bones, marked only with disordered fragments of runes, into the fire. The next morning, when emptying the ashes, he found that one of the bones had sprouted a completely new rune from his half-finished notes. This new symbol was created by the previous night’s fire, and yet was as elegantly executed as if Xu Fu had carved it himself. Gingerly, he brushed the ashes from the markings and began to read. Despite the severely crude understanding of the runic language at the time, he correctly recognized three radicals of this new rune: “good fortune”, “mineral”, and “feces”. Confused as to the meaning of this discovery, he returned to the farm where he had originally recorded his notes. When he arrived, the farmer greeted him excitedly, for just that morning, he had discovered a fist-sized chunk of jade, shallowly buried in the earth within his pigsty—a stone worth several times more than the farmer would have made in a lifetime.
Xu Fu quickly returned to his laboratory and endeavored to reproduce these results. First, he re-carved the fragmentary rune that he had tossed into the fire the night before. When burnt, it produced a second rune that, as before, predicted the farmer’s discovery of the jade. Further, Xu Fu found that if this second rune were carved into yet another bone and burnt, then it would produce a third rune that accurately predicted a hailstorm at the farm the following day. He discovered that this process could be repeated seemingly without end to predict events arbitrarily far in the future, provided he had enough bones to burn. His only real constraint was that his abilities were useless when extended beyond the millet farm; any attempt to reach into other parts of the empire or even across town was terribly inaccurate, though this finding he kept to himself. Fortunately, forecasts of fair weather and good harvests at the millet farm were generalizable to the surrounding area.
Rather than burdening our story with an exhaustive description of Xu Fu’s experiments, I will simply describe here the general principles of oracle rune carving that we derive from his work: an unetched bone will burn to produce a roughly hewn rune describing the burning of the bone itself. However, a bone already carved with a rune will extend the symbol, the cracks formed by the fire picking up where the first rune ends, creating a second that is just as expertly carved and lucid. The rune chain will terminate when one of two conditions is met: the bone upon which the runes are carved runs out of space (in which case the terminal rune can be carved upon a new bone to continue the chain), or the chain reaches the rune that describes the subject’s death (if animate) or destruction (if inanimate).[3,4] The runes generated in these chains are predictive of the events that follow the first and can be used to uncover the sequence of events pertaining to any given subject, whether past or future.[5]
By the year 219 B.C., Xu Fu had advanced his skills considerably, enough to have predicted several years of droughts and floods, and advised his village on how best to weather them. At that time, the understanding of oracle reading was more mystical than scientific, and Xu Fu cultivated an image as a sorcerer who consorted with spirits of the earth, sky, and sea. And so, when the emperor Qin Shi Huang arrived in Langya during the second tour of his newly united kingdom, he heard endlessly of the remarkable, supernatural powers of the sorcerer. He arranged to meet with Xu Fu and, being greatly interested in the occult, asked for a demonstration. Xu Fu was no fool, and he knew his abilities were restricted to the neighboring farm, but he had no desire for this to become common knowledge. Having foreseen this request, Xu Fu required only a moment’s thought before revealing that the bones spoke of a day when the emperor would return atop a strange and exotic animal from a distant land. Xu Fu gave the emperor a sealed box, which contained the secrets of the creature’s true nature.
Indeed, several years later the emperor began another tour of his kingdom (so proud was he of uniting the entire known world under his rule) and found himself once again on the road to Xu Fu’s village. While meeting with a provincial governor shortly before reaching Langya, the emperor was given an animal whose historical description roughly matches that of a zebra with red stripes. Immediately reminded of Xu Fu’s prophecy, and excited to learn what magical powers this creature possessed, the emperor immediately had the sealed box retrieved. Upon opening it, he found a length of bamboo inscribed with Xu Fu’s unexpectedly brief prediction: the emperor would return to Langya upon a common donkey. Enraged, the emperor traveled directly to the village upon his striped mount and demanded that Xu Fu explain his impudence. Xu Fu was deferential and promised that if his prediction was incorrect, he would submit himself to any punishment the emperor saw fit. But first, he asked that the creature be walked into the river that ran alongside the millet farm. The emperor obliged and as soon as he rode the creature into the water, its painted stripes were washed away by the rushing current. All that remained was an ass.
Astounded by Xu Fu’s abilities, Qin Shi Huang insisted that the sorcerer accompany him across the empire back to the capital of Xianyang to serve as royal sorcerer and advisor. Xu Fu knew he would be of no use so far from the millet farm, and made a counter-proposal: far out in the sea resided powerful immortal spirits who guided his prophecies. The spirits told Xu Fu that if he were to bring a large enough offering, they would be willing to share with him the secrets to everlasting life. The emperor, seemingly lacking faith in neither Xu Fu’s skills nor motives, sent him off with gold, seeds, and a small army of skilled craftsmen to proffer as gifts to the spirits. Though the emperor awaited news of Xu Fu's success even to his deathbed, Xu Fu never delivered him the elixir of immortality.6 Perhaps the even greater treasure, though, was that which Xu Fu left behind in Langya: a complete record of his experiments and findings, cementing his position as the father of our craft and history’s first oracle.
We shall pause here, dear reader, to consider the implications of this discovery. It is well within reason that the ambient influences present during the burning of a bone may directly guide the cracks that form upon it, and—however subtle these influences may be—can be uncovered with sufficient skill and patience. However, this phenomenon, the spontaneous generation of a new rune that describes an event entirely removed from the burning of the bone, frankly strains belief. Unfortunately, I lack sufficient paper to describe the historical consequences of Xu Fu’s discovery in full. Suffice it to say that the significance of this event can hardly be overstated. Religions were born and smothered, kingdoms founded and toppled, martyrs burned and slaughtered, and the majority of the known world was overtaken by war.[7] It shook our very understanding of the natural world and forever changed the way we interacted with it. And this is only what the idea of the predictive properties of the bones begot. Fortunately, no carver would come close to matching Xu Fu’s skill for many centuries, as one can only imagine what further damage this would have caused. As for the few remaining runic scholars who did not descend into wholesale mysticism, the task of explaining this phenomenon became an all-consuming challenge.
What emerged from this chaos and brought back a modicum of order to our craft was the theory of the Labyrinth, whose origins may be found in the renowned eleventh century philosopher Al-Ghazâlî’s Tahâfut al-Falsafa. Though it started as an expedient metaphor invented by researchers to describe the predictive abilities of the runes, the Labyrinth has become the leading theoretical model to explain the course of all natural events. To illustrate its core concepts, let us consider a simple sequence of events: first, a stone is held aloft in a person’s hand; second, the hand is open and the stone has fallen to the ground. Conventional wisdom would suggest that it is the general property of the earth to attract all stones, and that the earth can be named as the cause for the stone’s descent subsequent to its release. On the contrary, the architects of the Labyrinth theory drew no such direct relationship. They believed that the stone, like all other objects, lacks any intrinsic properties. Rather, its fall to the ground was mediated by an external agent whom it is bound to obey. This structure, called the Labyrinth, is hidden away from the world, and, like a book, records the paths of all things that have been and will ever be. As such, for every conceivable set of circumstances there exists a corresponding “page” describing this event and its outcome. Every agent in the event consults this page as if it were a script, learns its designated role, and acts accordingly. In this example, before the stone falls to the ground, it refers to the Labyrinth and finds the proper page describing its current situation. Seeing that the records indicate its descent, the stone falls to the ground. All other supposed cases of causality are mere illusions that, in reality, are mediated solely by the Labyrinth. In the absence of the Labyrinth, all of reality would lack instruction and simply cease to progress from one moment to the next.[8]
And in just what language is this “book” written in? It could be none other than the runes, connected linearly and in sequence, describing the course of all events. As for why the bones are able to reveal this structure, it is only natural that if a rune is connected to another in the Labyrinth, then the cracks on the bone follow an identical pattern. The oracle chains revealed by the bones are, therefore, quite literally maps of the Labyrinth itself; each chain representing one of the many parallel paths that compose its form. Just as the circumstances of the bones’ burning guide their cracks, so do the cracks mirror the Labyrinthian structure that has guided their burning; the bones are but a window into the inner workings of reality.[9]
This explanation, both by merit of its explanatory capacity and aesthetic appeal, gained rapid and widespread acceptance and has become the backdrop upon which all discourse surrounding the runes takes place. It had but one minor issue: even as our understanding of the runic language advanced to the level of reasonable utility, it was found that the runes were imperfect at predicting the future. While of course the predictions made by the runes were generally very accurate, even the smallest error was sufficient to spoil the entire Labyrinthine theory. This realization splintered the followers of the Labyrinth into many smaller sects, some of whom even went as far as to claim that the runes do not predict the future. We will turn to a classic English folk tale, “The Legend of the Brewers’ Duel”, to illustrate the two major positions on this issue.
Two brewers, one thin and one stout, found themselves in a dispute over which of them could rightfully claim ownership of a particularly successful beer recipe. The thin brewer argued that the recipe was the work of his great grandfather, while the stout brewer asserted that, on the basis of the substantial modifications he had made to the original methods, the recipe now belonged to him. They decided to settle the matter with a duel to the death, the winner of which would obtain ownership of the recipe. The two men agreed that the duel would take place at dawn under an elm tree between the town’s church and the river’s bend. The plump brewer, crudely educated in the ways of rune carving, decided to read the future of the duel in the bones. To this end, he crafted a rune describing the very terms of the duel as it had been agreed upon and set it aflame. In such a scenario, the bones indicated, the plump man would prevail. Considering the duel as good as won, the plump man began drafting plans to expand production of the brew after his acquisition of the recipe. The thin brewer, though knowing even less about rune carving than his opponent, was wise enough to employ a professional. The expert carver, too, found that a duel held under such circumstances would indeed result in victory for the plump man. However, the carver was clever and created several dozen runes that slightly altered the conditions of the duel. Eventually he struck upon a winning combination: if the duel were held at dawn under an elm tree near a river bend and the thin man drank the freshly squeezed milk of a wild goat before drawing his weapon, then the thin brewer would be the victor. Quickly, and ensuring his opponent learned nothing of the endeavor, the thin brewer arranged for the capture of a wild goat, which he brought with him on the morning of the duel. The plump brewer, seeing his opponent spending the moments immediately before combat milking a goat rather than checking the condition of his weapon, realized he had been outwitted. He frantically fled for his life, but tripped on the root of the elm tree, fell into the river, and was promptly carried away and drowned.[10]
This speaks to the unreliability of the runes as much as it does to the danger posed by the confidence engendered by a small amount of expertise in an obscure field. More to the point however, this story quite skillfully illuminates the most fundamental challenge facing the oracular arts in the middle of the second millennium: how is it that two runes that accurately describe the same scenario can contradict one another? The two major camps in this battle adopted similarly diametric names: the objectivists and the subjectivists.
