Gold Stars (draft)

Disclaimer: This story is fictionalized and should not be taken as historical.


There is a guy, let's just call him Delta. Delta was a fairly plain guy. He would go from one class to the next, sitting in the halls near wherever his next class would be. When it was nearing time for class to start, he would go in and sit down.

He didn't usually do much, just sit and pass the time as classes went on. Teachers would talk, and he might half pay attention. Other times, he might write down thoughts in a notebook he carried. He didn't usually think too much about classwork, or what the teacher was saying, there were more interesting things to think about. As thoughts came up, he might write them down, or maybe pay attention to what the teacher was saying if it seemed mildly interesting, or if the teacher started to make a fuss over his lack of paying attention. At the time, he had a passing interest in linguistics, and writing systems. To keep some thoughts to himself, he had used his own system, an anglicised combination of Greek and Cyrillic writing, spelling most English words phonetically. Anyone who cared could probably figure it out and read his notes, but to the casual observer it was incoherent. More something to foil the casual observers who might invade his space and world of thought. He also experimented a few times with using Hangul and Kana, but these were harder to use and a worse fit to English phonology, so he mostly stuck with his modified hybrid of the Greek and Cyrillic writing systems for obfuscating his notes, as it was good enough for the purpose.

He wrote of machines, and code, things which at that time beyond his grasp, but he was still inclined to imagine them; distracting himself from all the pain and anxiety of the world around him. The other students would make noise, throwing wads of paper at each other, or throwing pencils like darts. The lights were often unpleasantly bright, the only comfort here being when the teachers would turn of the main lights to use the overhead projectors.

Things were fairly repetitive, classes mostly always showing the same thing. He might look up in a math class, see they are still talking about "y=m*x+b, solve for x" or similar, and look back down. It was obvious enough to him that "x=(y-b)/m", and in most examples the numbers were simple. This didn't leave much room for him to care. While, "y=a*x^2+b*x+c", it was the same basic situation. The calculation was slightly longer, and there may be two answers, but still not much thought needed. He would then return to his notes.

Every so often, tests would come along, and he would do the tests. His scores on tests were usually good, so teachers would mostly let it slide that he didn't pay attention and that assigning homework was basically a waste of time and paper.

The other students mostly ignored him as well, more inclined to talk amongst themselves. Delta didn't have many notable skills, apart from a few novelty abilities. He could repeat some long numeric sequnces. Traditional examples, like pi, involved mostly rote memorization, so he didn't use those. However, some others, like powers of two or fibonacci numbers, could be handled by recursively adding numbers, and by the time the numbers get big enough that the addition becomes difficult, most listeners would have already long since lost interest. Similarly, with constants like pi, practically speaking, one very rarely needs more than the fist 10 or 15 digits. Say, for example, after 3.14159265358979 or so, one has already saturated the accuracy of double precision, so any more digits after this were largely irrelevant.

Some time later, he would get a moment of surprise from some other students in a class by casually performing a matrix multiply using mental arithmetic and then writing the output matrix on paper. But, mostly he avoided this sort of thing as the sort of attention it would bring was something he found rather annoying, and often he would rather not be bothered.

He didn't feel as much need to use scratch paper, as he could just sort of imagine a scratchpaper and then imagine the numbers on it. Then he could just proceed to write out the result on the physical paper. There were limits though, as this sort of imaginary scratchpaper was very volatile and its contents prone to disappear if one gets distracted.

Though, in most cases, if there started being too much attention on him, it was better to just play dumb, reduced back to being "yet another stupid kid". Then everyone would stop paying attention to him, and everything could return to normal.

Like with language, it often wasn't too hard for him to figure out what text in other languages was saying, using what words he did know to guess the meaning of the rest. Would often work across various European languages, most of which had words in common with English, or mutations on otherwise known words, leaving it mostly Asian languages as incomprehensible. There were subdivisions based on writing system, such as some of the languages using Greek or Cyrillic letters, but this was more of a mild inconvenience than in insurmountable hurdle. However, when it came to language, eventually he came to a conclusion on the matter: I am American, and Americans speak English, only English, good enough. Where, among Americans, their agressive monolingualism is almost a thing of pride in and of itself.

Similarly, to claim to know any language beyond English, he would need to learn the language properly, and well enough to be able to hold a conversation in the language. For the most part, it didn't seem worth the hassle, and being known as being multilingual would diminish his status as a proper American.

His language ability also had a flaw, in that what language skills and understanding he could get from it was often purely temporary, and required a pre-exposure process consisting of looking at examples of the language. This differs from a properly learned language in that actually learning the language doesn't require a pre-warm step.

This is almost kind of similar to when using an unfamiliar programming language, one needs to look at examples to gain an understanding of the basic syntax and features. Howerver, if one uses a language enough, they will learn it to a point where they no longer need to see examples to get going.


Well, he did have other skills. In another class, there was a girl who liked doing puzzles. Each puzzle she did, she did slowly. One time, they had Delta work with her on the puzzle. He looked at the picture, and the pieces, and proceeded to pick up each piece and put it down where he saw it went in the image. After a little while, there were no pieces left, and the puzzle was fully assembled. However, the girl, she was not pleased, as he had effectively deprived her of the experience of assembling her puzzle for herself; and the teacher didn't ask him to help with any more of her puzzles after this. Otherwise, she would speak in terms of movie references, and would surround herself with imagery from the movies she most enjoyed.

