Vili was somewhat flustered. Only after he saw that little brat from Yulia's family truly walk far away did he start running.
That little brat had bumped into him just now, and he had been terrified. He had used every ounce of effort to keep himself under control.
This can't go on...
Thinking this, Vili ran swiftly, soon leaving the edge of the village and crouching beside the main road. A cloud of dust came rolling toward him. Vili stood and waved both hands.
The whistle blared. Amid the screech of brakes and an explosive spray of dust, a dark figure stopped before Vili. Then came the sound of a camera adjusting its focus. After a while, a rough voice finally said, "Vili? Why are you here?"
"Enoch..." Vili's voice trembled. "I'm so scared, Enoch."
Vili made his living off the heavy workers, so he naturally knew their routines. He knew Enoch was likely to pass along this road around this time.
"Hey! What have you got to be scared of?" Enoch did not care in the slightest.
Vili shrieked, "You were the one who told me to push that guy out yesterday! It was you! You can't just abandon me! Otherwise... otherwise..." As he spoke, Vili began to cry. "Big Brother Enoch! I..."
At first, he had genuinely wanted to curry favor with Enoch, which was why he had agreed to "mess with" Yawg. Enoch was the most generous among the heavy machinery workers. More importantly, Enoch was lazy and often hired other workers to load and unload cargo. As long as he got on Enoch's good side, Vili would never have to worry about work again.
But Vili had never imagined that Yawg... no, that "mountain"... seemed to be truly formidable.
He had actually defeated a martial artist!
Enoch's tone carried a hint of nervousness too. "Did he spot you? That can't be right. Everyone around us was one of ours at the time... They were all involved. There's no way they'd turn us in."
"It's that little brat from Yulia's family!" Vili shrieked.
"Youji? He saw it?" Enoch was troubled. He truly found Youji irritating. If not for Youji, perhaps Yulia would have accepted him—even Xiang Shan had been dug up by Youji.
"He was walking down the street just now, and he bumped into me! He bumped into me!" Vili screamed. "That little brat must have seen it! Otherwise... otherwise..."
"Damn, he just bumped into you?" Enoch did not know whether to laugh or cry. "That's all?"
"What do you mean, 'that's all'? I pushed that monster!" Vili shouted. "Even that dog lost! There's no way I can win!"
"That was just luck!" Enoch said viciously. "The master was just kind-hearted, that's all! Pah, what victory? Didn't he collapse on the ground and keep saying, 'I lost, I lost,' or something? What a coward... pah!"
"You can't abandon me!" Vili shrieked. "Let's lure that child out! Whether we crush him or dismantle him for parts and sell them..."
"Hey! Are you crazy?" Enoch jumped in fright. He genuinely intended to be with Yulia. Enoch knew his own personality: he could not keep secrets. If he laid a hand on Youji, he would never be able to be with Yulia.
Enoch had already grown annoyed at being pestered by this guy. But he also felt that if he let this guy act on his own and something happened to Youji, he might get dragged into it. So Enoch said, "It's no big deal... How about this? I was planning to head into the city for some fun today anyway. I'll treat you to something good, all right?"
"Something good?" Vili looked confused. "What? A competition? Or a new game?"
"Way more exciting than that... Come on, get in!"
Enoch had no driver's seat on his body. He tilted his cargo bed slightly and let Vili climb aboard by himself.
Dust billowed into the air.
"A real programmer starts programming from bare metal!"
"To a real programmer, there is no distinction between object-oriented and procedural programming, nor between strong typing and type unsafety. From machine code to assemblers to compilers to countless high-level applications, he knows it all!"
Certain memories gleamed. Xiang Shan could no longer remember who had said those words to him. Yet something within his "knowledge" reminded him that this person had been a famous programmer in history, someone who had once shaped the course of history.
Xiang Shan had shared a deep friendship with this person, so he had learned "everything" about programming.
The essence of this was mathematics.
Programming was linguistics, and it was mathematics as well.
Or rather, linguistics itself was a kind of mathematics.
Around the end of World War II, mathematicians opened up an entirely new field known as the "word problem." Within this field, certain mathematical concepts were dressed in the garments of "words," with forms generated by algebraic structures naturally expressing themselves. Mathematicians tried to manipulate mathematics using the rules of linguistics.
In 1944, American logician and artificial intelligence pioneer Emil Post proved that the word problem possessed undecidability.
Then, in 1947, Anatoly Markov, Son of Andrei Markov, independently produced the same proof without knowing of Post's work.
Within "language," there existed "undecidability problems." This was the first undecidability problem not proposed by humans and not arising from the field of computational science.
At the same time, linguists reached the same realm from the opposite direction.
If modern linguistics originated with Ferdinand de Saussure, then Noam Chomsky was the summit that came after Saussure. Beyond being widely known as a linguist, philosopher, and sociologist, Chomsky could also be considered a mathematician.
His research into linguistics had even been included in the history of mathematics.
The two fields Chomsky created—"the grammar of context-free languages" and "the grammar of regular languages"—also held considerable status in theoretical computer science.
