Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things (11 page)

“I guess so. I’ve never seen a pink lighthouse,” she said.

“Neither have I! But if everything already existed, life would be pretty boring. Why is
your lighthouse tall?”

“So boats can see you,” said Laurie. “A short lighthouse wouldn’t work
so well. And you need the twisty staircase to get to the top.”

“Why the light?”

“The light is so the boats can see you at night.”

“And the lighthouse keeper’s room?”

“So you can see
them
.”

“Ah, so,” said Fresnel. “My balloon has a light very high up so people far
away can see it. I can look over the side and see them. I get to the top by elevator. The color
doesn’t matter. It does everything a lighthouse does. Is it a lighthouse?”

“It’s
like
a lighthouse,” Laurie admitted.

“You drive a hard bargain! I’ll settle for ‘like a lighthouse,’”
he said.

“So that’s how you Decompose?”

“That’s it, more or less. You take a big idea apart and see the
why
behind each part. Then you look for smaller ideas that do the same thing.
For instance, what did you think of my little bell?”

“Your
little
bell! That thing frightened the b—”

“It needs some adjustments, I agree. But the idea is sound,” he said. “The
essential part of a bell is the sound. Because the bell is way down on the ground, it needs a big
sound so I can hear it.”

“So why don’t you use a big bell, then?” she asked.

“If I used a big bell, I’d need a big frame to hang it from, and a big ringer, and
a big sign to go along with it. All the inessentials get bigger,” Fresnel said.
“There’s no need to use a big, complex idea when a small, simple one will
do.”

“I wish I could tell Bruto that,” Laurie said, remembering the giant pyramid.
“But he’s so far away.”

* * *

“Winsome, why am I delivering so many telescopes?” Laurie asked.

Winsome’s expression turned stony. “It’s not nice to open other
people’s mail.”

“I’m sorry. Those packages are really heavy and I wondered what could be so
fragile and expensive and important . . .”

Winsome didn’t say anything. She pretended to be busy with ropes and anchors.

Laurie pressed on. “Why telescopes?” “So the lighthouse keepers can see
farther out.”

“Why do they need to see farther out?”

“Because the other lighthouses are too far away.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Laurie said. “Why do people in
lighthouses want to see other lighthouses?”

“Because it’s how we’re going to send messages. It’s the Lighthouse
Network.”

“Why do you want to send messages that way?”

“Right now,” said Winsome, “if someone on Abstract Island wants to talk with
someone on Data Island, they have to pay the Colonel and his Network of mail daemons.”

“Is that a bad thing? Why build your own Network?”

“Because I can. And because Colonel Trapp doesn’t want me to.”

“Why doesn’t he want you to build a Network?” Laurie asked.

“That’s Five Whys already, kiddo. Are you ready to go? The next stop is an easy
one. You’ll like Ping. She lives in a treehouse!”

Once the
Doppelganger
reached the next island, Winsome sent Laurie off on
another delivery immediately. This telescope would be the last, but Laurie still wondered how on
Earth they fit into Winsome’s plan.

“Some things in life you just have to see for yourself!” Winsome said with a
smile.

Laurie found it hard to argue with the excitement in Winsome’s voice, so she just
trusted the usual set of odd directions to lead her to an answer. Before long, she and Xor reached
an enormous tree. A long, twisty staircase wrapped around the trunk and up into the leaves, and a
young woman stood at the base.

“Hello, Laurie! Glad you made it. My name is Ping Baudot. I’ve been waiting for
you.”

“Hello. Wait, how did you know my name?”

“Oh, Fresnel told me all about you.”

“Fresnel? He lives way over on Elegant Island!”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful? You and Winsome have been making lots of deliveries
lately. The Network is getting quite big now! I can hardly keep up with all the
chatter.”

“But I don’t—”

“You should be very proud. Here, let me help you with that.” Ping took the package
and raced up the stairs, round and round the trunk of the tree. Laurie followed as best she
could.

When they arrived at the treehouse near the top, Laurie gasped in surprise. It was a tree
lighthouse
! Not only that, but the lighthouse keeper’s room was filled
with telescopes pointing in all directions. A neat label was attached to each one.

“Well? What do you think?” Ping said.

“Why do you need so many telescopes?” Laurie asked.

“See for yourself.”

Laurie put an eye to the ‘scope labeled ELEGANT. A red, round splotch was hanging in the
air. And was that a rope?

“Hey, that’s Fresnel’s balloon! I can see him! He’s waving!”
Laurie exclaimed.

Laurie looked into other telescopes. Each one was pointed at a different lighthouse. The one
for ABSTRACT showed the lighthouse keeper who didn’t say very much, up in his tall white tower
by the sea, looking back through a telescope of his own. He didn’t wave. The BYZANTIUM
telescope showed half a pyramid covered in giant mechanical turtles. Bruto was busy counting
bricks.