She was particularly obsessed with a series of 3 movies revolving around the exploits of a tall golden robot, a short white and blue robot, and a main hero with a light sword; as they fly around in space in an effort to overthrow a tyrannical space government. She would then reference these movies often.

Some other people in the class would pester her about her odd ways of speaking on the occasions when she did speak, and for her being so weird in general, but the teacher would try to discourage them from doing so.

Freed from the social obligation of helping with the puzzle, Delta then returned to his notes. He did notice that he started having an odd feeling towards the girl, but didn't really act on it at the time. Years later, he might realize that he wished he could have spent more time with her, and is left to wonder where her life eventually led to, but this was not yet that time. Though personally, he never really got that much into puzzles either.


Delta often didn't feel like he had much in common with those around him.

He could remember back to the past. Long ago, he was put in among others that looked like him. They screeched and howled. The teacher towerd over them all, stooping down to show them cards with letters and digits. Delta wasn't terribly interested, he had seen these before, so just told the teacher what the smaller text under the large letter said, mostly the copyright and publisher. Her expression suddenly changed, from her initial cheerfullness to a more serious expression.

She then just sort of picked him up, and set him by the side. She then stepped out of the room. After she did so, a girl in the class got up and started trying to write her name on the chalkboard, getting the first few letters, then getting confused by which letter came next and giving up. He was then left with the odd realization that the others in the class didn't know how to read.

A moment later came back with the school librarian. The teacher then asked Delta to follow the librarian, and he was led to another room and sat down in front of a computer (II/e). The teacher turned it on, with a switch on the rear. A moment later, there was a momentary series of knocking sounds from the disk drive, a short beep, and then it was a screen with little more than a "]". He tried to type something, but was left with little more than a bewildering "?SYNTAX ERROR". The teacher pulled out a book, opening it to a page with some text printed in a box in a similar font to that seen on the screen.

The text said:
  10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
  20 GOTO 10
  RUN

She pointed to the text, and he proceeded to type it. It was awkward, as he had to find the keys, but soon enough, he managed. After doing so, the screen was filled with "HELLO WORLD!".

On the "II/e", also if a disk way put into the drive before turning on the power, it would boot the program from the disk. There were various programs available, for example, a game where one leads a covered wagon on its grand quest of heading westward, but almost invariably no one makes it.

Not long after, he was taken to a large building. Glass walls, and few things that seemed familiar. He was taken to a brightly lit room with a one way mirror, where some man he never saw before asked him some questions and showed him pictures. Some depicted colors, others shapes, and Delta answered as he did. He had little idea what was going on, but soon enough it was over. On the way out, they stopped briefly by another girl. She was taller than Delta, but smaller than the others, and she tried to say something, then mostly ended up depicting the looks and behavior of a rabbit with her fingers, using two of hwe fingers for its ears, and her fist for the rest of the rabbit. She then used her other hand to represent the ground, and managed to make her hand move in a way to resemble a rabbit hopping around on the grass. For a brief moment, it had almost seemed as if her hands had become the rabbit and the field. But, just as soon as it started, it was over, and they moved along (and he would never again know anything more about who she was).

Then he was back in classes, but the teachers didn't really try to teach him much and instead just left him to mess around with the computers. But, much past using the LINE command on the first computer to draw boxes and similar, his interest started to wear thin.

Not long after, a girl also appeared in the library, and was also tasked with doing things on the computer. She had blonde hair, and was also overly direct in her words and actions and also prone to speak loudly.

At some point, someone else came in to talk to Delta and the girl, and they were taken to a different room. In this room, they had a different computer set up, slightly newer. This computer had a GUI with a black and white screen, and a mouse with a single button. They were shown how to click on the icons. One could click on the disk drive, and would then be presented with a "Finder" window, where one could locate into an MPW folder, in which there were various programs. They were shown how to use an editor, and there was a shell where one could type commands.

They were then instructed to type in a small program:
  PROGRAM Hello;
  BEGIN
    WriteLn("Hello");
  END.

After which, the man showed the commands to turn the program into something that could run. The process was difficult for Delta and the girl, as it was awkward to use and neither was particularly skilled at making it work. This computer also posed the new challenge of dealing with the difference between upper and lower case letters, among other issues.

This computer (a "Mac II") consisted of a rectangular box, with the monitor sitting on top, separate from the computer itself. The keyboard sat in front, with its spiraled cable. The mouse having a straight wire.

This computer had several drives, one internal 3.5" floppy drive, where the icon would appear upon inserting a disk, and dragging the disk to the trash can would eject the disk. There was another large brick of a drive plugged into the computer from a port on the back, using a fairly wide connector similar to that of a parallel printer cable, but with the same connector on both end. The drives each had two ports on the back. After the first drive, another cable was use to connect a second drive. This drive had a removable disk. It was a fairly large disk, resembling the 3.5" floppy, but very much larger. It had a translucent case, and inside one could see a disk that sort of resembled a CD, but with a pattern of rainbows on its surface. When a disk was inserted into this drive, it would insert itself most of the way, but part of the disk would hang out of the front of the drive. As with the floppy, inserting this disk would cause an icon to appear on the desktop. To remove the disk, one would first drag the icon to the trash. Unlike the floppy, it did not eject by itself, but was necessary to push a button on the front of the drive. However, this button was very stiff, and one had to push very hard before it would release the disk (which even itself was large and heavy for them).

