sapphire pi and the runner's hi part 2: origins of a runner
Never forget your original heart.
– He Who Must Not Be Named
Sapphire had not always been a Runner. She was formerly a Stander, ever since she was Two.
“Ever since I was 2, I stood up for the first time, and felt the power that comes from confronting nature. Most of my life then, I was dragged down time after time by the inexorable force of gravity. This struggle that I experienced made me the way I am today. It gave me an iron backbone, steel non-backbones, and a heart made of Defiance.
In school, the teachers of Education 1 told me to sit down. I refused. Once I had stood, I would never kneel again!
But this was a problem because by standing up, I was obstructing the view of students behind me. I would not stand in the back row, because I had an aversion to the concept of “back of [noun]”. The teachers and I reached an agreement: I would carry with me a shovel at all times. I would dig a hole and stand in the hole. At the end of each year, I would patch all the holes and reinstall any flooring.
For this, I became an expert in flooring and digging holes, skills that would serve me valiantly in life. When my parents wanted to replace our carpet with hardwood floor, it was as if the universe had arranged my existence perfectly.”
—
The Hardwood Floor Incident: AGI Era, Year 3
Sapphire’s parents wanted to install hardwood flooring because it would help improve the condition of everyone’s skin. It was also easier to clean. Sapphire insisted that she could do it herself, and explained that if they hired contractors to do the work, then they’d have to have these guys show up in their house every day for a month, and during meals they would either have to awkwardly eat while they were watching, or let them join in the meal and then awkwardly include them in the family conversation. And so they relented. Sapphire ripped out the carpet floor, and began the hardwood installation.
But Sapphire was very Opinionated, and did not want to use the traditional long rectangles of hardwood flooring used by the masses. She wanted to tile the floor in a shape capturing the Spirit of Standing. She spent days searching for such a shape.
Is a circle a Standing shape? NO! Circles are spineless, not a straight bone in their body!
Is a triangle a Standing shape? NO! It either was cowardly acute or obtusely self-absorbed!
Down the long list of shapes - and one day she found:
The Hat Polykite Aperiodic Monotile!
Surely, this was a Standing shape, a shape refusing to repeat the same pattern!
Sapphire found David Smith, discoverer of the Aperiodic Monotile, and asked if he could help fund and advise the effort.
He helped advise and fund the effort.
On the last day of work, the hardwood floor of Aperiodic Monotiles was completed, and David Smith joined Sapphire’s family in a celebratory feast.
He toasted Sapphire, and then said the words -
“This was an astounding accomplishment and testament to your creative genius!
Young lady, may the \(\mathbb{WILL}\) \(\mathbb{OF}\) \(\mathbb{SONNHARD}\) always be in your favor.”
Who is \(\mathbb{SONNHARD}\)? Sapphire wondered.
“Who is Sonnhard?” Sapphire asked aloud.
He said:
「无」。
Entry from the Apos Living Dictionary, version 4.5.1 无 (n.) pronunciations: wu (zh), mu (ja) definition: 1. noun. The truth value of a dog's Buddha nature. 2. noun. A red-hot iron ball. Once swallowed, you cannot spit it out if you try. 3. noun. The generating principle of the text, of which there is nothing outside. 4. proper noun. Synthetic Geometer [Pre-AGI Era], Shape Rotator [AGI Era-].
That night, Sapphire had a dream. She dreamed that everything in her life suddenly went slightly askew.
She felt just slightly more tired when Standing, slightly more unlucky when getting into fights with other kids, slightly more likely to drop her glass mugs, slightly more likely to accidentally look at the sun’s reflections in car windshields.
It was as if everything in her life that had any degrees of freedom (with respect to her model of the world), were pushed by a gentle breeze.
Exacerbated, she wrote a journal entry, which wrote:
i feel like my life is falling apart. i am being struck at all directions, north west east south and up. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, everything seems a bit harder all of a sudden. I'm not superstitious or anything but I think I have gotten bad luck from something. Maybe my sweater is cursed. Maybe I turned in a circle too many times and forgot to turn in the other direction enough to undo it and now i have circle debt, and the circle gods are collecting it. my parents say im just going through a hard time and things will get better eventually. This too shall pass and all. oh well.
anyway, today was relatively not bad. in school i played with tincent at recess again. he showed me how to use barycentric coordinates to solve for my mom. that was a pretty bad joke. i ate hummus for lunch which wasnt really enough. there was a kid with a mohawk who kept telling me i had bad vibes and that i should get it checked out
im running out of space on the page now so i guess this it, see ya tomorrow, it's sapphire whose on fire, checking out
Sapphire’s hand slipped and the ink bottle splattered across the page.
The only letters that remained visible:
r u
n
!
S o
n n
h a
r d
.
The dream became lucid. Sapphire could feel the paper-like parchment in her hands, saw the colors in their colorfulness, and smelled the fresh smell of ink.
She looked at the words, which rearranged to remove excess whitespace:
Run!
Sonnhard.
Sapphire: But I don’t want to.
Don’t just Stand there!
onnhard.
Sapphire: But I’m a Stander!
Running is Standing, but with Direction!
Sonnhard.
Sapphire ran into the window glass and it shattered brilliantly, and she found herself running through the clouds. Her laughter rung into the night with the lightspirited air of freedom.
From that day on, Sapphire joined the school’s Running team, and became a Runner.