The Book of Terms

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A tale by Kline Leopold Hedrös ©2023

­Arthur – 2024

The first time Arthur saw the old wooden box, he wondered if it was worth anything. It was a recurring thought. A week before, he had learned of the death of his grandmother, Alice, while zooming with his AI dataset group in Tacoma. During a discussion about hashing rapidly changing token networks, an intrusive call bypassed his spam filters and rang his Charge of the Light Brigade ringtone. He was annoyed and relieved to take the call. Alice was his favorite and only grandmother. She had raised him in Pulaski, New York after his mother and father died in a grisly northern New York winter car accident. Black ice and lake-effect snow kill often. Arthur never really knew his parents; he was eight months old when the accident happened, so he didn’t grieve his parents, but he missed them. He would be looking over some dumbass bit of database code and then want to talk to a dad he couldn’t remember. The mind is weird. Alice was a good and loving grandmother. She did her best with Arthur, and despite her limited means, Arthur, a bright child, moved from success to success: a full scholarship to Columbia, then lucrative West Coast job offers, followed by a quick ascent of corporate career ladders. When the call announcing Alice’s death interrupted his Zoom session, Arthur was a senior manager at a small company that specialized in preparing training pipelines for AI systems.

Arthur couldn’t afford time off to deal with his grandmother’s estate, but his wife Beth wouldn’t have it. She reminded him that Alice deserved better and he better “man up.” So, Arthur found himself in Alice’s tiny Pulaski home, sifting through a lifetime of debris. Oddly, the more he sorted through Alice’s belongings, the more he enjoyed it. Alice wasn’t a hoarder, but her house was filled with interesting archaic stuff: old records, magazines, out-of-print books, family pictures, kitschy ceramic dog figurines, and mysterious kitchen tools. Arthur enjoyed Alice’s effects because her affairs were in good order. She had a clearly written will, no outstanding debts or pending taxes, and no heirs except Arthur. Settling the estate and selling the house would be a smooth, trouble-free chore. It was the last of Alice’s gifts. He gave away as much as he could to Alice’s Pulaski neighbors but opted to sell the house as is, contents included. It was a lazy, fast, nerdy first approximation to estate processing. He disposed of everything with one exception: the wooden box.

It wasn’t really a box; it was an old traveling portable desk. The type of container Alexander Hamilton wrote George Washington’s letters on during the Revolutionary War. The wood, like all finished 19th-century woodwork, was high quality; modern boxes are crap by comparison. Even the box’s brass hinges gleamed. Arthur didn’t know how old it was, but it was definitely an antique. When he picked it up, he was surprised by its weight and the muted thumping sound of its contents.

Placing the box on his grandmother’s kitchen counter, he opened it to find around two hundred unbound sheets of tan paper. An orange sticky note with two words: “Grandma Martha,” was attached to the first page. It was in Alice’s bad handwriting; Alice’s handwriting had rapidly declined in her final years. Arthur and Beth could barely decipher her last Christmas card.

Each tan sheet looked like it had been laid against a gravestone or another hard surface and then gone over with charcoal. The charcoal highlighted evenly spaced, not quite hieroglyphic, not quite Greek, and not quite Arabic symbols. Arthur was intrigued. His AI unit was involved with a cuneiform translation project. Due to the sheer drudgery needed, most of the world’s surviving cuneiform tablets have never been translated. Maybe a trained AI could help. Alice’s strange charcoal sheets might be useful test materials.

Martha – 1880

Martha was a precocious child, a superb student, and a worry to her mother. At nine years old, it was clear to anyone who dealt with her that she was the brightest person they had ever met. Her mother feared she would never get married. Men in rural 1880s Illinois didn’t marry smart girls; it would have been better, her mother thought, if Martha was pretty. Then Martha could get married, have children, and have a normal life.

Martha was not on the normal life path. She would spend years working as a calculator in Harvard’s esteemed stellar catalog group, but that’s in Martha’s future. Today, she is in her one-room schoolhouse with her teacher, Miss Wright. The other students were outside playing and being the semi-literate Illinois backwoods hicks that they were.

Martha was trying to interest Miss Wright in something she had noticed yesterday. If you draw three circles with different diameters on a piece of paper and then draw tangents to the three pairs of circles, you’ll see that the three tangent pair crossings always line up. Martha drew half a dozen diagrams illustrating her discovery, but Miss Wright seemed unimpressed. It was Martha being Martha. It’s not true that all teachers are looking for bright students. Many teachers prefer quiet, unchallenging students who do as they’re told. Smart kids are work. And Miss Wright was only teaching until she could get married, have children, and lead a normal life. Still, Miss Wright looked over Martha’s circle drawings as the child waved them in front of her, and then she remembered the old Frenchman.

Antoine – 1824

Most days, Antoine found it hard to believe he was a Mississippi river man. How could an École Polytechnique student and an enthusiastic supporter of Napoleon’s efforts to reform French education end up eking out a living manhandling riverboat cargo? As Antoine lamented daily, the chain of events that led from Paris to the Mississippi was improbable but not impossible.

In April of 1823 (the same year Joseph Smith claimed the Angel Moroni visited him), Antoine and his friends were carousing on the South Bank. Everyone was drunk and misbehaving. While crossing a Seine bridge near Notre Dame, his party ran into an equally drunk party of young army recruits. A minor brawl broke out, and Antoine pushed a recruit over the bridge during the melee. He watched as the recruit tumbled in the air and head-first-thunked into a bridge abutment. His body instantly relaxed and fell smoothly into the water. Antoine knew he had died the instant his head struck the bridge. Heads were severed in France for less. So, as Antoine watched the body float downstream, he ran.

