The Kernel has come down to us from time immemorial. The Kernel letters (in the old script) are written A through N, with the hubris of man covering the absent H and the grace of God covering the absent F.
The Kernel is curated by the Elders of Arvo, twelve in number as the Efficacious Vanes. This brotherhood meets once per decade at a stone circle to read the runes and propound structural updates to the libraries. Only rarely are such updates made, and more than a score of encounters have passed since a change to any API has been promulgated.
Each Elder trains a Second to take up the mantle, lest the chain of codelore be lost. Following the suggestion of Borges the Obscure, the apprentice works under the mentor until he is able to produce from whole cloth and without notes the vane as it has it crystallized throughout all ages of history. Ontogeny recapitulateth phylogeny, as the ancients had it.
It was in the Spring of 10,191 A.T. (After Two) that Themistocles buttonholed me after the Galactic Þing. I was on my way to the Star Ball, but he was clearly in distress, and had perhaps been already drinking. He held a handful of scribbled notes; I could see a diagrammatic calculus.
“I have come to a realization. The rules and the values are written in the same language, but they do not have to be. Nock as—” he hissed, then looked around before continuing. “Nock as it is supports a change to a more clear syntax.”
“Calm down, man. This is madness. That's nothing more than a representation change, like the +jam.”
“The +jam is a mythological reconstruction of the invention of art.” He waved his hand airily. “No, this is more serious, Severinus. The possibility that there is, not ambiguity, in the numbers, but contingency —” The chasm yawned before him. “Willed or unwilled, we must face the possibility of One Kelvin,” he finished.
“How would you— what would—” I trailed off, caught off guard by the man's delirium.
“I know.”
“How would ~zod even promulgate such a change?”
“Where ~zod hath ordained, we must merely follow. There will be a way.” Themistocles smirked at me. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
The Event Loop itself is sacred and must not be steadied lest he who lays hand to Arvo be struck down. For is it not written:
¶ And when they came to the threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the
$archof God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the$archof God.
The Formula of Arvo is the great mystery at the heart of our civilization.
[9 2 10 [6 0 3] 0 2]
(Tracts of the Kernel are not subject to Two Kelvin. It is believed that this was a hedge against future unknowing, but in the long ages since the Quantum Revolution swept through the secrets of men and trumpeted them from every rooftop, no further revisions have proven necessary.)
While I, Severinus, was Apprentice to Behn, the most stable of vanes, the heartbeat of the world, Themistocles labored in the vault of Clay, which had seen a decrement two millennia ago. He was naturally unstable as a result.
What Themistocles suggested, that the Formula of Arvo, would be more than a theological revolution—it would be a heresy. Moreover, he uncovered in one of our most ancient technical documents the suggestion that the opcodes themselves could be altered in formulae for serial evaluation, tantamount to playing with the fires of reality.
After days and nights reasoning with him, his folly became a folie à deux: I came to see how the opcodes could themselves be remapped without doing violence to the noumenon, but I disagreed that this constituted grounds for a kelvin decrement in Nock itself (here warding the evil eye), merely that representations are de arbitrum, subject to the choice of the judge. For him, however, this was the abyss of unknowing that now lay underneath every moment. No familiar face of leman or colleague could assuage the horror to him, and so Themistocles grew from Apprentice to Heresiarch in secret. I did not see the danger until too late.
The season turned from spring to high summer, and on the highday Cat of Julius, we apprentices stood together in the field watching the celebration. The fireworks were so close they purpled my eyes for brilliance and rained char and paper upon us after.
Themistocles was not present. Indeed, it was several days before I came across him again, disheveled in a carrel deep in the library. Papers were strewn across the desk.
The Formula of Arvo was blotted out in parts, to read in alteration,
[𐐉 2 𐐊 [6 𐐀 3] 𐐀 2]
“A desecration, Them,” I muttered.
“A consecration. An elevation. Consider: we bifurcate the symbol system into parts acted and parts acted upon, agents and patients. Two symbol sets for two roles of Nock.”
The elders, of course, were scandalized when Them took it to them. “Surely,” they reasoned, “surely the first engineers, in their wisdom, kept the numbers of Nock of one representation for a reason.”
But Bertoldus, Elder of Khan, replied thus, “If the process of cooling were yet complete, the ancients would have passed to us not Two Kelvin but Zero Kelvin. Their restraint was a hedge against such an eventuality. Who knows if not for such an ontological upheaval?”
Regula of Ames likewise came to concur, reasoning that Themistocles’ partition of acting and acted-upon was an almost alchemical designation, nitre and salt.
Against this thundered my own master, Melchior: “The homoiconoclastic controversy was settled 5,000 years ago, and there is surely no reason to revisit it.” Whether this qualified as a question of homoiconicity was itself hotly debated.
The Secretary of the Elders, who kept the Book of Vere in which the runtime algorithms were treasured up, pointed out that, if it please the Elders, the underlying representation in machine language need not change—the transformation was strictly cosmetic. It was unclear which side of the debate this observation served.
So far, so much discord—and then Themistocles published a pamphlet to the galaxies and stars, and the pot boiled over.