Neither Delta nor the girl had much luck with the tasks the man had given to them, and getting the programs to compile was difficult. His patience didn't seem to last all that long with either of them. The man was not pleased, and took both of them back to the library before then having a talk with the librarian.

Thereafter, the man and the computer disappeared and were not seen again. Though, the librarian seemingly went and got a IIGS for them to mess with, which was sort of like the Mac in terms of its GUI, but had a ProDOS icon that could be used to get back to a BASIC shell or similar.


Some time later, B's parents had gotten a computer of their own, and he began to play around on this. This computer was different. When starting up, it would instead have a screen that said "Windows for Workgroups" in a more vibrant full color display, and the new novelty of a CD-ROM drive. He then proceeded to play games on the computer, and began messing around with QBasic (after someone else had showed it to him).

Using the GUI was itself a challenge at first, faced with some amount of uncertainty and peril. It didn't take long before he managed to click the down arrow on "Program Manager", reducing it to an icon on a gray background. If he clicked on the icon, it would pull up a menu with options like "Restore, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close" but he didn't understand what these options meant or would do, so was faced with a sense of panic that he had messed something up.

However, with more exposure, he eventually figured out how to use it.


School continued to be chaotic, him sometimes spending time in class, or interacting with other people there, and was still expected to go outside at the designated times. At other times, he was left to himself on computers.

He coninued to poke around in this, and after some time began to learn a C instead. It was difficult for him to make it do much at first, but eventually he started to make progress.

Here, one would edit the C files in EDIT, then use commands like "tcc" and "tlink" on the DOS shell to make programs work, now starting to understand the things that had eluded him years earlier.

Similarly, one of the companies that made games he liked playing had ended up releasing code for them on a public ftp server. He looked at the code, mostly C with some amount of assembly language in the mix, trying to understand what sorts of mysteries it contained. He couldn't get the game rebuilt from source with his copy of the C compiler. But, still it remained, an artifact of mystery seemingly created by people far smarter than himself. By looking at this artifact, he hoped to understand some of its secrets for himself.

The game itself consisted of a world made of large cubes. The cubes mostly represented walls, with doors that would slide open when interacted with. Some walls were also special, and interacting with the wall would cause the cube to slide away to reveal secret areas. The player could run around in this world of cubes, and whenever an enemy was encountered, one could shoot at them. Also there were various golden artifacts the player could collect to increase their score, each item with its associated sound effects when picked up.

He came to understand that the game data mostly consisted of 4096 byte chunks, and each wall image was 64x64 and stored in these files. With the maps consisting on several 64x64 byte planes that were RLE compressed to save space.

By then, the same company had become more well known for a newer game, which now had angled walls, multiple floor heights. Here, the player would go and shoot at various types of monsters in the space around what was, in theory, Mars. He tried to understand how this game worked as well.

He tried to write some of his own code to mimic the former game, getting as far as drawing a cube with the same wall texture. This attempt, while the cube looked similar, was painfully slow. He soon after abandoned this, realizing that if one cube is already slow, a world of them would be unusable. He didn't really understand how the original game worked though, so his attempt did a significant amount of math calculating and drawing each vertical column, contributing to the slowness of the thing he had written. At the time, he also did not realize the extreme slowness of the various "math.h" functions on the compiler he was using, where every floating point operation was faked in software using 16 bit integer math. There would have been another option to the compiler to have it assume the use of doing floating point operations using native instructions, but he did not know these things at the time.

Interactions with others were awkward, and he had relatively few friends. Of those few he did have, things generally ended up going badly between them.

In some ways his life had already began to decline by this stage, as allthough he had tried to avoid showing it openly, he was already falling into issues with substance use and existential despair. Life started to seem meaningless, and one of the few friends he did have at the time, was lost when this side of himself was revealed openly. It being hard to hold everything together when one finds themselves steadily sliding into a nihilist worldview for which it would be well over a decade before they could start to recover. At times, the only way one could really carry on was in trying to find momentary distraction, it being a long time before he would regain a grasp on the value of the created meaning of his everyday experience and of the feelings of those around him. It didn't really help matters that seemingly all that anyone around him had to offer seemed like little more than a sort of naive absolutism.

In time he would come to realize there is no malice in the absurd, as there can't be malice in that which does not exist. At first, the void may seem scary and bleak, but in time one may realize there is nothing there to be afaid of, as there, there is nothing at all. But, much as Descartes said, "I think therefore I am" as a way to verify the reality of ones' own existence, one may find that the value of the little things within ones' own experience is enough to verify the meaning in the world around them, and by extension, reality as a whole. One needing neither an absolute reality or absolute worth, as value can still exist even if just within a tiny bubble floating within an endless void of nothingness.

But, at this time, this was the beginning of many hard years, and he did not want the others around him to realize just how far he had fallen. It didn't take much, often just a momentary slip of his mask of normality, and others would be scared right the hell off.

But, even his own experience of his own existence was not entirely immune.


He didn't really understand the thoughts or feelings of others very well, so often everything was more a thing of seeing the various patterns of behavior and trying to predict what would happen next. Then one might try to walk down the various branches of the tree far enough to predict whatever action would give the desired outcome. For the most part, he didn't want to be dealing with any of this stuff, so the often optimal outcome was the one that allowed him to get back home with the minimum amount of fuss, which mostly involved staying quiet for the most part, and acting nominally friendly when interaction was needed (largely unrelated to any actual feelings related to the person in question).

