Elmond spun up an algorithm, one with an objective, a curve, and as for the continuity he made it of the Lipschitz variety so it wouldn’t get too sharp in any one place. He filled the algorithm with a purpose and a thousand particles and called it a swarm. It ran at such a pace he had to back away because it was getting hot. With a finger he made to dip it in the algorithm and twirl, but – no need! – it was twirling quite fine on its own.

As for the objective, Elmond was having trouble with sleeping. He desired to know if the cause of such troubles was the litre of ground and roasted coffee beans in water he sipped at around four hours before the sun went down. Thus he charged his algorithm to solve his troubles: how much should I drink? As much as possible for that bitter dark drink I cannot live without, but not so much I cannot sleep. When do I drink? Too early and I’ll feel remiss in the evenings, for drinking hot coffee after dark reminds me of my mother.

At each constraint put before it the algorithm nodded, and then nodded once more to ask: is that all? For Elmond had only imbued his algorithm with a capacity for nodding and twirling, no voice for miles.

“That is all,” Elmond spoke, and the ground he stood on shook and his coffee rippled, for he was an enormous algorithm slinger of course. “And you shall be named Universe.”

Such a curious name? Elmond came up with it by the way it sat on his tongues, ran in his throat, and delighted his cortex. “Because you are one algorithm you are Uni, and because you will soon speak great songs, you are Verse.”

Universe started off so hot that Elmond scowled for five days and had never slept so bad in his life. The concern practically dripped from his brow in single, giant droplets, and he had to wipe it away with a cotton towel. Once the twirling caught on, things cooled, and Elmond was able to settle a bit more. He spent his evenings hauling great slurps from that brown liquid sustenance, looking from the rim of his cup down upon the commotion of an algorithm at work.

Universe had only to inform Elmond of the two numbers he wished to know about his sleep time and his sip quantity. These it inscribed within its formation. Sometimes Universe shrank, sometimes it expanded, and whatever the radius, this was its current prediction of the number of hours before sunset that Elmond should rest his head. Sometimes Universe grew heavy, other times light as a bead – this its current prediction for Elmond’s optimal weight in coffee to consume.

As the days passed and the sleepless nights crawled on, Elmond would watch his algorithm from his living room. It hung there in the middle of it, flooding the walls with wonderful blue colour. When not a wink was to be had, he watched Universe unfurl and think, and he began to draw from its behaviour patterns. Bespectacled with a billion dots, that was the first thing Elmond found. These dots ranged from the width of a hair on his head, to just larger than a crumb of bread. They could be blue and hot, red and rude, or white as blue-sky moon. And from a deep pocket Elmond drew a compass, with point on one end, pen on the other, and applied it to various positions of Universe.

Much more was found!

He noted that these white and red bespecklements clustered often in large groups, these he called globulars by the way they looked exactly like the bubbles on his favourite dish: tomato soup. Further inspection then revealed to him the twirls, which were so much like the spinning surface of his cup of coffee that he had to dance right then and there just to channel the excitement from his body. If there had ever been an indicator for an algorithm in good health, this was certainly that. Everywhere and everywhen the twirls appeared before him: in how a few bespecklements might wrap around a large, glowering bespecklement (these were the tiniest of twirls), to grand sweeping flushes with wings and flings, and they threw millions of bespecklements around in fabulously coloured arcs that were so much colour he could not name them all at once. He could not help but name these larger ones after his favourite brand of coffee: Galuc-Z.

Although the joy of discovery was great, it soon wore off as the days and weeks passed, and not much changed in Universe. Elmond grew concerned, and it did not help that Universe had expanded twice to twice its size and was only growing. Had he accounted for the presence of negatives, had he left his variables totally unbounded? For when he measured the radius it told him he should sleep after the sun rises, and wake up after it sets – an impossible sleep, or a negative sleep, whichever way one chose to look at it. This distressed him so much that he smashed his table but a little too hard, and four pieces of wood chip broke off and fell right into a globular, a Galuc-Z, and the lasts two scraped a few bespecklements away and that was all. Elmond leapt up to assess the damage, and in doing so tripped and quite accidentally scooped out a large amount of Universe matter by the flailing of his hands.

When he recovered from his fall, he used his cotton towel to wipe his hands which were very sticky from the globulars. He fumed, he shouted, and he went outside of his house to swing a few chairs and break some legs. Relieved, he came back in with a mind settled. He keenly checked for any damages, this time with a magnifying glass, and was happy to see Universe was correcting for the perturbance: the loss of mass it had handled by overriding the mass of everything so that, by default, it was larger than the actual mass it contained. Elmond nodded. With such a solution, everything still twirled well.

Soon Elmond grew tired of Universe, grew tired from little sleep. Universe adopted the role of an interesting conversation piece when Elmond entertained guests.

“My, what a twirly, whirly little glowering algorithm you have there, Elmond,” said his mother once as she came to see him for afternoon tea.

“Yes, see here,” and Elmond would point to a particularly interesting Galuc-Z, one quite oblong and looked like it had a smile.

“Ah, it’s smiling,” said Elmond’s mother, smiling.