Geneticists likewise respected Chomsky. They believed that Chomsky's research into language might become the key to deciphering the genetic code—they could work backward to uncover the "language of the Creator" hidden within genetic information.
Or rather, the "program" followed by genetic chemistry.
As long as one possessed sufficiently profound knowledge of the relevant mathematics, creating a unique language was not especially difficult.
What was truly difficult was ensuring that the language was obscure to humans while remaining simple and comprehensible to machines.
The more obscure the language, the greater its advantage in Inner Power. Vagrants relied on Inner Power to hide themselves within the network and within this world. "Language" was the root of all their defenses. The language functions in their brains worked in close coordination with their Inner Power.
The more obscure the language their brains were accustomed to, the more untraceable their internal force became.
If one simply sacrificed computational efficiency for an advantage in Inner Power, that would be putting the cart before the horse.
Lisp could not achieve "obscurity." It was too close to mathematics. Once someone knew its fundamentals, any capable mathematician could understand how to use it.
C Language was "a high-level language with the characteristics of natural language." Too many people used it, causing the language to develop in a wild, untamed fashion. It had even undergone "linguistic drift" within a very short time—much like the evolution of natural language. If two relatively isolated network regions emerged in the world, C Language might even evolve "dialects."
Xiang Shan was familiar with both sides.
In the field of Inner Power, this meant that once he understood one method, he understood ten thousand.
Xiang Shan felt that he ought to know someone else as well. This person might not have been so famous, but he had undoubtedly stood at the edge of human understanding.
He had learned many things from his friends—or so it should have been.
But on reflection, that seemed to defy common sense. In Xiang Shan's impression, a person could at most study one field in depth; in other areas, they could only dabble. Human knowledge had long since expanded to the point where no individual could grasp its full scope.
He should not have understood engineering, excelled at programming, and possessed such a high level of mathematics all at once. Even if he truly had been friends with such incredible people, there was no reason he should have learned all their strengths.
Einstein's closest friend in his later years had been the foremost mathematician Gödel. Yet that friendship had not raised Einstein's mathematical ability to Gödel's level—at least, in the eyes of real mathematicians, Albert Einstein's mathematical ability remained merely "enough for a physicist."
And yet... that was exactly how things had happened.
Xiang Shan dismantled the terminal's operating system. He replaced the original compiler with his own.
Whether it was the lowbrow Java, the foundational C Language, Perl—beautiful and lonely like ancient poetry—Ruby, passionate like modern poetry, Python—easy to learn but difficult to master, yet nearly divine once mastered—or Lips, the language closest to mathematics and creation itself, even their successors, none of them were suitable for sustaining the existence of Inner Power.
There was no other reason: they had all been created "for others to use."
These languages had been born to be understood by people.
The only thing stopping others from understanding them was intelligence.
Even if C Language had formed "dialects," dialects were still not enough for secrecy.
For Vagrants, a good language could conceal their intentions and, after firewalls had been dismantled, encryption cracked, encapsulation torn apart, and the Ren and Du Microcosmic Orbits interrupted, grant them one final chance to strike back.
And you could not hope that your enemy was an idiot—you had to find a way to ensure that even if the enemy was smart enough, without crucial information, they would be unable to use their consciousness to touch the endlessly circulating code within your program in a short time.
Every school of Inner Power corresponded to a special compiler, with its own grammar and naming conventions. The high-level languages they compiled followed design philosophies utterly different from those of past high-level languages.
These were languages created "to make them difficult for people to understand."
If programmers of the past had tried to create the "best language," so good that everyone would want to use it, then the languages created by Vagrants were the complete opposite: the "worst languages."
More importantly, they still had to ensure that machines could accept such "bad" languages.
On this point, Xiang Shan possessed absolute confidence. At first, he did not know where that confidence came from.
After spending two hours rewriting the compiler, he recalled even more knowledge.
The foundation of his Inner Power was an unnamed language passed down only within an extremely small circle.
Very few people knew this language. It had never been widely spread. Only a handful had ever encountered it, and even fewer could learn and use it. The effort required merely to learn this language exceeded that of learning a foreign language. Programming in it was as difficult as writing top-tier poetry in a foreign language—and that foreign language had to belong to an entirely different language family from one's native tongue.
"Come to think of it, if it was really that difficult... how did I learn it?" Xiang Shan muttered. "Who exactly am I? How am I this amazing?"
After completing the compiler rewrite, Xiang Shan seemed to unlock even more knowledge. Data rapidly streamed out from the chip directly connected to his brain. Code overwrote code, irregular blocks of color appeared on the terminal screen, and then it swiftly shut down and restarted.
This was not creation from nothing. Xiang Shan seemed to have experienced a very similar scene long ago.
Perhaps because his memories were incomplete, he could not perfectly reproduce the technology from that time. But even so, he had most likely acquired the means to survive.
This unnamed language was absolutely the most fucking difficult language in the world to use.
But from a Vagrant's perspective, it was also one of the strongest languages.