Balot composed her feelings and hit. Her card, a 2. Sixteen.
That number weighed frightfully heavy. Her tactics called for a stay. It was displayed right next to the true count.
If she didn’t follow the tactics, what else would she follow? But the choice was heavy. Her throat quivered.
Balot stayed, and Ashley casually flipped his hole card.
A 2. With the ace, thirteen. He drew another card. Again unforgivable. It was a 5. If Balot had drawn, she would have had twenty-one.
“So sorry,” said Ashley. It was sixteen against eighteen, and Balot’s second straight loss. With a slightly trembling hand, Balot placed her next bet.
“No one can predict the future,” the Doctor spoke up. “But it can be approximated. That separates us from animals. We can think with two minds. The stale, old-fashioned, and the ever-changing new—namely, the left brain, and the right.”
He orated with the clear, resonant tone of a bystander at ease.
“Humans have cerebral hemispheres—first, because the brain’s development was too rapid for the two sides to unite. The neurons projected out from the brain stem and the spinal cord and formed the cerebral cortex, enabling a great increase in the size of the human brain.”
Ashley, already having lost interest in the Doctor’s words, paid him no attention.
Bell Wing watched this would-be meddler, aloof—then, seeing through to the seriousness behind his words, wiped the expression from her face.
The cards came.
“But the left and right hemispheres grew abnormally large—almost like a defect—and an imbalance occurred. The left brain became digitalized, with a fluid intelligence. The right brain has crystallized intelligence, in analog. The origin of this behavior can be traced back to the development of the neurons.”
Ashley’s upcard, a queen. Balot had a 4-6.
Oeufcoque’s tactical display read hit. Balot hit.
“Since the dawn of the age of the invertebrates, nerves had been unmyelinated—that is to say, uninsulated, like bare electric cables. The unmyelinated nerves functioned with analog hormones, but with the development of myelinated nerves—that is to say, insulated just like jacketed electric cables—nervous structures came to utilize neural circuits that distribute digital neurological signaling. Therefore, even in the analog human brain, there are digital processes, and they interact with each other to function.”
She received a 9. Nineteen. Oeufcoque’s tactical display read stay. She stayed.
“Humans can’t divine the future. This is because, even with all the mathematical methods known to man, it is essentially impossible to solve for the multitude of occurrences concurrent with the many-body problem. If only one card remained in the deck, its identity could be deduced by examining the discard pile. But with two or more cards remaining, the identity of the next card cannot be determined.”
Ashley showed his hole card. A king. Twenty. Balot’s third straight loss.
“But humans, with two minds inside one skull, can use both the fluid knowledge—that is to say, the digital neural circuits—to explain a discrete event, as well as the crystalline knowledge—that is to say, the analog perception—to form a comprehensive image of all the other possible events. Therefore, humans have produced the ability to generate simplicial approximations and have essentially solved the many-body problem. By the time they are born, humans have already chosen a journey infinitely asymptotically approaching reality.”
Balot placed her bet. Ashley dealt the cards.
His upcard, a 6. Balot had a J-3, thirteen.
Oeufcoque’s display read hit. Balot also felt she should hit. She received a 6. Nineteen.
Ashley revealed his hole card, 4. He hit, and drew an ace. Twenty-one.
“And if those humans could create four minds where there had been two, they would no longer need to content themselves with simplicial approximations. No, they might be able to solve the many-body problem and determine each and every event. And for that dream, a being was created. That being was not able to divine the future. But for any object, it could quantify its entire composition, the external and internal forms equally, and become an All-Purpose Tool.”
Ashley’s upcard was 6. Balot had a Q-2.
She hit. Oeufcoque had told her to. Balot had thought the same.
Ashley showed no change. And his cards showed no change.
She drew a 6. Eighteen. On eighteen, you stayed. She hesitated.
But after a moment, Balot stayed. And she asked herself why she had hesitated.
Ashley flipped his hole card, a 5. He drew a king. Twenty-one.
Balot’s fifth straight loss. She was drowning in a marsh of defeat.
But as someone once said, blackjack demanded you walk a long, long path.
And that someone was raising his voice desperately behind her.
