Chapter 42
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Translator: volt
Chapter: 42
Chapter Title: Scientific Methodology
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<Scientific Methodology>
After bringing it up with Hewett, I immediately sprang into action.
"Uh... what? Suddenly, what are we doing?"
"Daughter? What's going on? Uh... Lord Nemo? What brings you here?"
First, I called Eleanor Dare and Sir John White.
"Please wait a moment. The Nautilus hasn't finished properly docking yet... What? What's that? Comp... puter?"
Vicente had to come too. He was the representative for about a hundred Spaniards.
"You need me? No, suddenly... handing me this square thing... It opens? Ugh, the light...!"
And of course, Manteo, the representative for the natives.
"What do we have here?"
"You're going to teach us something about a comp... whatever? Then of course we have to go!"
On top of that, Hewett, who was the first to discuss government with me; Harriot and Bacon, the scholars who were useful manpower here and there.
Basically, I'd called everyone I'd mainly worked with in this settlement. Walter Raleigh was off in England right now, so these seven were all of them.
I led them straight to Croatoan Island. Then I took them to the farm, sat them down at desks, and handed out tablets and laptops.
Two laptops my parents had used for office work, one I'd used as a college freshman, one after graduation, one from my working days...
Plus business tablets, Netflix tablets, and so on—new and old ones combined made twelve. People usually don't throw out old laptops or tablets, after all.
Of course, I'd formatted them all so no suspicious future data could be found. And I'd set the language to English on every one.
"From now on... think of these as your auxiliary brains."
At my words, Bacon suddenly raised his hand. I had a bad feeling but nodded to him anyway, and he asked,
"You call it a brain—surely you don't mean that humans think with their brains instead of their hearts?"
Was this future knowledge too?
I nodded with effort, and once again Bacon pulled out his notebook and scribbled something furiously. Ignoring him, I continued.
"...Anyway, the reason I call it an auxiliary brain is simple. It'll remember things for you, do complex number calculations in your place, and organize data for you."
At my explanation, Eleanor's eyes went wide as she grabbed the tablet I'd offered and examined it from every angle.
I could tell she was about to say something like, "Computer! Remember to bathe Virginia tomorrow!" so I hurried to act.
"Now... take a look."
The pre-connected projector activated, displaying my screen.
"You need to see properly... what this can do."
...Bacon couldn't believe the sight unfolding before his eyes.
"The average age of the initial Roanoke Island settlers was 23.3 years. Excluding minors..."
"Miss Harriot? You seem to have grasped the usage fastest, so try calculating this: 24,514 times 16,435. What's the result?"
"Mr. Hewett? You're picking it up just as quickly! Good. Now here—I'll give you some random names; sort them alphabetically automatically."
"Excellent! Eleanor?... Calculate the date 13,954 days after August 13, 1377!"
Tasks that might take someone all day to organize were completed in an instant with just a few finger taps.
Without a single mistake.
Without a single error.
"... ."
"Mr. Bacon? Mr. Bacon!"
"Uh, ah, yes."
"What's the average number of tribe members among our Algonquin tribes?"
"Ah... well... about 271.38."
"Good. Mind if I check how you set up the formula?"
"...Yes."
He could see why that lord called this an "auxiliary brain." No—it was a machine faster, more precise, and more astonishing than any brain. This was...
"Oh, ooh... this is a miracle..."
"Exactly. It's a miracle. Without this, how many office workers... er, angels would suffer from paperwork? With this, you won't need to fuss with data organization or calculations anymore."
Indeed.
The past few days learning to operate this thing, pressing the unfamiliar "keyboard," staring at this "monitor" until his eyes ached... it had been torture. But once he'd mastered it, he regretted not knowing about it sooner.
"Th-this, this is... the hope of all mathematicians and astronomers! With this, we could be freed from all those horrific calculations...!"
Harriot was trembling beside him, muttering to herself. The others, like Manteo or Eleanor, seemed to see it as just a convenient tool, but they were different.
"We'll record the names, birthdates, occupations, families, tribes, hometowns, genders, religions, immigration dates, and residences of everyone who settles in this colony here."
"... ."
"... ."
"... ."
"And we'll organize the land area and locations to be allocated to them here too."
"... ."
"... ."
"... ."
"So, what can we do with this going forward?"
What could they do?
With the ability to effortlessly organize, classify, and rank tens of thousands of pieces of information at every moment—what couldn't they do?
"...Everything."
Bacon murmured it without realizing.
Ugh, it was freaking exhausting.
Manteo not knowing how to read was a given, and the others were farther from modern gadgets than 80-year-old grandparents in the 21st century.
In that sense, teaching smartphone use at a senior center was a breeze by comparison.
It was teaching 16th-century people 21st-century tech. I hadn't expected it to be easy, but I tried anyway.
I laid out a textbook from my computer certification level 2 prep and taught them truly "from the beginning."