To some extent, he was able to fracture himself into multiple layers. He had an outer self that would manage physical activity and social interactions. His outer self would mostly follow commands, and was largely able to operate independently, interrupting his inner self whenever it needed help with something it couldn't figure out on its own.

His inner self could then largely exist in a space within his mind, in the world of imagination. This space was 3D, like the outer world, except that in this space he could pull objects into existence and play out scenarios. This world was almost like the world of dreams, except that whenever he was asleep the things in this space would play out on their own (as his main conscousness essentially shuts down, along with his outer self). His emotional self also existed within this space, partly as a separate entity, but also tied to the environment of the space itself. Sometimes, there were others in this space, more like copies of himself that could operate semi independently, sometimes with their own thoughts and memories (that would later remerge back into his own collective memory).

The inner selves do not have bodies, and don't really communicate using language, rather thought is shared between them, or concepts or objects are materialized within this shared imagination space.

At times, it seemed like cognitive abilities existed more like machines, which could misbehave and fail at times, and those standing around in this space would need to get involved and deal with issues as they arose. Though, in these stats, most often it was the natural language system failing, at which point the outer self would lose the ability to speak or understand language effectively. This might require the inner self to step back out and take over for the outer self, and try to reroute the streams of thought around the misbehaving component until issues could be resolved. Usually, if taken out of the loop for a while, the component resetting and returning to normal operation.

Most senses also broke down into components and layers, to which they were to some extent aware of. Something like vision then exists as a series of layers stacked on top of each other, some layers closer to the raw sensory experience, and others dealing more in abstact objects and concepts (like those seen in the inner space).

The inner space doesn't really look like the outer world, with objects often depicted as a sort of high contrast monochrome. There are a limited range of other colors used, so the color space is more like: Black, White, Gray, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. While more colors can exist in this space, using more colors or more shades of colors tends to make the objects unstable and more prone to spontaneously disintegrate. However, high contrast monochrome objects are easier to keep stable within the imagination space. For the most part, the background is an endless black void, and objects often resemble white wireframe like outlines drawn like low res pixel art.

Text is often present as well, and itself follows similar rules. It is placed on monospace grids, and in a form reselbling an 8x8 pixel ASCII font. In this space, may also hold chunks of code or pages of text. Sometimes one can also store memories of chunks of binary data in the form of hexadecimal representations.


But, from the perspective of outer world, he could look back at himself in a mirroe, and question for himself if, truely, there was anyone in there. Like, it didn't seem like he existed apart from the void, he himself was the void. One may see everything they are, including their own thoughts and emotions, as little more than an elaborate illusion, little more than a cloud of subatomic particles. Not really an easy thought for one to deal with at that age, nor something they are really allowed to admit to others. All they are allowed to do is carry on and pretend like everything is fine, even if at times they would almost rather just end it all, and end the great sham that is their own existence.

But, even as much as he saw into the void, he was left to realize that it would still hurt those around him. At times, it seems like even his pets knew what he was thinking and would try to talk him out of it. Like, even if his existence was an illusion, at least in some sense, the pain was still real. So, as it stood, the show went on.



Also, around this time, interactions with girls started to become different.

There was one girl he knew that he lived nearby, and they rode the bus together and got on and off at the same stop. One day, she pulled him off somewhere near her house, and wanted to do the thing of revealing their anatomy to each other. He went along at first, but it soon became more awkward. She then didn't want to just stop there, wanting to be able to handle it for herself. He didn't want this, so started backing off from her. At this point, she then got grabby, and he had little choice but to leave. She had then apparently also been claiming that he had been making advances towards her instead. They didn't really talk or interact any further after this incident.

Another time, he was near a girl who was older than him, who had started developing some more adult like features. When no one else was around, she had apparently started to get "hot and bothered" by him, and started trying to convince him to go off and sleep with her. She said things to try to diminish the nature of the activity, but he felt weirded out, and didn't really want to go along with it. They seemed to have been getting along OK before this point, just unexpectedly she started getting weird towards him. Though, afterwards, things mostly continued on as normal (though he didn't see her around again after this).

From then on, for many more years, interactions with girls would continue to be weird, and these were not the only or final times these sorts of incidents would happen. Some strategies to limit their occurance being to avoid being overly friendly and also to avoid situations where one would be alone with someone. Usually, after the occurence of such an instance, they would become quiet and avoidant.

Though, maybe luckily or unluckily, depending on perspective, this sort of thing mostly went away after high school. After entering adulthood, there were generally no more "grabby" girls, mostly just disinterested ones.

One time during highschool, there was a girl who decided to become particularly agressive about this. She made multiple attempts, and started trying to convince him openly in the middle of class. One time, the teacher was nearby and overheard. After the girl had first went into a thing of talking about guys with mullets, she then started trying to convince him to go to bed with her, after which he turned down her advances. The teacher had a visibly shocked expression after hearing this (though, unclear if this was because of the brazen nature of the girl's comments, or because he had turned her down).


Though, weirdly, not long after this, a guy in the same class also decided to try to make an advance on him, also needing to be turned down. This guy could be noted mostly for being oddly effemite and also for wearing a very tight shirt (with a perm like hairstyle).


He didn't really want to admit it openly, nor even fully realize it for himself at this stage that it was unusual, in that he wasn't actually particularly interested in the idea of physical intimacy in the first place. To what extent arousal existed, it was often more of a physiological thing, or something to be seen in an abstract sense, rather than something to be acted upon.


