Per 
I’ve lost contact with [RX] and [RY]. I expected it to happen at some point – that’s how explorations like this often go – but I didn’t expect it to be so soon.
They’re young. I hope I taught them well. Rachel had a fondness for physics; Rebecca always liked math. A seemingly-infinitely tall staircase seemed like an ideal early position for them; the staircase is lethal, of course, but it shows no signs of being a threat outside of its walls, and its lethality would teach them about D-Classes, as well.
You can’t get too close to D-Class personnel. They aren’t bad people, mind you. People focus on the inmates – they’re the ones the Foundation wants us to focus on - but Protocol 12 has been in place since [REDACTED], and we’ve been trying to generate our own as well. If you want a reminder, ask yourself how difficult it would be to find a subject with Urbach-Wiethe disease if we were limited to death row.
What D-Classes are, if they aren’t bad, is disposable. We try to avoid it; killing people indiscriminately reflects poorly on us as researchers, and more pertinently, as humans, but when our research is focused on scientific anomalies, and especially highly lethal ones, people will die in the process.
Rebecca was upset when she lost D-09184. It wasn’t her fault, but few people like having someone die when you’re responsible for them, even if they’re expected to. Rachel’s reaction was more muted. She’s always displayed a certain coldness and pragmatism that has worried me as a grandfather and impressed me as a researcher. I hope they balance each other out as they move up the ranks.To whoever reads this; if I am dead when you receive this, it wasn’t their fault. We view the lives of D-Classes as disposable; without the use of my legs I viewed mine as disposable as well.
You know why I did this. I’ve served the Foundation for the past [REDACTED] years, and my dedication has never wavered. Despite this, of course, death always settles in. I’ve come close to it many times – the Saskatchewan Experiments, the seventh implementation of the Goodstein Protocol, the closing of Site 55 – but never like what I saw in [REDACTED]. My pride does not allow me to say that I am a husk of a man, but things break apart, and things burn away – as we’ve both seen - and eventually one finds oneself without what was held dear. Rachel’s favourite album was called “What Burns Never Returns”; the title seems apt.
Of course she liked math-rock
I have set my affairs in order. [REDACTED] has taken the lead in conducting research on [xxx], the [REDACTED] Initiative is continuing uninterrupted, and you know the rest; you would never have authorized this otherwise.
Don’t miss me too much.
That’s what we all say before we leave.
.
One billion floors. One thousand million; ten to the ninth power.
Carl Sagan liked to stress the B when he explained what a billion was to people, in comparison to a million, because they’re very different numbers. I trust that you know the difference, but I should clarify.
We use a base 10 system because we have two hands with five fingers each. If I gave you ten pennies, you would likely have to quickly count them to determine how many there are.
You can then imagine one hundred pennies – the first number people tend to think of as “big” – and you would likely imagine it as ten rows of ten pennies. If you tried to visualize the gestalt in your mind, you would likely see the pennies begin to blur. Humans are good at “chunking” – rendering large pieces of information into smaller “chunks” – but only up to a point.
If you multiply those hundred pennies by ten you will get a thousand pennies – the second number you would likely consider to be “large”. At this point the reality of the number begins to fade and you will have to begin relying on mathematical methods to provide analogies for its existence.
Once you’ve reached one million, the individual pennies have disappeared from your mind’s eye; only the concept of “a block of one million pennies” remains, even if the reality of each single penny still exists.
You can duplicate this process with the blocks of pennies to get one billion.
If it took me one week to pass the millionth floor, it would take me seven thousand days to reach the billionth floor. It would be easier to express that as nineteen years.
It is important to remember that the largest number people can think of without consciously counting is four.
I do not know what a younger version of myself would say if you told him that my destiny would be to run up a seemingly-endless stairway for over twenty years while being pursued by a phantom. The concept seems ridiculous, but have I ever known anything else?
I have always been a runner. I ran away from home once, when I was three. I got to the credit union at [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] before they found me. [Mamere (double check if this is Quebecois after all)] asked me how I got that far and I told her that all I did was not stop.
It’s been a part of me since then. I joined cross-country when I was twelve to get in shape and “pick up girls” (it didn’t work), then began running as a form of meditation, and when I became estranged, I ran from home again. [my brother never joined.] Was I running from my stepfather or was I running from my responsibility to Vivien?
I thought I lost that part of myself in the aftermath of [REDACTED]. Things change when you can’t walk. People pity you and you resent them for it; they take care of you and resent you for it. If you could escape that fate, would you run from it?
They don’t tell you that being hungry and being fed are unrelated before they drip-feed you. The act of eating isn’t about satisfying your need for nourishment, it’s about satisfying your need for food. You have desires beyond survival – the cool feeling of water within your throat, the camaraderie of a meal with friends – that the [technobabble about nanomachines] can’t give you.
Those desires slowly disappear. The first to go was thirst. The [name] recirculator has taken care of that. The dryness in my throat has become its default state; knowing it is dry has passed from a physical sensation to mere knowledge that if I were to find water I would drink it.
The second was hunger. Your body makes its preparations to devour itself until the recirculator stands in its way. They reach an understanding; the hunger pangs subside, and your expected suffering vanishes, but the emptiness remains. To me, this emptiness feels as normal as the sensation of having finished a filling meal.
Other things will likely disappear. Will I notice them in time to write them down?
Carl Sagan never said “Billions and billions”. That was Johnny Carson doing an impression.
The “Saganth” floor.
It’s four billion, or course. Billions and billions. [may discuss "meaning" here…???]
