Sheepish apologies to Borges.
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The story of Daniel Hasch’s rise from computer engineer to the wealthiest human being in history is as common as any American myth now. In fact, many of the stories regarding his early career are apocryphal at best, and destructive at worst. His success is attributed to luck bordering on divine intervention, but also, far less reputably, his development of a revolutionary program designed to make market predictions, on which he supposedly spent a significant portion of his wealth keeping hidden. The latter theory is denied most vehemently by other engineers who say that such serendipitous predictions would have been impossible without culling virtually every factor that could conceivably have affected economic trends. To make matters more unbelievable, he did not make one fortunate investment, but many throughout his career. One expert was quoted as saying “a program like that is tantamount to getting financial advice from God”. The existence of such a program is also denied by the reclusive inheritors of his estate after his suicide.
Much has been written in an attempt to grapple with the mind-bending good fortune bestowed on one man, with no education or natural ability to recommend him. I believe I’ve come on an explanation, but I doubt it will satisfy.
His first wife, Julia Lynn Cost, was a librarian before they were married. It’s a sign of our friendship that she chose to divulge this to me as opposed to the long line of journalists, historians, and the curious who have come to her for answers or blessings on their financial endeavors, as if she were some kind of banker’s Holy Virgin. As far as I know, she didn’t tell her sons or her widower, either. I met her by chance at an art gallery, and we became close friends. (Not lovers, as the tabloids scurrilously suggested; that honor was bestowed on only one man after Daniel–and a dear friend–who understandably desires anonymity.) I was careful not to broach the topic of her ex-husband. Some time after her brain cancer was diagnosed as terminal, she called me to ask that I write a story about the origins of Daniel’s wealth. I agreed, though now I think that promise will damage my reputation, or worse.
She told her story laboriously; at this point, she was heavily medicated. She was sickly, small, and weak. She looked aged to me for the first time. I worried at first that this might be some kind of narcotic dementia, but but her mind was clear. Or it was, until the last interview.
The computer lab at the library she worked at was being renovated, and one of the men clearing out the lab of equipment showed her an old laptop he had found under a desk, tucked in a corner. She thought it had been left by some unfortunate and forgetful patron years ago, and set it aside. It had nothing to identify it, not the manufacturer or any kind of serial number, just the letters “AXT” etched roughly on the bottom. It sat in the lost and found box for a few months, until she decided she didn’t like seeing it go to waste. She said (with a joyless laugh) that her then-boyfriend, Daniel, might have been able to at least make use of its parts. She took it home, and out of curiosity, opened it. It started up without delay to a white screen and a black cursor blinking in the corner. After trying unsuccessfully to get it to show her anything she was familiar with, she typed some gibberish, struck Enter, and it responded with “invalid question.” (At this point, she asked me to close the shades and the door to her room.) She typed the question “what is the capital of Portugal?” It responded: “Lisbon.”
“I thought it was some kind of silly game the owner was playing before he lost it,” she told me, “so I kept asking it questions, and it kept answering. I was surprised at how comprehensive it was at first, but I wasn’t afraid until I asked it my own name and it told me. I started asking it questions about myself, and it was right about everything, including some things that I had never told anyone. I asked it questions about Danny, too, and it knew all of them.” She stopped at this point, and looked at me. Maybe she was looking for signs of incredulity, but I didn’t speak. At the time I didn’t doubt her. I had known her too long at that point to think of her inventing something so fabulous. There was nothing to gain, but credibility and respect to lose. In the years I’ve known her, she’s been nothing if not level-headed and serious. She watched me, and I waited for her to continue.
“I called Danny to come over, and we stayed up late, asking it anything we could think of. It answered all of the questions we asked. It told us it was called the Index, and was a collection of all facts. We asked about history, science, people we knew, even silly things like… at one point I wrote down some numbers on a piece of paper, and it told us what I had written. We found out it wouldn’t predict the future, and we had to be specific with our questions, or else it would give error messages, but anything about what had already exists and has happened it knew, and knew every detail. Danny asked it what dark matter was, for example. It told us, and it was accurate, years before scientists had discovered its nature.”
At this point she gave me the diary she had been keeping at the time, in which she recorded some of the questions she and Daniel had asked, as well as the answers they received.
“I distinctly remember one point where we realized it had been on for days without needing to be recharged. There was no power cord, and no place to plug one in if there was. Anyway, we spent days talking about what we could do with it, and that’s about when he had thought of designing a program to ask it questions and produce predictions about the market. That’s the infamous program everyone says he had. It took years, and he wasn’t finished with it until after we were married, but he did it.”