The objectivists, also known as believers of a “strong” Labyrinth, placed the fault of the stout carver’s inaccurate predictions solely in his hands. They believed that every event in the universe was described uniquely by a single rune within the Labyrinth, a non-degenerate, one-to-one mapping of rune to reality, such that no rune is ever used twice. With regard to the duel, there are thousands (or perhaps an infinite number) of duels that occur between a thin and a stout man near a river under an elm tree throughout the course of history.[11] The rune carved by the thin man does indeed describe one single duel in particular, somewhere and sometime—it simply did not happen to be the one that he found himself a participant in. In other words, the prediction made by the runes was indeed correct; it was simply that the stout brewer had asked the wrong question.[12]
The subjectivists, on the other hand, believed in a “weak” Labyrinth. Their doctrine held that the Labyrinth served not as an exhaustive catalog of all circumstances, but rather contained only generalized archetypes. In this way, a single rune is degenerately correlated to multiple independent events throughout history. So, the rune carved by the plump brewer did not describe precisely his duel (as such a thing would be impossible), but rather, all duels that may occur under the set of circumstances he specified. The reason the runes predicted his victory was merely because it was the most likely outcome of all such duels of that sort, rather than the certain outcome of any one duel in particular. The greatest opposition raised against this interpretation—one which was invariably met with much gesticulation and misdirection on the part of its adherents—was the lack of correspondence between an infinitely complex reality and a decidedly degenerate and incomplete Labyrinth. If the Labyrinth predicts that an event will resolve in a certain fashion, but in reality fails to do so, then what second factor is guiding its outcome? Something as base as mere chance? Human “choice”? And what role is left for the Labyrinth other than that of a simple advisor to causality?[13]
The only incontrovertible proof the objectivists could present to silence their vocal and intransigent rivals would be the discovery of a true name. In objectivist doctrine, this refers to a rune whose subject is known with complete certainty, such that all predictions made with this rune occur with perfect accuracy.[14,15] Subjectivists believed that such a rune could not exist, as the Labyrinth only provides general principles for the progression of events. Therefore, all runes must at some point produce an error in their predictions as a result. The opportunity to settle the debate finally came in the fourteenth century with the ascent of the Jianwen Emperor, the second regent of the Ming dynasty. The emperor assumed the throne with the intention of consolidating the power accumulated by the regional princes that his predecessor had installed when the dynasty was established. The emperor publicly demoted or arrested each in turn, starting with the weakest among them. Recognizing the potential for an armed rebellion, the emperor sought the assistance of the oracle bones to preempt the actions of his political opponents.[16] He was fearful of receiving a fatally inaccurate reading, however, and so he gathered the largest collection of oracles ever assembled, to determine his own true name. Armed with perfect knowledge of his future, he believed he would be guaranteed the power to change it as he wished.
It would please me to say that in the course of discovering the emperor’s true name, our predecessors developed many new and innovative techniques. In truth, it was an act of brute force and perseverance. It is impossible, of course, to include every iota of information about the emperor’s life in a single rune, so it fell to the carvers to determine what characteristics the Labyrinth considered most important to the emperor’s character, which they conducted mostly through trial and error.[17]
The assembled carvers were broken into eight hundred groups of three: one carver to generate improvements to the rune, one to etch and burn them, and one to compare the predictions they generated with the actions of the emperor. Each week, the teams would convene; notes were compared and the rune that had performed best since the last convocation became the new standard from which all units began their refinements for the next ten days. At the project’s outset, the consumption of bones was so great that the population of livestock in the area surrounding the capital city dwindled to dangerously low levels. Animals were forcibly taken from nearby farms and slaughtered for bones rather than their meat, which was, in a small consolation, returned without additional fee to the late creatures’ owners. This strained the cordial relationship the emperor’s predecessor had established with the peasantry, and quickly became unsustainable. Fortunately, it was soon discovered that specialized clay tablets with qualities similar to bone could be used without significant functional detriment (though to the carvers, the aesthetic consequences were immeasurable).
After several years, the researchers’ progress stagnated. Their most successful rune was able to predict the emperor’s actions over the period of one month, but any longer proved impossible. This is not to minimize their accomplishments. On the contrary, this was the pinnacle of our science to date. Unfortunately, their success went largely unappreciated. Though there exists little record of it, we can only assume the emperor’s frustration grew, not only with his researchers but also with the apparent inevitability of the future predicted by the runes they generated. During this time, the most powerful of the regional princes, Zhu Di, refused to surrender his title and waged a war that the emperor was steadily losing. One would imagine that the increasingly successful oracle readings foretold these difficulties, yet the emperor must have found himself incapable of stopping them. Rather than weaken his resolve in the project, the emperor appeared only to commit more ardently.
In the fourth month of the fourth year of the emperor’s reign, the situation appeared dire. Zhu Di’s military successes multiplied, and soon his armies occupied the land directly across the river from the capital of Nanjing. When he demanded the city’s surrender, the emperor made a bold proposition, not to his enemy but to his carvers: he would burn the bones from his very body.[18] The rune that appeared upon them would reveal the characteristics of his identity the Labyrinth found critical, hopefully accelerating the conclusion of the project and revealing how he might repel the insurgents. So the emperor ceremoniously severed his left arm and cast it into a great fire. Once the flames were extinguished, the bones were found to be etched with a single rune that stretched across their length.[19] While vanishingly little time remained to test its accuracy, the carvers spent three sleepless nights assembling the rune that they believed to be the emperor’s true name.[20]
For the emperor’s purposes, it would not suffice to simply have his true name carved upon a bone and tossed into a fire. Practically, there is not enough surface area on any single bone to predict further than several hours into the future. More importantly, however, it is not fitting for an emperor to conduct his oracle reading in the same manner as a common peasant. Simultaneous with the initiation of the name discovery project, the emperor had begun construction of a great temple of unbaked clay, inside of which was a vast chamber that, according to extemporaneous historical records, was so large a swallow could not fly from one wall to another without rest. This temple, when carved with the emperor’s true name and burned, would have sufficient space to produce an oracle chain that would depict the emperor’s life in its entirety.
On the twelfth day of the following month, with the threat of an invasion by Zhu Di becoming more likely by the hour, the emperor personally oversaw the carving of his true name upon the center of the temple’s floor. However, as the structure was filled with oil, wood, and kindling, several of the emperor’s own generals, having lost faith in his rulership abilities, opened the gates for Zhu Di’s army, allowing him into the city in an act of surrender.[21] Zhu Di’s troops arrived at the temple, barricaded the emperor and his carvers within, and set it ablaze. It is said that the fire, fueled by royal blood, burned for three days. The city was cloaked in perpetual daylight, every alcove and alley etched by the flames’ radiance into twisted and crooked imitations of the runes that consumed the emperor’s remains.
When the fire subsided, Zhu Di (now ascended to the throne as the Yongle emperor) gathered his guard, as well as the surviving carvers who would swear loyalty to him (a sizeable number, as the first to refuse were summarily executed). When they unsealed the temple, they found the entire surface of walls and floors marked by an immense spiral of runes covering thousands of square meters, immaculately and exhaustively describing every event in the emperor’s life. While the carvers were overtaken by the magnitude of their accomplishment, the new emperor, eager to ensure no threats existed to his newly acquired throne, began the hunt for his predecessor’s corpse. After several fruitless hours of searching the charred bodies scattered throughout the temple, Zhu Di found a politically expedient solution in the runes themselves: he would publicize the oracle chain describing the Jianwen emperor’s life, an abbreviated form of which has persisted to the present day. Most important among these runes was the final symbol in the sequence, which described the death of the Jianwen emperor in the conflagration that overtook his temple. Believing that this was sufficient to assure the populace of the certainty of his predecessor’s demise, the temple was demolished.[22]
Although the emperor’s true name, along with the full oracle record, went uncirculated and thus was lost to time, the reports of the carvers who personally studied the temple confirmed the totality of the project’s success: every event in the emperor’s life depicted in the runes upon the temple’s walls was perfectly true and accurate.[23] With this, the subjectivist theory of the Labyrinth’s nature was shattered and the debate was settled; because a rune that referred specifically to the Jianwen emperor had been found, then so must every rune uniquely describe a single subject. However, one glaring question remained: what if the emperor had not perished that night? What if he had seen the temple and learned his future with absolute certainty? With such knowledge, could one defy fate and reforge destiny, as the Jianwen emperor had planned to do? Most objectivist theorists, still basking in their victory, were quick to dismiss such a possibility. The absolute nature of the Labyrinth had been demonstrated—how could it be contradicted?
However, to those concerned with the practical consequences of oracle reading, myself included, the question remains to be of critical importance. And so we come to the contribution that I have made to the runic sciences: a test of whether the future can be rewritten, whether the cold stone halls of the Labyrinth can bend, and even break. I hope that you, dear reader, will indulge me in my relating several personal details to this end.
I am a runic researcher of Dong Hai Predictive Solutions. Our company is engaged in much the same research as the carvers of the Jianwen emperor: the discovery of true names. Whereas before, a small army of carvers required several years to find a single true name, we are the beneficiaries of several technological advancements that greatly accelerate this process. Runes are no longer carved on bones or clay tablets, but rather laser-etched upon silicon wafers, cracked not by fire but by electrical currents. Several thousand runes can be inscribed upon every square micron of silicon, all of which can be rapidly read through the differential levels of conductivity that each rune exhibits. Armed with a complete lexicon of all radicals and near endless computing power, we have generated a library of true names for roughly three trillion subjects, which we believe includes over ninety-nine percent of all humans who will ever live. As such, all that is required in most cases to generate a true name is to match a name from our database with its subject. This can be accomplished by submitting the subject to the administration of a life history questionnaire, as well as a brief but comprehensive observation period.
As a result, not only has the technology made the process of name discovery much more rapid, but also more accessible. The average monthly household income is enough to pay for the discovery of a client’s true name. Subsequent to name identification, we offer generalized life predictions, covering topics including the customer’s life expectancy, lifetime earnings, and fecundity. If they desire, our clients can even download an application to their personal device, which will guide them in purchasing products (such as cars and home appliances) to meet their future needs, or in meeting romantic partners that the Labyrinth has considered to be destiny-compatible. Further, a notification function informs users when a Labyrinth-ordained event will take place (such as serving oneself a meal or going on a walk) so that they may properly prepare. Of course, a true name exerts no supernatural effects on its subject, and one can choose to follow a different path than the one that the Labyrinth has foretold. In such a case, the subject has revealed that their true name belonged to some other individual all along, whose life was essentially identical up until that point of divergence. Unfortunately, from that point onward, all predictions will suffer from reduced accuracy as a consequence. As a result, consumers are advised against such courses of action unless they wish to pay the necessary fee for a name adjustment. Some people find it incompatible with their lifestyle to have near absolute knowledge of their future, but others find the certainty comforting.
Despite these methodological advances, our understanding of the Labyrinth had hardly progressed since the Ming dynasty. And though it may seem that the runic sciences are a “solved” problem, one glaring hole remains in our understanding: how can the Labyrinth account for interactions between its many parallel, non-intersecting chains? For example, a subject’s oracle chain may contain a rune describing them giving birth to their son. However, the chains describing the life of the son and of the parent are entirely separate and non-overlapping; even the rune describing the very same event, the birth of the child, are uniquely depicted within each subject’s oracle chain. What sort of topology does the Labyrinth employ, then, to allow for interactions between these two individuals’ lives? Some have voiced the opinion that asking such a question presupposes a causative role on the part of the parent in the child’s birth (an idea directly opposed to the fundamental idea of the Labyrinth as discussed earlier). In reality, they claim, the Labyrinth simply describes each of these events separately: a mother gives birth, and a child appears; there is no connection between the two.
The much more appealing hypothesis, however, is that there is a connection between these chains. Not only would it be satisfying for the structure guiding our lives to accord with our perceptions of the world, but it would have immense functional implications as well. Identifying an individual’s true name from their life history, while simpler than ever, is still far more difficult than it would be to generate one true name from another. If such a thing were possible, there would be no need to painstakingly map each individual name onto its subject, and no need for name adjustments, as every assignment would be perfect. Further, with sufficient computing power, the true names not just of all humans, but of all observable objects could be found. We would have absolute knowledge of the relationship between all things, so that the full extent of history could be inferred from the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, or the creaking of a tree in the wind. There would be no need for thought, no need for understanding. We could finally lift up our hands and let history wash over us. The practice of science would be—in a word—complete.
But rather than allowing us to agonize endlessly over this puzzle, the Labyrinth simply invited us in to have a look. As a way to boost employee engagement, my company ran a raffle each month in which the winner was offered a free name reading. One month, I was announced the winner. But rather than receiving an email several days after my interview to access my true name report, I learned that the results were delayed, and was asked to speak directly with my manager. When I arrived, I was surprised to find that the head of the company, as well as several members of the executive board, were present. They conveyed two pieces of information. First, they had discovered my true name, one that belonged to the handful of names that did not already exist within our database. Second, and more importantly, they found within my oracle chain a radical that had never been seen before, the first discovered in thousands of years, which they then showed to me on a piece of printer paper. It was surprisingly elegant; unlike the sharp, angular cracks that normally compose radicals, this one appeared as a long snake coiled about itself, gently curving and wrapping, though never intersecting itself or breaking. I understood at once: this radical represented the Labyrinth.
