Zero was a circle. One, two, and three were represented by the appropriate number of horizontal lines. Four could be remembered because it was a square with some extra stuff inside of it. Beyond that, however, the numerals were nonobvious. With a bit of help from Yuxia, she had been trying to learn them. In some contexts, where numbers were arranged in a predictable order, this was easy. Reading random numbers would have been impossible for her. The situation with this fuse box was somewhere between those extremes. At the top of the box she was seeing some labels that weren’t numbers at all—she guessed that they must say things like "cellar" or "laundry room." Below that she began to see numbers that began with a single horizontal line, meaning 1, and after several of those she saw some with two horizontal lines, and after that a bunch with three lines, and so on. So it seemed that the fuses were laid out in a somewhat logical fashion according to floor and apartment number. But all of this was more in the nature of general trends than absolute rules; it was obvious that the building had been rewired several times and that available fuse sockets had been put to use willy-nilly. She had to carry out a kind of archaeological dig in her head to reconstruct how it had come to be this way. Toward the bottom of the panel she began to see the squarish character that meant four, and below that, the less obvious glyph that she was pretty sure meant five. So the fuse that would kill the Atheron signal was probably in the bottom half-dozen or so rows of the grid. But this was the part of the box that had been most heavily exploited by opportunistic rewirers in more recent decades and so there was a lot more noise and misdirection for her to sift through here.