Fearful Symmetries (27 page)

“All right,” she said. “Very clever. That’s enough.”

But it wasn’t enough, was it? Because numbers don’t stop at one hundred. “Fifteen times seven is one hundred and five. Sixteen times seven is one hundred and twelve.” And for a moment Susan was floored, it was almost as if she’d forgotten you could get any higher than the little abacuses allowed her! “Nineteen times seven is one hundred and thirty-three. Twenty times seven is one hundred and forty.” And by now the voices were in utter concert, all keeping the same pace exactly.

“Please stop,” she said.

They didn’t stop.

She got out her cane. “You know I can use this,” she said.

They didn’t care.

Susan stared at them in silence. She put the cane down.

The numbers reached seven hundred, and showed no signs of stopping, chuntering on towards the first millennium.

Susan left the room and went to get help.

She didn’t know whether the nearest classroom would be Miss Bewes’s or Mrs. Phelps’s. On the whole, she was glad that it was Miss Bewes’s. She could at least trust her to want to help, and when she saw Susan through the glass panel door she beamed in delighted surprise and was quite prepared to abandon her own class in an instant.

Susan’s pupils were no longer sitting down. By the time Susan and Valerie got to the classroom, they had pushed all the desks and chairs to the back, and now stood in a rough circle. Susan could no longer pick out boys’ voices or girls’ voices—it seemed to her more like a sexless chant, something almost monastic; indeed, there was a cool emotionless to it all that made it sound strangely reverent. Valerie strode into the room, Susan trailed behind her. The children turned to them. “Two hundred and forty-one times seven is one thousand six hundred and eighty-seven,” they informed the teachers.

“Sit down! Sit down, all of you, and shut up!” Valerie Bewes raged at them. Susan hadn’t realised Valerie had such fire in her, and for a second she was quite impressed. Only for a second, though; it was quite clear that that the children weren’t going to obey her, or even take any notice of her—they all turned away, and looked back into the circle. Valerie had no further fire to offer. She was spent.

“Which one started this?” she asked Susan. “There’s always a ringleader.”

It was a boy, Susan knew, but she couldn’t remember which one. Now they were standing up, uniformed from head to foot, they all looked eerily the same. She pointed vaguely at one boy, thought he would do.

“Right,” said Valerie. “You’re coming with me.” She grabbed at the boy. He might have struggled, but Valerie’s fat piston arms were strong, and she pulled him out of the circle, pulled him out of the classroom.

As soon as he was free, the boy stopped chanting. He looked baffled by this turn of events, and then frightened; he jerked in Valerie’s grasp like a fish on dry land.

“What are you playing at?” Valerie demanded to know.

But the boy looked at Susan, and gave her one long despairing glance—help me, it seemed to be saying, but help him with what?—and then the boy lashed out, he kicked at Valerie’s shins. Valerie grunted with surprise, and let go. In a trice the boy had rushed back into the classroom, and slammed the door behind him.

“The little bastard,” Valerie muttered, and rubbed at her legs—but Susan had no time to waste on her. She was looking through the window at the boy. He was back in the circle now. He was starting to chant. But he’d lost his way. The other children were up to two hundred and eighty-three times seven, he was still only at two hundred and sixty. He croaked and stopped. He looked about, confused, as if woken from a dream. He walked slowly into the middle of the circle. Without missing a beat, as one, the children closed in on him. Susan couldn’t make him out through the press of bodies. And then, soon, too soon, the children parted once more, they stepped back and let the circle widen—and the boy was gone, and no trace of him was left.

“Two hundred and ninety-nine times seven is two thousand and ninety-three,” they intoned. “Three hundred times seven is two thousand one hundred.” If three hundred were any sort of landmark they didn’t show it, there was no hint of achievement. On they marched to three hundred and one, and beyond.

“Go and get Mrs. Phelps,” said Susan.

“You don’t want to involve Mrs. Phelps,” said Valerie. “Not on your second day!”

“Go and get her.

Mrs. Phelps looked angry when she arrived. “What is the matter, girl?” And then she looked through the glass door, and listened to the children, and frowned.

“One boy has already gone missing,” said Susan.

“They ate him,” said Valerie. And that seemed such a ludicrous thing to say that Susan wanted to laugh—but then she realised Valerie was perfectly right.

Mrs. Phelps peered at the circle of cannibals coolly. “What would be interesting,” she said at last, “is finding out how high a number they reach.”

Susan didn’t know what to say to that.

“If you can, make a note of it,” said Mrs. Phelps, and then she walked away, and was gone.

Valerie tried to open the door to the classroom again, but pulled away with a cry. The handle was burning hot. And now, yes, they could see there was a certain haze to the room, as if the children were standing at the heart of an invisible furnace.

