Chapter 42

After bringing up the matter with Hewitt, I immediately took action.

“Uh… pardon? Suddenly, what are we doing?”

“Daughter? What is it? Uh… Sir Nemo? What brings you here?”

First, I called for Eleanor Dare and Sir John White.

“Please wait just a moment. The Nautilus hasn’t finished mooring yet… Pardon? What is that? A com…pu?”

I had to call Vicente, too. He was the representative of the hundred or so Spaniards.

“Did you say you needed me? My. Suddenly… you hand me this square object… it opens? Ugh, the light…!”

And of course, Manteo, the representative of the native peoples, was a must.

“What is this about for us?”

“Did you say you would teach us about a com…something? Then of course we must go!”

On top of that, there was Hewitt, who had first brought up the idea of a government with me, and the scholars Harriot and Bacon, who were useful human resources for various tasks. I had called basically everyone I had been working with in this settlement. With Walter Raleigh currently in England, these seven were all of them.

I took them straight to Croatoan Island. Then I brought them to the farm, sat them down at desks, and handed out tablets and laptops.

There were two laptops my parents used for office work, one I used as a college freshman, one I used after graduating, one I used during my working life… On top of that, including work tablets, Netflix tablets, and so on, there were twelve devices in total, both new and old. People don’t usually throw away old laptops or tablets, after all.

Naturally, I had formatted them all so they couldn’t find any suspicious future data inside. Likewise, I had set the language on all of them to English.

“From now on… I want you to think of these as your auxiliary brains.”

At my words, Bacon suddenly raised his hand. Feeling a sense of foreboding, I nodded at him, and he asked, “By brain, do you mean to say that man thinks with his brain, and not his heart?”¹

Don’t tell me this was future knowledge, too?

As I gave a weary nod, Bacon once again took out his notebook and hastily scribbled something. I ignored him and continued.

“…In any case, the reason I call this an auxiliary brain is simple. Because it will remember for you, perform complex numerical calculations for you, and organize data for you.”

At my words, Eleanor’s eyes widened, and she took the tablet I handed her, examining it from all angles. It looked like she was about to say, ‘Computer! Remind me to give Virginia a bath tomorrow!’ so I moved quickly.

“Now… watch this.”

The projector, which I had connected beforehand, whirred to life, and my screen appeared. “You must see properly… what you can do with this.”

***

…Bacon could not believe the scene unfolding before his eyes.

“The average age of the initial Roanoke Island settlers is 23.3 years. Excluding the minors among them…”

“Mr. Harriot? You seem to have grasped how to use this the fastest. Please try calculating this. What is 24,514 times 16,435?”

“Mr. Hewitt? Your speed of understanding is no less impressive! Excellent. Then here, I will give you some random names. Please have it automatically sort these names in alphabetical order.”

“Excellent! Eleanor? Uh… calculate what date it will be 13,954 days after August 13th, 1377!”

Tasks that would have taken someone an entire day of organizing data were performed in an instant with just a few taps of the fingers. Without a single mistake. Without a single moment’s error.

“…”

“Mr. Bacon? Mr. Bacon!”

“Uh, ah, yes.”

“What is the average number of tribe members for the Algonquian tribes in our settlement?”

“Ah… that would be… about 271.38 people.”

“Excellent. May I check how you constructed the function?”

“…Yes.”

He thought he understood why that man had referred to ‘this’ as an ‘auxiliary brain.’ No, this was a machine faster, more precise, and more marvelous than a brain. This was…

“Oh, ooooh… this is a miracle…”

“That’s right. It is a miracle. If this didn’t exist, how many office workers… no, how many angels would have been plagued by miscellaneous tasks? With just this, all the bothersome data organization and numerical calculations become unnecessary.”

It was true. The past few days spent learning how to operate ‘this,’ tapping on the unfamiliar ‘keyboard,’ and staring at this thing called a ‘monitor’ until his eyes hurt had been torturous… but once he learned how to use it, he regretted not having known of such an object sooner.

“Th-This, this is… the hope of all mathematicians and astronomers! With just this, we can be liberated from all sorts of horrific calculations…!” Harriot, too, was muttering beside him, his hands trembling. The others, like Manteo and Eleanor, seemed to perceive it as just a convenient tool, but they were different.

“From now on, the full name, date of birth, occupation, family, tribe, hometown, gender, religion, immigration date, and residence of everyone who immigrates to this colony will be recorded here.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“And the area and location of the land to be allocated to them in the future will also be organized here.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Now then, what do you think we can do with this?”

What can we do with it? When we can easily organize, classify, and rank the information of tens of thousands of people in real-time, what can we do with it?

“…Everything,” Bacon muttered, without even realizing it.

***

Ugh, that was incredibly hard.

It was only natural that Manteo couldn’t read, and the others were more distant from modern civilization than an 80-year-old in the 21st century. In that sense, teaching seniors how to use a smartphone at a community center would have been exponentially easier.

This was teaching 16th-century people about 21st-century civilization. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I tried. I opened up the textbook from when I studied for my Computer Application Literacy Level 2 certification and taught them right from the ‘beginning.’

“N-No, Vicente! Don’t break it! That’s the power button!”

“The computer looks hot, so what about washing it with water? Eleanor, let’s think about it. When a person’s body is hot, what happens if you cut open their stomach and pour cold water inside? …No. It might come back even if it breaks, but it’s dangerous if it sparks.”