On the first Tuesday of the following month, according to the oracle chain generated by my true name, I would perform a series of utterly mundane actions (which I am quite certain you are familiar with if you have found my notes), and then find myself within the Labyrinth’s timeless halls. Three days later, I would emerge, presumably with privileged knowledge of the Labyrinth’s structure, as I would receive a sizeable promotion shortly after my return.
I am certain that the board would have preferred to lock me inside a cell until my departure, but the Labyrinth was kind enough to predict that they would instead assign me a chaperone. Fortunately, the board had little desire to be responsible for any discrepancy with the prophecy, no matter how small. During the following days, the chaperone made no secret of describing to my supervisors how well my actions were following the predicted course of events. As ordained by the Labyrinth, I let him sleep on the couch of my studio apartment.
My preparations for the expedition were minimal. I expected to find no source of sustenance within the Labyrinth, and so, on the night before I left, I packed everything I would require for the three day journey: dried food, water, a flashlight with several extra battery packs, a few days of clothes and a padded jacket in case it was cold, my copy of Brighton’s The Rune-Carved Tree, and a pencil and paper (which I preferred to any touchpad device). When I woke the next day, my chaperone saw me off on my journey until my final step. It was early morning, and the anemic winter sun hung weakly over the horizon, straining to raise itself high enough to cast its tepid rays between the high-rises and light the pallid sky. A thin layer of snow flattened under my feet as I walked down the stairs leading from my apartment building toward the sidewalk. The air, already thin and cold, took on an acrid quality. The long shadows around me shimmered. I looked up to see the sun for the last time in my life.
Much to my surprise, there was no lack of light upon my arrival; I had always imagined the place to be rather cave-like. I found myself in an entirely unadorned hallway, with walls five meters high on both sides, which continued for approximately ten meters in each direction before bending out of view. There was no ceiling, and I could see a dimly lit sky above me which I originally took to be the source of the passageway’s illumination. However, I soon realized that, rather than being emitted from a single point, light seemed to be emitted from the air itself, thus lending the walls the eerie property of neither casting nor receiving any shadows. I made a quick mark on my paper to record my position, chose a direction, and set off down the corridor. I walked for roughly twenty minutes, encountering nothing but more gently bending hallway, and continued to record its contours. Soon I found my suspicion confirmed: the passage’s shape corresponded exactly with the mysterious rune that had been observed in my true name. I must be standing within that very symbol, as if I had been shrunk down to the size of a flea and made to walk about on the cracks of a bone.
I continued for several hours, walking backward in time through my oracle chain, finding that it indeed recapitulated the course of recent events. I read how that morning, before I left for the Labyrinth, I would burn my scrambled eggs because I would be distracted checking that I had brought four battery packs instead of just the three that I remembered putting in my bag’s front pocket. This (from my perspective) followed the rune that indicated I would eat them anyway. I knew far down the chain, farther than one could walk in a single lifetime, lay events extending even farther in the past: the awarding of my oracle certification from the Rune Carver’s Board, the loss of my left eye, the death of my wife.
I knew that continuing forward would not yield any useful information. We had seen before that the oracle chains never branch, and this hallway seemed to correspond perfectly. My only remaining option was to climb up the walls on either side to see what lay above. For a moment I imagined that I might find a rune carver’s giant eye centered in the sky above me, prying secrets from the cracks in which I hid. I had no climbing equipment, but I found that the walls of the passageway were close enough together that I could press my legs against them and push myself upward with my hands and feet. After several failed attempts, tearing the skin off of my hands and nearly breaking my ankle, I fell to the ground and let the blood from my injuries collect on the stone beneath me. But rather than pooling up, the fluid spread into minute rivulets and revealed a pattern carved upon the floor. My chest tensed. The stone was blanketed with carvings of runes, miraculously smaller and finer than any hand could pen. My excitement was such that I could hardly keep my eyes on one etching at a time, as upon the floor ran countless parallel series of rune chains, each competing to tell me their story.
I was struck by an idea. Assuring myself I could wash the blood out later (and that the stone would not damage the fabric too severely), I wrapped my hands in the T-shirts I had planned to wear the next two days and climbed upward again. This time, I reached the top of the walls and pulled myself over the edge. Before me I could see the extent of the rune chain I had traveled, and where it extended far into the distance like a meandering river. But beside it lay another separate sequence of runes, and many more past that, like the pattern left by a comb drawn through sand, or threads stretched taut on a loom. The series of chains extended to the hazy horizon, where a wall of immense size rose up almost entirely out of sight. The same view presented itself behind me as well. The chain of runes I had been following was only one of infinite scratches on the floor of another enveloping rune, the five-meter walls nothing more than the gathering of dust at the edge of a knife’s stroke.
Chains of runes are not separate and parallel, as always supposed, but nested within one another. At the bottom of the valley-like strokes of a rune describing a mother giving birth to her child is contained the entirety of that child’s life, from birth to death. If that child’s oracle chain includes a rune where they themself give birth, then the life of its child is fully contained within that rune as well. In this way, every square micron is infinitely etched with ever finer markings; each of our acts encloses an unfathomable number of effects. To pry a single flake from the walls of the Labyrinth is to destroy endless cities, tear lovers from each other’s arms, and end just as many lives.
As my wristwatch told me that I still had roughly seventy hours until I was to leave the Labyrinth, I took some food from my pack and let my legs hang from my perch on the narrow wall as I paused to think. The secret of the Labyrinth had been under our noses all along. If we were to simply start carving runes larger rather than smaller as we had upon silicon wafers, we might have seen it long ago. If I were to bring this information back with me from the Labyrinth, it would revolutionize the way that we generate names. Using any true name as a seed, we could find the true names of every person and object that that person has and will ever interact with, each of which would seed their own blossoming of true names, ad infinitum. Truly, we would become neutered gods with no hope to change our futures. If such a world was all that awaited me, then perhaps I had no desire to return.
And so I was faced with a choice: I could spend my life in a world where my agency has been utterly stripped from me, with that of every other person and creature soon to follow. Or, I could simply remain here, never to serve as the reluctant messenger of the knowledge that I now bear. In truth, though, I was unsure of whether the decision was mine to make. For any common true name, its bearer is not bound to follow the predictions the Labyrinth has made for them, as there always exist sufficiently similar alternative true names. But mine is no common name; it contains a rune never once seen in the trillions of oracle chains that Dong Hai has generated; of all the people who will ever live, I am likely the only one whose life will be touched by this rune. Is it possible to disobey a prophecy which cannot conceivably belong to any other? Would I find myself bound to follow the dictates of the Labyrinth?
As a test, I simply waited and let my clock carve away the time until the predicted hour of my return. I took the opportunity to wander through the Labyrinth, and though I was continuously on my feet, I felt no hunger, thirst, or fatigue. Even as I deliberately traveled away from my point of entry, I feared I would find myself, through the very attempts I made to avoid my fate, drawing ever closer to my return home. Several days later, while charting the runes of a parallel path several chains over from my own, my alarm went off. My time to return home had passed, and yet here I remained.
I considered the implications of my finding. Perhaps, while the Labyrinth has infinite halls, they only mark the boundaries of possibility rather than unyielding inevitability; they demarcate what could be, not what must be. In which case, I will stay here and no one will follow; these notes that I now write will decay into dust and I will be forever forgotten. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the Labyrinth is absolute and prescriptive; my destiny must be followed under any circumstances, even though these halls lack the ability to bind my actions.
My watch now tells me that one hundred and thirty-four years have passed since I arrived in the Labyrinth. I have read the runes of thousands of lives, and experienced each as if they were my own. I have laid bare patterns that we could only guess at in our chaotic world—paradise gazed at through a smudged glass. Yet the only piece of knowledge the Labyrinth cannot provide me with is the outcome of my little experiment. The greatest secrets contained in these halls have become but cheap baubles in comparison. And so, every year, I return to this very spot, to find the one person who could answer my question. That person would be you, dear reader.
Was my story not familiar? Have you not also studied the exploits of Xu Fu? The fall of the Jianwen Emperor? Did you not spend your life carving runes upon the silicon wafers that divined your true name? Do you not find yourself, of all the infinite points in the Labyrinth, at the very spot where I arrived? If you have found my notes, then you and I are the same. My life has preceded yours by an interminable period of time, and yet our histories and the histories of our worlds are indistinguishable. You are proof of the perversion of the universe: the Labyrinth, like a stubborn child, insisted that someone arrive to fulfill the destiny that I rejected. It created someone new, someone perfectly identical to me, who must complete my purpose by returning to the world from which they came. It created you.
When I first returned to this point, here where I entered the labyrinth all those years ago, it was with quiet steps and stolen glances. Now I do so with jubilant shouts and stomping feet, hoping to see you overwhelmed by the Labyrinth’s splendor, just as I was when I arrived. I climb the walls, half-expecting to see you resting, watching your clock as I did, counting down the hours until your expected return, and wishing I could be the one to tell you that that rotten place has nothing for you. This is your home.
But I will wait no longer, for you have come too late. I ventured to the great wall of the horizon and discovered within it a tunnel. On the other side I found the answer to my question. The Labyrinth contains far more than cold stone and empty scratches. This is the last time I will ever revisit this spot; I go now beyond the wall, and I will not return. But I have not abandoned you, my dearest of friends. I leave you these notes so that you will not feel lost as I did when I arrived, and so that you may fully rejoice in the presence of the perfect knowledge that now embraces you.
Though we have lived identical lives, you need not follow the path that I have taken. So, now comes the time for you to make the choice that I was faced with all those years ago. You may take my notes and the discoveries you have made here and return home a hero, armed with far more knowledge than I could ever have brought to mine. But it will be to a world that lacks all freedom and possibility. You will return not as a scientist but as a slave, your soul forever lashed to the cold hard stone of this maze. Or, you could do as I have and spend your existence bathed in the immaculate truth of these halls, forcing the universe to deform itself for yet one cycle more, to recreate the entire history of the world just to bring us back into being.
I do not know what you will do, for your return home must be an inevitability, or it would not be written in the Labyrinth. But if you choose to stay, you will find us beyond the great horizon wall.
Endnotes
1. The third emperor of the Shang dynasty, whose reign was roughly thirty centuries ago, made a habit of requiring all visitors to burn a bone before he received them. Though a brilliant idea, his enthusiasm for the runes outpaced his court’s ability to extract information from them. When four visitors arrived in the sixth year of his reign, he failed to discover that these men were not envoys from a western kingdom as they claimed to be, nor did he learn that each carried a dose of poison that they intended to slip into his dinner that night. One of these men, the emperor’s successor, coincidentally became a major driving force behind the early development of the runic sciences after his assumption of the throne. Armed with the necessary knowledge that his predecessor lacked, he continued the bone-burning tradition, survived several attempts on his life, and reigned for forty years until dying peacefully of natural causes.
2. It was for a long time the case, however, that several runes within our vocabulary were inferred rather than empirically verified. In particular, runes that pertained to actions performed in the water, such as swimming or diving, went untested until relatively recent times. As one might imagine, these activities provide scant opportunity for the lighting of fires.
3. The reason an uncarved bone will produce a single rune and never a chain is that the fire has only one meaningful event in its existence: its burning. The single rune that it produces describes both its birth and death.
4. A transition between animate and inanimate (that is, death) entails the termination of the chain describing the creature’s life, and the commencement of a new rune chain that concerns itself with the events relating to the late creature’s corpse.
5. The temporal resolution (also known as the extent of “tiling”) of a subject’s timeline generally follows the “change of receptive state” rule. That is, whenever the object or creature undergoes a change that alters its manner of response to any future event, then a rune will exist that describes that change. As a result, the rune chain generated for any human is more densely packed with runes per unit of time than, say, a stone, which rarely undergoes meaningful changes in state or location.
6. That is not to say that Xu Fu never returned. In fact, he and the emperor were to meet years after his first voyage. Xu Fu told the emperor that the gifts he brought were insufficient and the creatures in the sea were too dangerous, so that yet another expedition would be required to retrieve the elixir. It speaks to the charisma of Xu Fu and the deep trust that Qin Shi Huang put in him, that he was once again provided not only with a similar set of cargo, but also a contingent of archers to guard their journey. This time Xu Fu never returned. However, there is convincing evidence that he arrived on the coast of Japan and was responsible for kindling the oracular (as well as agricultural) arts in those lands.