"N-no, Vicente! Don't break it! That's the power button!"
"The computer looks hot, so maybe clean it with water...? Eleanor, think about it. What happens if you slice open a hot person's belly and pour cold water in?"
"...No. It'd come back even if broken, but sparks are dangerous."
"You want to crack it open to check the internals? Great curiosity, but you wouldn't understand anyway. It's machined to microscopic levels invisible to the human eye... Hey, don't touch it! It's fragile!"
So, "from the beginning" meant exactly that.
How to hold a mouse.
The keyboard's purpose.
What function keys do.
The desktop's meaning and shortcut icons' uses.
And so on...
"Why doesn't this one move when I press the screen? It's different from my daughter's."
That's because, Mr. White, your daughter has a tablet and you're using a laptop without a touch screen.
"Aaaah! The screen suddenly went black and my face appeared! What in the...!"
That's because, Manteo, you accidentally hit the power button.
"P-people are trapped inside! We have to save them!"
No. There were leftover videos not deleted...!
...Thank goodness these were "indestructible" electronics. If one broke, my workload would've tripled or quadrupled.
Of course, explaining that nothing on the screen was real—that it was just complex abstractions of information rendered in specific forms—was impossible.
I just told them everything on the screen was an illusion.
And that wasn't all.
"Eleanor? Smile."
"Yes?"
Click.
"This is called a photo..."
"Kyaaah! M-my soul is trapped in there!"
"No, it's not."
"Kyaaah! A demon's imitating me from inside the picture!"
"That's not it either."
The concept of a digital camera was impossible to convey quickly too. Convincing them it was an ultra-detailed portrait drawn super fast was the best I could do.
So you can imagine how hard it was to get them to import photos from the digital camera into Excel tables.
Yeah.
It was really, really too much.
But the payoff from painstakingly training those seven was clear.
And so.
Two months passed.
"Uh... is this okay? I heard talk of ghosts and souls."
"Don't worry, ma'am. Do you doubt Lord Nemo?
Just look this way and smile for a moment, and we're done! One... two...!"
Click.
"Ugh, so bright."
"No worries! Almost done! Just write your name, birthday, hometown, and family names here!"
"I'm 21... and occupation... housewife?"
"All set! Head home now, and we'll assign you a proper plot of land!"
"Th-thank you! In England, my dream was farming our own land with my husband, and now..."
Over a few weeks like this, we compiled data on about 11,282 people.
Even those reluctant changed their tune when they heard they needed to register to get land allocations.
We couldn't do much with the data right away, but it'd make building the administration so much easier later. I could guarantee it.
It wouldn't even take long to divide land by religion, hometown, ethnicity, and so on.
This was the power of electronic administration.
"Oh... my God."
People generally have an image of paradise.
Angels in white robes and humans become like angels float in the heavens amid eternal light, praising the Lord in everlasting glory and joy.
Lions graze with sheep, milk and honey flow on the land, and vast beautiful meadows feel good even barefoot.
There, angels guard the throne of the Lord, singing eternal songs of happiness in praise of His very existence.
But...
'Is this a product of paradise too?'
Scroll. Scroll.
Harriot endlessly scrolled up and down, gazing at over a thousand smiling faces in the Excel file.
Did paradise have administration too? If so, how grand and efficient was paradise's bureaucracy?
And this "decimal point" concept was astonishing. Expressing numbers smaller than 1 in decimal form instead of fractions—what efficiency!
Beyond that, various mathematical symbols for tidy formulas, and ways to arrange and use them.
All of it inspired Harriot the mathematician. How much mathematical progress could come from this "Excel" alone?
Harriot couldn't sleep properly again tonight. He'd fiddled with Excel all day... and only caught some shut-eye at dawn.
Paradise... was probably a garden of mathematics.
In that case, God must be the greatest mathematician.
Maybe the world could even be described mathematically. If so...
Ah.
Semidreaming, Harriot sat up and opened his laptop again, peering at the screen.
-"Nothing on this screen is real. Huh? Then what is it? Hm... an expression of encrypted information... No. Just think of it as moving pictures depicting something. An illusion."
Yes. Lord Nemo had said as much.
The world inside this laptop... might already be expressed in mathematics.
If so, perhaps this world... could be too!
Ancient Pythagoras flashed in Harriot's mind, along with ideas that future natural philosophers and scientists would conceive, exploding wildly.
Unable to contain his excitement, he jumped up and rushed to Bacon, the closest thing to a scientist here, to discuss his revelation.
A world expressed in mathematics.
Exploring truth through rigorous, systematic experiments, as Bacon always advocated.
And, as Harriot had just realized, expressing those findings as abstract models using mathematics as the medium.
The world was a poem written in ink of water and earth, fire and wind.
But the language of that grand poem was mathematics.
The scientific method.
Its seed... had just barely begun to take root in this land.
In the New World.
In the conversation between Harriot and Bacon.