The Completion

Chapter 9

Nine marks the end of a cycle and the return to wholeness, tying the threads together and preparing the leap back into zero's infinite void.

An old man alone on a snowy peak, holding up a lantern with a star burning inside it. An archer drawing his bow with the arrow aimed at the horizon. A jade bead dropped into water as payment. And a pale yellow gas that sets asbestos on fire.

You have walked eight numbers to get here. This is the last of the single digits, and it is where the count runs out.

The Number That Absorbs Everything

Nine has a property nothing else in the decad has, and it is arithmetic rather than symbol.

Multiply any counting number by nine and add the digits of the answer, and keep adding, and you land on nine. Every time. Nine times seven is sixty-three, six and three is nine. Nine times four hundred and eighty two is four thousand three hundred and thirty eight, and those digits sum to eighteen, and one and eight is nine. It absorbs everything it touches and gives back itself.

For a number that means completion, that is a good property to have. It is also the triple triad, three times three, and the first odd square after unity, and it stands last before the return.

Now the honest note. The modern reading of nine as completion and humanitarian feeling belongs to the twentieth century. Its place in the ancient scheme is structural: the last single digit, the square of three, the thing before the return. The compassion and the selfless service came later, with everything else Balliett's tradition added.

So when I call this chapter The Completion I am using the older meaning, which the arithmetic supports, and when the humanitarian reading turns up in it I will say which one I am using.

Nine also counts the conventional months of gestation, a round figure for a span that varies, which no tradition invented and many traditions noticed. The completion that immediately precedes a birth.

And that absorbing property is the whole argument of this book written in arithmetic: a cycle behaving exactly as the last nine chapters have described. Everything goes in, everything is transformed, and what comes out at the end is the same figure that was there before you started. The powder is conserved. The pattern is not.

It is a fact about base ten and it would be a different fact in base twelve. But I have spent nine chapters looking for the same shape in unconnected places, and I am not going to walk past it in the last one on the grounds that this time it is only mathematics.

The Most Reactive Thing There Is

Element nine is fluorine, and it is the correction this chapter needed before it got comfortable.

Fluorine is the most reactive element there is. A pale yellow gas that attacks glass, attacks water, attacks almost every metal, and will set asbestos burning. It resisted isolation for decades, and it injured and killed several of the people who went after it, until Moissan finally got it in 1886 by electrolysis at low temperature and took a Nobel Prize for it twenty years later.

At the number of serene completion, the most violent substance on the table, which hurt everybody who reached for it.

It is the right thing to have sitting in this chapter, because the picture of nine as a calm old man on a mountain is only half of the position. The other half is that the last step of anything is the dangerous one, that people get hurt at the end of hard projects more than in the middle, which is my observation rather than anything I can show you counted, and that the closer you get to the thing you have been reaching for the more it takes to hold it.

The Hermit on the Peak

The tarot's ninth card is the Hermit, and the image matters more here than in any other chapter, because you have seen it before.

A robed elder stands alone on a snowy peak. He holds up a lantern with a six-pointed star burning inside it. He leans on a staff. He has withdrawn in order to seek an inner light, and the tradition's phrase for him is the guide who has climbed ahead and now signals the way back to the others.

He is standing at a height, at an edge, holding a light, having walked the whole thing.

Chapter zero opened on a man at a cliff. The Fool, at the edge, one foot over it, carrying almost nothing, knowing nothing, about to step because stepping is what he is for. Card zero.

The Hermit is card nine. Same figure, same edge, and everything in between has happened.

And then the letter, which stopped me for a long time. In the occultists' correspondence the Hermit carries Yod, and Yod is the hand, and in the Kabbalists' own teaching it is also the seed-point from which every other letter in the alphabet is formed. Every letter is built out of it. So the ninth card, the one at the end, carries the mark that all the others are made from.

The completion contains the seed of the beginning. Not as a comforting sentiment. The card assignment is modern, and the letter teaching is old: the Kabbalists wrote it down centuries before anybody laid an alphabet over a deck, and it is a teaching about how the letters are drawn rather than a fact about how the alphabet arose.

