Sticks and Stones and Sorcery

Once upon a time in a village called Vaja, a boy named John lived with his parents. The season was the usual. They called it the eternal spring.

Everyone in the village of Vaja was a proud block builder. In fact Vaja was the center of block production in the whole wide world. And naturally, here, everything was made of blocks.

There were blocks of different shapes and sizes, unique inner mechanics, and a variety different purposes. But they had one thing in common. Every Block was made of an ashlar concrete shell and brass gears on the inside. The concrete had holes to access the inner gears. Some blocks had really small holes, others exposed almost all of their inner workings. Using these holes, blocks could be combined and coupled. This way complex things could be built from blocks.

Even the houses were made of blocks. Large blocks and small blocks. Designed to work together to form rooms and doors. But this was nothing compared to the incredible machines the elders of Vaja had built. „The two Martins“ as everyone called them, were in fact named Martin Flower and Martin Robert. They had even built blocks to be used inside bigger blocks as well as blocks that created other blocks.

John liked to play hide and seek in the streets as all boys of his age do. And as he grew accustomed to the orthogonally running streets near his home, he ventured further and further and explored the outer rims of the village. Here, the streets were less straight, the houses less perpendicular. These were the outskirts where the mediocre builders lived.

Outside the village lay the planes, „the great waste“ as they called it. Here, dismantled smashed blocks and bent gears lay about. John had heard the stories. The problem was, that it had always been hard to reuse existing blocks for different purposes let alone change their inner workings. Because of their structure, blocks always had to be designed for use with specific other blocks. Truly generic blocks were extremely rare. So everyone, even the elders, smashed their blocks, threw them away on the planes and built new ones.

Another reason was that blocks always had moving parts which could be in a bad state. If a single gear was pointed in the wrong direction, whole machines would break. The elders knew how to make sure the gear wheels were correctly configured, or so they told everyone. They had even built machines (out of blocks) that reconfigured blocks with different inner blocks while they were running. It was a true marvel.

Between the great waste and the forest lay stones in various shapes and sizes. Some were round, some were block-shaped. Those were boring. Even though they had the same feel to it as a block’s shell, they had no inner gears. John found no value in them.

His parents had warned him not to go into the forest. It was dangerous because there were no blocks around. But someday curiosity won. Walking through the grass he found a stick. He did not know what exactly to do with it. So he flailed it around and threw it away. The stick bounced off a tree trunk onto a stone and then on the ground. That caught Johns attention. He had never seen anything bounce before! He took the stick and bent it with his hands. Amazed he saw it snapping back into position right when he let it go.

The following days John came back to the same place only to play with the stick. After a while he started combining it with other things. He attached a string to it so he could lash and make the air crack. That was fun. Then he attached the string’s loose end to the other end of the stick and bent it to a bow. With this bow thing he could shoot other sticks, even though the bow was itself only a stick. He had invented a higher order stick!

This was the most amazing discovery he had ever made. By combining two simple things, he could build a powerful tool. Perhaps equally important was the realization that the stick’s structure was also its function. This was unlike any block he had ever seen. Blocks were always structure outside and moving parts on the inside. The stick on the other hand was in itself pure function. Whereas most blocks could only be used for the purpose they were designed for, the stick could be used for a variety different things, restricted only by imagination.

On the way home he saw the stones in a different light. „What could one build“, he wondered, „by combining such simple things as stones, sticks and strings?“. He stacked block-shaped stones on top of each other, and had soon erected a wall. The sticks could tied together in triangular shapes and be used as a roof. He realized that houses could be built completely without blocks with gears inside them.

But then he got afraid. The elders had said everyone should use only blocks to build things. And because they were able to build enormously complex machines, they must be right, mustn’t they? The doubt, however, stuck to a corner of Johns mind and wouldn’t let go.

Then someday a stranger came to visit the village. Before he could see him, John heard the smaller children mock:

„Rich Hickory – crazy is he
Has cool hair but lives in a tree
Sticks and stones, stones of gray
He let’s his steward haul away“

The stranger told tales of tree houses and houses made out of wood and stone. He said that sticks and stones had value. That they were generic building material, didn’t have to be smashed and could be reused for other purposes instead. That simple things could be composed to build amazing things.

But no-one would listen.

Only John. He became Rich’s apprentice, a real wizard’s apprentice. From that day forth John learned how to build complex things from simple parts.