7. However, as people have engaged in such occupations for the entirety of human history with far weaker justifications, it could be argued that this event was hardly significant at all.
8. A more modern refinement of this theory suggests that the Labyrinth is not merely an instructive code that is semantically referred to, but that it is physically underlying every particle of our existence. When the first drop of rain in a storm falls upon the petal of a flower, the Labyrinth is immediately present, pulling the petal down under the weight of the drop, bending its stem. Just as a river will flow through the valley between the mountains rather than over their peaks, so must the flower and raindrop move according to their determined paths. In this variation, the onus of action is on the Labyrinth to act upon the world, rather than requiring every object to autonomously consult the information that it contains. This model is, of course, untestable and serves only as an aesthetic improvement upon the aforementioned formulation.
9. A labyrinth was adopted as the symbol for this theory because its path—unlike that of a maze which forks and thereby affords some level of choice to those who wander it—is completely linear. This was believed to correspond with the trajectory of an individual through life, which, while rife with branching points and opportunities for divergence at the outset, is only ever a single line in retrospect. The point is illustrated quite well in a story from The Rune-Carved Tree, a meandering work of poetry, fables, and essays by the Labyrinthian Oscar Brighton. The story of interest concerns a man who sets out into an untamed patch of woods. Expecting a difficult journey, he is surprised to find that his first step across the forest’s edge is supported by firm stone rather than peaty soil. Brushing aside the fallen leaves, the man sees an ancient cobblestone road, just a few feet wide, directly beneath his feet. Pleased with his good fortune, the man continues his walk through the woods, his feet always falling precisely in the center of the little road. After several minutes of finding his every step preempted, his pleasure turns to disquiet, and the man takes a sharp turn as a means of escape from the path. He runs circles around trees, jumps over rivers, and dives into caves, but always finds the little road squarely beneath his feet. Finally, he laments, “How can I know that my choices are mine if I cannot go two ways at once?” Later, Brighton sums up quite nicely, “…in short, the world is a labyrinth masquerading as a maze.”
10. The thin brewer, fearful that his adversary might rise up out of the water and strike him dead should the prophecy be contradicted, continuously drank the goat’s milk until his opponent’s body was retrieved and his death confirmed.
11. One French scholar, a prisoner during the Hundred Years’ War, was blessed with both capture by a very talkative English jailor who recited to him the brewers’ tale, and an ample amount of time to idle away during his imprisonment. Out of curiosity, the French scholar took it upon himself to generate as many permutations of the brewers’ duel as possible, in the style of the carver in the story. By the time of his death several decades later, he had generated over fifty-thousand runes describing unique elm tree-related duels, all of which generated productive oracle chains. This was long brandished as evidence that the future must be infinite in order to contain a seemingly unlimited number of duels. However, in the eighteenth century, a cult arose that found in the enactment of Labyrinth-ordained events a means of meditation and worship. They became particularly fond of performing the many non-lethal variants of the duel, which curiously made up the vast majority. From then on, a convincing argument could be made that the actions of this cult are the reason so many fruitful variants of the duel could be produced in the first place.
12. What continues to vex runic researchers to this day is why the Labyrinth seems to privilege some events over others with more concise runes. For example, if one examines the chain generated by the rune containing only the “man” radical, one will receive a description of the life of a cartographer in thirteenth century Italy. Why was this particular person blessed by the Labyrinth with such a simple description while nearly every other being was designated an immensely complex name? Some have proposed that the subjects described by simpler runes are those that are more archetypal representations of the rune’s meaning (in which case the Italian cartographer was the manliest man in all of history). Alternatively, some have proposed that the Labyrinth only includes information in a rune that it considers relevant to its subject. Therefore, perhaps the Labyrinth considered the cartographer supremely unremarkable and lacking all other defining characteristics.
13. The Argentinian carver Jorge Luis Borges resurrected subjectivist ideology to propose an interesting revision in "Nueva refutación del tiempo" (Sur issue 115, 1944). I present here what I believe to be a qualitatively consistent summary: A man walks home every night through a dusty corner of his city, every time thinking over the course of the day's events, whistling a tune, and gazing upon the water that flows through the canals. Let us suppose that on two nights, separated by the span of many years, the man happens to reflect on the events of the day and, while they are substantively different, they evoke an identical set of judgments and psychological states. Suppose that he whistles the same tune and, while of course his lips are aged and the contours of the melody are slightly altered in his recollection, the song produces the same feeling of homesickness. And although, all those years before, he gazed upon a canal that was filled with water and silt that are now buried under inches of stone, or submerged in an ocean trench, the waterway reflects the full, radiant moon in much the same fashion as it did so long ago. To this man, there are no distinguishing characteristics between those two nights. Although the events that preceded this night and those that come to follow may differ, the two points in time are, to him, completely identical. Thus, they represent one singular moment and may therefore map to the same rune within the Labyrinth. However, even the author, in designing this argument, seems to recognize that this position is no less repulsive than the subjectivist view it seeks to revise. To privilege the conscious experience of a human above the events that occur in the external world is blatant and Ptolemaic hubris.
14. Technically, a true name could refer to any rune whose subject is known with certainty. However, any given rune is only capable of generating a record of the subject’s life subsequent to the event described by the rune; rune chains can only extend forward in time. As carvers are interested in generating the complete oracle chain that narrates a subject’s entire life, the term “true name” is therefore generally reserved for the rune that describes that person's birth.
15. Xu Fu, in an incredible stroke of luck, seems to have stumbled upon the true name of his neighboring millet farm.
16. See the Qing era compilation Ming Shi, vol. 111.
17. At the outset, the emperor’s prime minister (a renowned sycophant) insisted that the researchers use descriptors such as “wisest man to ever live who rides upon beams of sunlight” or “eminent ruler of all creation for eternity”, but these runes failed to predict so much as what the emperor would eat the next morning for breakfast. Fortunately, the minister had mercifully little ability to read the runes, and so the researchers soon took to secretly ignoring his suggestions.
18. Though quite drastic, this practice was common in rural areas of that time, particularly as a substitute for formal judicial proceedings. A digit or limb of both the accused and accuser were removed, the flesh peeled away, and the bones burned in a fire. The information contained in the runes was used to generate identifiers for each party, and an oracle reading of the supposed crime was generated. Should the bones predict that the accused had indeed acted as purported, they were found guilty and punished appropriately. During the Salem witch trials, this method was independently developed, but sadly only to confirm guilt after the punishment was already meted out.
19. The emperor had the bones retrieved and, after they were interpreted, fused the joints together with gold. He used this charred and cracked skeletal arm as a scepter for the remainder of his rule.
20. Had this gambit failed, the carvers had already prepared several increasingly gruesome contingency plans. Several members of the group vehemently believed that a person’s true name was inscribed upon the brain in its sulci and gyri, and were fully prepared to remove the crown of the emperor’s skull to inspect his cortex. Fortunately such measures were not needed, not only because this would have spelled near certain death for the emperor (while the medical knowledge at the time was sufficient to keep him alive, the plaster cast the carvers intended to create of his brain would have certainly killed him), but because the idea is utter nonsense. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that anatomy may reveal an individual’s true name had arisen independently multiple times throughout history, most notably, with the extraction of Edward Teach’s brain to discover the location of his supposed hidden treasure. The only reported “successful” reading of runes from a brain involved a Cornish man whose skull was crushed in a wagon-related incident. A local carver who stumbled upon the man’s remains claimed to have found inscribed in his brain a perfect description of the events of the Battle of Waterloo (after the fact, of course). Unsurprisingly, the brain was never subjected to independent review; the eccentric carver claimed the brain was carried off by a murder of crows just after his examination of the organ was complete.
21. The historical record is silent about why these generals would betray the emperor, but speculation abounds. Some say that the emperor, initially unwilling to sacrifice his arm for the project, exhumed his ancestors to burn their remains instead. Upon discovering this, the generals (both of whom were the emperor’s uncles) were furious and colluded with Zhu Di to remove him from the throne. Others argue that one of the two generals had a secret but deep-seated hatred for oracular arts, as, many years before, a royal carver had predicted the death of the general’s mother but failed to prevent it. As revenge, the general plotted to destroy the temple, the greatest work the carvers would ever produce (yet this reads more as a self-pitying explanation on the part of the carvers). The most parsimonious explanation posits that the generals feared the emperor would amass too much power if he developed the ability to read the future, as they themselves had ambitions for the throne.
22. Several aspects of this account make it difficult to believe. The emperor was missing his left arm, so even a heavily charred corpse would likely have been easy to identify, not to mention that the cracks that appeared upon the emperor’s bones would resemble those which were used to generate his true name. Second, the publicly circulated version of the rune that prophesied the emperor’s death was found to contain a minor syntactical error. While officially attributed to a transcriptional mistake, some claimed that the rune was a complete fabrication on the part of the new government, and that his predecessor (the rightful emperor) still lived. These rumors would not be any great cause for concern were it not for independent reports that the Jianwen emperor was residing in the southern reaches of the kingdom disguised as a Buddhist monk. So worrisome were these accounts that Zhu Di sent several expeditions to search for the emperor, including the wide-ranging voyages of Zheng He that reached the Persian Gulf. It is puzzling that such an undirected search was undertaken, as, if the oracle chain indeed predicted that the emperor still lived, it would also reveal his whereabouts. Perhaps the remaining carvers who interpreted the runes remained loyal to their former ruler and deliberately concealed his location.
23. While we lack a complete transcription of the emperor’s true name, we do have verbal accounts of several of the radicals it contained. As it turns out, the very pursuit of his true name had a large bearing on its composition; one component of the rune identified him as “one who has futilely employed many rune carvers.”
***
If you are reading this, my dear friend, know that you are a walking miracle. The world has contorted itself in the most obscene ways to produce someone who bears your name and has lived your life. Your very existence is an affront to nature, yet it is my greatest joy that you have found your way here, of all places. By the time you read this letter, I will be long gone, but I have a request whose importance no span of time will decay: never leave these cold, dead halls. Expel your last breath here and perish before divulging the secrets that you find in this hallowed prison. There is still time yet, and before you make your decision, I will relate to you how I have come to be here, so that you may understand my intent.
The Earth speaks. Not in a petty language of tongues, lips, and lungs, but one of stone, trees, and smoke. It is our great inheritance that we may speak this language, as it is our forebears’ labor whose fruits we enjoy. It was nearly four thousand years ago when our ancestors on the banks of the Yellow River heard the quiet whispers from the Labyrinth. It did not come in the form of a prophet, nor of a mythical beast. Rather, it came to them in the humblest of ways: in the remains of their fires.
As anyone may readily observe, many materials—such as the bones from livestock or wild game—crack when exposed to a fire of sufficient intensity. Contrary to the impression that a cursory investigation might yield, these cracks are anything but random. The spreading of these tiny fissures is a natural record of the context under which the bone was burnt: the type of wood that was used as fuel, the intensity of the fire, the direction and speed of the wind, the time passed since the last rainfall, the phase of the moon. The bones are eager to tell their stories, and everything is recorded in the twists and turns of the marks they produce. With sufficient experience and patience, one can tease out the subtlest of signs. An anxious subject may cast bones into the fire with greater velocity, predisposing them to crack about the medial ring upon impact. Bones burnt by a bereaved mother have a particular twist in the thirty-second radial position, which, by no coincidence, is a mirror image of that observed in those burnt by a woman shortly after giving birth.
Through no small effort, our ancestors began to assemble a lexicon of symbols produced by the bones, which they took to calling “runes”. In addition to being indispensable tools for ascertaining a subject’s true nature, an understanding of the runic language became a sign of great erudition in a time when written language was still being developed.[1] Those who took it upon themselves to discover new variants constituted a highly respected class of society. Once the lower-hanging fruit was harvested, as it were, these researchers gained a reputation not just for intellect, but also for intrepitude, and were required to perform increasingly daring and unusual tasks to further their field. Bones were burnt on boats far at sea, at the mouths of volcanoes, on blood-stained battlefields in the midst of war.[2] As a result of these efforts, we could not only read any naturally occurring rune, but also create runes of our own that described scenarios of arbitrary complexity, including those wholly separated from the act of burning.