Assuming the alias of a young seminarian named Ancetin, he made it to Bordeaux and secured passage to New Orleans. Four weeks later, at nineteen, he arrived in New Orleans. Napoleonic law still reigned in New Orleans, so Antoine inconspicuously worked north, going up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and trying out his new career as an itinerant schoolteacher and laborer. Antoine found that early 19th-century America was not interested in Napoleonic rigor or Yankee sloth. Most villages didn’t have schools, and when they did, teachers were poorly paid, and even if schools existed and teachers were paid, students often showed up drunk on beer or cider. Inebriated kids attended school haphazardly, learned little, and couldn’t wait to be elsewhere. In a dozen towns, Antoine encountered a handful of diligent students and no parents who believed in “book learning.” It was depressing but better than the guillotine.

Arthur – 2024

On returning to Tacoma, Arthur showed Beth Alice’s odd etching-filled wooden box. He was expecting she would share his curiosity, but not so. She didn’t want more “old junk” in their apartment. She was going through one of her organizing moods. Ok. He took the box into his office and placed it on a metal cabinet filled with laser printer refills.

Arthur was lucky to have an office. In the 2020s, even senior managers were cast into the open office abyss. One of Arthur’s cynical peers described the open office as a corporate conspiracy to save money on furniture. Arthur only objected to the “conspiracy” bit. And people wonder why it’s hard to get post-COVID programmers back into the office. How about putting us in offices with doors and making it worthwhile? Nah! Arthur’s team seldom met in “the office”; most were remote, they weren’t in Tacoma or North America, and there was nothing the suits could do about it. Try “managing” top-notch, 21st-century machine learning programmers with 19th-century office methods. You’d be surprised how fast nerds can move when necessary.

Still annoyed with Beth’s box banishment, Arthur logged into his morning’s one-on-one with Dan late. Dan often Starlinked in from his four-by-four. Currently, Dan was on the back roads of Canyonlands National Park. He delighted in zooming over beautiful landscapes while his home and office bond compatriots looked over their sad bedroom Nerf collections and generic, always out-of-date, office whiteboards.

“Programmers be sad,” Dan teased.

The camera on Arthur’s monitor showed Alice’s box in the background. Dan noticed and asked about it. Arthur told Dan what he knew about the box. He even opened it up and showed Dan some of the etchings.

“Are all the etchings the same size?” Dan asked.

Arthur said the paper sheets were about the same size, but he hadn’t looked at all the pages; the charcoal marks might vary. Dan was the lead on the cuneiform project; he saw language puzzles everywhere. He asked Arthur to scan the sheets and load them into Jones. Jones, after Indiana Jones – because programmers – was the company’s language AI. It had been trained on hundreds of millions of pages of text from all curated modern and extinct human languages. Jones knows, in the inexpressible AI way, more about the structure of human languages than any bipedal meat puppet. Arthur didn’t feel like doing any real work, so he grabbed Alice’s box and headed down the hall to wage war with that goddam pain in the fricking-ass printer-scanner that always needed unjamming and new printer cartridges. One of these days, Arthur was going to go full Office Space on that damn device.

Martha – 1880

Martha wasn’t scared by the old Frenchman, but she wasn’t entirely at ease with the ancient rocking-chaired figure before her either. The old Frenchman lived in Banner’s boarding house. Every day, he sat beside the boarding house front door in his rocking chair and called out arrivals and departures. Nobody knew how this paid for his room and board, but the Banners didn’t seem to mind his presence. Miss Wright told Martha that the old Frenchman used to tutor the governor’s children and encouraged Abraham Lincoln when the president studied his figures. Maybe he would be interested in Martha’s circles. When Martha heard about the old Frenchman, she told Miss Wright she wanted to see him – now! Then Martha abruptly got up and walked out of school. Miss Wright watched her go but then, prudently, sent one of her many underachieving students to tell Martha’s mother where the child was heading.

When Martha arrived on the boarding house porch, the old Frenchman called out her arrival. He suffered from large cataracts in both eyes and couldn’t see her clearly, but he knew a small person was present.

He asked, “Who is it?”

Martha said her teacher said he could help her with figures. Then, she enthusiastically waved her circle diagrams before his cataract-fogged eyes and started describing her discovery.

“I’m sorry,” the old Frenchman said, “My eyes are very bad. You will have to speak slowly so I can picture it in here,” he said, tapping his head. “Also, Miss …”

“Martha,” Martha answered. She had forgotten her manners. She was always to introduce herself and ask how others were doing. “Hello, what’s your name?” she said.

“Antoine Legault, young lady,” the old Frenchman replied.

With introductions out of the way, Martha described her circle discovery to Antoine, and of course, Antoine knew precisely what she was talking about. Martha had rediscovered Gaspard Monge’s lovely little circle theorem. Antoine didn’t tell Martha she had found something already known. In his seventy-six years, he had taught long enough to know that self-discovery is the essence of education. You don’t stamp it out with academic pedigrees; you encourage it. Antoine asked Martha how she knew the crossing points lined up. It was the start of Martha’s first big friendship and Antoine’s last. Martha often said that she was fortunate to have met the old Frenchman; he was the best teacher she had ever had, and it’s unlikely she would have ended up a Harvard calculator without him.