Ping put down the heavy package Laurie had delivered and released the latches. Inside was a
squat telescope. “Excellent! I’ve been waiting for this.”

“It’s for the Network, right? Will you show me how it works?” Laurie
asked.

“Of course,” Ping said. “Watch this.” She went to the middle of the
room and turned a giant wheel until a red arrow pointed directly at Elegant Island. Then she pulled
a lever up and down quickly:

“Now look at Fresnel again,” she said.

Laurie put her eye to the Elegant Island telescope. Fresnel had pointed
his
light at
them
and began blinking a message:

“He answered back! What did he say?” Laurie asked.

“Oh, he just said ‘hi.’”

“All that just for ‘hi’?”

“That’s how the Baudot Code works,” said Ping. “Sentences are made of
words, and words are made of letters, right? In the same way, we make
letters
out of FLIPs and FLOPs. Like this.”

“That’s pretty neat! But I still think it’s a lot of work just to say
‘hi.’” Laurie said.

“Maybe you’re right,” Ping said, smiling. “But now that the hard work
of building the Network is finished, we can do something
really
interesting:
use the Network to make itself better.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, I’m working on a way to use two colors of lights. Fresnel has an idea for a
simpler Code that uses only four FLIPs or FLOPs, though I’m not too sure how that will work.
We use the old Baudot Code to talk to each other about our ideas for new codes, and then try them
out.”

“So . . . you can use the Network to talk about how to use the Network?”

“And you helped make it possible, Laurie, by delivering all of those telescopes. Now,
the Network will only get better and better as we learn how to use it. We can already pass a message
from one end of the Network to the other in just a few minutes! Even the
Doppelganger
takes a couple of days to deliver the mail that far. Everyone will
want to use it once we work out the bugs.”

“But . . . what about Winsome? Is she going to lose her job?” Laurie asked.

“What? No, not at all! The Network was her idea.”

“It was?”

“Sure! All of us work for Winsome. She doesn’t want to spend her days hauling mail
bags around. That reminds me,” Ping said, searching through a pile of paper, “Winsome
says she has one more job for you.”

“Oh! What is it?” Laurie asked.

“She wants you to deliver this letter to a person on the other side of the Garden of
Forking Paths.”

There was no name on the envelope, but that wasn’t half as strange as some of the
assignments Laurie had been given in her time on the
Doppelganger
. If she got
it done quickly, she could come back here and play with the Network. “So how do I get to the
Garden?”

“You’re in a hurry, huh? I’ll show you where it is.”

The Garden was surrounded by a hedge at least eight feet tall. The entrance was an archway cut
out of the bushes. A wooden sign above the entrance read

“Here you go,” said Ping.

Laurie was suddenly very worried. “Ping, is this a laba . . . laber . . . one of those
garden mazes?” Laurie had read stories about little girls and garden mazes, and they never
ended well. Garden mazes were full of monsters and twisty little passages between you and the
exit.

“It’s not really a labyrinth. You can always find a way out,” said Ping.
“Where you end up is a different story.”

“Oh, good. After I deliver this letter, can I come back to the Treelighthouse? Maybe we
can ask the Network about how to find Hamilton!”

“That’s . . . a good idea. Yes. When you’re done, if you want, we can talk
about it.”

“Thank you! See you soon!”

“Good-bye, Laurie. Take care of yourself.”

Laurie and Xor stepped through the entrance into a kind of hallway made of more bushes. After
a short walk, they found a small fountain with a sign above it.

Laurie dropped her last Fair Coin into the fountain, closed her eyes, and made a wish. She
held her eyes closed for an extra moment just in case. But nothing exciting happened.

She kept walking down the green hallway. There wasn’t much to see except hedges, and
more hedges, and more signs that talked about the Garden.

“Only 16 million? That’s nothing!” Laurie said. “Userland had millions
of millions of
millions
.”

“That’s okay. I want to get through here quickly.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“I wonder which path is the shortest,” Laurie said. The next sign answered her
question.

“Then how do I know which one to take?” she asked.

That’s when she came to the first fork in the path. Each fork had its own sign. The
left-hand sign said

and the right-hand sign said

Laurie had seen a lot of Ideas lately. A simple Thing would be a nice change. She took the
left-hand path. A minute later she came to the next fork. The signs there said

“I’ve seen a lot of Strange Things lately, too,” she said. “I’ll
go for Familiar.”

“Um . . . Old!” Down the right-hand path they went.

“That’s an easy one,” said Xor. “Interesting.”

“You’re not the one who has to climb rocks and cross scary bridges when we make
Interesting deliveries,” Laurie said. “But okay.”