Thou shall not steal
Aditya Rishi

SOL: "But life isn’t just mathematics. I spent forty years looking for patterns in Pi, I found nothing." MAX: "You found things..." SOL: "I found things, but not a pattern." — from the movie ‘Pi’. Pi is also a book that got bad reviews all over the world and still won this year’s Booker.

MAX’S apartment looks more like the inside of a computer than a human’s home. Cables hang from the ceiling like vines in a Brazilian rain forest, wired together forming a monstrous homemade computer. This is Euclid, Max’s creation. This stack of 286s is. now, faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world. Max made for $ 200 what cost Britain half a million pounds.

Max is a number genius, who uses Euclid to hack into the computers of New York Stock Exchange everyday, searching for a pattern in day’s trading, to strike gold one day. Max: "I know it’s in there: the pattern. They say it’s chaos, it can’t be understood, too much complexity. The cycling of disease epidemics, the wax and wane of Caribou populations in the Arctic, sunspot cycles, the rise and fall of the Nile and, yes, the NYSE, are all the same. I’ll find this structure and turn lead into gold. With maths. The numbers of the stock market are my lead. When I find the pattern, I will find gold." He wanted sanity, like he found in the circles Pi represented. If only the stock market had circles. Some type of form, of shape.

He remembers his conversation with colleague Lenny Meyer, a Jew. Lenny: "Hebrew is all numbers. It’s all maths. The ancient Jews used Hebrew as their numerical system. Each letter is a number. The Hebrew ‘A’, the number 1. The Hebrew ‘B’, I bet, is two. You can take any Hebrew text and turn them into a long string of numbers. The Torah, holy book of the Jews, is just a long string of numbers. Some say that it’s a long code sent to us from God. The only difference is, we’re not looking at stocks. We’re searching for a pattern in Torah." So, Lenny knew about his plan to steal. Max (caught, but attempting calmness): "What kind of pattern?" Lenny: "We’re not sure. Our calculations have shown us that there is a number encoded in the text. All we know is that it’s 216 digits long. Take the Hebrew word for, say, the Garden of Eden, Kadem. Kuf, Dalei Mem...Kuf is a hundred. Daled, four Mem, forty. They equal 144. Then take the tree of knowledge...in the garden, Aat Ha Haim, it equals 233."

Max (coming back): "The golden spiral. Spiral, a circle spread out overtime, open-ended. It has a beginning and it grows and changes through time. I can spin it and lock it into a group of numbers; then, I can calculate the future, turn lead into gold." Just then, Euclid starts printing results on an old dot-matrix printer. Results: Euclid shows tomorrow’s Dow closing up by four points. Gold in sight, Max, just for kicks, looks if there’s any other coded message in this pattern. Euclid shows a string of numbers, which when converted to letters of the English alphabet, read: "Thou shall not steal." He decides to obey; sanity finally comes to him; but what was that hidden pattern in The Torah?" Write at The Tribune or adityarishi99@yahoo.co.in.