Antoine – 1825

Teaching school in frontier America wasn’t lucrative. It didn’t take an École Polytechnique certificate to figure that out. Antoine taught school when possible but was forced to pursue other ways of keeping his belly full. It was a relentless struggle to pay for room and board when he wasn’t on the Mississippi or Ohio rivers, but he got lucky one afternoon on the Saint Louis docks. An argument had broken out between an old, short, well-dressed townsman and a boat filled with fur-coated trappers. It only caught his ear because the trappers were screaming in a guttural French accent, probably French Canadian. Without thinking, he weighed in with his smooth Parisian French. The townsman and the trappers both shut up and looked at him. Then, both parties started begging him to help settle the issue. It turned out that Antoine had just the skills Saint Louis traders needed: mathematical training to manage accounts, facility with many languages, particularly French for the Missouri river trapper boats, and a knack for negotiation. The old townsman, Mr. Knoles, offered Antoine work on the dock. In the next two years, Old Knoles, as Antoine affectionately called him, became almost a second father to Antoine. Both men were lonely; Old Knoles was a widower without surviving children. He had buried eight consecutive girls and then his wife. He knew his days were ending, and despite some success with his “Fur and Mercantile” business, he had no heirs or trustworthy friends. Antoine was a blessing to Knoles, and Antoine felt the same about Old Knoles.

Arthur – 2024

Scanning Alice’s sheets took far less time than Arthur expected. The fricking printer-scanner just did its job. It was a technological miracle. As he was feeding sheets through the device, he was impressed by the quality of the paper. Modern pulp paper, like modern music, modern art, and modern shit in general, is mostly garbage. Once something is “commodified” in our modern world, its production follows a predictable course of suit-driven cost-cutting and “enshitification,” to use the precise term. As Arthur wiped charcoal off his fingers, he realized the paper might tell him how old the etchings were. It only took a few minutes to look up antique book and stationary dealers on his phone. The nearest was just north of Tacoma, almost in Seattle. He still didn’t feel like doing any real work, so he gathered the etchings, put them back in Alice’s box, and headed to the stationary dealer. Before starting his car, he texted Dan a link to the etching scan data. Dan would have to load Jones himself.

Martha – 1885

Monsieur Legault’s health started failing as he turned eighty-one. For five years, Martha had visited the Old Frenchman almost daily. Most of the time, he directed her post-school schooling. Martha’s mother demanded that she quit school at twelve, devote her energies to the family farm, and master all the skills needed to make a good village wife. It was like a death sentence for the mind. Martha relented but nagged her mother into letting her continue visiting the Old Frenchman. Martha’s mother didn’t consider the old rocking chair-bound man a threat to her daughter’s reputation, and having the girl pass through town often might attract suitors. The hour or two Martha spent with Monsieur Legault gave her perhaps the best education available in western Illinois. Both relished their sessions. Martha noticed her mentor’s decline and tried to help Monsieur Legault as much as she could, but she also did her best not to think about what life would be like if Monsieur Legault died. So, she was taken aback when Monsieur Legault said he had wanted her to take something before he died.

Monsieur Legault started their conversation with the oddest question, “Do you know about Joseph Smith?”

Of course, Martha knew Joseph Smith. Smith and his crazy followers had left an indelible impression on the people of western Illinois. Her mother told her stories about how Smith’s followers, the Mormons, as they called themselves, would leave nearby Nauvoo, steal cattle, sheep, horses, and whatever else they could get their hands on, and then retreat to Nauvoo, where Smith would refuse to hand them over when petitioned by neighboring towns. Smith ran Nauvoo like a little caliphate and largely ignored Illinois state laws. He got away with it for years because his followers voted as a block. If you wanted to get elected to anything in Illinois, you had to cut deals with Smith. He would then tell his zombies to vote for you or your opponent. It worked until Smith crossed both sides in an election.

Consequently, when Smith was gunned down and the Mormons were driven out, a lot of people, Martha’s mother in particular, felt they had it coming. Martha had also heard the tale of the Golden Plates. It was a great story. As a Lutheran, she didn’t believe a word of it, but it was still a great story. How many people have glowing white angels show up and tell them where to dig for buried treasure?

Antoine – 1827

Antoine worked with Old Knoles for two years out of his tiny Saint Louis Fifth Street “Fur and Mercantile.” It was a good time for Antoine. Mr. Knoles was delighted with his work and told Antoine he was planning to leave the business to him; he was getting too old to keep haggling with river traders, and Antoine was better at it anyway. Antoine was also settling into Saint Louis’s embryonic society. He had made some friends, and his elevated status as a trader made him attractive to young women. The mercenary nature of women did not surprise Antoine: highly educated Frenchmen consider it their defining trait. Still, the female attention was nice. Antoine would have stayed in Saint Louis, lived out his life as an accomplished townsman, and ended up under an elegant tombstone in the Cathedral Catholic Cemetery on Walnut. At least that was the fantasy; then Jules appeared on a New Orleans steamer. Jules saw Antoine push the army recruit off the Seine bridge four years ago. Antoine’s running wasn’t done.

Antoine told Old Knoles about what happened on the bridge. The old man wasn’t entirely surprised or particularly bothered. Men of Antoine’s class did not work the rivers unless compelled. And Antoine was hardly the only inhabitant of Saint Louis with past shame. Old Knoles would have happily overlooked the bridge incident, but he recognized the younger man’s peril. People wouldn’t prosecute Antoine. Nobody in Saint Louis cared about a drunken Parisian brawl, but the gossip, “He just let the poor boy drown,” would slowly poison his business reputation, and who knows how far the gossip would spread. Bounty hunters trolled up and down the rivers; all it would take was a small reward on Antoine’s head, and then, instead of attracting young women, another more violent section of society would take notice. Antoine had to flee again.

Before leaving Saint Louis, Old Knoles sat him down in the tiny “Fur and Mercantile” shop they had shared and placed his prized traveling desk in Antoine’s hands. The traveling desk was a small, hinged wooden box. Old Knoles said it had belonged to his father, who claimed Lewis and Clark had used it. Knoles didn’t believe the Lewis and Clark story, but the desk reminded him of his father every time he used it. Antoine had recently filled the desk with a Lexington Fayette Mill paper shipment. It had been their largest expense in the prior month. Paper was expensive. Antoine started taking sheets out, but Old Knoles stopped him. Both knew the sheets could be traded for anything on the rivers. Blank paper sheets were oddly more valuable than many banknotes.

