Savant

by Nik Abnett

  “Oh no,” said Wooh, her eyes widening and her skin turning a pale, unhealthy colour.

  “I’m sure it’s not that. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I was speculating... guessing. Don’t take any notice of me.”

  Wooh stood up, suddenly, and reached for the door handle. Saintout put his hand out flat on the door, above her shoulder height, to prevent her opening it.

  He wasn’t entirely sure why Metoo would not allow them out of the garden room, but he did know that she was absolutely serious about it, and, from what Wooh had said about the situation, he guessed that she was acting impulsively and would regret entering the flat, proper, and ruining all the work she’d done.

  “I’ll get Service to send a tone to the flat. If you need to speak to Metoo, let’s get her in here, rather than go storming out there and upsetting the apple-cart.”

  Wooh sagged back down onto her chair, and lifted the screen away from in front of her face.

  “You’re right,” she said, “let’s get her in here. By the way, what has any of this got to do with apple-carts? The stuff you say!”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when this is over, or when we’ve been stuck here for so long that our boredom thresholds give out, and we begin to share our life stories.”

  “We’d have to be pretty bored, and I doubt that’s going to happen. Your life, my life, Tobe’s life: it all comes down to the same thing.”

  “You don’t believe that,” said Saintout.

  “Don’t I?” asked Wooh.

  “Well if you do now, you won’t by the time this is all over.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” said Wooh. “Now, any chance of you sending that request to Service?”

  “Asked and answered.”

  “THE STUDENT?” ASKED Tobe.

  “Yes,” said Metoo. “Why did you ask the Student to do the work on the cotpro, on the linopro? The squeak? Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “Metoo could do it,” said Tobe. “It was easy.”

  “Yes. So why did you have Pitu 3 do it?”

  “Pitu? Pitu 3, the Student? Tobe asked Pitu to work out the linopro thing.”

  “Why?”

  “If Tobe gives Students something to do, Students go away and do it.”

  “Did you want him to go away? Did you want him to go away for a reason?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes you want the Students to go away?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “If Tobe gives Students something to do, Students go away.”

  “And sometimes you want the Students to go away, so that you are on your own? So that you can work?”

  “Sometimes, the maths is better. Always, the maths is better.”

  “You like to be on your own to work?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes Students are work.”

  “Sometimes they are,” said Metoo.

  The Service tone sounded in the flat. Tobe ignored it, so Metoo ignored it too.

  “When is it nice to work in your office, on your own?” asked Metoo.

  “When can Tobe go to the office?” asked Tobe, as if remembering suddenly that he had an office to go to. He began to get up off his stool.

  The Service tone sounded again. Metoo got up, and went around the counter to Tobe. She took his hands in hers, and pulled gently on them until he was sitting down again.

  “Sit there for me, Tobe. Stay there and I’ll come back in a minute. Okay?”

  Tobe tilted his head back, slightly, closed his eyes, and began to murmur.

  Metoo touched his cheek, gently. Tobe didn’t respond to her. She knew that he would be occupied until she disturbed him, and so left the room and went to sign in with Service.

  “WHY DID YOU get me back in here?” Metoo asked Wooh.

  “Are you asking him the questions I gave you?” asked Wooh.

  “Yes.”

  Wooh was still pale, and she looked hard at Metoo, holding her gaze.

  “Are you asking him only the questions I gave you?”

  “His name is Tobe, or Master Tobe,” said Metoo, not flinching from Wooh’s stare.

  “Are you asking Master Tobe only the questions I gave you?”

  “No.”

  “There, you see? Problem solved,” said Saintout, smiling in vain.

  “Our problems are only just beginning, if Metoo can’t perform the function required.”

  “I tried,” Saintout said to Metoo. “I got you in here, but now you’re on your own. She’s a hard task master.”

  Metoo broke her gaze with Wooh.

  “You got me in here?” asked Metoo.

  A Service tone sounded in the flat.

  “Well?” asked Metoo.

  A Service tone sounded in the flat, again, and Metoo left the garden room, afraid that the tone would wake Tobe out of his reverie, and send him looking for her.

  METOO SIGNED INTO Service.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Please verify location of Operator Saintout?”

  “He’s here, in the flat.”

  “Please verify current inhabitants of this residence.”

  “That would be me, Metoo, Master Tobe, Doctor Wooh, and Police Operator Saintout.”

  Metoo signed out of Service and sighed. She felt as if she was being cornered, and required to perform tasks for Service that were not in Tobe’s best interests. Why did they employ her, and then tell her what to do? If they didn’t think she could do the job, why had she been with Tobe for six years?

  She didn’t want to fight the system, but they seemed to be giving her no choice, and, now, Saintout was back in the Service loop, and she could no longer rely on him for help if she needed it.

  Metoo did not return to the garden room. They had let her down. She went back to the kitchen, and sat at the counter opposite Tobe.

  “Hey Tobe,” she said. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  “Tobe wants to go to the office.”

  “I thought we could just have a walk around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because friends do what their friends ask them to do,” said Metoo, looking down at her hands, clasped together in her lap.

