The Hunter

I launched my model again and again, and again and again the surface collapsed too fast.

I tweaked the coefficients every which way. I even wrote a simple “genetic” weighting machine that selected, on its own, the parameters leading to the longest-lasting survival of the network. But it was all useless. The crack would appear on some pitiful ten-thousandth iteration.

Clearly, my sphere was nothing more than an amusing toy. It couldn’t lay claim to the title of a serious economic model. And yet something nagged at me and wouldn’t let me drop the whole entertainment.

You know that gnawing, springtime feeling, when you understand that right here and now something is missing. You don’t know exactly what. That something might turn out to be a full shot glass, a talkative friend, a good joint, a girlfriend, a sea breeze, a Tenhi song, a reproduction of early Mondrian, the smell of jasmine and rain, laughter on a neighboring balcony…

You feel, with the keenest sharpness, that all you need is a pinch of some unknown seasoning to make the recipe perfect and the understanding complete. This feeling haunted me throughout my teenage years, driving me to experiment constantly. It was the same feeling that led me into IT and into literary work.

I was experiencing a sharp, sweet torment from the sense that something was missing in everything happening around me. The model lacked some important component. And that lack stirred my imagination, filled me with a spicy, viscous, adolescent excitement. I had often felt that kind of excitement in the late eighties, before my first boyhood dates.

The neighboring apartment was occupied by a young guy. Very likely he was gay.

I remember that early morning clearly. I was standing on the balcony with a cup of coffee. A “BMW” pulled up to our entrance — precisely the sort that leaves absolutely no doubt as to its owner’s line of work.

I was studying the beautiful, powerful, aggressive, broad-snouted ride, feeling that if I just reached out my hand I’d grab the elusive component of my project by the wing. My neighbor came out of the entrance in a sumptuous pink shirt, glossy black skin-tight trousers, and dazzlingly white sneakers with thick soles. He flung open the door of the “BMW” with great confidence and disappeared into the car. “Dangerous liaisons,” I thought, and it hit me at once.

The dangerousness of the connections in my model could be assessed relatively easily, by entirely formalizable criteria. The dangerous connections were noticeable.

I went back into the room and in a couple of hours sketched out a simple component that ran across the entire network, destroying the connections most dangerous from its point of view, while trying not to sever anything unnecessary. And it all worked. In this form the model easily withstood half a million iterations.

I played with the “paranoia” of my “hunter of dangerous liaisons.” It turned out that its effectiveness was not boundless. If it was too zealous, it itself became the cause of the early death of its netted universe, severing too much. If, on the other hand, I set it to be excessively easygoing, the system also collapsed too early, but now from neglecting the dangerous connections that had multiplied.

In short, at the optimal, balanced setting, the “hunter” allowed the sphere to live, on average, a little over half a million iterations. After which a crack would appear anyway, and the sphere would collapse.

At this point I experienced something like a creative orgasm. A quiet happiness and a deafening emptiness washed over me. It was Sunday.

Until evening I worked with enthusiasm on an article for Habr. In the article I described the architecture and certain concrete implementations of my spherical toy, while along the way recounting just how terrible, inevitable, and inexorable the systems-engineering threshold of fragility of the current civilization is.

I intended to end the article with the dramatic appearance of the “hunter of dangerous liaisons.” Toward the end of the text I meant to invoke the Strugatskys’ Definitely Maybe and to pile up a thicket of marginal hypotheses about an analog of my “hunter” in the space of actual life. In short, the article promised to be quite striking. I sensed glory, flutes, and incense in my tailbone. The laurel wreath was already pricking my pale brow…

Around five in the evening I set off to a restaurant with a charming British lady I’d found on Tinder the day before. Afterward she and I smoked my little pipe on the couch, ate salted pistachios, and watched “Hotarubi no Mori e.” I absolutely love tender, intelligent shōjo. Yuki Midorikawa in particular. We fell asleep around four.