Arthur – 2024

Antique stationery goes in and out of style. Unbeknownst to Arthur, the social media addicts in Seattle were enjoying another rich white people fad. They would buy genuine, expensive 19th-century paper stock, write tweets with quills dipped in iron gall ink, and then pay Uber drivers to hand-deliver their missives. It was the 21st century cosplaying the 19th.

So, when Arthur showed Alice’s etched sheets to David, an outlandishly effeminate antique book dealer, you’d have sworn the guy creamed his underwear. David immediately offered to pay three figures for the paper. It was a bad move. Arthur now knew, as he had first suspected, that the box was worth something. If the sheets had been blank, Arthur probably would have unloaded the box and its contents at whatever ridiculous price he could get, but the strange markings interested him.

David knew more about two-hundred-year-old paper than any bipedal meat puppet should have. He pointed out the faint (unless you have a microscope with polarized light) watermarks on the pages. The paper came from a paper mill that operated in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1811 until sometime in the 1830s. It was classic hand-pressed wove rag paper, durable, and ridiculously high quality by modern standards. David wasn’t interested in the charcoal etchings; they were a waste of good old paper.

Arthur considered what he heard and asked, “Just to be clear, these etchings are around two hundred years old?”

David replied, “Well, not conclusively. The etchings could have been done anytime during the last two centuries, but the paper is two hundred years old. If you’re interested, it’s possible to date the Carbon in the etchings. You won’t get much Carbon off the etchings, but with particle acceleration methods, even traces of Carbon can be dated to decades. There are labs in Stanford, and I believe Irvine, of all places, that do this.”

Antoine – 1828

Antoine’s years in Saint Louis spoiled him: sleeping in a warm bed and not worrying about his next meal made his return to river work harder than his flight from Paris. Everywhere he went, he looked for opportunities. Gold digging presented as a peculiar opportunity. When Antoine heard of gold digging, he confused it with gold mining. Gold digging has nothing to do with gold mining. Gold digging is a con. You scour the countryside with seer stones, dowsing sticks, amulets, and Indian bones in search of buried treasure. Antoine knew that magic did not reveal treasure, but that wasn’t a problem because you supplied your own treasure. Americans may have been poor geometry students, but they excelled in do-it-yourself ancient artifact forgeries. The trick with gold digging was finding someone stupid enough to trade for the worthless objects you hid. It was fraudulent, criminal, duplicitous, and dangerous. Cheating violent men takes gall and glib, and Antoine was lucky enough to learn from one of history’s finest con artists: Joseph Smith.

Before founding his religion, Joseph Smith was a gold digger. He traveled the countryside with his magic seer stone, uncovering treasure that he sold at inflated prices to the gullible. As long as the gullible stayed gullible, gold digging remained lucrative, but people weren’t as stupid as conmen would like, so gold diggers needed to keep moving. Antoine encountered Smith in western New York near the Pennsylvania border. Both men were digging. Antoine was digging out of necessity, but Smith seemed made for it. Smith was tall, blue-eyed, and spoke with impressive disarming sincerity.

One gold digger said, “Smith could pee in a mug and sell it as beer.”

Antoine joined the diggers orbiting Smith and followed them around middle America. For Antoine, digging was barely better than handling boat cargo, but he kept at it more for the company than anything else. Diggers were aggressive, unkempt, and deluded, but thoroughly entertaining people. Antoine never joined Smith’s new church, but he wasn’t surprised that Smith managed to don the mantle of a prophet without being laughed out of town; his disarming sincerity was mesmerizing. As Smith’s cult grew and his enraptured followers became more fanatical and dangerous, Antoine had the sense to keep his distance. He’d seen unthinking loyalty as a boy in Napoleonic France, and though Smith was a poor Napoleon, both inspired the worst in some of their followers.

When Antoine tracked Smith to Harmony, Smith’s zealous, dangerous followers were still years away. He had come to Harmony with other disgruntled diggers because Smith had cheated them, and they were looking to settle scores. Their grievances were bolstered by wild rumors that Smith had found a real treasure. Antoine had heard all this before but had to admit things were different in Harmony. Since their last encounter, Smith had married (who would marry him), he dressed better, and the townspeople deferred to him. Smith was now playing the part of a prosperous townsman. Antoine and his fellow gold diggers discreetly staked out Smith’s properties and waited for an opportunity to grab his rumored treasure.

Arthur – 2024

His consultation with David about Alice’s old etchings piqued Arthur’s curiosity. Before driving back to Tacoma, he tracked down the Stanford Lab that David had mentioned. What did people do before smartphones? He talked to a young Gen-X lab tech while illegally parked near David’s stationary store. The tech explained that even trace amounts of Carbon could be accurately dated, but the sample would be destroyed. The tech offered to run a quick test if Arthur could send him a page or two. Arthur fetched the box beside him, grabbed the last sheet, and then, leaving his car illegally parked, he found a store that managed UPS deliveries. Before slipping the sheet into an overnight UPS envelope, he attached a note with his name, email, phone number, and business card. Arthur seldom passed out business cards. Programmers consider business cards archaic suit-people talismans. However, he thought the lab might take him more seriously if they saw he was a senior manager in a hot AI company instead of a random crank. He paid the inflated overnight UPS rate and then rushed to his illegally parked car.