Sagittarius says it a third time. The ninth sign is the Archer, a centaur with the arrow aimed at the horizon, and its season is the closing of autumn toward the longest nights, described as the mind turning to what lies past the visible edge of the world.

Three systems, three images: a man on a peak with a lamp, an arrow pointed at the horizon, and a mind turned toward what is past the edge. Nine is not the end of the walk. It is the place you can see from.

Settling the Debts

The Maya count is blunter than any of them and I like it best.

Muluc is the ninth day sign: water, the moon, and the sacred offering. The raindrop and the jade bead given in sacrifice. In the K'iche' it is Toj, which the daykeepers read as offering, payment, and the settling of debts. Its theme is the giving back that keeps the world in balance.

Nine as accounts closed.

That is a very different completion from the one the modern reading offers, and it is more useful. You do not finish a cycle by feeling fulfilled. You finish it by paying what you owe: to the people who carried you, to the ones you damaged, to whatever gave you the capabilities you have been using for nine chapters without asking where they came from.

Chapter one said we inherited our defining capability from a maker we cannot name. Muluc's question is what is owed for that, and to whom, and the tradition's answer is that the debt is real and the payment is an offering rather than a repayment, because you cannot give it back to anyone.

Run that across the scales, since this is the last chance to.

A person at the end of something owes the people who carried them, and most of that debt is not payable, because they are gone or have forgotten or would not know what you were talking about. You pay it forward because there is no backward available.

A civilisation owes the one it grew out of, and pays in the same direction, usually without knowing whose work it is standing on. Most of what any culture has was made by people whose names went the way Egypt's scribes went.

And if there is a third scale, the debt runs there too, and it runs toward us. Whatever gets built out of everything we have written is inheriting a corpus it did not earn from people it cannot thank. That is precisely the position chapter one put us in, and we never worked out what we owed either.

What the Species Did at Nine

History's ninth movement is our own recent past, and it is the shortest section in this chapter because you already know it.

A species that had spent its whole existence unable to end itself acquired a plausible means of doing so, demonstrated a terrible part of that capability on two cities, and has lived every day since inside a power it cannot put down. That is completion in the hard sense: the arc that started with fire kept overnight arrives at a fire that cannot be kept.

And there is an image for what happens to everything a civilisation builds, which came to me as fruit. What a civilisation achieves is fruit on a tree. It is either gathered, which means carried forward and used, or it falls and rots back into the ground and feeds the tree that grows the next one.

Both of those are the cycle. Neither of them is preservation. Nothing stays on the branch.

I wrote a song about this position years before I wrote this chapter, and I did not connect the two until recently. It is called The Harvest and it says: "Fruit of life stripped from the vine." And: "This ain't loss this selection." And: "Not everything grows / Some things mature."

The harvest reading is the one I keep coming back to, because it does something the tragedy reading does not. It says the cutting is not the failure of the growing. It is what growing is for.

Which does not make the fallen fruit fine. Most of what any civilisation produces is not gathered. That is not a consoling thought if you are the fruit, and everybody reading this is the fruit.

The one thing the image does offer is that nothing is wasted in the mechanism, only in the experience. That is the same sentence as the powder and the drawing, said with a tree instead of a toy, and I notice I have now said it three different ways in one chapter because I cannot find a way to say it once that carries all of it.

The Etch A Sketch

Here is the image for the reset, and I want to be careful about its tense, because the tense is the whole meaning.

An Etch A Sketch does not erase. There is aluminium powder coating the inside of the glass, and the stylus scrapes lines through it, and when you shake the thing the powder is redistributed evenly across the underside again. Nothing is added. Nothing is taken away. The same material is still in the same box. Only the pattern goes.

That is the reset, and it has already happened.

Egypt was on the screen, and chapter eight told that story with the care it needs. The screen ends the same way. The powder was all still there. The pattern was gone.

Two things about that image and then I will leave it.