Or, when his friend Dr. Muz came by, he was an expert in algorithmic botany and so had much to say about his algorithm. Elmond tried his best to veer the conversation away from a discussion about how plants are the perfect computers for all tasks that demand growth – that is, every task. But, Dr. Muz was a doctor for the reason that he was more obsessed over a single topic than was deemed healthy. Dr. Muz had lots to say about Universe, most of which involved him elaborating extensively on how a small cove of Gusper Trees would probably solve the task in five weeks tops, and at the end he could chop them down and recycle their leaves for tea, their bark for warm winter clothing. He showed Elmond his jacket, inside and out, with had the unmistakable twirling pattern of the Gusper Tree bark on it. “Fashionable, too,” said Dr. Muz.

Dr. Muz soon left when he phone rang and informed him of a robbery. “I did not schedule for a robbery!” shouted Dr. Muz down the phone, but whoever was on the other end of the line insisted that he had. Dr. Muz stormed out with a huff, but came back to apologize for his rudeness, bowed low, handed Elmond a packet of seeds, and then departed again in quick haste.

Another five weeks went by and Galuc-Z tasted as deliciously bitter as ever. But the cycle of reliance is a sadistic one: Elmond could not sleep because of it, but without a big cupful in the morning, he could not awake either. Despair came in from all angles and he resorted to means of perusing. He perused his kitchen shelves, the crevices of his sofa, but he did not find anything of interest until he went online where a Algorythmic Alchemist was advertised to him purely by chance. The next day she was at his door, head to toe enshrouded in robes of blue. Some force floated the corners of the cloths out by her sides so that she looked as if she was walking on the floor or the ocean.

“Good day,” she spoke, and bowed with her twelve hands all in prayer.

“Hello,” said Elmond and he stepped aside to let her walk in. She settled herself into Elmond’s green and yellow tartan armchair in the corner. Her fabric remained unsettled and floating still. Elmond offered tea, Galuc-Z, various chocolates, but she politely declined them all, for she had forgone consumption of anything long ago. Elmond wished to ask her how she survived on such a devoid diet, but he was paying by the hour and decided better of it.

“Is this it here?” For the first time since coming in, she parted her palms and point with one of her sixty possible fingers at the spinning disk in the centre of the room.

“Yes.” said Elmond, “What can you do for it?”

“Well,” said the Algorythmic Alchemist, returning to her twelve-fold prayer, “I work by unconventional means, but my means are incredibly average, as – I believe – well-meaning means should be.”

To this, Elmond nodded, squeezed his eyes a bit, and scowled so as to make it apparent that he understood – he did not follow a word.

“Any good algorithm should, by its lexicographical nature alone, be composed of four parts algo and five parts rhythm.” Elmond had not asked why such a ratio or portions, but the Algorythmic Alchemist told him anyway: “The ratios so set by their character distribution we see in the word algorithm itself. Now.”

She stood up, calm as a breeze, and almost floated over to Universe in the centre of the room. She spent such a long period of time scrutinizing the glowing mass that Elmond almost wanted to move things along, for his wallet was not that deep. But eventually she spoke, “Ah, you have an algorithm – Universe, you call it? – Universe here, is an algorithm on the precipice of success. Almost complete in its optimization but it is caught, ensnared, in a devilishly deep saddle point.” With two of her hands she made an arc down like a rainbow, and with two other she made an arc up, like an upside down rainbow, drawing before Elmond a saddle point.

“It needs some perturbing, that is all. This can be done by way of music.” She now turned away from Universe and addressed Elmond: “I recommend a dose of improvised jazz, twice a day, for five minutes – no more. No less.”

“Any particular artist or instruments?” asked Elmond.

“It does not matter at the start. You’ll soon know what it needs. Do this for twelve weeks and Universe will complete its task.”

At this, Elmond thanked her, adorned her with complements of the floating fabric variety, and she was gone like a wisp.

Over the weeks, Elmond, each morning, would down his coffee and walk to the record store, select a new album from the jazz section, bring it home, and play a random snippet of five minutes of it for Universe. For the first two weeks, nothing stirred, just a little expansion here or there, but no more. Then on the third week – it was subtle but clear – Universe moved in a way it had not before. And by week four, when Elmond would turn off the music machine after five minutes, the song would continue on, emanating directly from Universe itself. In itself it had a calming effect on Elmond in the evening, and he had the best sleep in years. Eventually Elmond stopped buying new records, for he only had to play a few seconds before Universe took it away – and finally Universe orchestrated sound all by itself. Elmond would wake up to wonderful notes, snaps of a snare, plucks of a bass, and hoots and toots of brass gone wild.

It was eight weeks after the visit by the Algorythmic Alchemist that Elmond’s curiosity drove him to investigate. Armed with his magnifying glass and field recorder, he trawled through Universe, looking for the source of the sound. He thought, at first, that it must be from the clanging and bashing of the bespecklements in the Galuc-Z’s. Very often these would collide and through pockets of varicoloured gases about. But upon recording them, the sound of the force was only fuzzy and garbled. He tried a hole, all black, but nothing came from that, a pulsing bespecklement which he had named a pulsar, this did tick like a wood block percussionist, but that was all the sound it had to offer.

Where then?

And he sat back in his armchair, exhausted, listening to the technical diversity of the jazz music emanating from Universe, and folded a frown around his mouth.