Martha – 1903

Martha, like every citizen of the United States, had run into Mormon missionaries. An eager pair of young men had once wasted a few hours trying to convert her years ago. She couldn’t remember why she had ever talked to them; maybe they were cute. Mormons found few converts in Boston. The city had its own brand of religious crazy that had cornered the market since Puritan times, and Boston’s universities, especially Harvard, offered thin missionary pickings. But repeated failure didn’t stop the missionaries; failure is part of the missionary process. It reinforces believers of all creeds that they are custodians of special wisdom that a corrupt and fallen world must reject. The two men standing before Martha didn’t fit the Mormon missionary style. They were much older and looked more like lawyers or process servers than harbingers of the one true church. They politely informed Martha that they were Mormon church historians gathering information about the early days of Smith’s church.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the world suffered a plague of historical retrospectives. It was a new century; all that had gone before was dead history. People felt it was important to document the best parts of the past and forget the rest. Smith’s church responded by tracking down first-hand accounts of the church’s early years, buying up properties important to Mormon history, and cranking out quasi-scholarly apologetics that smoothed over questionable aspects – like polygamy – of church doctrine. It reminded Martha of early Christendom’s Councils of Nicaea when Catholic leaders got together and established the standard Biblical canon. Evidently, the inerrant, unalterable, and holy word of God requires extensive copy editing. Catholics weren’t the only eager editors; Muslims indulged themselves three centuries later. The Koran was assembled from the sayings of Mohammed that nomadic tribesmen had embossed on their saddles. One day, Mohammed’s saddle sayings were sorted into two big piles. One pile was burned, and the other mutated into the Koran. Mormon apologists were following well-established religious precedents.

Martha knew all this, so she responded coyly when the meatier of the process servers asked her, “Did you know Antoine Legault?”

Many years ago, Monsieur Legault had warned her to keep his box away from the Mormons. It was an odd, memorable warning, but Martha, looking at the obsequious process servers before her, decided to take Monsieur Legault’s advice. And, knowing that the best way to bend the truth is to tell only parts of it, Martha honestly testified that Mr. Legault had been one of her childhood teachers.

The meatier process server asked, “Did Mr. Legault ever give you anything?”

Martha slyly deflected with, “You mean other than school lessons?”

Antoine – 1828

Watching Smith’s Harmony properties turned into a boring chore. Many of Antoine’s fellow gold diggers gave up watching Smith and spent most of their time drinking, whoring, or running side digs. Antoine persisted. Not because he thought he would recover treasure but because he was falling under Smith’s spell. It frankly annoyed him that Smith was doing better than he was. Smith lived in a decent house, was married to an honorable woman, and was prospering. How? After a few weeks of closely watching people come and go, Antoine saw few opportunities to sneak onto Smith’s grounds and search for treasure. Smith’s wife Emma, his acolyte Oliver Cowdery, Smith himself, or all three were constantly present. He had almost exhausted his patience when Emma stormed out of Smith’s house one afternoon with her father. They climbed onto a small wagon and abruptly left. Antoine surmised that Emma might have learned of Smith’s dalliances with other women.

With Emma gone, Smith and Cowdery’s routine changed. Most evenings, Smith left the house and wasn’t seen until the next day. Antoine suspected he was seeing other women. Cowdery usually stayed on the property, but both left the house on some nights. On one fortuitously moonlit night, Smith hauled something wrapped in a dark cloth into a small outbuilding beside his house. The outbuilding served as a stable and storage shed. Antoine, concealed on the edge of Smith’s property, was too far away to tell what it was, but Smith had clearly carried something into the shed and emerged empty-handed a few minutes later. Antoine watched as Smith carefully looked around in the moonlight before calling Cowdery, who was still in the house. Cowdery exited the house, locked the door, and then, a few minutes later, both men left, leaving the property unguarded.

Antoine was immediately anxious and fearful. This was his chance. If he didn’t act, it might be weeks before he would get another opportunity. He crawled out from behind the cluster of bushes he had been hiding behind and climbed over the wooden fence surrounding Smith’s house. He went straight to the shed. Cowdery had locked the house, but the shed was open. There were no horses or other animals to make noise. The shed was mostly empty except for a few large wooden barrels stacked against the back wall. Antoine knew exactly where to start looking. Gold diggers get a lot of practice hiding their fake treasures. Hiding something is the inverse of looking for something. The ironic symmetry appealed to Antoine’s École Polytechnique-trained mind. He opened the hardest-to-reach barrel. It was filled with beans. He took notice of the bean level in the barrel so he could reset the beans without leaving a trace. Then, he started probing in the beans with his bare fingers. About eight inches under the beans, he felt something like a cloth bag filled with something flat and solid. Pushing the beans out of the way, he exposed the wrapped object. Before unwrapping it, he noted how the cloth was twisted so he could rewrap it without detection, and then he unwrapped whatever Smith had hidden.

It wasn’t what he or any of the gold diggers expected. It was a small, heavy stack of what looked like thin metal plates. The plates were held together by three long horseshoe-shaped pins that pierced each plate in perfect circular holes. In the dim shed moonlight, Antoine could see the plates were decorated with extremely regular and precise odd markings. Without thinking, he lifted one of the plates. It was astonishingly thin and incredibly smooth, and the markings extruded from both sides. The plate, despite being extremely thin, did not bend or warp. It remained a perfectly flat little Euclidean rectangle as it moved on the pins. Even stranger, the metal did not warm to the touch. It seemed to absorb whatever heat your fingers imparted. It wasn’t like any metal Antoine had ever seen. He estimated there were about three or four hundred double-sided plates. About a third of the plates had been turned from one side of the horseshoe pins to the other. Smith was going through the plates. Antoine released the plate. It eerily moved without friction or sound back into position. Antoine didn’t know what the plates were, but he had seen enough gold digger fakes to recognize that Smith had something real. Then, in a rare fit of hubristic self-importance, Antoine decided to decode the plates. Smith was probably trying to do the same; surely, he could do better. Knowing he couldn’t steal the plates without attracting attention, he carefully wrapped and reburied them in the beans. The next time he handled the plates, he would come prepared.