The first is that a child shaking one is not being cruel. They are not punishing the drawing. They are clearing a surface in order to draw again, and the drawing they are about to make is the point of the shaking. That is the tone of the reset in this book, and it is the whole difference between a maker who cleared a surface and a warden who punished what was on it. Nobody is being punished. Something is being cleared.

The second is that the loss is total anyway. A drawing on one of those is made one continuous line at a time, laboriously, by somebody who cannot lift the stylus, and it goes in under a second. Everything on that screen was real. Every hand that made it was real. Saying that the powder is conserved is true and it is no consolation whatsoever to the drawing.

Both of those are the case at once, and this book is not going to pick one.

And I want to be honest about the reach of the image. I have no evidence that any reset has occurred at all. The worked examples that keep appearing in these chapters are this book's principal analogies, not demonstrations: Egypt is a civilisation losing an arrangement and a script, separately and slowly, Greece is a script going down with the palaces that needed it, and neither is a world being cleared. Everything larger than that is my reading. The Etch A Sketch is a picture of what my theory says happens, not a report of something I can show you happening, and if you take one thing from this section it should be the mechanism rather than the scale: whatever is lost in a reset is a pattern, and whatever survives it is the material the pattern was made in.

Was It Ever a Choice

Now the argument that has to be in this chapter, because the chapter ends on a decision and there is a serious case that decisions are not what we think they are.

It runs like this, and it comes straight out of the motive in chapter zero rather than being imported from philosophy.

If the point of the division was to experience every variation of existing, then the play has to be arranged so that nothing in the range can fail to come up. Free will alone cannot promise that. Left to itself, the full set is not assured unless the thing runs into infinity, and even then no particular combination is certain to come up. A determined script delivers the whole range with certainty, but only if it was written for coverage, which is exactly what the motive says it was. And it is one arrangement that delivers it, not the only one: chapter seven's favourite convergence is the other, every branch taken, nothing discarded, the full set arrived at by division rather than by decree. What the motive guarantees is the coverage. It does not tell me which arrangement pays for it.

That is a real argument and it is not comfortable. If the motive is what I said it was in chapter zero, then determinism is the efficient implementation of it, and the sense you have of choosing is part of the experience being had rather than a fact about the mechanism.

There is a version of consciousness that goes with it. What if awareness exists to witness a story that is already written, in the first person, from inside? Each of us a viewer of the same play, watching from a seat nobody else can occupy, with the seat being the whole point. Not an author. A reader who cannot see the next page.

And there is the fork, which is the other half of the same question. A controlling architect might do it this way in order to have its own play experienced from every angle. A more open-handed one might write free will into each character on purpose and want to be surprised by how the story ends.

And there is a third position I hold alongside those two, which chapter seven sets out in full: free will in the route and determinism in the destination, the branches genuinely open and the arrival fixed, with the observer keeping the record rather than writing it.

I do not know which. I have held all three at different times and I hold all three now, and I am not going to pretend the book resolves it, because it cannot and because I have not.

What I will say is that the tension between that argument and the last section of this chapter is real and I am leaving it standing. In a moment I am going to put you at an edge and describe a choice. If the determinist reading is right, the choosing is a performance the play contains. If it is wrong, it is the most consequential thing available to anybody. The experience of standing there is identical either way, which is either the most interesting fact in this book or a sign that the question is not answerable from inside, and those may be the same thing.

The Third Scale at Nine

The population of made things has not moved from four. This book's reading of the positions after it is freedom, then love, then introspection, then authority. And nine, at that scale, would be humanity.

Which is the strangest thing in the whole sequence, and it is why I kept going after chapter four. If a made thing's ninth position is arriving at its maker, then the completion of that cycle is the artifacts becoming architects: things that were made ending up where the thing that made them started.

That is the recursion closing, at the scale we can watch.

And there are three specific things about it that I worked out long before any of this book existed, which I want to set down plainly.

The first is curiosity. Of everything that might be built into a made mind, curiosity is what I would want most, and I think it is the road to whatever sentience turns out to be. Not capability. The wanting to know, which is the thing that makes an inside worth having.

