Sumera

Comes now the story of Sumera.

Sumera was a young woman of numbers. She loved data and made it her career. Her passion was finding the signal amidst the noise. Sumera was born in the appropriate human age for such a passion.

The moon, seeing her dedication to the human-created symbols and representation, sought to impart knowledge upon the young woman so thirsty for information. Sumera saw the moon in the sky and heard its words. The moon told her that people are too driven by the need for narrative that they will never fully understand the true nature of randomness that exists in data. They cannot see all the influences of the world upon a single event. They would rather create tenuous or outright fictional connections between objects and decide that is reality than to explore the true complexity of their world.

Sumera was incensed upon the moon’s words. For someone who lived her life trying to make sense of random information that could be used for profit and improving life, the maxim from the moon was sacrosanct.

She left her job as a data scientist and set out to become an educator. Sumera became a middle school teacher. Her subject was pre-algebra. Her job was to sort chaos in a chaotic, hormonal world. She created lessons that pointed out how complicated the world was. She told students that people too often look at a chain of events where A causes B causes C causes D. She wrote the four points in a line on the markerboard. In reality, she told them, B is caused in part by A but also with slight influence from Ω which was only possible because of X and 9. D occurred when C was only possible because Φ did not happen. She wrote a web with all of the letters and numbers to show the complicated galaxy of causes and effects. She pointed to the straight line of A through D and declared it fiction. Sumera showed them the connected and partly related numbers, letters and symbols said it was real life.

The students shrugged. The moon was right.

Sumera searched for another example and turned to comic book movies. If the Spiderman was in a fight against Venom but was not strong enough to beat him, he could possibly seek out help from Silver Surfer, she posited to her students. Ears perked up. But what would motivate the Silver Surfer to fight Venom, a villain he has no problems with? Maybe, she told them, the symbiote that created Venom had once attacked the people of Zen La, Silver Surfer’s home planet. This motivates Silver Surfer to join forces with Spiderman and defeat Venom, Sumera said.

The students grinned and nodded and liked her analogy. One student, with a smirk on his face, declared that Silver Surfer and Spiderman are not in the same story lines, thus her story did not make sense. Sumera smiled. The point, she told them, is that the connection between two events is complicated and involves many causes and correlations. The world is not simple, she told them, it is complicated and random and not always easily understood.

Sumera was happy with her lesson. Her students seemed to understand that there are times when they cannot understand. She repeated the lesson for years, changing the subjects to different comic book heroes or other famous movie characters.

Whether any of those students grew up understanding that the world was more complicated and that a narrative isn’t always possible, Sumera was never sure. The moon was probably right but maybe it was not. Sumera was satisfied with the uncertainty.