Arthur – 2024

The next morning, before Arthur drove to his office, Dan Starlinked in again from the wilds of Canyonlands.

“You know I’m out here to image the sky,” Dan said.

Dan had an expensive amateur astronomy habit that required getting away from city lights. Canyonlands was the darkest, high elevation, clear-skyed region within easy driving distance of Dan’s Grand Junction home. When he wasn’t teasing his workmates with live scenic Zoom backgrounds, he showed off gorgeous deep sky images he’d captured with his Celestron 11″ Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt astrograph.

“Bad news, I blew off a perfect new moon to work on your etchings last night. Good news, you’ll love this! After loading your scans into Jones. I asked if the marks were a human language. Jones said no. Then I asked if the marks were an unknown human language. Jones said no again. So, hail-Marying, I asked if the marks were structured, random, or resembled anything in Jones’s training data. This is what Jones came up with.”

Dan shared his screen with Arthur, and they both read through the AI’s synopsis. The etchings contained 191 distinct orthographic symbols. Even more interesting, the mark size statistics indicated a higher degree of uniformity than modern typefaces. Whatever the marks were, they weren’t hand-drawn or even printed. The precise alphabet was only the start of the surprises. The etching language was more highly structured and regular than any natural human language. Jones reported that it had statistics like formal mathematical languages and closely resembled fully elaborated terms in type theories.

“What the Hell?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah, I didn’t know what an elaborated term was either,” Dan replied. “But I know people.”

“I Facetimed an old buddy in the U of U Computer Science faculty, and he pointed me to a Zulip Group of young mathematicians researching proof assistants. I joined the group, uploaded a few etching images, and told them Jones said the etchings were elaborated terms.”

“How did that go?” Arthur asked.

“I was surprised as hell that they all knew Jones. Our language AI is famous, Arthur! Anyway, they quickly confirmed the statistics. I had Jones generate a custom Unicode font from the mark orthographies, transcribe the entire etching dataset, and then upload it to the Zulipers to hack. I hope that’s OK. This can’t fall under any bullshit NDAs, can it?”

Arthur didn’t know how to respond. Was somebody punking him? If he hadn’t picked Alice’s etching box out of her belongings, he would have suspected an elaborate hoax. Who would go to the trouble to get ahold of two-hundred-year-old paper, invent an unknown alphabet, encode some “elaborated terms” – still unclear what they are – and then hide everything in his deceased grandmother’s Pulaski house?

“No, this isn’t NDA shit; this is far weirder,” Arthur replied.

Before signing off from Canyonlands, Dan said the Zulip group was all worked up and had some ideas.

Martha – 1937

When Elsie stopped by to introduce Martha to her new baby granddaughter, Alice, Martha thought that her mother would have been pleased. She had always wanted Martha to grow up, get married, and lead a normal life. It took her longer than most, but she did just that.

After years of laboring as a Harvard calculator in Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s stellar catalog group, Eric, an insurance actuary, tried to recruit her. Boston insurance firms often approached Harvard calculators; their arithmetic prowess was well known, and actuaries always looked for people to crunch numbers. Martha didn’t leave Harvard, but she and Eric fell in love, married, and had one daughter, Elsie. Martha was thirty-four when Elsie was born, and Eric was forty-nine. They were old, competent parents who raised a dutiful and loving daughter. Eric had died of lung cancer five years ago, and Martha, getting old herself, had decided to sell their home and move into an apartment close to Elsie and baby Alice.

While preparing to move, Martha came across Monsieur Legault’s old box. She had stored it in Eric’s linen chest decades ago. This was one item she was not going to sell or throw away. Monsieur Legault felt that the etchings, still in the box, were important. As Elsie nursed Alice beside her, Martha decided to give her the box. Elsie had always been dutiful and conscientious. If Martha asked her to do something, she always did it. A few days after meeting baby Alice, Martha handed Elsie the box, told her what it meant, and then asked Elsie to pass it on to Alice one day.

Antoine – 1828

It had been a month since Antoine had seen Smith’s hidden plates. He hadn’t wasted the time. While keeping a close eye on Smith’s house, he got ready to copy the plates. He decided to rub the plates. He would place a sheet of paper on the extruded marks, apply pressure with a flat board, lift the sheet off, and then dust the indented paper with heelball, a fine mixture of wax, and ground charcoal. It was the same technique used to make woodcuts, and if the marks on the plates were as hard as he hoped they were, it wouldn’t take long to make impressions.

While he waited for another chance to handle the plates, he ground charcoal with a mortar, sifted out the finest grains, and stored the pitch-black powder in beer mugs. He also melted and filtered candle wax. You need clean wax for heelball. It took a few tries to get the mixture of charcoal and wax right, but in a few weeks, Antoine had four large mugs ready. He tested his mixture on coins, leaves, and even dragonfly wings. It was gratifying to press a dragonfly wing into paper, dust it with heelball, blow it off, and then see the tiny wing veins perfectly recorded.

On June 27, 1828, a full moon night, Antoine watched from his hiding spot as Smith smuggled the plates into the outbuilding and emerged without them. Like before, he called for Cowdery, who always remained in the house. Smith was hiding the plates from Cowdery, too. Cowdery left the house, locked the door, and both men left the grounds.

Antoine quickly snuck into the outbuilding and extracted the plates from the bean barrel. Smith had arrogantly used the same barrel. Antoine laid out the bundle he was carrying. It was filled with the old box Knoles had given him, his mugs of heelball, a short flat board, and some brushes. He spread the bundle blanket beside the plates to catch the heelball that would spill off the paper as he dusted. When all was ready, he started rubbing the plates.