This research was accelerated by the discovery that the runic language is derivative and can be subjected to structural decomposition. All runes are made up of smaller modular components called radicals, which can be endlessly combined to produce new meanings. The radical describing granite, for example, is made up of sub-radicals representing “firm”, “archaic”, and “granulated”. Of these, “archaic” is considered a core radical (no further productive components can be extracted from it). On the other hand, “granulated” is considered a seventh order radical as it can be decomposed into “seed” and “many”, both of which can then be decomposed in turn for six cycles further until only core radicals remain.
This was all very fine in its own right, but the language of the runes was far too complex to be of any practical everyday use. Even the most cumbersome of man-made languages was preferable to the runes’ endless bends and sharp angles. A brief narrative of a man going to the market to sell a pig could be easily contained within a single carving, but it would take an expert over an hour to plan and sketch such a symbol.
Fortunately, the language had greater utility than serving as a simple record keeping system, or for pavonine displays of intellect. As you are certainly aware, the runes betray not only the present but also the future. This was an early discovery, one made by the sorcerer and oracle Xu Fu, at a time when our understanding of the runic language was still in its infancy. I relate here his story as it is recorded in the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian’s Shiji. Xu Fu was a carver in the coastal region of Langya in the third century B.C. At the start of his career, while he was but a minor provincial scholar, he devoted himself to the discovery of the radical for millet. To this end, he organized a trip to several neighboring farms and requested that the families there burn several bone samples for his study. Having returned home with his findings, he found himself short on the bamboo he commonly used to record his notes, and so instead etched the runes he discovered onto the spare animal bones that remained from his excursion. After he had finished, he discarded several of these bones, marked only with disordered fragments of runes, into the fire. The next morning, when emptying the ashes, he found that one of the bones had sprouted a completely new rune from his half-finished notes. This new symbol was created by the previous night’s fire, and yet was as elegantly executed as if Xu Fu had carved it himself. Gingerly, he brushed the ashes from the markings and began to read. Despite the severely crude understanding of the runic language at the time, he correctly recognized three radicals of this new rune: “good fortune”, “mineral”, and “feces”. Confused as to the meaning of this discovery, he returned to the farm where he had originally recorded his notes. When he arrived, the farmer greeted him excitedly, for just that morning, he had discovered a fist-sized chunk of jade, shallowly buried in the earth within his pigsty—a stone worth several times more than the farmer would have made in a lifetime.
Xu Fu quickly returned to his laboratory and endeavored to reproduce these results. First, he re-carved the fragmentary rune that he had tossed into the fire the night before. When burnt, it produced a second rune that, as before, predicted the farmer’s discovery of the jade. Further, Xu Fu found that if this second rune were carved into yet another bone and burnt, then it would produce a third rune that accurately predicted a hailstorm at the farm the following day. He discovered that this process could be repeated seemingly without end to predict events arbitrarily far in the future, provided he had enough bones to burn. His only real constraint was that his abilities were useless when extended beyond the millet farm; any attempt to reach into other parts of the empire or even across town was terribly inaccurate, though this finding he kept to himself. Fortunately, forecasts of fair weather and good harvests at the millet farm were generalizable to the surrounding area.
Rather than burdening our story with an exhaustive description of Xu Fu’s experiments, I will simply describe here the general principles of oracle rune carving that we derive from his work: an unetched bone will burn to produce a roughly hewn rune describing the burning of the bone itself. However, a bone already carved with a rune will extend the symbol, the cracks formed by the fire picking up where the first rune ends, creating a second that is just as expertly carved and lucid. The rune chain will terminate when one of two conditions is met: the bone upon which the runes are carved runs out of space (in which case the terminal rune can be carved upon a new bone to continue the chain), or the chain reaches the rune that describes the subject’s death (if animate) or destruction (if inanimate).[3,4] The runes generated in these chains are predictive of the events that follow the first and can be used to uncover the sequence of events pertaining to any given subject, whether past or future.[5]
By the year 219 B.C., Xu Fu had advanced his skills considerably, enough to have predicted several years of droughts and floods, and advised his village on how best to weather them. At that time, the understanding of oracle reading was more mystical than scientific, and Xu Fu cultivated an image as a sorcerer who consorted with spirits of the earth, sky, and sea. And so, when the emperor Qin Shi Huang arrived in Langya during the second tour of his newly united kingdom, he heard endlessly of the remarkable, supernatural powers of the sorcerer. He arranged to meet with Xu Fu and, being greatly interested in the occult, asked for a demonstration. Xu Fu was no fool, and he knew his abilities were restricted to the neighboring farm, but he had no desire for this to become common knowledge. Having foreseen this request, Xu Fu required only a moment’s thought before revealing that the bones spoke of a day when the emperor would return atop a strange and exotic animal from a distant land. Xu Fu gave the emperor a sealed box, which contained the secrets of the creature’s true nature.
Indeed, several years later the emperor began another tour of his kingdom (so proud was he of uniting the entire known world under his rule) and found himself once again on the road to Xu Fu’s village. While meeting with a provincial governor shortly before reaching Langya, the emperor was given an animal whose historical description roughly matches that of a zebra with red stripes. Immediately reminded of Xu Fu’s prophecy, and excited to learn what magical powers this creature possessed, the emperor immediately had the sealed box retrieved. Upon opening it, he found a length of bamboo inscribed with Xu Fu’s unexpectedly brief prediction: the emperor would return to Langya upon a common donkey. Enraged, the emperor traveled directly to the village upon his striped mount and demanded that Xu Fu explain his impudence. Xu Fu was deferential and promised that if his prediction was incorrect, he would submit himself to any punishment the emperor saw fit. But first, he asked that the creature be walked into the river that ran alongside the millet farm. The emperor obliged and as soon as he rode the creature into the water, its painted stripes were washed away by the rushing current. All that remained was an ass.
Astounded by Xu Fu’s abilities, Qin Shi Huang insisted that the sorcerer accompany him across the empire back to the capital of Xianyang to serve as royal sorcerer and advisor. Xu Fu knew he would be of no use so far from the millet farm, and made a counter-proposal: far out in the sea resided powerful immortal spirits who guided his prophecies. The spirits told Xu Fu that if he were to bring a large enough offering, they would be willing to share with him the secrets to everlasting life. The emperor, seemingly lacking faith in neither Xu Fu’s skills nor motives, sent him off with gold, seeds, and a small army of skilled craftsmen to proffer as gifts to the spirits. Though the emperor awaited news of Xu Fu's success even to his deathbed, Xu Fu never delivered him the elixir of immortality.6 Perhaps the even greater treasure, though, was that which Xu Fu left behind in Langya: a complete record of his experiments and findings, cementing his position as the father of our craft and history’s first oracle.
We shall pause here, dear reader, to consider the implications of this discovery. It is well within reason that the ambient influences present during the burning of a bone may directly guide the cracks that form upon it, and—however subtle these influences may be—can be uncovered with sufficient skill and patience. However, this phenomenon, the spontaneous generation of a new rune that describes an event entirely removed from the burning of the bone, frankly strains belief. Unfortunately, I lack sufficient paper to describe the historical consequences of Xu Fu’s discovery in full. Suffice it to say that the significance of this event can hardly be overstated. Religions were born and smothered, kingdoms founded and toppled, martyrs burned and slaughtered, and the majority of the known world was overtaken by war.[7] It shook our very understanding of the natural world and forever changed the way we interacted with it. And this is only what the idea of the predictive properties of the bones begot. Fortunately, no carver would come close to matching Xu Fu’s skill for many centuries, as one can only imagine what further damage this would have caused. As for the few remaining runic scholars who did not descend into wholesale mysticism, the task of explaining this phenomenon became an all-consuming challenge.
What emerged from this chaos and brought back a modicum of order to our craft was the theory of the Labyrinth, whose origins may be found in the renowned eleventh century philosopher Al-Ghazâlî’s Tahâfut al-Falsafa. Though it started as an expedient metaphor invented by researchers to describe the predictive abilities of the runes, the Labyrinth has become the leading theoretical model to explain the course of all natural events. To illustrate its core concepts, let us consider a simple sequence of events: first, a stone is held aloft in a person’s hand; second, the hand is open and the stone has fallen to the ground. Conventional wisdom would suggest that it is the general property of the earth to attract all stones, and that the earth can be named as the cause for the stone’s descent subsequent to its release. On the contrary, the architects of the Labyrinth theory drew no such direct relationship. They believed that the stone, like all other objects, lacks any intrinsic properties. Rather, its fall to the ground was mediated by an external agent whom it is bound to obey. This structure, called the Labyrinth, is hidden away from the world, and, like a book, records the paths of all things that have been and will ever be. As such, for every conceivable set of circumstances there exists a corresponding “page” describing this event and its outcome. Every agent in the event consults this page as if it were a script, learns its designated role, and acts accordingly. In this example, before the stone falls to the ground, it refers to the Labyrinth and finds the proper page describing its current situation. Seeing that the records indicate its descent, the stone falls to the ground. All other supposed cases of causality are mere illusions that, in reality, are mediated solely by the Labyrinth. In the absence of the Labyrinth, all of reality would lack instruction and simply cease to progress from one moment to the next.[8]
And in just what language is this “book” written in? It could be none other than the runes, connected linearly and in sequence, describing the course of all events. As for why the bones are able to reveal this structure, it is only natural that if a rune is connected to another in the Labyrinth, then the cracks on the bone follow an identical pattern. The oracle chains revealed by the bones are, therefore, quite literally maps of the Labyrinth itself; each chain representing one of the many parallel paths that compose its form. Just as the circumstances of the bones’ burning guide their cracks, so do the cracks mirror the Labyrinthian structure that has guided their burning; the bones are but a window into the inner workings of reality.[9]
This explanation, both by merit of its explanatory capacity and aesthetic appeal, gained rapid and widespread acceptance and has become the backdrop upon which all discourse surrounding the runes takes place. It had but one minor issue: even as our understanding of the runic language advanced to the level of reasonable utility, it was found that the runes were imperfect at predicting the future. While of course the predictions made by the runes were generally very accurate, even the smallest error was sufficient to spoil the entire Labyrinthine theory. This realization splintered the followers of the Labyrinth into many smaller sects, some of whom even went as far as to claim that the runes do not predict the future. We will turn to a classic English folk tale, “The Legend of the Brewers’ Duel”, to illustrate the two major positions on this issue.
Two brewers, one thin and one stout, found themselves in a dispute over which of them could rightfully claim ownership of a particularly successful beer recipe. The thin brewer argued that the recipe was the work of his great grandfather, while the stout brewer asserted that, on the basis of the substantial modifications he had made to the original methods, the recipe now belonged to him. They decided to settle the matter with a duel to the death, the winner of which would obtain ownership of the recipe. The two men agreed that the duel would take place at dawn under an elm tree between the town’s church and the river’s bend. The plump brewer, crudely educated in the ways of rune carving, decided to read the future of the duel in the bones. To this end, he crafted a rune describing the very terms of the duel as it had been agreed upon and set it aflame. In such a scenario, the bones indicated, the plump man would prevail. Considering the duel as good as won, the plump man began drafting plans to expand production of the brew after his acquisition of the recipe. The thin brewer, though knowing even less about rune carving than his opponent, was wise enough to employ a professional. The expert carver, too, found that a duel held under such circumstances would indeed result in victory for the plump man. However, the carver was clever and created several dozen runes that slightly altered the conditions of the duel. Eventually he struck upon a winning combination: if the duel were held at dawn under an elm tree near a river bend and the thin man drank the freshly squeezed milk of a wild goat before drawing his weapon, then the thin brewer would be the victor. Quickly, and ensuring his opponent learned nothing of the endeavor, the thin brewer arranged for the capture of a wild goat, which he brought with him on the morning of the duel. The plump brewer, seeing his opponent spending the moments immediately before combat milking a goat rather than checking the condition of his weapon, realized he had been outwitted. He frantically fled for his life, but tripped on the root of the elm tree, fell into the river, and was promptly carried away and drowned.[10]
This speaks to the unreliability of the runes as much as it does to the danger posed by the confidence engendered by a small amount of expertise in an obscure field. More to the point however, this story quite skillfully illuminates the most fundamental challenge facing the oracular arts in the middle of the second millennium: how is it that two runes that accurately describe the same scenario can contradict one another? The two major camps in this battle adopted similarly diametric names: the objectivists and the subjectivists.
