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North Beach ~ San Francisco
Conor Morgan realized he’d just been cheated out of 249,750 billion US dollars.
He stared at the treacherous array of numbers on the screen in front of him until they seemed to sway and dance. The final string of mocking zeros coalesced into a mandala of emptiness and waste, ruining hours of careful plans and calculations.
In consumptive Catholic penitence he gulped down the remains of a steaming hot triple espresso at his usual sidewalk table outside The Steps of Rome, the muddy russet liquid bittersweet and punishing his throat.
He slapped his laptop computer shut in disgust.
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Con once made his living manipulating numbers and time.
He knew a googol was not a twenty-first century search engine, or a nineteenth century Russian writer: a googol represented a known quantity, a one followed by a hundred zeros; and, dwarfing that to insignificance, he knew a googolplex was a one followed by a googol of zeros, an essential number to know.
And he knew a yoctosecond was one septillionth of a second, zero point two four zeros followed by a one; while Planck time, like the googolplex, dwarfed that to insignificance by a further nineteen zeros.
Con liked known quantities.
Known quantities comforted him.
Con had worked with zeros and ones all his life:
Base two, zero to one, binary;
Overlay with base eight, zero to seven, octal;
Overlay with base ten, zero to nine, decimal;
Overlay with base sixteen, zero to nine and A to F, hexadecimal;
Underlay with base infinity, zero to zero, and you have bodhi —
binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal, infinity — perfect knowledge.
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Two and a half thousand years ago Buddha reached the bliss of nirvana under the sacred bodh, the tree of all knowledge. The essence of perfect knowledge is embodied in a bodhisattva.
Now Con’s sattva marched to the frenzied primeval echoes of pig rib bones remorselessly beating the goatskins of ancient Celtic bodhrán war drums.
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Con’s known unknowns underpinned his own bodhi of perfect knowledge to catalyse four essential frissons of meaning for him:
He believed truth was found in simplicity, not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
He believed prime numbers, divisible only by one and the number itself, were the dwellings of the mystics, and secret keys to all creation were hidden within the first: one, two and three.
He believed the language of Gods was contained within the mathematical ratio of periphereia divided by diameter, pi: 3.141592 accelerating east, so far east it’s decelerating west, all the way west past infinity.
He believed the entrance into knowledge of all existing things could be divined by understanding gravity, energy, vibration and frequency.
And he believed he’d been stiffed out of 249,750 billion US dollars.
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Growing up in London’s Shepherd’s Bush, when all things once were possible, Con watched the film version of Mark Twain’s The Million Pound Note, and his Jesuit mathematics master, Monsignor Harman, had taught him that a million was a one followed by six zeros. And, that much rarer bird in England at the time, a billion, was bi, double, a million million; a one followed by twelve zeros.
And now that he had come to America to make his fortune, and was about to launch his very first transatlantic business venture, he discovered he had a problem:
An American billion was only a thousand million; a one followed by nine zeros.
Where was the bi in that?
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An American billion seconds ago, when Con was fourteen years old, Monsignor Harman, after celebrating Mass rather too enthusiastically with the communion wine one morning, recommended to the third year his own mnemonic cipher to calculate the first seven digits of pi:
“God I need a drink, alcoholic, oh! 3.141592.”
Con sat squeezed in the corner of room thirteen, in the far left of the back row, overlooking the cemetery far below. On that midwinter’s day epiphany the crumbling white hoarfrost gravestones stood bleak among desolate elm trees demarcating jagged frozen-mud rugby pitches in the playing fields beyond.
He made sure to keep his chair tight against the classroom’s rear wall to avoid becoming too obvious a target for the good Monsignor’s viciously random punches to the back of the neck. Monsignor Harman shuffled along the aisle in an unkempt flowing black Roman-buttoned cassock, hands clasped behind his back over his cincture. Dandruff flakes from yellowing white hair framed his ruddy face and rounded shoulders.
The Monsignor was fond of quoting, in Greek, the first verse of the Gospel of St John for religious education and mathematics lessons.
“En arche en ho logos,” the Monsignor began. “Sit more still! Kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos. Translation for class master Morgan!”
Con knew the Greek well:
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
The Monsignor used the passage to emphasize his superiority, that his Jesuitical word was akin to God’s.
He stood at Con’s shoulder, any excuse would do. Con smelled whiskey breath, stale cigarettes, the sour stench of unwashed socks.
“Do come along master Morgan, class is waiting!”
Con’s chair screeched violently forward of its own volition over uneven floorboards, his abdomen shoved hard into the whittled desk lid. He managed a difficult breath.
“In the beginning was the ratio, and the ratio was with God, and the ratio was God, Monsignor Harman.”