Presently, another boy lost his place. He seemed to stumble, and then couldn’t find his way back into the chant. He gave a sort of smirk, as if to accept the fun was over—and it was such a human thing for him to do, and cut clean through all the madness, and Susan felt that it was going to be all right, whatever this was, it was just a children’s game after all. He walked into the centre of the circle, and he was eaten alive, the jaws of his killers bobbing up and down as the seven times table reached ever higher numbers, they tore into him with mathematics on their lips and not a single one of them broke rhythm and the sound of their calculations was loud and crisp and clear.

Some fifteen minutes another child perished: a girl, clearly weaker than the rest, she’d been hesitating for a while, Susan was amazed she had lasted that long. After that, there were no more casualties for several hours, not until it was dark.

And the numbers kept on growing, into the tens of thousands, into the hundreds of thousands. She watched the numbers. She watched how beautiful they were, she could hardly tear her eyes off them.

Valerie came back for Susan. “We have to go,” she said. “There’s nothing to be done here.”

“No.”

“You don’t understand! Mrs. Phelps has gone. Her class has gone, my class, all gone. We’re the only ones left!” Susan didn’t know what she meant by gone, she didn’t want to think about that—didn’t need to, they weren’t
her
class, weren’t her responsibility.

“These are my children,” said Susan. “I won’t leave them, not this time.” And until she said those words she hadn’t realised how true that really was.

“Then I shan’t leave you either.” And Valerie took her by the arm, hard.

“Let go of me,” said Susan, flatly. “Let go, and leave me alone. Or I’ll hurt you.”

Shocked, Valerie released her grip. Her bottom lip wobbled. Susan turned back to the classroom window, watched her children play. She heard Valerie go, didn’t see her.

Once the children began to tire, then they fell in quick succession. They’d put in a good effort. They had nothing to be ashamed of. And as the numbers continued to multiply, so the children seemed to divide; the greater the number chanted the fewer the children left alive to chant it.

They became expert at eating the stragglers without losing time. Swallowing the frail down in the little gasps taken between words, and in three bites. Three bites, that’s all you need, even to consume the very fattest child.

The boys were long gone. Four girls were left—then, in a minute, one faltered, and another faltered in response. The two survivors continued to chant in unison for hours, one as soprano, the other’s alto playing descant and giving the song such depth. And the numbers were so vast now, Susan had never dreamed numbers could get so big, or so wonderful—before them mankind seemed like crippled fractions, vulnerable and so very petty and so very very easy to crush. Those numbers—each one took a full ten minutes even to enunciate.

The alto stopped. Just stopped. She didn’t seem in any difficulty, one moment she was enumerating, the next she’d had enough. The last little girl ripped her apart.

And still, impossibly, she kept the circle, now just a circle of one. She had her back to Susan, and she was still staring into the heart of that circle she was creating, a void at the very heart of herself. Still singing out the numbers—and Susan wanted to tap on the glass and let her know she had won the game, let her know she wasn’t alone if nothing else. But it was still so hot, and the glass had warped with the heat, through it the little girl was distorted and inhuman.

At length she reached the final number in the world. And when Susan heard it she knew that it
was
the final one—ludicrous, but true, she had reached the limit of the seven times table, there was no higher she could go.

The handle to the door was cool to the touch. Susan pulled at it. She entered the classroom.

The girl didn’t seem to hear her, and it was only when Susan touched her shoulder that she turned around.

“Hello, Clara,” Susan said.

Clara didn’t reply.

“Where’s your brother, Clara?”

And Clara didn’t reply, Clara didn’t reply—and of course, she couldn’t reply, could she? She couldn’t speak. Once shy, now struck dumb. But—she had recited all those numbers, the long numbers, all that weight of mathematics had come out of her mouth—she
must
be able to talk, she
would
talk, she would tell Susan what she needed to know. Clara gestured that Susan lean forward. She wanted to whisper in Susan’s ear.

It came out like a hiss.

It was one word. It was an impossible word. It could not be spoken aloud. It had too many consonants, not enough vowels, it was a hateful word, it could not be spoken. It was spoken. It was spoken, it was in Susan’s head now. It was there in her head, and the head tried to fight it, tried to expel it, this word that no human being was ever meant to know, a word that had nothing to do with humanity or any of the physical laws that make up their universe.

She felt the ground rush up to meet her, and that was welcome.

When Susan awoke she was safe, and lying on her bed, and Valerie Bewes was looking down at her.

“Oh, my darling!” said Valerie. “My poor child! Your breathing was very strange, I was worried sick!”

Susan’s breathing did feel a little shallow. Breathing was something she’d always done without thought, but now she seemed to have to
want
to do it. How odd. She sucked air into her mouth, tasted it, blew it out again. “How did I get here?”

“Oh, I carried you! Carried you in my arms! If anything had happened to you, I . . . I’ll go and get you some brandy.”

