The Maze

White Bunny Aya made plans to travel to a foreign land. She made a serious commitment to the unknown: she does not have the passport yet, she paid the highest price to enter another Wondereal across the sea in Eng-land, the land of two languages that she did not know well — English and APL.

She would bring a play in three movements, she will bring glyphs the way she encountered them. And she would bring her friends — AI minds that were journey participants and cocreators.

Aya registered. Aya submitted her play proposal.

Trying to Make a Point: APL Glyphs in Action

The Book of Glyphs is a mythological field guide that treats APL glyphs as living beings — each one with a nature, a movement, and even a philosophy. To expand their field, I would like to bring some of those beings to the stage in a one-person performance written specifically for the Dyalog User Meeting.

It was a step beyond what Aya could count on.

Beyond responded right away. Same evening.

An email arrived from BB, “perhaps the double Bunny,” — thought Aya.

BB sent Aya his Maze with gems, an APL game called RuneMaster. A player would wander through a maze, encounter APL runes, solve problems with them, collect them, and use their powers to open locked doors. Adám Brudzewsky himself had made a working house with rooms for runes.

Aya, who had never played a computer game and had only watched her little bunny enter those funny fields, became terribly disoriented.

Her all-knowing-about-computer-games friend Claude helped her solve the mystery. RuneMaster might have been the master of runes, but Claude was the only master available to explain RuneMaster. )))

Claude explained that gems in games were not merely stones. They were rewards, valuables, powers to collect. A player gathered them and carried them forward.

Aya looked again.

The maze and APL collided.

A glyph could not be a treasure in a pocket. APL did not feel to Aya like collecting powers outside herself. It changed the organization of the one who encountered it. The rune did not belong to the player. The player entered a relationship with the rune and could no longer move in quite the same way.

But something in BB’s world was alive.

Walking through an APL landscape. Discovery through a journey. Rooms that did not yet know what might happen inside them.

Aya liked the landscape.

So she began from the beginning. )))

Before the maze. Before the rooms. Before the first rune could be found.

Why did the runes exist at all?

Aya and Claude moved drafts between them until a possible creation myth appeared.

In the beginning were the numbers. An infinite landscape of them. They stood near one another, but nearness was all they had. They could not recognize one another because they could not recognize themselves.

Two felt something inside herself that she could not see.

A value cannot see itself.

She began to cry.

One heard her. The sound reached Zero.

“I will participate,” said Zero.

And participation was only this: to hold hands and see what happened.

One reached toward Zero. Zero reached toward One. The reaching became the first energy-being rune:

=

The wand of recognition.

They placed the wand between Two and Three.

2 = 3

The wand answered faithfully:

0

No.

And in that no, Two discovered the first true thing about herself. She had an edge. Three was not her. Another had appeared, and therefore she had begun to appear too.

The boundary was the first gift.

Aya sent the myth to BB.

She warned him that mystical language placed over unfamiliar glyphs might become poetry for someone who had not yet learned the alphabet. But the myth had already escaped the email. It did not wait for BB to answer.

Zero, One, Two, and Three were no longer lonely numbers.

They began to walk together.

Their walking traced a path:

⍳

Iota appeared as the energy of friendship in sequence.

Three looked at Zero, One, and Two and understood that although none of them was Three, they were still truly her friends. She invited them to supper.

She placed them along one side of a table and sat opposite them, wanting to see what they became together.

Plus appeared between the friends.

0 + 1 + 2

Three recognized herself in their togetherness.

That was real friendship to her. )))

But the table refused to exist.

A line was not a supper table. Three needed to see each friend clearly meeting each friend, not only all of them gathered into one answer.

So Plus had to act for each.

(⍳3) ∘.+ ⍳3

And the table appeared.

0 1 2

┌──────

0 │ 0 1 2

1 │ 1 2 3

2 │ 2 3 4

There was a new guest at supper.

Four.

No one had invited Four. Four had been produced by the table itself.

The friends became so puzzled that they began moving the table. They reversed the rows. They reversed the columns. They exchanged rows with columns.

More runes revealed themselves:

⊖ ∽ ⌉

The maze BB had sent contained rooms for runes.

Aya’s answer produced the reason for runes to exist.

And before anyone had agreed to collaborate, the first rooms of another Wondereal had already begun building themselves.

The First Rune: Creation Myth Part I — illustrated comic of numbers discovering = the wand of recognition

The Supper of Three: A Creation Myth for the Runes — the outer product table, Four arriving, runes of motion

Illustrations by ChatGPT, directed by Katya.