Collections of Elegant Formulas: Prologue
Masterlist | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Epilogue | Notes
Apparently, Red thought as he turned around his hat and gathered his Pokeballs, the top of Mount Silver is not loud enough that you cannot hear a dragon roar. The dragon in question was a shimmery black with blue glowing patterns on its body and a blue cylinder of light inside its tail; it looked a little bit like a Tyranitar, maybe, but it was no Pokemon Red had seen before. Its roar cut through the wind, the sound halfway between a power station and an angry Garchomp. It had the air of wildness about it - was there even a trainer? Yes, the man in white on its back must be its trainer, although it seemed that the Pokemon was calling the shots more than the man. When Red lifted his head and made eye contact with the other man, he took a step forward, lifted up Lapras’s Pokeball, and pushed the button.
Lapras lifted his head and looked up at the dragon, planting itself firmly and preparing to use Blizzard. When the man in white saw Lapras, he immediately jumped off of the dragon’s back, landing hard in the snow and scrabbling to his feet. He ran up towards Lapras, green hair whipped back in the wind, arms spread wide. Red looked down and grabbed another Pokeball, watching him carefully. Lapras waited for a signal, on the verge of attacking; the black dragon stood still, looking bored, also watching the man with the green hair. The man reached Lapras, and blocked his path to the dragon, palms turned up, biting his lip to keep from shivering in the wind. He said something, but Red couldn’t hear it, so Red instead signalled Lapras to feint left and then use Blizzard. Lapras started to move, but the man threw himself around Lapras’s neck, holding on tight and shaking his head. Lapras turned his head back to Red, and Red shrugged, putting the other Pokeball back on his belt and lowering his hand. Lapras relaxed and then man fell to his knees, bare hands in the snow, breathing heavily.
-
“So the way the storage system works is basically that the Pokemon gets converted to digital data, a single very large number, which can be stored inside the PC system and then partially extracted into the code that runs inside a Pokeball.” Amanita sat on her couch and looked across the coffee table at the grey-haired woman in black and the man in the fedora. Neither of them carried visible Pokeballs; the man in the fedora, who must have been at least fifty, looked like Pokemon might still have been caught in Pokeballs made from Apricorns when he grew up. His suit was in an old style, too, the sort of thing she’d only seen in movies and at that on retro party she’d make the mistake of going to during college. “While experimental Pokeballs can use that single number to store the Pokemon until released, those available on the commercial market through Silph Co. maintain backwards compatibility with the miniaturization provided by the original handmade Apricorn balls.” She kicked her ankles awkwardly against the couches, slippers dangling from her feet but not quite dragging along the floor.
“How do you prevent Pokemon from being duplicated if they are just a large number?” The man leaned forward. “Couldn’t you just write the same number into multiple balls?” The grey-haired woman coughed lightly into her sleeve, nose buried in a ruffle of fur there.
Amanita shook her head. “The number contains a checksum that -” The woman across the table stared blankly at her; she was reminded of the one time she signed up to be the teaching assistant for a class. Never again. “Part of that number is a code that refers to the Pokémon’s location, and the last part of the number uses a special formula to encode all of the number that came before it. So one Pokemon can only be in one place at one time. If you tried to write the same data to a different Pokeball, nothing would come out of the PC system at all. It wouldn’t pass validation checks. Sometimes you can turn that into an empty egg if you try hard, but that’s all.”
“Then how precisely do you explain all of the Kyurems?”
“I’m not a biologist. Maybe they can breed even though they’re legendary, like Manaphy?” Amanita shrugged. “Have you tried just, like, putting one of them in a garden with a Ditto for a while?”
The man in the fedora slammed his hand down on the table, startling the Musharna who had been napping on the ceiling. “You don’t think we tried that?”
Amanita shrugged. “Like I said, not my field. But the function that encrypts the Pokemon as it travels to the Pokeball and back uses literally hundreds of factors. You couldn’t brute force it, mathematically, given a decade.”
The woman stood up. “Amanita, are you willing to be sworn to secrecy?”
