Sonny was back alone in the outerlands again, but this time it was different. Now he had his problem: A goal that he might not yet see, but he could definitely imagine. The man from the administration of information had given him a book on Fourier theory along with plans to the corrupter which was attached to the transmitter. The original signal coming from the talking centers was being transformed before it went out. The transformation consisted of delaying the signal and adding it to it self. This delayed signal was then delayed and added to the original signal. This was repeated, yet each time the delayed signal was added, it's volume was reduced. When that delayed signal was then delayed and it's volume was reduced, it's volume would be even less. After a few repetitions of this the volume would become so low compared to the original signal that it's effect would be negligible. Thus we would have a discrete number of delayed signals being added together. Here is an example:
Delay time is 1 second and the volume is cut in half every repetition. At anytime what we hear is what the person is saying now, mixed with 1 second ago, mixed with 2 seconds ago, with 3 seconds ago, and etc. But each time the volume is cut in half so we are adding original plus 1 second ago / 2 plus 2 seconds ago / 4 plus 3 seconds ago / 8 etc. After a while the contributions will become negligible. ie. The signal of 7 seconds ago being added would be divided by 128 (since 4 sec ago / 16, 5 ago / 32, 6 ago / 64) . Divding by 128 makes its' contribution less than 1% of original. Anything past this would be inaudible.
The effect of the above process would be that it would sound as if a bunch of people were talking at the same time, consequently muffling what was being said. It was like listening to the murmur of a big crowd. It was not hard to understand what the corrupter was doing after studying the plans describing it. Seeing this was the easy part. The hard part was reversing its' effect. This was his mission. He somehow needed to pick apart the corrupted signal and transform it into the actual signal coing from the talking centers. He knew the answer lay in the mathematics contained in the book given to him by the man from administration. He spent hour upon hour reading this book and thinking. He was having trouble seeing how it related to his problem. He would think so hard that it made him physically sick. First he would get dizzy and his head would hurt, then his stomach would turn and his throat glands would swell until he became nauseus and shaky. But it was worth it. When he could take no more, he would lie and think of the beauty of information and the warmth of a full cave. This would make him feel better and he would dive back into the search.
He felt like someone was pointing at something in the sky, and he couldn't see it no matter how hard he looked. Still, he knew if he kept loking he would find it. And eventually he did. It was like learning how to read: When he was young he used to see people stare at groups of symbols on paper. He watched as these characters on the page made the people laugh and cry. This intrigued him, what did they see? Eventually he learned that these different groups of symbols represented objects or actions or descriptions. His elders would point at them and tell him what they said, but soon this grew inefficient. His hunger for knowledge had exceeded the time they could give to the boy. So he learned the alphabet, and he saw that the symobls each had their own unique sound, and when these sounds were combined they sounded like words, words that he already knew how to speak. Now he knew how to teach himself, he could look at the paper and sound out the words. He no longer had to waste his time trying to memorize somthing that he already knew. He had learned how to read!
Now, years later he realized that mathematics was like that. It was just a new way of representing something that he already knew. Before he could speak he knew what an object was, he could see it. And once he learned to speak, he represented it with a sound. Then, after he could read, it was represented with symbols on paper. Now, using math, he could represent that thing with numbers, where numbers were just a simple way of describing how things were different, or similar, to each other. Numbers were an attempt at comparison, a tool for balance.
He could see, and now that he could see he knew that he could find what he was looking for. Soon, after this revelation he came upon what he hoped to be his homeland. Sonny looked in awe at the city in the distance, and like he'd done many times in the past, he thought about the grandfather that he never knew.