Though, further back in the past, not long after the incidents with the first 2 girls. His parents then moved to a new place, and after some excursions I will not go into, he then found himself back in classes with the others. The experience was unplesant, but each year the others became more capable. He was also told not to tell anything about what happened at the former school. Here, they would no longer just let him go off and be by himself, he had to be in the same classes as all the others. It was a mix of being both stressful and hopelessly dull at the same time, and he had a hard time adapting and not acting out of line.

Things were not perfect, and his grasp on reality wasn't so great at times. At one point, in a lapse of judgement, decided to "do the TV psychic thing" and cold read another of the students. This, however, also quickly turned into more attention than he wanted. Pretty much anything he did, asside from just trying to act like everyone else, would bring unwanted attention.

So, soon enough, it became more a thing of trying to avoid doing anything that would bring inconvenient levels of attention. Even, if in retrospect, there might not have been that much worse that could happen than was already the case of being stuck in classes all day and being expected to mimic the behaviors of everyone around him.

It became sort of a thing of precedent, where for a particular action to be "acceptable", or a piece of knowledge "allowed", one needed to see that the others already exhibited the behavior or had the knowledge in question; or, if one of the teachers mentioned it or similar (so that, presumably, there would be other students around who knew it). But, this whole experience was draining, and it became easier to not interact with people at all if it could be avoided.

He wasn't really concerned about things like schoolwork or grades, he wasn't really inclined to bother, and much of the time was unsure if he would be around for long enough to matter. He didn't imagine that he would still be around, many decades later, but rather that the end was always just around the corner, the time when he might finally be willing to decide that enough was enough. Well, and, preferably find some way to make it look like an accident so that no one would figure out what really happened. But, as much as he considered it at times, there was just a little too much fear in the way.


As the years passed, computers had become more advanced. You could now connect then together with Ethernet cables and access the internet from any computer in the house, rather than just the one with the modem. Systems had advanced as well, and he was running an OS known informally as NT4 for a while, before then switching to 2K. He also had experimented with using another OS known as Linux, but at the time faced continual frustrations with anything actually working, and with driver support, so mostly just stuck with running the more mainline OS, where, at least, everything basically just worked.


His programming skills improved as the years went on, but still failed to live up to the things he imagined, and in class could do little more than write in his notes, and wait for the day to end so that he could get back home, back to his projects.

By now, the code for a newer game had become available. It was fully 3D, and he was tinkering around with it trying to make it into something more advanced. There had been another newer game released that was based on the same 3D engine as this game, which had a much larger world built from various interconnected spaces. In this game, one played as a scientest become world savior, battling through various alien infested hallways.

He was trying to do his own attempt at turning the released code for the former game into something more like the latter. However, his coding and debugging skills were not up to the challenge at this time, and his attempt steadily decayed into a buggy and unusable mess until he basically gave up in defeat and abandoned the project.

By this point, his interests had gotten more esoteric, and he had written an interpreter for a language known as Scheme, which was a dialect of the Lisp language family. The interpreter he had written wasn't particularly advanced, and had worked primarily by walking the S-Expression tree and iteratively evaluating each S-Expression. In the process, he had also incorporated some features from a language known as Common Lisp.

Around this time, a girl approached him, lets just call her Cee. She seemed reasonable enough at first, with long black hair. She invited Delta to come sit with her, and they talked about various topics. She was unlike most of the others. She was able to carry on conversation with him without him having to put effort into talking to her in a way she could understand. For most other people, to say things to then, he would have to spend time trying to organize his thoughts into a form that they could understand, with few words and simple sentance structures.

With her, for the first time, it felt like he didn't need to, he could speak to her directly, and she seemed to understand. Likewise, he could express his thinking as he saw it, and she wouldn't just get a glazed over look and run away.

While she didn't know much about computers, she seemed willing to listen to whatever he had to say. Her topics of interest were different, as she was more interested in things like math and law.

Not long after, they started meeting up and hanging out outside of school. At first, things seemed to be going well, they could spend time together and talk. He met her parents, and she met his parents. Things seemed to be going well.

One time, in a class, a girls asks Delta, "So, I hear you are dating Cee, is that correct?", "Yes.", "How are things between you?", "Well enough.", "Does she sleep with you?", "No", "Are you sure she is not cheating on you?". Delta does not have an answer, before replying that he was just assuming that if she wasn't with him, she probably wasn't with anyone else either. Another male that was a short distance away, interjects, "Doorknob! Everyone gets a turn!", and the girl then shuts him down, with a look of concern.

However, she was generally on good terms with Delta, so in general he had a favorable opinion of her.

This girl was very tall and thin with blonde hair, paste white skin, and blue eyes. By conventional standards, she would not have been considered particularly high on the attractiveness scale. She was friends with the girl who does puzzles, who was shorter with long black hair, brown eyes, and more going on up top. There was also another girl, average height with mouse brown hair and also paste white skin. Some students had referred to this trio in a derogatory sense as the "Dog Squad" in reference to none of them being particularly conventionally attractive.