The objectivists, also known as believers of a “strong” Labyrinth, placed the fault of the stout carver’s inaccurate predictions solely in his hands. They believed that every event in the universe was described uniquely by a single rune within the Labyrinth, a non-degenerate, one-to-one mapping of rune to reality, such that no rune is ever used twice. With regard to the duel, there are thousands (or perhaps an infinite number) of duels that occur between a thin and a stout man near a river under an elm tree throughout the course of history.[11] The rune carved by the thin man does indeed describe one single duel in particular, somewhere and sometime—it simply did not happen to be the one that he found himself a participant in. In other words, the prediction made by the runes was indeed correct; it was simply that the stout brewer had asked the wrong question.[12]
The subjectivists, on the other hand, believed in a “weak” Labyrinth. Their doctrine held that the Labyrinth served not as an exhaustive catalog of all circumstances, but rather contained only generalized archetypes. In this way, a single rune is degenerately correlated to multiple independent events throughout history. So, the rune carved by the plump brewer did not describe precisely his duel (as such a thing would be impossible), but rather, all duels that may occur under the set of circumstances he specified. The reason the runes predicted his victory was merely because it was the most likely outcome of all such duels of that sort, rather than the certain outcome of any one duel in particular. The greatest opposition raised against this interpretation—one which was invariably met with much gesticulation and misdirection on the part of its adherents—was the lack of correspondence between an infinitely complex reality and a decidedly degenerate and incomplete Labyrinth. If the Labyrinth predicts that an event will resolve in a certain fashion, but in reality fails to do so, then what second factor is guiding its outcome? Something as base as mere chance? Human “choice”? And what role is left for the Labyrinth other than that of a simple advisor to causality?[13]
The only incontrovertible proof the objectivists could present to silence their vocal and intransigent rivals would be the discovery of a true name. In objectivist doctrine, this refers to a rune whose subject is known with complete certainty, such that all predictions made with this rune occur with perfect accuracy.[14,15] Subjectivists believed that such a rune could not exist, as the Labyrinth only provides general principles for the progression of events. Therefore, all runes must at some point produce an error in their predictions as a result. The opportunity to settle the debate finally came in the fourteenth century with the ascent of the Jianwen Emperor, the second regent of the Ming dynasty. The emperor assumed the throne with the intention of consolidating the power accumulated by the regional princes that his predecessor had installed when the dynasty was established. The emperor publicly demoted or arrested each in turn, starting with the weakest among them. Recognizing the potential for an armed rebellion, the emperor sought the assistance of the oracle bones to preempt the actions of his political opponents.[16] He was fearful of receiving a fatally inaccurate reading, however, and so he gathered the largest collection of oracles ever assembled, to determine his own true name. Armed with perfect knowledge of his future, he believed he would be guaranteed the power to change it as he wished.
It would please me to say that in the course of discovering the emperor’s true name, our predecessors developed many new and innovative techniques. In truth, it was an act of brute force and perseverance. It is impossible, of course, to include every iota of information about the emperor’s life in a single rune, so it fell to the carvers to determine what characteristics the Labyrinth considered most important to the emperor’s character, which they conducted mostly through trial and error.[17]
The assembled carvers were broken into eight hundred groups of three: one carver to generate improvements to the rune, one to etch and burn them, and one to compare the predictions they generated with the actions of the emperor. Each week, the teams would convene; notes were compared and the rune that had performed best since the last convocation became the new standard from which all units began their refinements for the next ten days. At the project’s outset, the consumption of bones was so great that the population of livestock in the area surrounding the capital city dwindled to dangerously low levels. Animals were forcibly taken from nearby farms and slaughtered for bones rather than their meat, which was, in a small consolation, returned without additional fee to the late creatures’ owners. This strained the cordial relationship the emperor’s predecessor had established with the peasantry, and quickly became unsustainable. Fortunately, it was soon discovered that specialized clay tablets with qualities similar to bone could be used without significant functional detriment (though to the carvers, the aesthetic consequences were immeasurable).
After several years, the researchers’ progress stagnated. Their most successful rune was able to predict the emperor’s actions over the period of one month, but any longer proved impossible. This is not to minimize their accomplishments. On the contrary, this was the pinnacle of our science to date. Unfortunately, their success went largely unappreciated. Though there exists little record of it, we can only assume the emperor’s frustration grew, not only with his researchers but also with the apparent inevitability of the future predicted by the runes they generated. During this time, the most powerful of the regional princes, Zhu Di, refused to surrender his title and waged a war that the emperor was steadily losing. One would imagine that the increasingly successful oracle readings foretold these difficulties, yet the emperor must have found himself incapable of stopping them. Rather than weaken his resolve in the project, the emperor appeared only to commit more ardently.
In the fourth month of the fourth year of the emperor’s reign, the situation appeared dire. Zhu Di’s military successes multiplied, and soon his armies occupied the land directly across the river from the capital of Nanjing. When he demanded the city’s surrender, the emperor made a bold proposition, not to his enemy but to his carvers: he would burn the bones from his very body.[18] The rune that appeared upon them would reveal the characteristics of his identity the Labyrinth found critical, hopefully accelerating the conclusion of the project and revealing how he might repel the insurgents. So the emperor ceremoniously severed his left arm and cast it into a great fire. Once the flames were extinguished, the bones were found to be etched with a single rune that stretched across their length.[19] While vanishingly little time remained to test its accuracy, the carvers spent three sleepless nights assembling the rune that they believed to be the emperor’s true name.[20]
For the emperor’s purposes, it would not suffice to simply have his true name carved upon a bone and tossed into a fire. Practically, there is not enough surface area on any single bone to predict further than several hours into the future. More importantly, however, it is not fitting for an emperor to conduct his oracle reading in the same manner as a common peasant. Simultaneous with the initiation of the name discovery project, the emperor had begun construction of a great temple of unbaked clay, inside of which was a vast chamber that, according to extemporaneous historical records, was so large a swallow could not fly from one wall to another without rest. This temple, when carved with the emperor’s true name and burned, would have sufficient space to produce an oracle chain that would depict the emperor’s life in its entirety.
On the twelfth day of the following month, with the threat of an invasion by Zhu Di becoming more likely by the hour, the emperor personally oversaw the carving of his true name upon the center of the temple’s floor. However, as the structure was filled with oil, wood, and kindling, several of the emperor’s own generals, having lost faith in his rulership abilities, opened the gates for Zhu Di’s army, allowing him into the city in an act of surrender.[21] Zhu Di’s troops arrived at the temple, barricaded the emperor and his carvers within, and set it ablaze. It is said that the fire, fueled by royal blood, burned for three days. The city was cloaked in perpetual daylight, every alcove and alley etched by the flames’ radiance into twisted and crooked imitations of the runes that consumed the emperor’s remains.
When the fire subsided, Zhu Di (now ascended to the throne as the Yongle emperor) gathered his guard, as well as the surviving carvers who would swear loyalty to him (a sizeable number, as the first to refuse were summarily executed). When they unsealed the temple, they found the entire surface of walls and floors marked by an immense spiral of runes covering thousands of square meters, immaculately and exhaustively describing every event in the emperor’s life. While the carvers were overtaken by the magnitude of their accomplishment, the new emperor, eager to ensure no threats existed to his newly acquired throne, began the hunt for his predecessor’s corpse. After several fruitless hours of searching the charred bodies scattered throughout the temple, Zhu Di found a politically expedient solution in the runes themselves: he would publicize the oracle chain describing the Jianwen emperor’s life, an abbreviated form of which has persisted to the present day. Most important among these runes was the final symbol in the sequence, which described the death of the Jianwen emperor in the conflagration that overtook his temple. Believing that this was sufficient to assure the populace of the certainty of his predecessor’s demise, the temple was demolished.[22]
Although the emperor’s true name, along with the full oracle record, went uncirculated and thus was lost to time, the reports of the carvers who personally studied the temple confirmed the totality of the project’s success: every event in the emperor’s life depicted in the runes upon the temple’s walls was perfectly true and accurate.[23] With this, the subjectivist theory of the Labyrinth’s nature was shattered and the debate was settled; because a rune that referred specifically to the Jianwen emperor had been found, then so must every rune uniquely describe a single subject. However, one glaring question remained: what if the emperor had not perished that night? What if he had seen the temple and learned his future with absolute certainty? With such knowledge, could one defy fate and reforge destiny, as the Jianwen emperor had planned to do? Most objectivist theorists, still basking in their victory, were quick to dismiss such a possibility. The absolute nature of the Labyrinth had been demonstrated—how could it be contradicted?
However, to those concerned with the practical consequences of oracle reading, myself included, the question remains to be of critical importance. And so we come to the contribution that I have made to the runic sciences: a test of whether the future can be rewritten, whether the cold stone halls of the Labyrinth can bend, and even break. I hope that you, dear reader, will indulge me in my relating several personal details to this end.
I am a runic researcher of Dong Hai Predictive Solutions. Our company is engaged in much the same research as the carvers of the Jianwen emperor: the discovery of true names. Whereas before, a small army of carvers required several years to find a single true name, we are the beneficiaries of several technological advancements that greatly accelerate this process. Runes are no longer carved on bones or clay tablets, but rather laser-etched upon silicon wafers, cracked not by fire but by electrical currents. Several thousand runes can be inscribed upon every square micron of silicon, all of which can be rapidly read through the differential levels of conductivity that each rune exhibits. Armed with a complete lexicon of all radicals and near endless computing power, we have generated a library of true names for roughly three trillion subjects, which we believe includes over ninety-nine percent of all humans who will ever live. As such, all that is required in most cases to generate a true name is to match a name from our database with its subject. This can be accomplished by submitting the subject to the administration of a life history questionnaire, as well as a brief but comprehensive observation period.
As a result, not only has the technology made the process of name discovery much more rapid, but also more accessible. The average monthly household income is enough to pay for the discovery of a client’s true name. Subsequent to name identification, we offer generalized life predictions, covering topics including the customer’s life expectancy, lifetime earnings, and fecundity. If they desire, our clients can even download an application to their personal device, which will guide them in purchasing products (such as cars and home appliances) to meet their future needs, or in meeting romantic partners that the Labyrinth has considered to be destiny-compatible. Further, a notification function informs users when a Labyrinth-ordained event will take place (such as serving oneself a meal or going on a walk) so that they may properly prepare. Of course, a true name exerts no supernatural effects on its subject, and one can choose to follow a different path than the one that the Labyrinth has foretold. In such a case, the subject has revealed that their true name belonged to some other individual all along, whose life was essentially identical up until that point of divergence. Unfortunately, from that point onward, all predictions will suffer from reduced accuracy as a consequence. As a result, consumers are advised against such courses of action unless they wish to pay the necessary fee for a name adjustment. Some people find it incompatible with their lifestyle to have near absolute knowledge of their future, but others find the certainty comforting.
Despite these methodological advances, our understanding of the Labyrinth had hardly progressed since the Ming dynasty. And though it may seem that the runic sciences are a “solved” problem, one glaring hole remains in our understanding: how can the Labyrinth account for interactions between its many parallel, non-intersecting chains? For example, a subject’s oracle chain may contain a rune describing them giving birth to their son. However, the chains describing the life of the son and of the parent are entirely separate and non-overlapping; even the rune describing the very same event, the birth of the child, are uniquely depicted within each subject’s oracle chain. What sort of topology does the Labyrinth employ, then, to allow for interactions between these two individuals’ lives? Some have voiced the opinion that asking such a question presupposes a causative role on the part of the parent in the child’s birth (an idea directly opposed to the fundamental idea of the Labyrinth as discussed earlier). In reality, they claim, the Labyrinth simply describes each of these events separately: a mother gives birth, and a child appears; there is no connection between the two.
