In honor of Jay Lake’s genome becoming freely available, I present my story “The Nine Trillion Names of Jay Lake,” which I wrote for the Jay Wake Book.
Vainglorious Sparkle isn’t the best name ever for a planet, but when a hundred and some-odd million planets already have names, it’s kind of tough to find a good one that hasn’t been used. Unfortunately, my parents were very patriotic — so much so that they named their only daughter after our planet: Vainglorious Sparkle Chiu. My friends call me Glory. (My enemies call me Vain, but only behind my back.)
Anyway, I’d better shut up about me or you’ll start thinking I really am vain.
The jaylakeologist’s starship was an hour and half late arriving at the Vainglorious Sparkle spaceport. Considering the ship had just travelled the 45 k-lights from Earth in only nine years, I was willing to grant the pilot a little leeway. Plus, I’ve never been off-planet, so I like to hang out at the port sometimes and watch the launches and landings. Eventually my implant popped up an alert that the ship had docked.
We hadn’t known the starship was coming until it flipped under lightspeed after entering the system. The jaylakeologist had sent a message asking to meet with the head of a local university. Since Mom’s duties as chancellor of V.S.U. keep her pretty busy and I’d never seen anyone actually from Earth before, I volunteered to pick him up and bring him to campus.
My implant face-recced the stooped, white-haired man the moment he came through the customs gate, superimposing his name: Pedro Reyes. I sauntered toward him and said, “Dr. Reyes?”
He stopped and smiled, his antigravved baggage bobbing to a halt behind him. “I am he. And you are?”
“Glory Chiu. I believe you’ve been in touch with my mother since arriving in-system.”
“Yes, Chancellor Chiu has been most helpful.”
“Well, follow me. I’ve got a groundcar outside,” I said, as I summoned it from the parking lot via my implant.
From the FAQ page on jlake.com.earth.sol (archived 362013-07-28 01:03:14 AM UTC):
Q: Why are there so many Jay Lakes?
A. The Jay Lake genome was one of 65,536 genetic codes carried aboard the Von Neumann 1, the first self-replicating automated interstellar colonizer. The colonizer was programmed to create robots to build a colony infrastructure, including artificial wombs in which to gestate the babies who would become the founding colonists, tended through their childhood by nanny robots. Then the colonizer would replicate itself, and both it and its copy would launch to seek out new habitable planets and start the process over. Decades later, it was discovered that a single error in one line of code among millions meant that the same genetic profile would be loaded into every artificial womb: the Jay Lake genome.
Once we were inside the groundcar, I directed it to take us to my mom’s office about a half hour away, then sat back. After the silence stretched a little long, I said, “So, how was the trip?”
He shrugged. “I spent it in cryo. It was uneventful, which is always to be desired.”
I guess that made my life pretty desirable, since Dr. Reyes’s arrival was about the most interesting event in months. “We don’t get a lot of visitors from Earth. Nine years is a long time, even in cryo.”
He nodded, but said nothing.
Well, if he wasn’t going to volunteer information, I was obviously going to have to draw it out of him. “So, what brings you to our neck of the galaxy?”
“I’m afraid it’s nothing very interesting.”
“Most people don’t travel 45 k-lights for nothing very interesting.”
He smiled wryly. “I mean, it’s not interesting for people outside my specialty. I’m collecting the names of Jay Lake.”
I frowned. “I thought they were named Jay Lake. You can’t just write down ‘Jay Lake’ and you’re done?”
That brought a chuckle. “The original source of the genome was Joseph Edward Lake, Jr. But that name is just the start of the list. You see, until follow-up ships could arrive with colonists from Earth, everyone in a new colony was a Jay Lake — tens of thousands of Jay Lakes. It would have been tremendously confusing if they all went by the same name. So, for use among themselves, they each took a unique name. It is those names I am collecting.”
“But there must be billions and billions of them,” I said.
“About nine trillion, actually. Some people joke he’s got a thousand times as many names as God.”
“You can’t possibly collect them all.”
He shook his head sadly. “Of course not. But I can collect as many as possible from this region of the galaxy. Others are collecting elsewhere. Eventually all the collections will be unified on the galactinet.”
It didn’t really make sense to me. Why spend nine years in cryo to come here just to track down the names of a bunch of Jay Lakes? But people do all sorts of oddball stuff, and it seemed harmless enough. “What happens when you have all the names?”