He was on worse terms with the third girl. One time previous, he had been near the third girl when she was with another friend. The friend wasn't in a good mood, so Delta tried to make a joke. The joke didn't go well, and the friend began to cry. The 3rd girl also looked shocked, and Delta wasn't so happy with this turn of events either as this had not been the desired outcome. Though, the nature of the joke had been slightly morbid (black commedy). There wasn't much interaction between them after this point. It was around this time that he noted that many people don't see dark or morbid topics as comedic. Though, at the time, he had been mostly inclined towards black commedy, and had assumed others would also find such jokes amusing. Also doesn't go over well if the joke hits too close to the topic the other person is upset about; which was an unforseen consequence of making a joke about topics like death. In this case, there was a risk that the girl thought he had done this intentionally. Though, his sense of humor tended to be fairly dry, mostly consisting of black commedy and nihilist jokes.

Though, he had found by this point that many people didn't really seem to even understand jokes involving topics like the nature and meaning of existence. These being a sort of joke where a person first needs to go through the valley of existential despair, avoid falling entirely into nihilism, and come out the other side; before then being able to understand what the joke means or how it could be funny. Though, in his case, he had already been dealing with existential despair issues since elementary school and it almost seems odd to him that others have not had issues with questioning the meaning of existence (and the closest the mainstream got to these sorts of jokes was the so called "show about nothing", though, more often, it was jokes about the hopelessly mundane). In many cases, the problem with existential jokes is that most will not realize the joke even exists.


Not long after the conversation with the tall girl, Cee momentarily pretends as if she does not see Delta, but he continues trying to get her attention. After she leads him to a spot where there are fewer people around, she looks at him, with anger, and says, "Don't tell anyone what happens between us. If you do, I will make you regret it."

Delta then appologizes, and begins to cry about it. Cee then says, "Stop crying. Stand up.". He manages to stop crying, and picks himself back up off the floor. After he does so, she says, "We can stay together, if you do what I say. You can still be useful to me, and are not just a waste of my time."

But, from then on, things are not quite the same between Delta and Cee. When they are by themselves, she is now colder, and more distant. The version of her he knew before, seemingly now gone. They still spend time together, but sometimes the activities differ. When they are around her parents, or others she knew, she would switch back to the more positive self she had originally, but this was more like a mask that would fall when they were by themselves.

Even as such, for him, there were still times where it would feel like she cared. But, whenever he got too cheerful, or let his affection show a little to much, she would drop her mask, often just briefly, as if to remind him to get back in line.

One time, they go off for a walk somewhere, and meet up with one of her friends, another girl we will call Alef. The 3 of them go and hang out in a park for a little while, before heading back. The friend then quietly asks Cee, "So, why are you even with him?", at which she responds, "If something happens, and I start to show, I will need him.", "Oh." He hears them say this, but isn't quiet sure what to make of it, so says nothing at first.

They start talking about another of their friends, who was in a similar situation, and got a boy to stay with her even though it wasn't his. Delta then gets up the courage to ask them, "Like a Utah wedding?", at which Cee responds, "You know nothing. Though, in her case, she was r*ped, but you didn't know." After hearing this, Delta backs down. She mostly continues talking to her friend on the way back to Cee's house.

Another time, Cee says to Delta, "You know, I want a rich husband.", "Can it be me?", "Prove yourself, show me the money, show you can afford me." He shrinks down, knowing he doesn't have anything, she then says to him, "As is, you are nothing, you will always be nothing."

Later, he says to her, in the feel of the moment, "I do love you, you know." Her expression then turns to anger, "You are merely useful to me, you already know I don't feel the same way about you." He is overcome with sadness, and starts to cry, and this just makes her more mad at him.

He was just left to wish for the moments where she would let him lean his head on her arm. Here, at least for a moment, he could feel a sense of happiness, like everything was OK. Though, almost invariably, she would get annoyed at him for doing so.

One other time, he started talking some about the GNU project, some of the ideals of copyleft, and then some about the original Marxist ideology. She interrupts, saying, "Wait, do you actually believe any of that crap?" He hesitates for a moment, then responds "No." But, he can still see from her annoyance that she didn't really believe his answer. While it didn't really make much sense in terms of economics, and most attempts to put it into practice on a large scale either ended in disaster or later mutated into a more capitalist system, there did at least seem to be some appeal in the ideals behind a lot of it. Though, in time, he would later switch to releasing his code under more permissive license terms.


In all of this, Delta has a hard time than usual dealing with school. The lights continue to be often painfully bright, and sometimes feels triggered whenever something reminds him of her. One time, in a class where the teacher sort of reminds him of her and also says something that reminds him of her, this gets to be too much for him, so he gets down and crawls under the table, curling up into a ball. The teacher then goes and gets someone, and they lead him off to another room. In this room, there was a girl, around his age, playing with some plastic toys. She looks up at him, with an initial look of surprise, then awe fills her face. She starts to get up, but the teacher in the room goes over to her and puts her hand on her shoulder, instructing her to sit back down. He is led to a dimly lit closet, where he sits out the rest of the day and regains his composure. The day ends, and he goes home as usual.

Another time, there was a girl who sat in front of him in the class. He felt a mild attraction to her, as she had some features he found attractive, but it never led to anything. Near the end of class, she turned around and said to him, "My friend likes you." at which the friend comes over, it was another girl in the class that he had never really paid much attention to, and did not know her name. He said to her, "I already have someone though.", "Cee? Yeah, I saw you two together, she is nice." Though the girl seems sad as she says this, and Delta also feels sad knowing that Cee's niceness is more of a public act.