  “Tobe is Metoo’s friend.”

  “Thank you,” said Metoo.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  CODE YELLOW REMAINED in force on the Service Floor, and all Workstations, apart from station 2, were on a two-hour switch-out. They began with the subjects most likely to be contaminated, giving each subject a two hour surveillance window. It was the biggest surveillance of its kind for over thirty years. No one on the Service floor had ever completed this procedure, apart from in Manoeuvres, and the majority of the subjects had never been seen on screens before.

  AT 07:28, BABBAGE and Siemens, at Workstation 4, began their countdown for a switch-out.

  “Subject switch-out at 07:30,” said Babbage.

  “07:30,” said Siemens.

  CHEN LOOKED AT Bob. The screen in front of them went from the swirling silver and blue figure of eight to the reflecting sphere, and back again, a number of times in the two hours after the switch-out.

  “What is it?” asked Chen. “Who is it? Shouldn’t we inform someone of this?”

  “I’ve wanted to do this for as long as I can remember,” said Bob. “I’ve wanted to watch this from the beginning. If I never look at another screen, it will all have been worth it.”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s the dream. Subject switch-out at 08:00.”

  “08:00,” said Chen.

  “Three... two... one... monitoring switch-out. Okay, who’s next?”

  Chen looked intently at the screen, and wondered, for a moment, why she felt so disappointed. The screen showed a tangle of bluish strands. Their luminescence was low, and the corona was almost non-existent.

  “How do you go from that to this?” asked Chen, gesturing at the screen.

  “That’s the job. Line-check?”


  “Line-check at 08:02.”

  “Verify.”

  “Verify line-check. What just happened?”

  “Let’s get through the line-check first,” said Bob, “and then we’ll discuss it.”

  QA BROUGHT A sheaf of translucent papers into the room, in a plasticpro wallet. There were hundreds of tissue-thin sheets, each showing an image from one of the screens on one of dozens of Service Floors around the World. Anywhere that was known to have had any interface with the contaminating mathematical material was producing screen wafers, half-hourly, and after every line-check and every sent tone.

  The sheets could be viewed separately, or could be super-imposed on top of each other for comparisons.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “WE CAN’T STOP proliferation of this thing,” said Branting. “We can’t contain it, and we can’t control it. This thing has a life of its own. Does anyone have any thoughts?”

  “Do we have a complete rundown of the effects of this thing, yet?” asked Adjentetti.

  “By which you mean?”

  “Do we know the real effects of this thing on individuals or are we guessing?”

  “Master Tobe has been in Code Yellow for 24 hours,” said Branting, “and the crisis is now time sensitive; without a resolution, Code status ramp-up becomes automatic, unless something changes between now and then. It is, absolutely, my aim to cut this thing off.”

  “Have we been able to measure the effects of this thing?” asked Adjentetti, again. “And when does it get a name? We can’t keep referring to it as ‘this thing’ indefinitely.”

  “We have not fully ascertained what it is yet,” said Mr Ahmed. “We have ruled out certain things; for instance, it is not a computer virus of any of the old-fashioned varieties. It is not a Trojan Horse, a Wormhole, or a Psytrap.”

  “So, we don’t know what this thing is, but we do know that it is affecting certain vulnerable people at the neurological level?” asked Adjentetti.

  “No,” said Branting. “We have not verified that, which brings me to the next point on my agenda. The screen, Qa.”

  Qa was sitting in the alcove next to the door of the conference room. He pushed his chair back and entered a code, using the switch on the facing edge of the counter. He placed his hand over the rubberpro sphere in the counter-top, and hit the switch on the bottom edge of the screen in front of him. The end wall of the conference room lit up with a screen, similar to those used on the Service Floors, but larger, and with a slightly lower resolution. There was also a menu strap down the left-hand side of the screen. There was no image on the screen.

  “I’m going to show you all a series of wafers, collected from various Workstations, on a number of Service Floors, worldwide,” said Branting. “Feel free to interject at any point. The time for justifying holding Master Tobe at Code Yellow is limited. If this thing ramps up, we’ve all got problems.”

  The men and women, sitting around the table, turned their chairs at an angle, so that they could all see the screen at the end of the room.

  “Qa will talk you through the wafers. Qa?”

  “Sir,” said Qa from his seat. His back was to the room, but he was wearing a mic, attached to his headset, and his voice appeared to be coming from the screen in front of the gathered advisors.

  “The first wafers,” said Qa, “are a series of stills from Master Tobe’s screen, taken over the past fifteen days. They obviously include stills from his daily life before the ramp-up, and then stills from the ramp-up to Code Green and so on, until about two hours ago.”

  The screen filled with a blue mass of threads, more or less spherical, with a cloudy halo. The image did not pulse or throb as the moving screen images on the Service Floor did, but represented a moment in time rather than the continuum.

  The wafer faded out to be replaced by a second, and then a third. The first dozen were blue, and all very similar. No one in the room, including the neurological specialists could distinguish one from another with the naked eye.