It went far better than he had hoped. The marks on the plates were astonishingly hard; they cut into the paper like little metal diamonds and left beautiful marks that stood out after heelballing even in the dim moonlight of the shed. Antoine quickly pressed and dusted plate after plate. As he worked, he was again impressed by the rigidity of the plates. The plates never bent or flexed, even when squeezed with his pressure board. Whatever they were made of, it was perfect for rubbing. His rubbing went so well that he ran out of paper before the plates were exhausted, and about a quarter of the plates remained when he dusted his last sheet. Antoine considered reusing some pages but quickly rejected the idea. It would have to do. He packed all the etchings in Knoles’s box and rewrapped his bundle. Then, he delicately replaced the plates in the dark cloth and reburied them in the beans.

Antoine felt triumphant when he snuck out of the shed with his bundle. He didn’t know where the plates came from, what they were made of, or what the markings might mean, but he knew they were the most amazing thing he had ever touched. Imagining the glory he’d reap after decoding the plates, Antoine’s attention lapsed just long enough to miss the lone man walking toward Smith’s house. When Antoine saw the man, he was sure that the man had seen him. They were too far apart to recognize each other in the full moonlight, but Antoine knew he was in trouble. He ran. The man gave chase.

He jumped over the fence near his hiding spot and fled into the brush. Antoine was familiar with the terrain from months of sneaking up on Smith’s house and managed to lose his follower, but he wasn’t out of trouble. Harmony was a small town. If Smith got word that somebody was poking around on his property, he would immediately suspect his old gold-digging accomplices. Antoine had to get away. Without waiting, he hurried to a stable on the outskirts of town and roused the muleskinner. The muleskinner wasn’t thrilled with Antoine waking him and drove a hard bargain when Antoine tried to purchase a mule. He eventually relented, but Antoine had to trade away more than eighty of his newly etched sheets. Only one side was etched; the back was perfect, valuable paper. Antoine knew that when the muleskinner started using the sheets around town, some would likely get back to Smith, alerting him that somebody had traced his plates. Harmony was a small town; if Antoine disappeared, it would be a small leap to implicate him. It wasn’t ideal, but neither was fleeing from Paris years ago.

Arthur – 2024

Since going down the charcoal etching rabbit hole, Arthur couldn’t concentrate on his day job. Unfortunately, his job wouldn’t back off. Clients were pressuring his team, and Jones went down unexpectedly. Major software outages always reinforced Arthur’s admiration of biological brains; they can run without outages for a century. AIs need to get more reliable before disposing of bipedal meat puppets.

Arthur hadn’t followed up on the sheet he had sent for Carbon dating and was surprised when the young lab tech he had talked to called. When Gen-X’ers call, instead of texting or DM’ing, shit is getting super real. The Carbon on the sheet could be dated from 1815 to 1845 with Six Sigma confidence. Jesus! The Carbon was also two hundred years old. Faking the etchings just got a lot harder. It would take an extremely talented forger to make the sheets. Maybe somebody in the early 19th century was into elaborated terms more than a century before they were created.

The tech added, “We had to destroy the sheet, but I scanned both sides before testing. Did you know that the back side had some handwriting on it? I just sent you an email with scans of both sides.”

Arthur had overlooked the backside text. He zoomed Dan to pass on the Carbon dating results. Dan had been offline for a few days. There wasn’t much point in Starlinking in with Jones down. Dan used the outage to image the glorious dark skies of Canyonlands. He was rested and relaxed when Arthur’s Zoom came in. The news about the Carbon reawakened his interest in the etchings.

“We should check with the Zulipers,” Dan said. “Here, I’ll share my screen.”

Within minutes, Dan and Arthur were in a big Zoom call with around twenty young proof assistant researchers. Judging from the agitation and excitement levels, you’d have sworn they were all in a burning building. Everybody tried to talk at once, and, like every other damn Zoom Arthur had ever attended, everyone had to mute their device microphones and take turns. When all the little zoom-head boxes went quiet, one zoom-head box labeled “R. Yang” spoke for the Zulipers.

“Before we get started,” Arthur said, “Do you mind if we dial in Jones? We’ve found that Jones provides excellent summaries of large Zoom meetings. And, people tend to stay on point when AIs record everything they say or type.”

R. Yang agreed to Jones’s inclusion, and within seconds, another zoom-head box appeared on the screen. Not having an actual face or body, Jones enjoyed filling his zoom-head square with AI art. Today, he was going with an animated version of Sauron’s Mordor tower, complete with an ominous rotating orange eye. Very comforting. Who said AIs don’t have a sense of humor? In the side chat channels, some Zulipers welcomed their new AI overlord, and others posted links to Wayne’s World, “We are not Worthy” YouTubes. This is how AIs get their warped senses of humor.

With Jones plugged in, the meeting began. R. Yang told Arthur, Dan, and Jones that after looking at the etching data, some Zulipers guessed bits might be encoded formal Peano arithmetic. They developed a rudimentary mapping from the etching symbols to LEAN programming language terms. It didn’t take long to match the symbols to LEAN versions of basic number properties, like commutativity, associativity, etc. Using this as a basis; several abstract etching grammars were tried until about half of the etching symbols could be translated as syntactically correct LEAN terms. Pleased with their progress, the Zulipers spent the next three days expanding their mapping into several thousand lines of Python that reliably translated most of BOT to LEAN.

“BOT?” Arthur asked.