Not too much was notable about the class, and he didn't pay much attention. He did take note at one point, where the topic of the class was theororetically supposed to talking about Evolution, but then the teacher got slightly irritated with the, topic, and instead switched to talking about Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity instead, stopping just short of openly evangelizing to the class. This seemed slightly unprofessional to him, but not like he felt much reason to care either way, and not like he felt all that inclined to say anything about it.

While Delta would later come to regain a sense of religious belief, at this point in his life he was not particularly positively inclined towards religion, seeing the world as almost entirely mechanistic. Though, he couldn't say with any real confidence that there was nothing beyond the physical world either. The only things which could really be known with any real confidence being those things which have testable predictions and some level of falsifiability. He tended to just sort of allow every possible interpretation to live in his mind, until whatever evidence is available became sufficient to exclude it as a possibility.

The burden of proof for impossibility is higher than that for improbability. Where, it doesn't take much to say whether one answer or another is more likely, but another to say that one possibility or another is not possible.

Had he been inclined, he could have brought up some of the scientific issues with the flood story, such as where did all the water come from and where did it go. Or all the heat and radiation from adding roughly 10 orders of magnitude to the nuclear decay rates. He said nothing. If he had said anything about this, this again would be more attention than he wanted. So, he wasn't going to challenge her on her deviation from what she was theoretically supposed to be teaching. Also, if anyone did make a fuss about it, or the matter spread much beyond the classroom, it would not likely have turned into a good situation for her. So, he said nothing.


Some time later, Cee calls, and says "It is over, you are no longer useful to me.", "So, this is it then?", "Yeah." at which she hangs up. But, in this last moment of interaction, is sounds as if he actually hears some sadness in her voice.

He later calls back, getting her parents. They are angry, and asks why he is calling, he says, "She left, but I want her back.", they get her on the phone, "I want you back... Why do they say I left you?", "They don't know, they don't need to know.", She then hangs up. He tries a few more times, eventually getting an answering machine, but by this stage has nothing more to say than, "I am sorry for everything. I now accept that this is the end. Goodbye."


There is no more contact for several years, after which she messages online. He says to her, "After all of this. Even if I know you weren't a good person, and would not otherwise accept you knowing what I know now. I still miss you, I still love you." She responds, "You know it was not good between us." She tells of a relationship with someone else, who was already married at the time, "We got to an agreement, things would continue. They would continue to pay for my company, and I would not tell their spouse. Eventually, the payment ended. I told his spouse about us, but they already knew." Delta then ends up questioning her about the ethics of all of this, at which she responds, "Who are you to tell me what I should or should not do?", "I don't make the rules, it is not about my opinion.", "It was their fault, it was them who was already married." They continued, but despite knowing the specifics, Cee continued to deny that there was any wrongdoing on her part, or that deriving benefit from the moral failure of another could make them in part responsible for the guilt.

Cee's friend Alef then also sends a message, saying, "It was nice that you were able to talk again at least."

Though, this was the last time that he would hear from either of them again.

After the thing with Cee ended, pretty much no one seemed to take much interest in him anymore, so he spends the rest of his life alone.


Though, even if it was all rather painful for him, if there was something he did gain from this experience, it was learning more what it felt like to care for someone. It is sad in a way that some, even if they have someone by their side that cares for them, they may still never know what it feels like to care for someone else. Or, what it feels like to want the best for them, regardless of whether it works out in favor of ones own self interest.

His grasp on ethics remained shaky at times, though at its core, there did seem to be a few central assumptions:
* People will tend to act in ways that benefit their self interest;
* People dislike things that negatively effect their self interest;
* Treat others as you would like to be treated;
* Hostile actions taken against others permits them to take comparable hostile actions in retaliation;
* In most stable interactions, the net sum value cost for all parties is 0;
** If the value is positive, someone else is being exploited;
** If the value is negative, the party in question is being exploited.
* Etc.

Working outwards from these assumptions, one can derive the rules of most existing ethical systems.

One way to work this system would be to try to assign a value to each possible action based on how it would effect each party, then roughly keep track of the positive and negative contributions to each party. When everything adds up to a value near zero, the system is balanced, and thus (presumably) ethical.

Where, for example:
* Loss of life or serious injury: Large negative (say, for example, 1048576);
* Physical pain or discomfort: Moderate negative (say, 1024);
* Emotional pain: Small negative (though, depends on the person, say, 16);
** If one person has a larger emotional pain tolerance, they can reduce it;
** If a person is more senstitive, the value can be increased;
** Since Delta noted he seemed to have a high pain tolerance, he reduced this value for himself.
* Happy or enjoyable experience: Small positive (say, 16);
* Significant material benefit: Moderate positive (say, 256);
* Life-promoting benefit: Large positive (say, 8192).
** Or, say, birth of a child, 262144.
** But, subsequent loss of said child, 131072.
*** But, each child also has a high time and monetary resource cost.

Where, say:
* Absence of any offspring could add a lifetime cost of 1048576.
* But, one can assume an extra benefit of 65536 for each living child.
** However, the relative cost diminishes by each generation (say, log curve).

The exact numbers were subjeect to interpretation, but often didn't need high accuracy as the classification of choices would effectively quantize the values, and any small residuals could be discarded in the evaluation. So, values where the exponent is less than -6 or so can be discarded.

Where, for sake of imagination simplicity, it may be easier to imagine the numbers, rather than using decimal, as S.E7.F8 floating point numbers. Where, one can represent these in visual memory as roughly 4 hexadecimal digits. In this case, thinking directly in hexadecimal to avoid the comparably high cost of converting between this and decimal.