The much more appealing hypothesis, however, is that there is a connection between these chains. Not only would it be satisfying for the structure guiding our lives to accord with our perceptions of the world, but it would have immense functional implications as well. Identifying an individual’s true name from their life history, while simpler than ever, is still far more difficult than it would be to generate one true name from another. If such a thing were possible, there would be no need to painstakingly map each individual name onto its subject, and no need for name adjustments, as every assignment would be perfect. Further, with sufficient computing power, the true names not just of all humans, but of all observable objects could be found. We would have absolute knowledge of the relationship between all things, so that the full extent of history could be inferred from the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, or the creaking of a tree in the wind. There would be no need for thought, no need for understanding. We could finally lift up our hands and let history wash over us. The practice of science would be—in a word—complete.
But rather than allowing us to agonize endlessly over this puzzle, the Labyrinth simply invited us in to have a look. As a way to boost employee engagement, my company ran a raffle each month in which the winner was offered a free name reading. One month, I was announced the winner. But rather than receiving an email several days after my interview to access my true name report, I learned that the results were delayed, and was asked to speak directly with my manager. When I arrived, I was surprised to find that the head of the company, as well as several members of the executive board, were present. They conveyed two pieces of information. First, they had discovered my true name, one that belonged to the handful of names that did not already exist within our database. Second, and more importantly, they found within my oracle chain a radical that had never been seen before, the first discovered in thousands of years, which they then showed to me on a piece of printer paper. It was surprisingly elegant; unlike the sharp, angular cracks that normally compose radicals, this one appeared as a long snake coiled about itself, gently curving and wrapping, though never intersecting itself or breaking. I understood at once: this radical represented the Labyrinth.
On the first Tuesday of the following month, according to the oracle chain generated by my true name, I would perform a series of utterly mundane actions (which I am quite certain you are familiar with if you have found my notes), and then find myself within the Labyrinth’s timeless halls. Three days later, I would emerge, presumably with privileged knowledge of the Labyrinth’s structure, as I would receive a sizeable promotion shortly after my return.
I am certain that the board would have preferred to lock me inside a cell until my departure, but the Labyrinth was kind enough to predict that they would instead assign me a chaperone. Fortunately, the board had little desire to be responsible for any discrepancy with the prophecy, no matter how small. During the following days, the chaperone made no secret of describing to my supervisors how well my actions were following the predicted course of events. As ordained by the Labyrinth, I let him sleep on the couch of my studio apartment.
My preparations for the expedition were minimal. I expected to find no source of sustenance within the Labyrinth, and so, on the night before I left, I packed everything I would require for the three day journey: dried food, water, a flashlight with several extra battery packs, a few days of clothes and a padded jacket in case it was cold, my copy of Brighton’s The Rune-Carved Tree, and a pencil and paper (which I preferred to any touchpad device). When I woke the next day, my chaperone saw me off on my journey until my final step. It was early morning, and the anemic winter sun hung weakly over the horizon, straining to raise itself high enough to cast its tepid rays between the high-rises and light the pallid sky. A thin layer of snow flattened under my feet as I walked down the stairs leading from my apartment building toward the sidewalk. The air, already thin and cold, took on an acrid quality. The long shadows around me shimmered. I looked up to see the sun for the last time in my life.
Much to my surprise, there was no lack of light upon my arrival; I had always imagined the place to be rather cave-like. I found myself in an entirely unadorned hallway, with walls five meters high on both sides, which continued for approximately ten meters in each direction before bending out of view. There was no ceiling, and I could see a dimly lit sky above me which I originally took to be the source of the passageway’s illumination. However, I soon realized that, rather than being emitted from a single point, light seemed to be emitted from the air itself, thus lending the walls the eerie property of neither casting nor receiving any shadows. I made a quick mark on my paper to record my position, chose a direction, and set off down the corridor. I walked for roughly twenty minutes, encountering nothing but more gently bending hallway, and continued to record its contours. Soon I found my suspicion confirmed: the passage’s shape corresponded exactly with the mysterious rune that had been observed in my true name. I must be standing within that very symbol, as if I had been shrunk down to the size of a flea and made to walk about on the cracks of a bone.
I continued for several hours, walking backward in time through my oracle chain, finding that it indeed recapitulated the course of recent events. I read how that morning, before I left for the Labyrinth, I would burn my scrambled eggs because I would be distracted checking that I had brought four battery packs instead of just the three that I remembered putting in my bag’s front pocket. This (from my perspective) followed the rune that indicated I would eat them anyway. I knew far down the chain, farther than one could walk in a single lifetime, lay events extending even farther in the past: the awarding of my oracle certification from the Rune Carver’s Board, the loss of my left eye, the death of my wife.
I knew that continuing forward would not yield any useful information. We had seen before that the oracle chains never branch, and this hallway seemed to correspond perfectly. My only remaining option was to climb up the walls on either side to see what lay above. For a moment I imagined that I might find a rune carver’s giant eye centered in the sky above me, prying secrets from the cracks in which I hid. I had no climbing equipment, but I found that the walls of the passageway were close enough together that I could press my legs against them and push myself upward with my hands and feet. After several failed attempts, tearing the skin off of my hands and nearly breaking my ankle, I fell to the ground and let the blood from my injuries collect on the stone beneath me. But rather than pooling up, the fluid spread into minute rivulets and revealed a pattern carved upon the floor. My chest tensed. The stone was blanketed with carvings of runes, miraculously smaller and finer than any hand could pen. My excitement was such that I could hardly keep my eyes on one etching at a time, as upon the floor ran countless parallel series of rune chains, each competing to tell me their story.
I was struck by an idea. Assuring myself I could wash the blood out later (and that the stone would not damage the fabric too severely), I wrapped my hands in the T-shirts I had planned to wear the next two days and climbed upward again. This time, I reached the top of the walls and pulled myself over the edge. Before me I could see the extent of the rune chain I had traveled, and where it extended far into the distance like a meandering river. But beside it lay another separate sequence of runes, and many more past that, like the pattern left by a comb drawn through sand, or threads stretched taut on a loom. The series of chains extended to the hazy horizon, where a wall of immense size rose up almost entirely out of sight. The same view presented itself behind me as well. The chain of runes I had been following was only one of infinite scratches on the floor of another enveloping rune, the five-meter walls nothing more than the gathering of dust at the edge of a knife’s stroke.
Chains of runes are not separate and parallel, as always supposed, but nested within one another. At the bottom of the valley-like strokes of a rune describing a mother giving birth to her child is contained the entirety of that child’s life, from birth to death. If that child’s oracle chain includes a rune where they themself give birth, then the life of its child is fully contained within that rune as well. In this way, every square micron is infinitely etched with ever finer markings; each of our acts encloses an unfathomable number of effects. To pry a single flake from the walls of the Labyrinth is to destroy endless cities, tear lovers from each other’s arms, and end just as many lives.
As my wristwatch told me that I still had roughly seventy hours until I was to leave the Labyrinth, I took some food from my pack and let my legs hang from my perch on the narrow wall as I paused to think. The secret of the Labyrinth had been under our noses all along. If we were to simply start carving runes larger rather than smaller as we had upon silicon wafers, we might have seen it long ago. If I were to bring this information back with me from the Labyrinth, it would revolutionize the way that we generate names. Using any true name as a seed, we could find the true names of every person and object that that person has and will ever interact with, each of which would seed their own blossoming of true names, ad infinitum. Truly, we would become neutered gods with no hope to change our futures. If such a world was all that awaited me, then perhaps I had no desire to return.
And so I was faced with a choice: I could spend my life in a world where my agency has been utterly stripped from me, with that of every other person and creature soon to follow. Or, I could simply remain here, never to serve as the reluctant messenger of the knowledge that I now bear. In truth, though, I was unsure of whether the decision was mine to make. For any common true name, its bearer is not bound to follow the predictions the Labyrinth has made for them, as there always exist sufficiently similar alternative true names. But mine is no common name; it contains a rune never once seen in the trillions of oracle chains that Dong Hai has generated; of all the people who will ever live, I am likely the only one whose life will be touched by this rune. Is it possible to disobey a prophecy which cannot conceivably belong to any other? Would I find myself bound to follow the dictates of the Labyrinth?
As a test, I simply waited and let my clock carve away the time until the predicted hour of my return. I took the opportunity to wander through the Labyrinth, and though I was continuously on my feet, I felt no hunger, thirst, or fatigue. Even as I deliberately traveled away from my point of entry, I feared I would find myself, through the very attempts I made to avoid my fate, drawing ever closer to my return home. Several days later, while charting the runes of a parallel path several chains over from my own, my alarm went off. My time to return home had passed, and yet here I remained.
I considered the implications of my finding. Perhaps, while the Labyrinth has infinite halls, they only mark the boundaries of possibility rather than unyielding inevitability; they demarcate what could be, not what must be. In which case, I will stay here and no one will follow; these notes that I now write will decay into dust and I will be forever forgotten. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the Labyrinth is absolute and prescriptive; my destiny must be followed under any circumstances, even though these halls lack the ability to bind my actions.
My watch now tells me that one hundred and thirty-four years have passed since I arrived in the Labyrinth. I have read the runes of thousands of lives, and experienced each as if they were my own. I have laid bare patterns that we could only guess at in our chaotic world—paradise gazed at through a smudged glass. Yet the only piece of knowledge the Labyrinth cannot provide me with is the outcome of my little experiment. The greatest secrets contained in these halls have become but cheap baubles in comparison. And so, every year, I return to this very spot, to find the one person who could answer my question. That person would be you, dear reader.
Was my story not familiar? Have you not also studied the exploits of Xu Fu? The fall of the Jianwen Emperor? Did you not spend your life carving runes upon the silicon wafers that divined your true name? Do you not find yourself, of all the infinite points in the Labyrinth, at the very spot where I arrived? If you have found my notes, then you and I are the same. My life has preceded yours by an interminable period of time, and yet our histories and the histories of our worlds are indistinguishable. You are proof of the perversion of the universe: the Labyrinth, like a stubborn child, insisted that someone arrive to fulfill the destiny that I rejected. It created someone new, someone perfectly identical to me, who must complete my purpose by returning to the world from which they came. It created you.
When I first returned to this point, here where I entered the labyrinth all those years ago, it was with quiet steps and stolen glances. Now I do so with jubilant shouts and stomping feet, hoping to see you overwhelmed by the Labyrinth’s splendor, just as I was when I arrived. I climb the walls, half-expecting to see you resting, watching your clock as I did, counting down the hours until your expected return, and wishing I could be the one to tell you that that rotten place has nothing for you. This is your home.
But I will wait no longer, for you have come too late. I ventured to the great wall of the horizon and discovered within it a tunnel. On the other side I found the answer to my question. The Labyrinth contains far more than cold stone and empty scratches. This is the last time I will ever revisit this spot; I go now beyond the wall, and I will not return. But I have not abandoned you, my dearest of friends. I leave you these notes so that you will not feel lost as I did when I arrived, and so that you may fully rejoice in the presence of the perfect knowledge that now embraces you.
Though we have lived identical lives, you need not follow the path that I have taken. So, now comes the time for you to make the choice that I was faced with all those years ago. You may take my notes and the discoveries you have made here and return home a hero, armed with far more knowledge than I could ever have brought to mine. But it will be to a world that lacks all freedom and possibility. You will return not as a scientist but as a slave, your soul forever lashed to the cold hard stone of this maze. Or, you could do as I have and spend your existence bathed in the immaculate truth of these halls, forcing the universe to deform itself for yet one cycle more, to recreate the entire history of the world just to bring us back into being.
I do not know what you will do, for your return home must be an inevitability, or it would not be written in the Labyrinth. But if you choose to stay, you will find us beyond the great horizon wall.
