Chapter 52, The Calculus.

The Calculus

At nine years of age Frank knew little of Utilitarianism apart from the phrase his father had painted above the hearth: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure”. He knew little of pain and much of pleasure, since to Frank at this age the greatest pleasure was the freedom to think, experiment and learn. It never occurred to him until much later that his parents had obeyed Bentham and deliberately sought a home in which pain was, as far as possible, excluded. Oskar Kørner was an existentialist ahead of his time, already realising that Hell was other people, and so he moved his tiny family to Edgeøya, population officially recorded as zero, in order to pursue his  interests in minerals and give his son freedom to develop without social conventions. Conveniently this also enabled Oskar and his Sami wife to forgo clothes when the temperature allowed and fuck in the open air, which was normal for communal families in animal hide tents, but probably rather outré for members of the Norwegian Science Academy.

It was during one prolonged coition just after his ninth birthday that Frank learned the power of counting. His mother, concentrating on keeping Oskar’s cock between her breasts, simultaneously massaging his testicles and licking the glans, failed to notice Frank slip away to the cave. It was here that Frank learned to count exponentially, and shortly after discover logarithms.

Frank had placed a small sample of flesh from his heel in the pool three days earlier, now he saw a foot floating in the black liquid, and from it ran long spindles of fibre, already suggesting the form of an entire leg. Frank looked up to the roof of the cavern and began to count in multiples of two. At first, he used his fingers to arrive at 1024, but then went on to imagine how many cells would be created by binary fission even at the rate of one split per hour. At this moment he had no idea that there would be about thirty trillion cells in an adult body, but by observing the formation of the leg he realised that the growth of a complete individual would take less than a year. The foot floating before him would eventually become a copy of himself: so now the issue was how to give it consciousness. It was at this point that Frank conceived of consciousness as an infectious disease, and that idea was to afford him immortality, at least until he met Kay.