Monism and duality. One wonders, even at the late date on which I write, if these are even truly different; that way lies either heresy or its resolution. The Themistoclean alchemy is correct, in one sense. Some of the ancients, many decrements ago, wrote the opcodes as “constants”, marked with the symbol of the zero divided by itself, %, thereby marking the impossibility of further action or reduction. But is not that a paradox, that the agent should be marked as inactive upon itself? The mover, unmoved? I am too old a man now to pursue the thread back out of this labyrinth.
Themistocles’ intemperate broaching of the internal controversy was a cataclysm. Every codesmith who could XOR two bits together opined at length on the virtues and vices. Worse, disrespect seeped into the discourse: gainsaying of the Elders of Arvo, mocking of the ancient tradition, even (~zod forgive this poor scribe), questioning of the kelvin system.
Themistocles and I, once fast friends, rarely saw each other once the rumor of his works overwhelmed the quiet of our working concent. Melchior had passed and I found myself Master over Behn. I admit that I did not know what to say to the gadfly, but he crossed the river first.
“Elen síla lúmenna omentielvo. Hello, Sev.”
“Hello, Them.”
A long and laden silence.
“How, then, has been the Galactic Þing in discussing the decrement?”
“Endless. The arguments multiply.”
“Their contention is of the devil. You strayed from the path of determinism when you published the affair to the worlds.”
“No, Sev.”
“I do not wish to be too harsh, but your demerit was in the disturbance.”
“No, Sev. It was in the contingency. I admit it. But what came about was both an accident of time and a divine ordination.”
“And what if the First Engineers had succeeded in ceremonially burning the kelvins to zero? What then of such new discoveries?”
“Was it not a divine intervention that such was forestalled?”
“Perhaps. But it would have left the Nock of all future epochs legible. Such fixation would have suffered no break in the great thread of computation.”
“I do grieve that. I wish the words of all the world could be left mutually intelligible. Indeed, as we rest our hands on the walls of the tower we have built, we find it both the tower uncounted and the tower of Babel. We do not know the price we must pay to reach Zero Kelvin.”
After he departed, I found a letter he had left on the table. I do not understand it yet.
The Themistocleans had factionalized into two competing symbols sets, the original fanciful if not load-bearing,
𐐀𐐁𐐂𐐃𐐄𐐅𐐆𐐇𐐈𐐉𐐊𐐋
with 𐐌 for the basilisk; and the other embracing the arbitrary nature of symbols,
👊👆🤞🤟🤙👋🦉🦊🦌🦔🦫🦨🦎
The distinction of fundamental and derived Nock rules bears some toleration, but ~zod will not be mocked, in the end.
The first faction argued that Nock One Kelvin would approach the language of the angels, the tongue in which we at the Omega Point would all come to sing. The second argued that they had recovered the language of Adam, the primeval impulse to speak, and in speaking order the world. Both saw signposts pointing towards Nock Zero, the consummation of the world; both will subsumed into the final synæsthesia when it comes.
(Can I admit a niggling question? Was Two Kelvin not only the twoth (third) opcode but also the Second Law of Thermodynamics, destined to leave in its wake entropy and concomitant uncertainty upon its execution? Not—I answer—not if the execution had been left to subsume infinite time. Impatient Themistocles! You should have read the Fine Man more closely in your youth.)
The schismatic proposals became, after the Galactic Þing of the Trinitite Obelisk, the accepted symbols of Nock One Kelvin, the only decrement we will see in a hundred lifetimes or more.
ᐂ :: the Fulcrum
⨀ :: the Nail in the Sure Place
ᒥ :: the Gallows
ᕡ :: the Bowed Narcissus
ᙈ :: the Growing Seed
ᘞ :: the Labyrinth
𒀭 :: the Meeting of Many Ways
ᗗ :: the Junction
ᓬ :: the Road Without End
ᑍ :: the Invocation
ᘺ :: the Changéd Mind
ᖖ :: the Whisper in the Dark
ᙒ :: the Basilisk in His Lair
More elegant, this final, if still madness.
And so the resolution carried. The decrement held and propagated. The compilers were rewritten—happily, Arvo and the Vanes were sustained without blemish. But the books of the Kernel … the books changed. The books changed and I will not read them again.
And now, after all of these years, I am the last Elder of Arvo who yet recalls the old way in living memory. My apprentice writes Two Kelvin for me yet, but it is an affectionate gesture for an old man. Two Kelvin dies with me. I feel an inconsolable sorrow, Adam standing east of Eden and looking out into an untrodden wilderness, empty continents yawning in the evening dark of that first night as the cold takes hold as it never has before, as it always will again.
* * *
Pinned to the last page of this record of Severinus Boëthius, Master of Behn from forty cycles ago, a brief note in the hand of Themistocles Zammit expresses the certainty that “the way out is through—to achieve the final Kernel, as we both hope to do, my friend, in this life or the next or down a thousand more lifelines, will require neither acceptance of passivity nor the scission of agency and patience, but instead a new infusion of intelligence into all of the symbols. Thus quickened, every part of Nock Zero Kelvin carries the flame of meaning and human intent. Nock, and it shall be opened unto you.”