Endnotes
1. The third emperor of the Shang dynasty, whose reign was roughly thirty centuries ago, made a habit of requiring all visitors to burn a bone before he received them. Though a brilliant idea, his enthusiasm for the runes outpaced his court’s ability to extract information from them. When four visitors arrived in the sixth year of his reign, he failed to discover that these men were not envoys from a western kingdom as they claimed to be, nor did he learn that each carried a dose of poison that they intended to slip into his dinner that night. One of these men, the emperor’s successor, coincidentally became a major driving force behind the early development of the runic sciences after his assumption of the throne. Armed with the necessary knowledge that his predecessor lacked, he continued the bone-burning tradition, survived several attempts on his life, and reigned for forty years until dying peacefully of natural causes.
2. It was for a long time the case, however, that several runes within our vocabulary were inferred rather than empirically verified. In particular, runes that pertained to actions performed in the water, such as swimming or diving, went untested until relatively recent times. As one might imagine, these activities provide scant opportunity for the lighting of fires.
3. The reason an uncarved bone will produce a single rune and never a chain is that the fire has only one meaningful event in its existence: its burning. The single rune that it produces describes both its birth and death.
4. A transition between animate and inanimate (that is, death) entails the termination of the chain describing the creature’s life, and the commencement of a new rune chain that concerns itself with the events relating to the late creature’s corpse.
5. The temporal resolution (also known as the extent of “tiling”) of a subject’s timeline generally follows the “change of receptive state” rule. That is, whenever the object or creature undergoes a change that alters its manner of response to any future event, then a rune will exist that describes that change. As a result, the rune chain generated for any human is more densely packed with runes per unit of time than, say, a stone, which rarely undergoes meaningful changes in state or location.
6. That is not to say that Xu Fu never returned. In fact, he and the emperor were to meet years after his first voyage. Xu Fu told the emperor that the gifts he brought were insufficient and the creatures in the sea were too dangerous, so that yet another expedition would be required to retrieve the elixir. It speaks to the charisma of Xu Fu and the deep trust that Qin Shi Huang put in him, that he was once again provided not only with a similar set of cargo, but also a contingent of archers to guard their journey. This time Xu Fu never returned. However, there is convincing evidence that he arrived on the coast of Japan and was responsible for kindling the oracular (as well as agricultural) arts in those lands.
7. However, as people have engaged in such occupations for the entirety of human history with far weaker justifications, it could be argued that this event was hardly significant at all.
8. A more modern refinement of this theory suggests that the Labyrinth is not merely an instructive code that is semantically referred to, but that it is physically underlying every particle of our existence. When the first drop of rain in a storm falls upon the petal of a flower, the Labyrinth is immediately present, pulling the petal down under the weight of the drop, bending its stem. Just as a river will flow through the valley between the mountains rather than over their peaks, so must the flower and raindrop move according to their determined paths. In this variation, the onus of action is on the Labyrinth to act upon the world, rather than requiring every object to autonomously consult the information that it contains. This model is, of course, untestable and serves only as an aesthetic improvement upon the aforementioned formulation.
9. A labyrinth was adopted as the symbol for this theory because its path—unlike that of a maze which forks and thereby affords some level of choice to those who wander it—is completely linear. This was believed to correspond with the trajectory of an individual through life, which, while rife with branching points and opportunities for divergence at the outset, is only ever a single line in retrospect. The point is illustrated quite well in a story from The Rune-Carved Tree, a meandering work of poetry, fables, and essays by the Labyrinthian Oscar Brighton. The story of interest concerns a man who sets out into an untamed patch of woods. Expecting a difficult journey, he is surprised to find that his first step across the forest’s edge is supported by firm stone rather than peaty soil. Brushing aside the fallen leaves, the man sees an ancient cobblestone road, just a few feet wide, directly beneath his feet. Pleased with his good fortune, the man continues his walk through the woods, his feet always falling precisely in the center of the little road. After several minutes of finding his every step preempted, his pleasure turns to disquiet, and the man takes a sharp turn as a means of escape from the path. He runs circles around trees, jumps over rivers, and dives into caves, but always finds the little road squarely beneath his feet. Finally, he laments, “How can I know that my choices are mine if I cannot go two ways at once?” Later, Brighton sums up quite nicely, “…in short, the world is a labyrinth masquerading as a maze.”
10. The thin brewer, fearful that his adversary might rise up out of the water and strike him dead should the prophecy be contradicted, continuously drank the goat’s milk until his opponent’s body was retrieved and his death confirmed.
11. One French scholar, a prisoner during the Hundred Years’ War, was blessed with both capture by a very talkative English jailor who recited to him the brewers’ tale, and an ample amount of time to idle away during his imprisonment. Out of curiosity, the French scholar took it upon himself to generate as many permutations of the brewers’ duel as possible, in the style of the carver in the story. By the time of his death several decades later, he had generated over fifty-thousand runes describing unique elm tree-related duels, all of which generated productive oracle chains. This was long brandished as evidence that the future must be infinite in order to contain a seemingly unlimited number of duels. However, in the eighteenth century, a cult arose that found in the enactment of Labyrinth-ordained events a means of meditation and worship. They became particularly fond of performing the many non-lethal variants of the duel, which curiously made up the vast majority. From then on, a convincing argument could be made that the actions of this cult are the reason so many fruitful variants of the duel could be produced in the first place.
12. What continues to vex runic researchers to this day is why the Labyrinth seems to privilege some events over others with more concise runes. For example, if one examines the chain generated by the rune containing only the “man” radical, one will receive a description of the life of a cartographer in thirteenth century Italy. Why was this particular person blessed by the Labyrinth with such a simple description while nearly every other being was designated an immensely complex name? Some have proposed that the subjects described by simpler runes are those that are more archetypal representations of the rune’s meaning (in which case the Italian cartographer was the manliest man in all of history). Alternatively, some have proposed that the Labyrinth only includes information in a rune that it considers relevant to its subject. Therefore, perhaps the Labyrinth considered the cartographer supremely unremarkable and lacking all other defining characteristics.
13. The Argentinian carver Jorge Luis Borges resurrected subjectivist ideology to propose an interesting revision in "Nueva refutación del tiempo" (Sur issue 115, 1944). I present here what I believe to be a qualitatively consistent summary: A man walks home every night through a dusty corner of his city, every time thinking over the course of the day's events, whistling a tune, and gazing upon the water that flows through the canals. Let us suppose that on two nights, separated by the span of many years, the man happens to reflect on the events of the day and, while they are substantively different, they evoke an identical set of judgments and psychological states. Suppose that he whistles the same tune and, while of course his lips are aged and the contours of the melody are slightly altered in his recollection, the song produces the same feeling of homesickness. And although, all those years before, he gazed upon a canal that was filled with water and silt that are now buried under inches of stone, or submerged in an ocean trench, the waterway reflects the full, radiant moon in much the same fashion as it did so long ago. To this man, there are no distinguishing characteristics between those two nights. Although the events that preceded this night and those that come to follow may differ, the two points in time are, to him, completely identical. Thus, they represent one singular moment and may therefore map to the same rune within the Labyrinth. However, even the author, in designing this argument, seems to recognize that this position is no less repulsive than the subjectivist view it seeks to revise. To privilege the conscious experience of a human above the events that occur in the external world is blatant and Ptolemaic hubris.
14. Technically, a true name could refer to any rune whose subject is known with certainty. However, any given rune is only capable of generating a record of the subject’s life subsequent to the event described by the rune; rune chains can only extend forward in time. As carvers are interested in generating the complete oracle chain that narrates a subject’s entire life, the term “true name” is therefore generally reserved for the rune that describes that person's birth.
15. Xu Fu, in an incredible stroke of luck, seems to have stumbled upon the true name of his neighboring millet farm.
16. See the Qing era compilation Ming Shi, vol. 111.
17. At the outset, the emperor’s prime minister (a renowned sycophant) insisted that the researchers use descriptors such as “wisest man to ever live who rides upon beams of sunlight” or “eminent ruler of all creation for eternity”, but these runes failed to predict so much as what the emperor would eat the next morning for breakfast. Fortunately, the minister had mercifully little ability to read the runes, and so the researchers soon took to secretly ignoring his suggestions.
18. Though quite drastic, this practice was common in rural areas of that time, particularly as a substitute for formal judicial proceedings. A digit or limb of both the accused and accuser were removed, the flesh peeled away, and the bones burned in a fire. The information contained in the runes was used to generate identifiers for each party, and an oracle reading of the supposed crime was generated. Should the bones predict that the accused had indeed acted as purported, they were found guilty and punished appropriately. During the Salem witch trials, this method was independently developed, but sadly only to confirm guilt after the punishment was already meted out.
19. The emperor had the bones retrieved and, after they were interpreted, fused the joints together with gold. He used this charred and cracked skeletal arm as a scepter for the remainder of his rule.
20. Had this gambit failed, the carvers had already prepared several increasingly gruesome contingency plans. Several members of the group vehemently believed that a person’s true name was inscribed upon the brain in its sulci and gyri, and were fully prepared to remove the crown of the emperor’s skull to inspect his cortex. Fortunately such measures were not needed, not only because this would have spelled near certain death for the emperor (while the medical knowledge at the time was sufficient to keep him alive, the plaster cast the carvers intended to create of his brain would have certainly killed him), but because the idea is utter nonsense. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that anatomy may reveal an individual’s true name had arisen independently multiple times throughout history, most notably, with the extraction of Edward Teach’s brain to discover the location of his supposed hidden treasure. The only reported “successful” reading of runes from a brain involved a Cornish man whose skull was crushed in a wagon-related incident. A local carver who stumbled upon the man’s remains claimed to have found inscribed in his brain a perfect description of the events of the Battle of Waterloo (after the fact, of course). Unsurprisingly, the brain was never subjected to independent review; the eccentric carver claimed the brain was carried off by a murder of crows just after his examination of the organ was complete.
21. The historical record is silent about why these generals would betray the emperor, but speculation abounds. Some say that the emperor, initially unwilling to sacrifice his arm for the project, exhumed his ancestors to burn their remains instead. Upon discovering this, the generals (both of whom were the emperor’s uncles) were furious and colluded with Zhu Di to remove him from the throne. Others argue that one of the two generals had a secret but deep-seated hatred for oracular arts, as, many years before, a royal carver had predicted the death of the general’s mother but failed to prevent it. As revenge, the general plotted to destroy the temple, the greatest work the carvers would ever produce (yet this reads more as a self-pitying explanation on the part of the carvers). The most parsimonious explanation posits that the generals feared the emperor would amass too much power if he developed the ability to read the future, as they themselves had ambitions for the throne.
22. Several aspects of this account make it difficult to believe. The emperor was missing his left arm, so even a heavily charred corpse would likely have been easy to identify, not to mention that the cracks that appeared upon the emperor’s bones would resemble those which were used to generate his true name. Second, the publicly circulated version of the rune that prophesied the emperor’s death was found to contain a minor syntactical error. While officially attributed to a transcriptional mistake, some claimed that the rune was a complete fabrication on the part of the new government, and that his predecessor (the rightful emperor) still lived. These rumors would not be any great cause for concern were it not for independent reports that the Jianwen emperor was residing in the southern reaches of the kingdom disguised as a Buddhist monk. So worrisome were these accounts that Zhu Di sent several expeditions to search for the emperor, including the wide-ranging voyages of Zheng He that reached the Persian Gulf. It is puzzling that such an undirected search was undertaken, as, if the oracle chain indeed predicted that the emperor still lived, it would also reveal his whereabouts. Perhaps the remaining carvers who interpreted the runes remained loyal to their former ruler and deliberately concealed his location.
23. While we lack a complete transcription of the emperor’s true name, we do have verbal accounts of several of the radicals it contained. As it turns out, the very pursuit of his true name had a large bearing on its composition; one component of the rune identified him as “one who has futilely employed many rune carvers.”
Kenny Kuhn is a American neuroscientist who is residing in Austria while he completes his PhD. He is interested not just in how the acquisition of knowledge produces transformation, but also how the natural world might respond to being picked apart, examined, and revealed.