“What happens?” He blinked a few times in rapid succession. “Well, I suppose someone will throw a party.”
From the FAQ page on jlake.com.earth.sol (archived 362013-07-28 01:03:14 AM UTC):
Q: Why was the Jay Lake genome selected for inclusion on the Von Neumann 1?
A. Although everybody nowadays is familiar with Jay Lakes because they founded over 90% of human colony worlds, when the Von Neumann 1 was programmed in the 2100s, the original Jay Lake was one of the best-remembered speculative fiction writers of the previous century [See Biblio]. Some people have theorized that due to budget cuts in the space program, the Jay Lake genome was selected because it was open source and therefore it did not require a license fee, but there is no evidence to support such a theory.
As a firsty at V.S.U., I hadn’t officially chosen a major yet. I was leaning toward archaeology, although with our colony being only 127 years old, we didn’t have a whole lot of archaeology on Vainglorious Sparkle. Someday I hoped to go off-planet and see something really old, find a lost city or a hidden artifact or whatever. Anyway, I was taking a variety of classes to get a feel for different things. My history class had a segment on early Vainglorious Sparkle history, and meeting Dr. Reyes had made me curious, so I skipped forward to that and watched the holo-lecture about our Jay Lake Period.
“In many ways, a Jay Lake made the perfect early colonist,” said Professor Scholes. “Each of them needed only five hours of sleep per night and was amazingly productive during waking hours. Individual Jay Lakes would focus their prodigious intellects on particular specialties within the colony, so there were medical Jay Lakes, construction Jay Lakes, and so on.”
“Did they pick names based on their specialties?” I asked.
The holo of Professor Scholes paused, then a message flashed up saying, “We’re sorry, an answer to your question cannot be synthesized from this lecture. Would you like to broaden your search?” There were buttons for “Other Lectures in This Class”, “Lectures in Other History Classes”, “Lectures in Other Departments”, and “Other Resources”.
After trying this class without results, I got a hit in other history classes. We didn’t have an entire jaylakeology department, but there was an upper-division course called The Jay Lakes of Vainglorious Sparkle. Even better, it was taught by a Jay Lake simulacrum. The last of our colony’s Jay Lakes had died several years before I was born, but the simulacrum could draw on the huge amount of public data about them.
“Jay Lake naming conventions were based on a complex mathematical formula,” said Professor Lake. “They were designed by one of the mathematician Jay Lakes on the first colony world, and passed along as part of the historical data in the Von Neumanns 1 and 2 when they left. In fact, he took his inspiration from the prime-number-based algorithm for the self-replicating colonizer, which was designed to ensure a unique serial number for each of the ships even after hundreds of generations without contact between ships. Thus, each Jay Lake, despite having an identical genome to myriads across the galaxy, has a name that is his and no one else’s.”
I frowned. “Do we know what the algorithm is?”
In response, the holo brought up a complex section of computer code.
“If we know what the algorithm is, then why would anyone be going around collecting the names of Jay Lake? Why not just generate the names?”
The holo flashed up, “We’re sorry, an answer to your question cannot be synthesized from this lecture. Would you like to broaden your search?”
I skipped straight to the other resources button, but it brought back nothing.
I briefly considered then discarded the idea that Dr. Reyes didn’t know about the naming algorithm. If I could find that info in just a few minutes, any jaylakeologist interested in the names of Jay Lake must know. So what was his real purpose in coming here?
From the FAQ page on jlake.com.earth.sol (archived 362013-07-28 01:03:14 AM UTC):
Q: How did the original Jay Lake die?
A. He died of an ancient disease called cancer, which was a common cause of death prior to the 22nd century. Since cancer involves changes to a cell’s genetic makeup, both the standard Jay Lake genome and the Jay Lake’s Cancer genome were sequenced prior to his death. Because the Jay Lake’s Cancer genome was one of the first open-source cancer genomes, it ended up being instrumental to the researchers who created the first generalized cancer vaccine in 2032.
When I finally tracked down Dr. Reyes, he was in the Von Neumann room of the Vainglorious Sparkle Colonial History Museum. The walls were filled with images of the Von Neumann that had originally colonized our planet, as well as of the duplicate it had constructed before both ships launched to find new planets. The centerpiece of the room was a five-meters-tall scale model of the colonizer.
