petronia | Blind Go fic, the completed version

Uploaded to my website:

A Proof by Contradiction (Eight Primary Sources)

Implicit spoilers for the entirety of the series (if you didn't read it already as part of

blind_go). Lightly edited and about 600 words longer than the version posted to

answer_key. Part V was the first section I started writing, and the last section I finished writing; it was like pulling teeth. ^^;

Author's Notes:

The HnG fic I always wanted to write. Or rather, the HnG fic that encompasses everything I wanted to say about the series at the time I first read it. ^^; All the (mostly male) HnG fans I knew offline as well as many of those (mostly female) I knew online were inspired by the series to start playing go, and some of them became quite serious about it. Probably as a reverse psychological reaction, I never learnt to play. XD Instead I read online white papers about go-playing programs, and their implications for the field of artificial intelligence. I found it fascinating that you couldn't rely on full-board lookahead, and instead had to implement pattern recognition heuristics loosely based on those of the human brain. "Sai playing net go" was virtually the definition of a ghost in the machine, only the real explanation was much simpler. So I came up with the idea of an alternate Sai: "a computer program, capable of playing go at the level of a 8-dan or 9-dan, that by virtue of being such is also able to pass the Turing Test with ease." A Singularity story, in other words, where Singularity = Hand of God.

I couldn't figure out a way of writing it with the actual HnG characters, though, because none of them would/could program anything of the sort. Unless (I kept thinking) Hikaru got hit by a Mack truck or something, and Akira decided to create a virtual version of him so they could keep playing and attain the Hand of God. [1] But why the heck would I voluntarily write a story in which Hikaru gets hit by a Mack truck??

orz

When I was gently peer-pressured into signing up for

blind_go I needed a fic concept - any fic concept - pretty badly, but it was

obakesan's Anti-OTP Challenge that made me dust this one off. I couldn't submit it to both but the idea was there. Mind you "one half of the OTP gets hit by a Mack truck" is a crude response to the challenge of defining "anti-OTP", but then I thought, the reason people write gratuitously angsty deathfics is because they're proof by contradiction, innit? In lieu of a straightforward proof in which the characters get married and have babies and live happily together until they're 100 years old, you show that without the OTP, things fall apart. Also, "proof by contradiction" would make a great ~~name for a band~~ title for the fic itself ahaha.

I still didn't know how to write it until the interview format came to mind (I only had the one nebulous scene in mind, Ashiwara's, plus a lot of jumbled essay bobbins on evolution etc.), and then I wrote it very fast - Monday to Friday of deadline week, at an average of 1000 words a night. ^^; It was meant to be SF but the characters themselves threw me for a loop: as I wrote I realised most of them did not believe, at all, that this virtual!Hikaru was a computer program, or else considered it irrelevant. XD So in the end I left the metaphysics wide open. The canon is a supernatural series, though I tend to forget the fact.

Sometime after I finished I realised I'd written two other interview/epistolary fics in the past six months that dealt explicitly with the same themes, and that I was going to write another in short order. I've lost count of how many people I know, both online and offline, who've had deaths and medical emergencies in their families this past year (including my own), and suspect it filtered through as a fictional preoccupation.

Thanks once again to everyone who commented and said kind things, as well as to the organisers of

blind_go who gave me the excuse/opportunity to squeeze this out. It was always the story I should have written, but very unlikely that I would have, otherwise. ^^;

[1] It had to be Akira because Hikaru isn't good enough at math. I'M SORRY BUT IT'S TRUE.