For example, in this system, one might represent 1.0 as 3F00, -1.0 as BF00, 3.0 as 4080, -3.0 as C080, etc.

It was instead preferable to simplify the cost of evaluations when possible.

For example square-root could also be simplified, for example, if one imagines it as keeping the sign bit in place, but shifting the exponent and mantissa right by 1 bit.

To add two numbers, one might unpack the mantissa values by taking the low bits and adding a 1 to the high end, then shift the smaller value right by the difference into the exponents, and then adding the mantissa values. If there is a carry into the high digit (so, it is 2 rather than 1), the mantissa is shifted right by 1 bit and 1 is added to the exponent. Subtraction is similar, but one may use ones complement on the mantissa.

To multiply the numbers, one may in thoery add the exponents and then feed each of the pairs of digits through a hexadecimal multiplication table. But, it is easier to simply add the two numbers in hexadecimal form (while subtracting 3F from the result). This is less accurate, but achieves the same effect (and, in ones imagination, one isn't necessarily going for accuracy). This leaves multiplication as (ironically) one of the cheaper operators.

Likewise, division can be approximated with a subtraction.

While one could object that, say, 3*3 as 4080+4080-3F00 gives 4200, which is 8 rather than the correct value of 9, because of the almost pitiful weakness of his own mind at dealing with this stuff, it was acceptable to accept some level of inaccuracy here. Though, with some level of experience, one may get more adept at wrangling numbers in hexadecimal for than dealing with non-trivial decimal numbers.

Though, a semi-cheap way to compensate for the inaccuracy of multiplication is to add a fudge factor depending on the combination of high-order 2 bits in each mantissas:
* 00/00, 00/11, 11/11: 00
* 00/01, 00/10, 01/11: 10
* 01/01, 01/10, 10/01: 20

Where the previous example now gives 4220, which is 9.


In all this, care may needed to deal with things like exponents going out of range. Say, if an operation would result in a carry (or borrow) out of the exponent field, the value may be clamped to zero or infinity (depending on direction). Where, 7F00 is +Inf, FF00 is -Inf, and 0000 is zero.


One should not equate the ethical values with dollar amounts, as the relative value of a monitary gain or cost would diminish with value. So, for example, monitary evaluations could be considered along a signed square root curve. Similarly, the value for any monitary gain or loss needed to be (for an individual) less than the value of their own life (realistically, for an individual, there is no amount of money that someone could pay them to offset the cost of their own life).

However, things started to break down when evaluating the relative cost of life between individuals, as while from the perspective of one individual, their own life has a near infinite value, from the perspective of another person, the relative cost of a person's life is significantly smaller. In this case, it could make sense to use a cubic or quartic curve as a transfer function when evaluating cost of life tradeoffs.

Though, this did run into an ugly edge case with the model: If one assumes a quartic curve for cost of life, then the value of the gain of money for one individual would quickly exceed the relative cost-of-life for another individual. In this scenario, if taking the life of another would result in a sufficient monetary payoff, the person would be expected to take the others' life. In the model, this would be seen as ethical, but in mainstream society would not be seen as ethical, implying a fault in the logic. Though, the relative cost can be reduced if one assumes a cubic transfer function, where at least the "price to end someones' life" value remains sufficiently large that it is unlikely to occur by chance.

However, a cubic curve is harder to evaluate, whereas a quartic cuve can be evaluated using two signed square-root operations in series. Where in a signed square or signed square-root, the sign of the input value is preserved from the input to the output. This allowing the evaluations to remain within the space of real numbers, rather than needing to go off into the complex plane (and as moch as one might find it amusing to break out the use of Bra-Ket notation to formalize their system of ethical evaluations, doing so would be solidly missing the point when a system of quantized real-number evaluations is sufficient).


However, it one also adds a factor for the likelihood that the individual would be caught and subjected to a sufficient punishment (such as the loss of their own life), then the cost of the probability of being caught and punished would exceed that of the probability of monetary benefit from doing so.

Note that one would also be discouraged from directly pursuing large benefits for themselves, as to maintain cost balance, they would need to pay something of equivalent value in exchange to maintain balance (all good things paid for in loss and tragedy).

One other flaw is the notion that a person could try to use good deeds (such as monetary payments to a charity) to pay for the cost of bad deeds (such as the mistreatment of others). While this is known to be incorrect, there is no good solution within the model.


While this model did have its flaws, he was seemingly unable to find much clearly better that "actually made sense".

He was left to realize it was lacking, but how to fix it became an unsolved issue. While one option is to start throwning ad-hoc rules into the system, there was no good way to do so without leading to systemic instability. So, the number of core rules needs to be kept small to maintain stability (and also to make it possible to reason about choices).


As much as his experience with Cee had been painful, by his own reasoning, the costs mostly balanced out, to it was harder for him to hold anything against her. For everything that happened between them, the net sum was still approximately zero, so he still couldn't bring himself hold her at fault. As much as her memory hurt him, he was left to realize that she was still someone special to him.


And so it would continue for many more decades of pain and loss.
For a while, he had thought he had escaped the pain, his pain itself being abstracted away as just another cost metric, until much closer to the end of his span of existence, it all comes back to him.

And, all he could every find in the remainder of his years has been rejection and hostility; as he wonders if there will be anything waiting for him on the other side, or if he will simply fall into nothingness; the dream of his own existence now finally coming to an end.