ines, d5f — fin | Hunger Games: The RPG

fox Graphics 1,361 POSTS Pronouns: she/her last seen Apr 18, 2024 20:36:13 GMT -5 but a butt ?	ines, d5f — fin May 18, 2022 18:42:47 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by fox on May 18, 2022 18:42:47 GMT -5 inès qadir 16 “My grieved country, In a flash You changed me from a poet who wrote love poems To a poet who writes with a knife” - Nizar Qabbani girl who doesn't like math writes girl who likes math type beat
	Last Edit: May 19, 2022 0:08:21 GMT -5 by fox

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ines, d5f — fin May 18, 2022 19:02:44 GMT -5

Quote

Post by fox on May 18, 2022 19:02:44 GMT -5

I had learned that math was the mother of all things –

of trout glimmering in ponds like a tessellation of pearly gems,

the way my spine curves like a miracle,

and mollusks in their logarithmic homes, clinging to the undersides of leaves after rain.

//

Grief does funny things to a person, my brother says.

He is four years my senior and sees the way our mother has changed long before I would.

//

We birthed a calf in the spring, elbow-deep inside the heifer as she bleated and bawled and bleed. We saw a foot first, pulled by a metal chain my brother had wrapped around its leg.

I remember how he stood at the sink for a long time afterwards, with his hands underneath the scalding water, shaking and red. And Nadim, who used to cry from needles, who used to grow faint at the sight of a bloody nose, left our house quietly, dragging the body from the barn.

//

Father would say,

Allah speaks to us in Arabic and mathematics.

//

Our father worked on little hexadecimal strings of 32 characters in his research.

So much of the Capitol's data had been hashed with SKEIN3, an algorithm of supposed collision-resistant construction. Data would become blocks of bits b inputted into the compression function f, its internal state s fed with an initialization vector. Then, the state would be updated by the function that compressed the current block with the current state, s_i+1 = f(s_i, b_i). There were four rounds of random mixing for a total of sixty four steps, bits chained together into 32 characters.

There is no true randomness from people, and father would say to his students that hash functions always have a fixed skeleton, bones to give it a shape, no matter how complex the mathematical functions are that support it.

He found differential patterns that would give rise to collisions in SKEIN3, with elegant intuition, and subsequent papers from his lab would reverse engineer the first collision to obtain the conditions on the outputs. He could create CA certificates that Capitol servers accepted, he could feign passwords to locked channels.

When the Capitol came to him in the middle of the war, he had been creating a new algorithm and a new construction based on random permutation instead.

They offered him fame, money, power.

The university was destroyed by them. But here were colleagues who yielded to the hand of the Capitol, who became technocrats that rebuilt the digital infrastructure with our father's work, his people's work, stepping over their graves on the way to their kingdoms.

They call it Sycon-128.

//

Mother still keeps his publications, collected by students who survived the destruction of the university.

But she keeps the papers underneath a loose floorboard in the attic.

Up there, she still keeps his qibla compass, his leather journals, his poetry books.

But we never speak of them, and we never look at them.

Our silence blazes.

My chest roars with a scream that never surfaces.

//

The king Al-Mu'tamid himself wrote poems about birds, where the sparrows were never sparrows, but letters of another language, its meaning in the feathers.

Father liked to show me his collection of ancient texts even when I was too young to understand their meanings. But he would show me how diacritics in a verse became binary code, how a fathah hides a one in every other instance, and a kasrah becomes a zero.

Words became algorithms too. He would point out how the signature of a malhoun became a product of two secrets, ciphered with abjad numerals. He would read to me, once as it was, once as he knew it.

There are no computers here in District Five.

But before computers, we had the poets.

//

Sometimes I see all the perfect, unexplainable things, a honeycomb, a fern leaf, and almost believe him – his god.

//

I will know how Sycon breaks because I have known my father.

//

I lost my father's tongue when I lost him, language fading from me in the last ten years. I lost a part of myself when they burned our books and took our relics and we left our home in District Three after his death.

Nadim says it is survival.

We cannot have our own god if the Capitol is to be our idol.

We cannot have our own culture if the Capitol is to be our scholar.

We lost the war.

//

And he wrote,

النهاية

Last Edit: May 19, 2022 0:38:41 GMT -5 by fox

fox Graphics 1,361 POSTS Pronouns: she/her last seen Apr 18, 2024 20:36:13 GMT -5 but a butt ?	ines, d5f — fin May 19, 2022 0:07:59 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by fox on May 19, 2022 0:07:59 GMT -5 L△LIA

L△LIA RP Tutor 3,567 POSTS last seen Jun 24, 2019 15:25:10 GMT -5 BOOM SH△KALAKA	ines, d5f — fin May 19, 2022 11:24:00 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by L△LIA on May 19, 2022 11:24:00 GMT -5 ACCEPTED!
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