Amanita tensed up, hands digging slightly into the couch cushions. “Look, I don’t want to get involved in politics. I don’t battle, I don’t do biology; that’s Aurea’s business. Maybe you should talk to my sister, if you want Pokemon psychology. I just do math that happens to be more useful for encrypting lifeforms than encrypting email. I don’t want to hold secrets, I don’t want to get into fights, I don’t want to have to be afraid to do my job.”
“You really are the opposite of your sister,” the woman said, tapping her finger against her lips. “Looker, I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Oh god please don’t kill me-”
The woman reached into her coat and pulled out a small black box, maybe the size of a paperback book, with network connectors on either side. “Look, that’s not what we’re about. But we need your help. Here’s the box they used. Can I come back tomorrow to talk to you about how it works? We won’t make you do anything else.”
Amanita sat up straight. “You mean you know someone broke the code?” She picked up the box, turning it over, seeing no sign of an opening or a stamp of manufacture. It was just smooth plastic, all around. “Ugh, fine. I’ll take a look.”
-
Iris stood on a rocky outcropping overlooking Route 7 with Haxorus, looking down at a pair of Rocket Grunts guarding a white truck. The two of them were focused on the road, one nervously fidgeting with the three Pokeballs on his belt, the other leaning against the truck and taking advantage of its shade. She waited a moment, and then jumped down, sliding down the hill face on her feet between steps, Haxorus following behind her. When they were maybe a hundred feet from the Rockets, the nervous one turned his head and shouted, so she sprinted at the other one and knocked him down before he could get a Pokeball out. The first trainer called out a Kyurem, but Haxorus immediately Dragon Tailed it back into its Pokeball; when another took its place, Haxorus used Dragon Tail again, and rather than call out another Pokemon, the Rocket reached behind him and pulled out a handgun. He raised it unsteadily toward Iris, but before he could do anything, a mound of concrete behind him shot into the air, and Excadrill grabbed him from behind, knocking the gun out of his hands and holding him still.
Within five minutes, both Rockets were tied to a tree, and Iris was driving the truck on to Mistralton City wearing the lazy Rocket’s sunglasses.
-
Silver and Black sat by the fire, warming their hands. A ways into the woods, Typhlosion and Samurott paced slowly, while behind them, Julie was sleeping in the open tent, green hair pouring out of her sleeping bag, Eevee curled up on top of her.
“It’s still hard to believe you’re his son,” Black said. “You’re not crazy like...” He tilted his head toward the tent, trailing off.
“You don’t know me well enough. I’m worse.”
“No, that’s not crazy.” Black leaned back, looking up at the stars through the trees, folding his hands behind his head. “You’re miserable and you wallow in it, but that’s different from crazy. You at least have shit to be miserable about. N doesn’t even-”
“Julie has plenty to be miserable about.” Silver glared at Black; the younger man shrugged. “Maybe she’d have less if you’d get her name right.”
“Okay, look.” Black sat back up. “You don’t know the history, okay? I know you’re oh so protective because of your Eevee or whatever, but I can’t just, like, forget the person I’ve always known just because when someone deigns to come back home they’ve suddenly got tits.”
Silver’s voice was flat. “Is it really her body that bothers you?”
“Don’t you try to get incisive at me.” Silver raised his hands and shrugged. “It’s not like that. I mean, it’s weird, but I guess it makes a weird kind of sense. ...They were never really good at being a boy, anyway. It’s just... when we first met, I got strung along and it turned out Ghetsis was behind the whole thing, and now I’m supposed to believe the same pattern isn’t repeating itself even after they ran away and only came back after the entire region was chock full of Kyurems?”
“Well, it’s certainly not like she wants to battle them.”
Black huffed and stared at Silver. “Well, she showed up all but falling over some mopey redhead from Johto who’s the only competition in daddy issues for five thousand miles, so at this point I don’t think I can rule anything out!”
Silver met his gaze for a moment, and then laughed quietly as Crobat flew down from the trees to land on his shoulder. The Pokemon glared at Black for him while he looked into the fire. “You got the pronoun right that time,” he said, watching the wood turn black and then white. “Good job.”