“You want to open it up and see its internal structure? That’s good curiosity, but it would be difficult for you to understand even if you saw it. This is a machine that has been processed to a point where it’s too fine for the human eye to see… uh, uh, don’t touch that! You’ll get hurt!”

So, ‘from the beginning’ meant things like this.

How to hold a mouse.

The purpose of a keyboard.

The meaning of the function keys.

The meaning of a desktop and the use of shortcut icons.

And so on and so forth…

“Why, why doesn’t this one move when I touch the screen? It’s different from my daughter’s.”

That’s because, Mr. White, your daughter is using a tablet, and you are using a laptop without a touchscreen.

“Aaaaaah! The screen suddenly turned black and I can see my face! What is this…”

That’s because, Manteo, you accidentally pressed the power button.

“Th-There are people trapped inside this thing! We have to save them!”

No. There was an undeleted video file…!

…It was truly a relief that these were electronic devices that would ‘never’ break. If they had malfunctioned, my workload would have tripled or quadrupled. In any case, I obviously couldn’t make them understand that nothing on the screen actually existed and was merely the result of reading abstracted information in a specific, complex way. I just told them that everything on the screen was an illusion.

That wasn’t all.

“Eleanor? Smile.”

“Pardon?”

Click.

“Here, this is called a photo…”

“Kyaaaaaaah! M-My soul is trapped in here!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Kyaaaaaaah! The devil is mimicking me in the picture!”

“That’s not it either.”

The concept of a digital camera was also something I couldn’t make them understand in a short amount of time. The best I could do was to have them accept it as a very detailed portrait that was drawn very quickly. So you can imagine how difficult a task it was to take a photo with a digital camera, transfer it to Excel, and save it in a table.

That’s right. It was really, really hard. But the effort I put into educating these seven people was definitely worth it.

And so. Two months passed.

“Uh… um… is this alright? I’ve heard talk of ghosts and souls and whatnot.”

“Don’t you worry, madam. Do you doubt Sir Nemo? It’ll all be over if you just look this way and smile for a moment! One… two…!”

Click.

“Ugh, ugh, it’s so bright.”

“Don’t worry! We’re almost done! Here, just write down your name, birthday, hometown, and your family members’ names!”

“I’m 21 years old… and for occupation… should I put housewife?”

“All done! You can go back now, and we will allocate a field for you in a suitable location!”

“Th-Thank you! In England, my husband and I dreamed of farming on our own land, and to think that here…”

In this way, over the course of several weeks, we secured the data of approximately 11,282 people. Even those who had been resistant changed their attitude when they were told they had to register their identity to be eligible for land distribution. It would be difficult to do anything with this data right away, but it would make the work of organizing the administrative system much easier in the future. I could guarantee that. After all, it didn’t take that long to distribute the land, divided by religion, hometown, and tribe.

This was the power of e-governance.

***

“…Oh, my heavens.”

There is a general impression people have of heaven. Angels in white robes, and humans who have become like angels, float through the sky and live in eternal light. They praise the Lord in eternal glory and happiness. The lion grazes with the lamb, the land flows with milk and honey, and one can walk barefoot on the vast, beautiful meadows. There, the angels are beings who guard the throne of the Lord. They praise the very existence of the Lord and sing of an eternally happy life.

But… uh…

‘This, too, is a product of heaven?’

Scroll. Scroll.

Harriot endlessly scrolled up and down, looking at the thousand or so smiling faces contained within the Excel file.

Does heaven have an administration? If so, just how great and efficient must the administration of heaven be?

Furthermore, the concept of a ‘decimal point’² introduced here was also astonishing. A system that conveniently expresses numbers smaller than 1 in the decimal system instead of fractions—was it not astonishingly efficient? In addition, there were various mathematical symbols that conveniently organized equations, and the way such mathematical symbols were arranged and used.

All of it brought inspiration to Harriot as a mathematician. How much mathematical progress could be achieved with the inspiration gained from this thing called ‘Excel’ alone?

Harriot couldn’t get a proper night’s sleep today either. He fiddled with Excel all day… and only managed to shut his eyes when dawn broke.

Heaven… is perhaps a garden of mathematics.

If so, then God is probably the greatest mathematician.

Perhaps it might even be possible to describe the world with mathematics. If that were possible…

Ah.

In a daze, Harriot sat up and opened his laptop again, staring at the screen.

—“The things that appear on this screen are not real. Pardon? Then what are they? Hmm… they are expressions of encrypted information… No. Just think of them as moving pictures that depict something. They are illusions.”

That’s right. Sir Nemo had said it himself. The world inside this laptop… might already be something expressed through mathematics. If so, then perhaps this world, too… such a thing might be possible!

In Harriot’s mind, something that the ancient Pythagoras had thought,⁴ and something that the natural philosophers and scientists of the future would come to think, began to surface like crazy. He couldn’t overcome his excitement and shot up from his seat. He went to Bacon, the closest thing to a scientist here, and discussed his realization.

A world expressed through mathematics.

To explore the truth of the world under rigorous and systematic experiments, just as Bacon usually insisted. And, as Harriot had just realized, to express what was thus explored as an abstract model through the material of mathematics.

The world is a poem written in the ink of water and earth, fire and wind. But the language that forms that grand poem is mathematics.

The scientific method.

That seed, just a little bit… began to be planted early in this land.

In this New World.

In the conversation between Harriot and Bacon.