  “It is not unusual,” said Qa, via the screen, “for all of these wafers to be virtually identical. It does, however, prove a stability of character that one might not expect from a Master of Tobe’s calibre.”

  The wafer faded out and was replaced by another. This one had a pale area on it, which Qa was able to zoom in on, and show as an inset, projected on top of the original.

  “This wafer records the moment at which Code Green was established,” said Qa. “You can all see the area of concern in detail here, and the area of the brain in which the change occurred.”

  “This moment represents the beginning of the problem as we recognise it,” said Branting.

  “Has that area of the brain been affected continuously, over the period since this wafer was shot?” asked Adjentetti.

  “Do we have that information?” asked Branting.

  “I’m not sure, sir,” said Qa, “but we do have a series of wafers for the subject taken at regular intervals since the initial ramp-up from Code Blue to Code Green.”

  “Perhaps we should see them,” said Branting.

  Qa continued to feed the information into his screen, a wafer at a time, and it continued to appear on the large screen at the end of the room, for all those present to inspect.

  The mass of threads had changed colour from blue to green, and then, again, to yellow, but the pictures appeared to be largely similar. Several members of the team, sitting around the table, leaned forwards in their seats and peered at the large screen, trying to divine anomalies in the visual information.

  “Could we see the sequence again, in close-up on the affected area?” asked Adjentetti.

  “Qa?” asked Branting.

  Qa moved the rubberpro sphere under his hand, weaving backwards and forwards over the anomaly until it was writ large on the screen. The sequence ran more slowly, but the specialists were able to sit back and read each wafer thoroughly without having to strain.

  It took two hours to cover the wafers extracted from Tobe’s Service screen.

  The room was silent, except for the sound of breathing, and the rustle of paper and the whispers that pens and pencils made as several of the advisors took notes or drew diagrams.

  “Can we see the entire sequence again?” asked Adjentetti. “I’d really like to see all the wafers, back to back, without colour on them, and can we do it at speed so that we can see the changes?”

  “Qa?” asked Branting.

  “Yes, sir,” said Qa, “just give me a moment to change the settings.”

  Qa spun the rubberpro ball under his palm, and hit a button on the counter. The menu on the left-hand side of the main screen in the room came to life, so that the advisors could see the adjustments that Qa was making, altering the contrast on the wafers, and de-saturating the colour in them. When the first image of a wafer appeared back on the screen, it was a mass of white, bright threads, with pearlescent grey hazing between them and around the corona. The surface of the screen had been blacked-out entirely, so that the subtlety of the greys and whites on the screen was more apparent than the colours had been.

  “How fast do you want the wafers to feed?” asked Qa.

  “Adjentetti?” asked Branting.

  “Perhaps one per second, at least, so that we can scroll through the entire sequence and get an overview,” said Adjentetti. “If that suits everyone?”

  There were murmurs of general assent around the table, and Qa began to feed the wafers through the system.

  Strung together, the wafers began to ebb and flow with light, pulsing in a staccato fashion from one to the next, and the next, right through the sequence. The entire sequence took only a few minutes to complete.

  “Can you put that on a loop, Qa and fade from one wafer to the next, rather than jump?” asked Branting. “There’s something odd about this, Adjentetti.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” said Adjentetti, “but there’s very definitely a pattern of some sort.”

  “Looping now, si
r,” said Qa, his voice emerging from the screen in front of the gathered experts, as his instructions were clearly visible from the menu on the left-hand side.

  Some of the dozen or so men and women in the room held their collective breath for a moment or two, while the screen interpreted Qa’s instructions, others took a few moments to make more notes or to consult the notes they’d already taken. Branting left the head of the conference table, and went to stand beside Adjentetti, who had risen from his seat.

  “Rolling the loop,” said Qa, and the large screen blacked-out for a moment, before coming back to life with the mass of white-light threads, and the pulsing grey corona of Tobe’s screen. They all watched in silence as the wafers cycled through the screen, twice, three times, and, finally, when the cycle began for the fourth time, Adjentetti stepped up to the screen with a telescopic pointer, and made an imaginary circle in the air just in front of it, indicating the section of the screen that he was most interested in.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked, when the wafers had cycled through to the end, again, and Qa stopped the screening.

  “I think you’re on to something,” said Branting. “Anyone else concur?”

  There was a general stirring and murmuring at the table, but it sounded mostly positive.

  “It might start to become interesting,” said Miss Goldstein, “if we compare this sector of scrolling wafers with those of other subjects. I’m not sure we can discuss any possibilities before we have made direct comparisons with subjects of known status.”

  “Qa,” said Branting, “please set up a control group of wafers for Miss Goldstein. And let’s see the material we’ve collected from anyone that we know to have been contaminated. Let’s get a look at the Student’s screen, to begin with, shall we?”

  “Absolutely,” said Adjentetti.

  “Please,” said Miss Goldstein.

  “I can have those wafers fed through the system in a few minutes,” said Qa, “but perhaps one or two of us might benefit from a break, sir?”