High up in the trees, a sleeping Pidove shifted form back to Zoroark and bounded away.
Apparently, Red thought as he turned around his hat and gathered his Pokeballs, the top of Mount Silver is not loud enough that you cannot hear a dragon roar. The dragon in question was a shimmery black with blue glowing patterns on its body and a blue cylinder of light inside its tail; it looked a little bit like a Tyranitar, maybe, but it was no Pokemon Red had seen before. Its roar cut through the wind, the sound halfway between a power station and an angry Garchomp. It had the air of wildness about it - was there even a trainer? Yes, the man in white on its back must be its trainer, although it seemed that the Pokemon was calling the shots more than the man. When Red lifted his head and made eye contact with the other man, he took a step forward, lifted up Lapras’s Pokeball, and pushed the button.
Lapras lifted his head and looked up at the dragon, planting itself firmly and preparing to use Blizzard. When the man in white saw Lapras, he immediately jumped off of the dragon’s back, landing hard in the snow and scrabbling to his feet. He ran up towards Lapras, green hair whipped back in the wind, arms spread wide. Red looked down and grabbed another Pokeball, watching him carefully. Lapras waited for a signal, on the verge of attacking; the black dragon stood still, looking bored, also watching the man with the green hair. The man reached Lapras, and blocked his path to the dragon, palms turned up, biting his lip to keep from shivering in the wind. He said something, but Red couldn’t hear it, so Red instead signalled Lapras to feint left and then use Blizzard. Lapras started to move, but the man threw himself around Lapras’s neck, holding on tight and shaking his head. Lapras turned his head back to Red, and Red shrugged, putting the other Pokeball back on his belt and lowering his hand. Lapras relaxed and then man fell to his knees, bare hands in the snow, breathing heavily.
-
“So the way the storage system works is basically that the Pokemon gets converted to digital data, a single very large number, which can be stored inside the PC system and then partially extracted into the code that runs inside a Pokeball.” Amanita sat on her couch and looked across the coffee table at the grey-haired woman in black and the man in the fedora. Neither of them carried visible Pokeballs; the man in the fedora, who must have been at least fifty, looked like Pokemon might still have been caught in Pokeballs made from Apricorns when he grew up. His suit was in an old style, too, the sort of thing she’d only seen in movies and at that on retro party she’d make the mistake of going to during college. “While experimental Pokeballs can use that single number to store the Pokemon until released, those available on the commercial market through Silph Co. maintain backwards compatibility with the miniaturization provided by the original handmade Apricorn balls.” She kicked her ankles awkwardly against the couches, slippers dangling from her feet but not quite dragging along the floor.
“How do you prevent Pokemon from being duplicated if they are just a large number?” The man leaned forward. “Couldn’t you just write the same number into multiple balls?” The grey-haired woman coughed lightly into her sleeve, nose buried in a ruffle of fur there.
Amanita shook her head. “The number contains a checksum that -” The woman across the table stared blankly at her; she was reminded of the one time she signed up to be the teaching assistant for a class. Never again. “Part of that number is a code that refers to the Pokémon’s location, and the last part of the number uses a special formula to encode all of the number that came before it. So one Pokemon can only be in one place at one time. If you tried to write the same data to a different Pokeball, nothing would come out of the PC system at all. It wouldn’t pass validation checks. Sometimes you can turn that into an empty egg if you try hard, but that’s all.”
“Then how precisely do you explain all of the Kyurems?”
“I’m not a biologist. Maybe they can breed even though they’re legendary, like Manaphy?” Amanita shrugged. “Have you tried just, like, putting one of them in a garden with a Ditto for a while?”
The man in the fedora slammed his hand down on the table, startling the Musharna who had been napping on the ceiling. “You don’t think we tried that?”
Amanita shrugged. “Like I said, not my field. But the function that encrypts the Pokemon as it travels to the Pokeball and back uses literally hundreds of factors. You couldn’t brute force it, mathematically, given a decade.”
The woman stood up. “Amanita, are you willing to be sworn to secrecy?”
