Alan

Paul F Walsh

 

Alan hated school with a passion. School sucked. School was so far behind his own thinking, and school clearly wanted to keep him harnessed to a past that was no longer relevant. Even the school uniform was a statement of just how uniform the school expected him to be. Alan attended a private school on a high hill that had a view of everything, and a view on everything, with little original understanding attached. The school had been selected on the basis of pretension because that is how Alan’s mum chose everything; including Alan’s name, of course.

Alan was named after Alan Turing because his pretentious mum hoped that her little baby would become a universal thinking machine. Alan’s mum was a hover parent who inspired other hover parents with her resplendent artificial intelligence. Alan’s mum was a doctor, worse, she was a doctor in pursuit of a vaccine for the virus, a lady on a secret mission for the local medical research mob.

Alan loved the virus. The virus had effectively killed his school, but the school was still sadly on life-support via distance learning. His mum refused to use the expression home-schooling as she felt it was too common for their circumstance. Alan now sat in front of his computer screen waiting for the school day at home to begin. His school sucked so badly that he was obliged to wear his school uniform even at home.

If anything sucked worse than the school, it was the school uniform. The boater hat and blazer were the epitome of indignity. The school motto emblazoned on the blazer did not help: Look Forward in Latin seemed rather backward to Alan and a complete repudiation of the school’s reality, which always looked back. Alan’s mum said that the uniform made him look distinctive, but Alan knew that it made him look like a first-class wanker.

As he waited for the split screen images of his teacher and his mates to appear, Alan looked at his own reflection in the computer screen that was the child of his namesake Alan Turing. He wondered if young Turing had ever looked at his reflection and looked forward to winning World War II with his codebreaking exploits and being the father of the computer age. Doubtful, thought young Alan, since that would lend credence to the school’s pretentious Latin motto. Bloody wankers!

The day began with mathematics class. Alan loved mathematics, but hated the backwards nature of the course, and he hated his mathematics teacher Mr Artesian Bore. Right on cue, his mum began hovering. ‘Oh goody, Alan,’ she said, ‘it’s mathematics. I’ll be able to help you again!’ Alan privately groaned, and he hoped that the class would be interrupted by naked pictures of frolicking goats.

Alan glanced away from Mr Artesian Bore, a Pythagorean goat-fancier of cornucopian persuasions, and he observed a movement in Stockton Bight.

What was that?

The view from Alan’s current home-schooling desk was the most pretentious view that his mum’s money could buy in Newcastle. Their unit block, the aptly named Ivory Tower was the tallest and ugliest modernist structure in the East End commanding a panoramic vista of the harbour, Stockton Bight and Newcastle Beach. His mum had bought the penthouse on the very top floor because … of course she did. Can anyone spell P R E T E N S I O N?

But, ironically, this was a genuine pre tension moment. The Japanese submarine I-21 had just surfaced in Stockton Bight. And Alan just knew that the entire Japanese Imperial Fleet was hovering over the horizon like some grotesque, combative caricature of his hovering imperial mum.

The I-21 was massive, and its 5.5-inch deck gun blew up the Light Rail, but nobody noticed. Nobody cared, either. Except Alan’s mum, of course. ‘Now that’s an example of projectile motion, Alan. Study it carefully. How could you use trigonometry to improve their gunnery?’

But their gunnery did not need improvement.

A battleship over the horizon delivered a full broadside that proved that old weaponry was surprisingly good at bringing down modern unit blocks. As Ivory Tower began to arc like a pendulum, and neighbouring unit blocks collapsed in vertical concrete cascades, Alan’s mum felt pedagogically inspired. ‘Now this is an example of Simple Harmonic Motion, Alan, study it carefully. Applied mathematics is so much more interesting than pure theory.’

At this Cartesian point in the earth’s rotation, Alan’s mum was called away to work. Theoretically, she was trying to save the human world from the virus, but the lack of her hovering presence ironically allowed her son Alan to save the human world from itself.

Alan achieved this heroic feat in a very Turing-like way, through the power of mathematics.

Alan was a great observer of patterns. He was aware that the vacuum created by his mum’s absence was always filled with inspiration. He watched as the past continued to attack the present. And he pondered the nature of this repetitive historic pattern.

A wave of Japanese heavy bombers carpet-bombed what had once been the heavy-rail corridor as though clearing the way for the old Newcastle Flyer to return. And a squadron of Japanese dive-bombers blew up the modern ends of the Court House with all the precision of an architectural demolition crew. Yes, this attack from the past was not random, and Alan could see the viral implications of a human world without equality, a world of imbalance devoid of solutions for its absent equations, a world of artificial love without real functions.

And then Alan realised that disease was a complex unreal function of imbalance and inner conflict that, if left unchecked, could manifest in outer conflict. And, just as Alan had this inspiration, his school was wiped off the face of the earth by a massive experimental neural bomb, and his computer screen pixelled Mr Artesian Bore into a dizzying kaleidoscope of spectral oblivion.

Now that school was wiped out like ancient chalk from a modern smartboard, Alan could think for himself.

And think, Alan did.

But thinking alone could not solve the problem.

Alan staggered from thinking about one-to-one and one-to-many functions into a mathematics realm that he truly loved.

And it was the loving that did it, rather than simply the thinking.

Alan downloaded a universal loving machine from the conflicting pensive clouds that were swirling around him.

Alan used Calculus to differentiate integrated artificial love to arrive at an expression for pure real love without constant or limits within the Real Numbers system. There were no complex imaginary parts in pure real love.

Alan saw a way in which the Distributive Law could distribute pure love consciousness across the human world to all humans simultaneously.

And the past suddenly stopped attacking the present.

The past began to inform the present.

And the virus was no more.

Like his namesake, Alan had won the war.

Alan had created a vaccine derivative that prevented imbalance and inner conflict, which were the root causes of all disease and lack of harmony in the human world.

It was later discovered that Alan’s universal loving machine was equally a vaccine to prevent harmful climate change.

But Alan’s pretentious mum kept hovering. She had little else to do now that Alan’s vaccine derivative had destroyed the need for medical research and left her unemployed. And yet, being eternally pretentious, Alan’s mum advised all of her hover-parent friends that she was not really unemployed. She had simply been promoted to become Alan’s mental mentor. A very important and well-paid job, she said.

Alan’s mum regarded Alan’s genius as a testament to her genius in recognising and nurturing his potential from the cradle to the grave. But the latter aspect troubled Alan’s mum. What if she should die before nurturing Alan to his maximum flowering.

Alan’s mum now wanted Alan to discover a mathematical solution to death.

Alan advised his mum that death did not require a solution because death was not a problem.

‘Humans just grow out of this world, mum, like a teenager grows out of his school uniform.’

‘Don’t be silly, Alan. Look Forward to me helping you with your mathematics for eternity.’

 

 

Copyright Paul F Walsh 2020