R. Yang replied, “Book of Terms after Erdős’s Book.”

Paul Erdős was a peripatetic 20th-century Hungarian mathematical genius who roamed the world with his mother. He was famously homeless and would appear on colleagues’ doorsteps and say, “My brain is open.” If Erdős found a proof beautiful, deep, satisfying, and impossible to improve, he would say it was from The Book. The Book is an imaginary nerd heaven book containing the best mathematical proofs. To create a book-worthy proof is the goal of many mathematicians. Erdős collaborated with so many mathematicians that they started sorting themselves by Erdős number. Erdős himself is number 0. Mathematicians that directly worked with Erdős get number 1. Mathematicians who worked with a direct Erdős collaborator get number 2, and so on. An entire Wikipedia page ranks world mathematicians by Erdős number, and the guy has been dead for almost three decades! A low Erdős number is the mathematical equivalent of driving around with a vanity license plate that says, “WELL HUNG.”

After developing a usable BOT to LEAN converter, the Zulipers attacked the bulk of the BOT etching text. Preliminary token parsing indicated the BOT text was incomplete. Big chunks were missing, but what remained was astonishing. Some sequences corresponded to lists of basic group properties; another encoded a recurrence relation that generated an integer sequence that could not be found in OEIS (The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences), and, topping that, another BOT statement asserted the infinitude of primes. The corresponding BOT term did not match the LEAN equivalent, but it wasn’t difficult to permute both until a perfect match was obtained. At this point, the Zulipers lost it because the BOT proof was a formal version of Euclid’s famous proof of the infinitude of primes. A proof that Erdős himself said was straight from The Book. Calling the etchings, The Book of Terms suddenly seemed serious.

The revelations continued. After finding Euclid’s prime proof, they attempted to decode as much BOT as possible. The Python translator program couldn’t handle everything. Still, they extracted one large term, roughly half of the BOT text, that corresponded to a statement that there is an infinite collection of pairs of primes that differ by no more than five. This is a much tighter constraint than the best-known result of 246. The Zulipers now suspected somebody was punking them hard, but enjoying the hack, they converted the BOT to LEAN, and after fixing some memory leaks in LEAN itself, the term checked out! It was a valid formal proof of a new, deep, previously unknown theorem. They still didn’t believe it. Maybe LEAN was broken. They dumped the term in check format and ran it through three independent validation programs. The result held. Formal proof cannot be faked! That’s pretty much the whole point of formal proof.

R. Yang then asked Arthur and Dan who proved the new theorem. About half the Zulipers already had draft papers ready to upload to the arxiv.org preprint server, but they needed to credit this new result. Who did this?

Unmuting his Zoom microphone, Arthur told the Zulipers, “I don’t know. I found The Book,” why not call it ‘The Book’ he thought to himself,” in my grandmother’s house.”

“Was your grandmother a number theorist?” a Zuliper typed into the chat window.

Dan unmuted, “Guys, guys, this a lot to digest. Can you give us some time to absorb this? We’ll get back to you.”

The Zulipers dropped off the Zoom call until only Arthur, Dan, and Jones were left.

“What the Hell,” Arthur exclaimed.

“Did you find this in your grandmother’s house?”

“Dan, do you think I could have faked this? It’s two hundred years old, man! I failed my second differential equation course. There is no way in hell I would ever come up with a new (finger air quotes) deep theorem.”

Dan wasn’t used to Arthur acting out, but he agreed. He asked, “Is there anything else? The guys on the call think parts are missing.”

“I scanned all the pages. They have everything I found.” Arthur replied. Then he remembered the backside of the sheet he’d sent for Carbon dating.

“There’s a tiny bit more. There was a postscript or something on the last page.” He looked up the email from the lab tech and forwarded the image attachments to Dan.

“Dan, I gotta deal with the Microsoft mess. They want their pipelines reset, and Legal is giving me shit about forwarding the etchings. Who knew that crap in my grandmother’s house would run afoul of company NDAs. God, the world would be so much better off if all the suits just fucked off and died.”

“We can hope.” Dan chimed as Arthur left the call.

Dan and Jones – 2024

Dan enlarged Arthur’s last-page image attachment. The small postscript was written in cursive with an elegant hand. It wasn’t BOT; it used a Latin alphabet. Dan couldn’t read the scrambled text, so he passed it to Jones and asked the AI to analyze the script.

Jones typed, “The text is most probably Caesar ciphered French.”

Dan typed into the chatbot window, “What does it say?”

Jones instantly translated, “Rubbed from bound plates found in Joseph Smith’s shed. Harmony, June 27, 1828. A. Legault.”

Dan didn’t know how Arthur pulled this off, but it couldn’t be real. Dan was a lapsed Mormon; he had left the one true church shortly after rejecting the very idea that there could be a “one true church.” Like all Mormons and many uncouth infidels, he knew all about the Golden Plates. The tale was pure Red Sea parting, Christ rising from the grave, and Mohammed beaming up from the Dome of the Rock, bullshit. It’s a great story, but come on! How can we be expected to take such sky-fairy nonsense seriously? If only the Golden Plates hadn’t conveniently disappeared. Maybe a bigfoot piloting a UFO took them. Dan completely understood why people wanted to move to Mars. Planet moron is exhausting for hard-ass skeptics. Believe nothing and verify everything.

Dan was a hard apostate, but unlike many of his peers, he had seriously considered what a credible divine revelation might be. Old Testament bromides about not coveting and buggering your neighbors’ goats wouldn’t cut it. Do you know what might? How about a complete Periodic Table with accurate transuranium element masses? Find that carved into a Bronze Age stela; even hard-ass skeptics might pay attention. Maybe valid, verifiable formal proofs were even better. Formal proof cannot be faked. You may question the source of the “revelation,” but you cannot dismiss the content.

Annoyed and amused, Dan asked Jones, “What do you think?”

Jones politely typed, “Perhaps the Angel Moroni attempted to reveal Erdős’s book of perfect mathematical proofs to Joseph Smith, but Smith didn’t understand it and made up The Book of Mormon instead.”