A trillion floors. Markers have so far only appeared at numbers that have “meaning”; that is the set of numbers that I have my own mental constructs for, as opposed to the sum total of floors I have climbed. A billion is one thousand millions, but 454 232 941 805 is simply enormous. I have decided that listing the appearance of markers as being notable in and of themselves is irrelevant. A floor like the Sagan is relevant for you, but you already understand that there is a marker at every third power of ten.
I just reached a floor marked as Avogadro’s number, or approximately 6.022142*10^23. More evidence for my hypothesis that I am only receiving markers at numbers that I perceive as having meaning. [should probably discuss just how big Avogadro's number is, though]
10^56 – “Asougi”. “Innumerable” in Japanese.
There’s a floor above it, of course.
Eddington's Number; that is, the number of protons hypothesised to exist in the observable universe, or more accurately:
15 747 724 136 275 002 577 605 653 961 181 555 468 044 717 914 527 116 709 366 231 425 076 185 631 031 296.
It means nothing. Eddington chose it for aesthetic reasons, and its hypothesised relation to the fine-structure constant is nonexistent.
[discussing why it's meaningful to him]
This raises a question: Eddington's number means nothing to most, but it did to me. Will it appear in the stairway if you run up it? What would you see that I would not?
A googol; ten to the hundredth power.. Milton Sirotta was nine years old when he coined the term, and his uncle Edward Kasner used it to demonstrate how large a finite number can be. It doesn't even have the distinction of being an alleged scientific constant.
I’ve concluded that the markers aren’t “real”. This has no bearing on the reality of the stairwell; what I am trying to say is that if I were a Telefol tribesman who counted in base twenty-seven, I would have seen markers at, say, 27^6, instead of our understanding of a million.
This leaves the question of what would happen if we counted in something like base pi unanswered. Will we attempt to discover this in future testing?
I have not aged. My equipment remains intact.
2^276,509. The reciprocal of the probability that a spaceship would pick someone up in the cosmos within a thirty-second period, according to Douglas Adams.
Of course, we know the real probability is [REDACTED], but he made a good guess for a civilian.
The millionth term of the Fibonacci sequence.
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The largest known twin primes.
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The largest known prime not containing the digit “4”.
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Borges’ Number; 25^(410*40*80). The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a library that contains every possible book that has 410 pages, 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line, and using 25 characters. Most of the books are gibberish, of course, but the rest…
But when you think about it, determining what books are gibberish and what books aren’t depends on the language you speak, doesn’t it? The Anglos would say that about French, of course, because they have no culture, but if we think about it, even a person whose language consists entirely of commas and the letter Q would still find whatever they wanted in the Library if they looked hard enough.
He wrote another short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, about a review of “The Quixote”, which was a line-for-line recreation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The review argues that due to the layers and layers of literary developments since the release of the original Don Quixote, “The Quixote” is not in fact “the same work” as Don Quixote, but has obtained new meanings beyond the original due to its historical context.
They’re two ways of looking at the same concept. People can find any meaning in anything, they can express that meaning in any way they please, and the “reality” of that meaning stems from how effectively one can share that meaning. I see powers of ten because I use my fingers to count, my Telefol counterpart sees powers of twenty-seven because he uses his fingers, toes, wrists, upper and lower arms, eyes, and nose to do so, and the reason I am describing the stairwell instead of him is because we run the Foundation and he does not.
Largest Known Prime.?
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Largest known squarefree semiprime. [He’d probably start admitting that he’s kind of a dork about big numbers here].?
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Largest known perfect number.
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Billionth term of the Fibonacci sequence.
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SCP-1941’s number. [Definitely worth noting].
I apologize for this not being helpful in finding the prime factors of SCP-1941’s number.
http://googology.wikia.com/wiki/Asankhyeya - meaning “innumerable”, but it clearly isn’t.
The flower garden sutra would be neat to talk about here.
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A googolplex. That’s it. That’s the biggest number I’ve seen described. Milton Sirotta defined it as “one, followed by writing out zeroes until you get tired”, and his uncle defined that as “one with a googol zeroes behind it”.
You could name more numbers after it, of course. One with a googolplex zeroes, one with a [one with a googolplex zeroes] zeroes, and so on and so forth, but what would they mean? If the scorecard were to display each digit of my score individually at this point – and even if each digit were represented by one proton – the supermassive black hole it would generate in its stead would instantly cause an XK-class scenario. How much worse off would we be if it created a larger one?
The largest number you can understand without counting is four. A fourth of a googolplex is larger than [unspoken number in flower sutra] by [x] orders of magnitude.That number, itself, is larger than [innumerable]
The stairwell disappeared when I lost count of where I was; some eight thousand floors above my previous log. [why would he lose count?] In front of me lies a white void and behind me, as always, is my companion.
As I have mentioned, the stairwell shows markers when I reach numbers that have “meaning” to me. The meaning isn’t related to any strict mathematical concepts, unless Borges and Adams knew more than they were letting on, and I believe that the stairwell has disappeared from view because no number beyond my previous marker has a “meaning” for me anymore. I will make a marker for myself at the floor corresponding to the number “ten to the power of a googolplex”.
We always make meanings for ourselves. I came in here fully expecting to die, and I viewed my death as a way to snatch a shred of my pride back from the void after losing my legs and thus much of my self-concept as a runner. It was selfish of me, of course, but I justified it to myself by telling myself that I would be the one to unlock the secrets of the stairwell.
My fear that the scorecard will display each digit of my score and thus destroy the universe is not necessarily rational, but it has provided me with the motivation to continue running into infinity.
In turn, telling myself that I need a motivation to continue running is a way to ascribe meaning to my situation. I am still unconsciously compelled to run, and am unable to stop.
I tried thinking of a one with a googolplex zeroes behind it.
The stairs failed to rematerialize.