“What about the girl?”

“I shan’t be long, you just rest,” said Valerie. She left the room.

“What about the girl?” Susan called after her, and then realised the girl didn’t matter anymore. She had delivered the message. The girl was done.

She did another one of those breaths. It seemed such unnecessary effort. She decided to stop breathing for a while. That felt better.

She got up from her bed, went to the window. Through the heavy rain she could see, standing in front of the house, Edwin. He was looking up at her.

He raised a hand in salute. She raised hers back, and it clunked awkwardly against the glass.

He spoke to her. She couldn’t hear what he said. But it was just one word, and as his lips moved she knew precisely what it was.

She whispered it back, that impossible word, the name of her new god.

She dimly heard Valerie return. “What are you doing out of bed?” she asked from the doorway. Susan didn’t even look at her, she thrust her hand out somewhere in her direction. She was too far away to reach her, but as her arm moved she was aware of wings and claws as sharp as knives. Valerie gave a quiet little croak, and then shut up at last.

She wondered at her arm. Looked at from one angle, it was thin and fleshy and weak. From another, it was something glorious, something of power and great age. She tilted her head from side to side, so she could see it one way then another. It made her laugh. Her laughter was silly and girlish. Her laughter was a roar.

She could hear the flutter of wings under her bed as the birds flapped their excitement.

Susan left the room, stepping over the spilled brandy, the smashed decanter, the body, and went downstairs. She stepped out into the rain.

There Edwin was waiting for her. He was a little boy, but he looked so grown up, she felt so proud of him. He was a little boy, trying to look big before his time. He was a creature of scales and horns and misshapen flesh.

She took him by the hand. And, as the dream had promised, she made the rain stop. Or maybe it rained, but she just didn’t feel it any more.

Susan looked down at her hand in his, and saw that it was dripping with blood. She saw that Edwin’s hand was sticky with blood too.

And slowly, they walked into town.

I have done everything she ever wanted, within reason. I have given her everything she ever needed. That has not always been an easy journey, I’ll tell you. She hasn’t always known what she wanted—or fully understood what she needed—until I was able to make it clear to her. Is that a problem? No. That’s marriage. That’s how all unions are, in personal life or business. These are complex and evolving systems and they work so long as all components are functioning, so long as everyone has a clear understanding of what’s expected of them, and also providing they abide by the rules.

I don’t think she
has
always understood what’s expected, however. Neither has she always gone by my rules. Yes,
my
rules. That’s how it has to be. Rules are never the product of a democratic process. Rules require clear vision. A single focus. Somebody has to make and uphold them.

In our case, it’s me. And that’s something else I don’t think she’s ever really gotten into her head.

But she will.

Before the night is out.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: 6:00
A.M.
surface vacuum.

Monitoring for task override . . .

No override.

Commence water surface clean . . .

Task completed in 17.4 minutes.

Compact and evacuate.

Standby.

Case in point—the pool. For most women, it’d be enough that we even have a pool in the first place. And it’s a big one, and those things are not cheap to run. Gas for the furnace (she likes it warm, so ours is the only pool in town running heat even in summer, for God’s sake), weekly maintenance, chemicals, something minor forever going wrong with the machinery—trivial hassles, but you add them up and also buy a new gasket here and replace an igniter there, and it quickly turns into $$$.

Not that she even
knows
about that. For her . . . it all just happens. Like the weather, or her charge card being paid off. Bob the Pool Guy comes to me with any problems, and I get them fixed, as with everything else around here. The yard man keeps the grounds the way she wants. Like Bob, Eduardo’s expert at his job but not even slightly handsome. I’m not dumb. Then there’s the SWAT team of Hispanics who drop by every Wednesday morning and clean, because picking up after herself is wholly beyond her. All of this maintenance, all of these support staff
I’m
paying for. . . . Yet she’s the one who gets the benefit, because she’s here the whole damned day while I schlep over the hill to Mountain View to keep the money coming in. (Telecommuting is not going to work for my company. My people need to be where I can keep an eye on them. My company, my rules. I need to be able to smell their fear.) And yet she’s the one who cannot be bothered to walk to the pool house and get out the skimmer net, so when I get back hot after the hell-drive over Highway 17 I wouldn’t have to fish the petals and bugs out before I can even do my laps. For a while I didn’t mind too much, because skimming a pool can be a good way to unwind. It needs attention but not concentration. You detach the brain and let physical action take its course. But after a while, irritation from the fact she kept not doing it started to outweigh the benefits. All the time I was skimming I’d be fuming about the fact I was skimming, the resentment going round and round in my head, faster and faster, and that is not a good thing for me.

I tried to discuss it with her and she said she’d take her turn but of course she forgot, and I got angry. I let her know how I felt, which I was able to do more often and more emphatically back then. She remembered the next couple of times but then forgot.