“Do you know the serial number of your colonizer?” Dr. Reyes asked before I had a chance to confront him with what I had discovered. “It is not listed in the information here.”
“Umm,” I said, trying to remember what I’d read about our colonizer. “They’re all identical on the outside. I think the serial number’s just a software thing.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was just wondering if you knew.”
“I’ll tell you what I do know: Jay Lake names are generated by an algorithm. So there was no reason for you to come all the way out from Earth to find out the names.”
The lines around his eyes wrinkled deeper as he laughed. “Just because the algorithm can be used to generate the unique names for Jay Lakes on each colony does not mean we know which names were used by actual Jay Lakes. Only about half the names generated for any particular colony end up being chosen for use. It is those names that matter.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat crestfallen that the mystery I had discovered turned out to be so easily solved. “I guess that makes sense.”
He leaned toward me, a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. “But you are correct that the names are not all that I seek.”
“Really? What else are you looking for?”
“The names are a clue. Figure out what the clue means, and I’ll tell you more.”
From the Biblio page on jlake.com.earth.sol (archived 362013-07-28 01:03:14 AM UTC):
…
“Live Cleveland, Without the Sparkle”, Fictitious Force Issue 1, April, 2005 (See 98 reprint venues)
…
“Of Stone Castles and Vainglorious Time”, The River Knows Its Own, Wheatland Press, September, 2007 (See 372 reprint venues)
…
Back at home, I had my implant bring up a list of Jay Lake names for the colony on Vainglorious Sparkle. As I looked at the list, at first they all looked like three random words: Backward Food Father, Street Agreed Came, Then Level Roast. After looking through the list more closely, I found occasional sets of words that looked like they had names mixed in: Blubbered Hethor Plantains, Dreamt Carving Huang.
I did a search to see if “Vainglorious” was used in any of them. It was: Vainglorious Caltrop As. But there was no “Sparkle.” What did that mean?
I brought up the simulacrum of Professor Jay Lake on the holo. “Where do the words in the Jay Lake names come from?” I asked.
“They come from the 26,047 unique words in the complete published works of the original Jay Lake. Combinations of unique words can be used to represent a number.”
“How high a number?”
“You might as well ask how high numbers go. It depends on the number of words in the name.”
“Three words.”
“Approximately eighteen trillion.”
And if only half were used, then that would mean nine trillion names, and Dr. Reyes had said there were about nine trillion Jay Lakes. Which meant the three-word names that could be generated by the algorithm were almost used up.
Dr. Reyes must be looking for the first four-name Jay Lake. But why come to Vainglorious Sparkle? I double-checked and confirmed that none of our Jay Lakes had four names.
Remembering that the Jay Lake naming algorithm was based on the algorithm for the Von Neumanns, I asked, “Based on the naming algorithm, is it possible to project the serial number of the Von Neumann that would produce the first Jay Lakes that would require four names?”
“Yes. It would be serial number 1.”
Von Neumann 1. The original colonizer. Arguably the most important artifact in the history of the human race.
I had one more question: “Based on the names of the Jay Lakes of Vainglorious Sparkle, what was the serial number of the Von Neumann that colonized our planet?”
“One.”
From the FAQ page on jlake.com.earth.sol (archived 362013-07-28 01:03:14 AM UTC):
Q: I’ve heard there are people who track the names of Jay Lakes on all the colony worlds. Is that some sort of religious thing?
A. No. The original Jay Lake was an atheist, and would probably be very disturbed at the thought of a religion being founded around him. But too often nowadays, people only think of the Jay Lakes en masse. The jaylakeologists who track the names of individual Jay Lakes do so out of a belief that every individual matters.
“You’re looking for the first four-name Jay Lake,” I said, meeting Dr. Reyes again in the Von Neumann room at the museum. “But more than that, you’re here looking for clues as to where the Von Neumann 1 went after it left here 97 years ago.”
“Impressive,” he said. “I thought you might get to the four-names part, but only a few people have figured out the correlation with the Von Neumann 1.” He sighed. “But so far I have not determined where it went.”
“I can help you do research,” I said. Then, suddenly sure of where I wanted to go with my life, I added, “And I’m coming along when you go after it.”
THE END