His peripheral vision detected a jaundiced liver spotted hand whiten and transform into a weapon. The pointed middle knuckle protruded an inch, locked in place by an overlapping nicotine stained thumb, the age-cracked nail bitten to the quick.
Monsignor Harman’s voice trembled. “And just where do you get ratio from boy?”
Con felt three dozen pairs of eyes watching him, all knowing what came next.
“Sit more still! Eyes to the front of the class or you will all do three hours detention!”
“The Greek logos translates to ratio Monsignor Harman. The Enforcers substituted word in its place.”
Con saw the shaking fist slowly raised, felt it hover above him, Monsignor Harman directly behind now. A familiar waist-high tumescent lump frottaged the small of Con’s back, his chair and desk advancing as one. Tiny specks of dead off-white skin floated past his head to settle on the ink stained graffiti-carved wooden desk.
“Oh did they indeed ... it seems we have an expert on the Parthenon in our midst. We are truly blessed. And just who exactly are these mythical enforcers?”
“The same ones who destroyed the library at Alexandria Monsignor Harman.”
“Enough impertinence! Perhaps master Morgan can tell class the first seven digits of phi, the Golden Ratio, our Lord’s Divine Proportion.”
But the Monsignor had incorrectly pronounced phi as fie, to rhyme with fry. Something further possessed Con, and he couldn’t help himself, speaking as if from another person from another time; he pronounced phi the Greek way, fee, to rhyme with free.
“Monsignor, if you mean phi — the Golden Section — before he was murdered by the Cult’s Enforcers, Pythagoras said, all is number.”
“The digit sequence Morgan! Yet more insolence. It’s the whack if you do not know!”
Con answered back instantly:
“I demand a Jameson’s, o yes sir! 1.618033.”
He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and he resigned himself to his fate.
Monsignor Harman ground his groin into the back of Con’s black blazer. He leaned in close and whispered, “Fee fie foe fum ... I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ’live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread...”
“But I’m Irish, Monsignor Harman. I’m entitled to an Irish passport.”
“An Irishman born next to Her Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs, an institution with which I’m sure you will become intimately acquainted in due course? There’s no such thing. Now let me introduce an Englishman to the Divine Proportion, the Golden Ratio of an Irish enforcer’s golden fist...”
The three excruciatingly painful blows were worth it.
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Now Con needed a drink — a big one.
He rubbed the back of his neck as he ordered a molto grande Licor 43, using its Spanish name, Cuarenta Y Tres, to a bemused Italian waitress.
Con’s ruling numbers were four and seven.
They comforted him.
No coincidences...
The first seven digits of pi add up to seven.
A prime number.
Four plus three equals seven.
A prime number.
Forty-three.
A prime number.
43: Kuai.
A Break-through number in the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes.
He turned to his right and looked through the high restaurant window, searching deep into the familiar bright and bustling tiled interior until he found the usual gaggle of Italians going pazzesco over a Roma versus AC Milan Serie A football match just starting on live satellite television. Normally he’d have infiltrated the ragazzi, drinking a San Miguel and reminding them Italian clubs didn’t play in the same league as Los Galacticos of Real Madrid or Fulham Football Club.
He wanted to ask them what the hell they were doing in San Francisco anyway? Didn’t they realise three goddamn zeros were missing?
But considering the way the lira had hyperinflated ever since Mussolini’s reverse gear intervention in the 1920s, they wouldn’t have noticed a septillionth of missing zeros, let alone three.
His morning was ruined.
He pushed his half eaten plate of tiramisu away, a dull pain in his gut, his mind racing in fast rewind.
George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
Con thought they were also two countries separated by three missing zeros.
He drained the bright yellow vanilla and citrus liqueur in seven swallows: made from forty-three secret ingredients, and two hundred years older than Christ, it mirrored his mood perfectly; forty-three San Franciscan hills surrounding him, 43 summits to Kuai.
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In ancient times, the zero was hated and feared in equal measure. An abomination, representing death, darkness, nothingness, the void of chaos and destruction.
One zero’s bad enough, Con thought, but three all at once? And I’m in town recruiting three zeros, three cleanskins, three lilywhites of my own?
No coincidences...
The Licor 43 heated him like a furnace, soothing his being and rekindling the crucible of endless possibility.
Con immediately began to feel better.
For the first time he noticed how attractive the waitress was, a dark haired Marisa Tomei lookalike. He ordered in halting Italian — un altro molto grande licquor quaranta tre, molto grazie mia bella amore...
That won a dazzling smile from his inamorata. She returned with two golden elixirs, a piccolo glass for herself, and sat across from him at his shaded table.
“My break...” — Mia intervallo — she said.
“Mia tesoro...” — My treasure — he said.
Con reached across his laptop to clink classes with her.
Too late now:
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Plans tiger in place.
Meetings to grace...
Mierda...
What are three missing zeros between friends anyway?
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