Amanita tensed up, hands digging slightly into the couch cushions. “Look, I don’t want to get involved in politics. I don’t battle, I don’t do biology; that’s Aurea’s business. Maybe you should talk to my sister, if you want Pokemon psychology. I just do math that happens to be more useful for encrypting lifeforms than encrypting email. I don’t want to hold secrets, I don’t want to get into fights, I don’t want to have to be afraid to do my job.”
“You really are the opposite of your sister,” the woman said, tapping her finger against her lips. “Looker, I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Oh god please don’t kill me-”
The woman reached into her coat and pulled out a small black box, maybe the size of a paperback book, with network connectors on either side. “Look, that’s not what we’re about. But we need your help. Here’s the box they used. Can I come back tomorrow to talk to you about how it works? We won’t make you do anything else.”
Amanita sat up straight. “You mean you know someone broke the code?” She picked up the box, turning it over, seeing no sign of an opening or a stamp of manufacture. It was just smooth plastic, all around. “Ugh, fine. I’ll take a look.”
-
Iris stood on a rocky outcropping overlooking Route 7 with Haxorus, looking down at a pair of Rocket Grunts guarding a white truck. The two of them were focused on the road, one nervously fidgeting with the three Pokeballs on his belt, the other leaning against the truck and taking advantage of its shade. She waited a moment, and then jumped down, sliding down the hill face on her feet between steps, Haxorus following behind her. When they were maybe a hundred feet from the Rockets, the nervous one turned his head and shouted, so she sprinted at the other one and knocked him down before he could get a Pokeball out. The first trainer called out a Kyurem, but Haxorus immediately Dragon Tailed it back into its Pokeball; when another took its place, Haxorus used Dragon Tail again, and rather than call out another Pokemon, the Rocket reached behind him and pulled out a handgun. He raised it unsteadily toward Iris, but before he could do anything, a mound of concrete behind him shot into the air, and Excadrill grabbed him from behind, knocking the gun out of his hands and holding him still.
Within five minutes, both Rockets were tied to a tree, and Iris was driving the truck on to Mistralton City wearing the lazy Rocket’s sunglasses.
-
Silver and Black sat by the fire, warming their hands. A ways into the woods, Typhlosion and Samurott paced slowly, while behind them, Julie was sleeping in the open tent, green hair pouring out of her sleeping bag, Eevee curled up on top of her.
“It’s still hard to believe you’re his son,” Black said. “You’re not crazy like...” He tilted his head toward the tent, trailing off.
“You don’t know me well enough. I’m worse.”
“No, that’s not crazy.” Black leaned back, looking up at the stars through the trees, folding his hands behind his head. “You’re miserable and you wallow in it, but that’s different from crazy. You at least have shit to be miserable about. N doesn’t even-”
“Julie has plenty to be miserable about.” Silver glared at Black; the younger man shrugged. “Maybe she’d have less if you’d get her name right.”
“Okay, look.” Black sat back up. “You don’t know the history, okay? I know you’re oh so protective because of your Eevee or whatever, but I can’t just, like, forget the person I’ve always known just because when someone deigns to come back home they’ve suddenly got tits.”
Silver’s voice was flat. “Is it really her body that bothers you?”
“Don’t you try to get incisive at me.” Silver raised his hands and shrugged. “It’s not like that. I mean, it’s weird, but I guess it makes a weird kind of sense. ...They were never really good at being a boy, anyway. It’s just... when we first met, I got strung along and it turned out Ghetsis was behind the whole thing, and now I’m supposed to believe the same pattern isn’t repeating itself even after they ran away and only came back after the entire region was chock full of Kyurems?”
“Well, it’s certainly not like she wants to battle them.”
Black huffed and stared at Silver. “Well, she showed up all but falling over some mopey redhead from Johto who’s the only competition in daddy issues for five thousand miles, so at this point I don’t think I can rule anything out!”
Silver met his gaze for a moment, and then laughed quietly as Crobat flew down from the trees to land on his shoulder. The Pokemon glared at Black for him while he looked into the fire. “You got the pronoun right that time,” he said, watching the wood turn black and then white. “Good job.”
High up in the trees, a sleeping Pidove shifted form back to Zoroark and bounded away.