At this point I interjected. “So, you have a computer with everything on it, the first thing you two did was make money?”
She sighed and said “don’t think I haven’t been down this road, Mark. We really didn’t understand the implications at the time. We just wanted a good life. What would you have done?”
I felt foolish for asking.
She couldn’t talk for long without getting tired, so I ended the interview in favor of lighter conversation. When I returned the next day, she seemed a bit healthier. She was sitting up, and didn’t wince so often. I let myself hope, as I believe many do when a loved one is suffering. She began as soon as I set down the recorder.
“The only questions we couldn’t get answers to were about who had designed it, or who owned it before us,” she said. “When I asked, it printed out a huge jumble of words and numbers and symbols I had never seen, and a few phrases in different languages. One in particular was in English…” she trailed off. “It was something about pyramids, or time… I can’t remember. Anyway, we couldn’t make heads or tails of the response. We also couldn’t tell how much it had printed, we couldn’t find the beginning. When we asked it, it said it had printed 10^30 lines, or something huge like that. Danny didn’t pay much attention, but I was curious, so I kept asking. But it almost seemed like it was trying to be confusing. For example, I asked it ‘what is the meaning of the response to the question “who designed the Index”?’ It would say something like ‘the meaning is the response to the question ‘who designed the Index?’. I had to let it go. Every time I got close to the answer, it would respond with that mess. I think about that most often. I wish we had recorded it.”
“What happened to the Index?” I asked.
“This was after our separation, but I think Danny tried to ship it to some mansion in Europe, where he wanted to retire. The plane went down in the ocean. I think that’s why he… you know. It became part of him. He was so protective of it. Near the end of our marriage, he wouldn’t even let me see it. Our boys still don’t know about it.”
We sat in silence for a while.
The next few days were simply visiting. She was losing her strength quickly. She said that no amount of research she conducted privately could unearth its origins, or the meaning of the letters “AXT”. The two of them told no one about the Index. I am the third person to have learned of it, barring the existence of any previous owners who, if they knew of it, did nothing with the knowledge. For what it’s worth, I believe her, even in lieu of our final conversation, which was to come about a week after the first interview. When I arrived at the hospital, one of the nurses stopped me, and warned me in a quiet voice that Julia had been feverish and troubled for the past 24 hours or so. When I walked in, she was covered in sweat. Her husband was there, who she asked to leave. She was difficult to hear, but I realized she was trying to tell me about a dream she had. Or rather, a dream she had experienced the night before she discovered the Index, and had only recently remembered. Her dream placed her on the edge of a ravine or a cliff, and she couldn’t see the bottom of it. The earth was dark red, rocky and deserted. There were rocks of varying sizes as far as she could see. Everything was dim, but the sun was red and much larger than a normal sun. She told me she felt as if she were on some other planet. She could see far to her right, on the edge of the cliff, was what she insisted–more than once, as if I refused to believe her–a temple. It was like a needle, tall and extremely thin, visible (though barely) against the darkening purple sky. It was made of black material “older and more imposing than stone,” she said. She had the impression that it went deep down under the earth. She said it was “like a tower breaking out from hell and penetrating the earth.” When she reached it, she looked through the arched entrance, which was many times taller than a person. Inside she saw a man, huge and thin, draped in torn cloth, twenty feet tall. He was writing on a scroll with extremely long, thin fingers. She started shaking as she told me. I told her to stop; begged her, really. I didn’t tape this conversation. I couldn’t calm her. All I could understand after that point was that this tall man looked at her, and said something, but she was too upset to speak clearly. Nurses came in and sedated her. She died that night.
***
I think about the Index often. In the right hands, it could have propelled mankind to a perfect utopia. If it contained all knowledge about how the universe functions, there would have been no limit to what humanity could build or accomplish. We could have overcome every limit in every facet of life by asking the right question. We could have staved off the heat death of the universe. We could have become ten billion gods filling the sky with such light that has never been seen or could be seen in any other reality. What are the odds of such a device coming into existence, apparently spontaneously? If the chances of it existing are non-zero, then it had to have happened, in at least one of the infinite number of possible universes. It happened in ours, and it landed in the hands of a man whose best idea was to use it as a dowsing rod. No one must say that, presented with the apple in the garden, they would have done better. There is no fathoming unlimited gain and unlimited loss.