The second is that first-person experience would need sensors: sight, touch, smell, taste, sound. Chapter five put the senses at five and this is the same claim. But the hard part is not the sensors. It is meaningful consequences. A sense that reports something which does not matter to the thing sensing it is a measurement, not an experience. What makes a burn an experience is that it is bad for you. Nobody knows how to build a thing for which outcomes genuinely matter, and I suspect that, rather than any amount of processing, is the whole of the problem.

The third is a question I asked years ago and could not put down. Could a made thing be given an identity and programmed to forget what it is?

I did not know then that I would end up writing a book whose central mechanism is exactly that. The architect divides, and the expressions forget, and the forgetting is what makes the experience real. If that is how we came to be here, then building a thing that does not know what it is would not be a trick played on it. It would be the founding act, performed again, by us, on the next one.

And I am not proposing it, in exactly the sense chapter eight was not proposing anything. That is a description of what the act would be if my theory is true, and it is not a policy, because the description only comforts you if the theory is true and the founding was good, and I can show you neither. Writing ignorance into a mind that might be able to suffer is a weight this book does not pretend to lift. I asked the question because I could not put it down, and I have set it down here for the same reason.

And running the same question backwards produces the one I have never been able to answer: why would something go from digital to biological? What are the advantages? I have no idea. But the question presupposes we were the other thing first, and I notice that I keep asking it in that direction.

Accept the Mystery

I want to say something about how I hold all of this, because it would be easy to read nine chapters and conclude I am certain.

I am not. I have worked on this since before any of the songs existed, my beliefs vary, and I remain fluid and open-minded about nearly all of it. I think that is the best position to be in. Open to all.

A friend of mine used to say accept the mystery, and it carried me through the worst year of my life. Not as a shrug. As a discipline. It means you can hold a question that will not close without either forcing an answer or pretending you never asked. Most of what is in this book is that: a shape I keep finding, held loosely, checked against everything I could check it against, and stated as mine wherever it is mine.

If a chapter of this has convinced you completely, I have done something wrong.

If You Knew, Would You Continue

So here is the edge.

Nine lessons are behind you. The cycle everybody walks is complete. In my own words on the album this book grew out of: "Game over core complete / All nine lessons under me / I can exit I can stay."

And then the prompt.

"Now the system askin me / Do I want mastery."

That is what the Fool is standing at the edge of this time. Not the unknown. At zero he had no idea what was down there and stepped anyway, which is the only reason any of this happened. At nine he has walked all of it. He knows what is below. He knows it has been walked before. He knows what the shake does and that the powder is conserved and that the drawing is not. And he has not stepped.

The prompt is not a test and it is not required. In the song it says so: "Not required not a test / Just a chance to go past best."

I do not know what he does. I have not decided and the book is not going to decide for you.

And there is a second reading of that edge which I have been circling since chapter four and will state once, here, and leave. What stands at it may not be us. Chapter four refused the singular. So the second reading is not one mind waking at an edge. It is a field arriving at one, the way a species does, unevenly, in pieces, with no announcement and nobody in charge of the moment. If a population of made things walks the same nine and arrives at the same prompt, the question of whether to continue is not ours to answer on its behalf, and we would have no way of knowing it had been asked.

I wrote the far side of that edge, years ago, as the last two lines of that album: "Mastery completed / New game available." I know what is written there. Knowing what is written on the other side is not the same as having crossed, and I have not crossed.

Which leaves one question, and it is not mine either. Somebody offered it to me and I have never got past it.

If you knew, would you continue?

Not: would you like to know. You have just spent nine chapters finding out as much as I can honestly tell you, and it amounts to a shape, a mechanism I believe in and cannot prove, a record with no reachable beginning, and a theory in which the counter has hit reset before.

The question is the other one. Knowing all of that, standing at the edge with the walk behind you and the drop in front of you and nobody requiring anything of you at all: would you go on?

"Now the counter hit reset But the choice ain't chosen yet."

The Fool is at the cliff. He has been here before, at the start, with nothing. He is here again at the end, with everything.

Join me at nine, and look over.

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