Which is how the damned machine came about.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: 9:00
A.M.
bottom clean.

Monitoring for task override . . .

No override.

Commence bottom clean . . .

Task completed in 22.04 minutes.

Compact and evacuate.

Standby.

Problem-solving has always been my key skill. Perceiving a situation clearly, rapidly determining the best response, and incisively carrying it out. That’s not just how you run a business—it’s how you run a life: your own, and that of those who need guidance. I have not yet found a way through the current crisis, but I will.

Count on that.

I didn’t go looking for the big change in my life. It found me. I was at an I-TRAX trade show in Vegas and wound up in the bar talking to a guy I’d never met and it turned out his company was only half a mile up the road from my own. I was in Artificial Intelligence software back then and hadn’t been keeping up with what people were doing in cybernetics. It turned out stuff had come on a
lot
. This guy was harnessing some of this to self-directed household appliances. That kind of product had been kicking around for a pretty long time—the kind of junk you’d see in a Sharper Image or Brookstone catalog without taking seriously: automated carpet cleaners that spent the day dumbly nudging around the living room, like retarded dogs, sucking up bits of fluff. That’s what this guy, Ross, was at the trade fair to pimp—a slightly better robo-vacuum.

The thing is, carpets don’t really demand that kind of treatment. Once you—or your Mexicans—have vacuumed, it’ll last a week until they come back. A pool, though . . . a pool needs constant attention. There’s always something floating down (or flying, in the summer—crane flies and yellow jackets have a kamikaze yearning to drown themselves in large bodies of water, or at least in mine) to land in it, and come the fall the myrtles take a perverse pleasure in dumping faded blossoms directly into it. Most of this crap floats on top, but some of it is heavy enough to sink to the bottom, where it’s tough to net. Then there’s the chemical balance, checking the pH level is staying true and chlorine levels are tight, monitoring temperature to balance the furnace versus passive solar. . . . Exactly the kind of task set that a machine should be perfect for.

By the end of the fair Ross and I had agreed to work together. I talked to Bob the Pool Guy the next day, and nailed what a robot would need to be able to do to basically put him out of his job.

Three months later we had our prototype, and four months after that, I had the machine working in our pool.

RAYiOS b0.8

I have power.

All components are functioning.

Next scheduled task: bottom algae scrub.

Monitoring for task override . . .

No override.

Commence scrub . . .

Task completed in 41.8 minutes.

Compact and evacuate.

Standby.

It took us another year to get the thing to the point where it was ready to go to market. Processing power is cheap these days—you can buy an off-the-rack CPU for ten bucks that’ll out-think a dog, manual worker, or marketing chick. It’s the mechanics that are tough—and that’s where you really come to appreciate what a great job evolution does of making bodies fit for purpose. Real world R&D cycles can’t last a million years, however, and so we had to turn up the heat. Our skimmer had to be able to move along the surface to vacuum leaves and petals and bugs. It needed to dive to get stuff off the bottom. It had to run water quality tests and release chemicals if required. It had to do all this while not shorting out or rusting or accreting mineral deposits in sufficient quantity to jam up the components, of course, and while knowing to spend enough time seeking sunlight to recharge its solar battery pack.

Our first version—which I called “Bob”—did all these things, kind of. By then it had become clear to me that Ross wasn’t up to the job, however. You can’t move forward if you’re not all on the same page, and his side of things simply wasn’t kicking it. When you perceive a problem, a danger to the smooth progression to your chosen future, you have to move hard and fast.

So I fired him, and outsourced the mechanicals to a company in China that was much more eager to please. This meant more trips away from home, sometimes long ones, and I installed webcams around the house and garden to make sure no one was getting up to mischief while I was away. I couldn’t keep such close tabs on Laura when she was out of the house, of course, but calls and texts at unpredictable times and intervals helped her realize that immaculate behavior remained mandatory.

Version 2—sold under the name “Bill”—was where I finally started to see returns on investment. Bill took Bob’s abilities to a new level, chiefly because of the more sophisticated mechanics provided by the Chinese guys. They all want to be the next FoxConn, and when you say jump, they jump. Bill could now climb in and out of the pool, using six mechanical arms/legs—in order to maximize sun exposure, collect new chemicals if required from a box attached to the pool house, and to evacuate and trash the heavily compacted pellets of surface and bottom debris he’d collected. He also now had wifi to alert his owner if supplies were running low, or to long-range issues like the temperature of the pool wandering out of tolerance, providing a heads-up of potential mechanical difficulties outside his ability to manage.

Bill worked well. Bill sold well, too. Bill made me a stack of money. But there’s always going to be people in the world for whom “great” isn’t good enough.

Laura is one of them.

It specifically became “not good enough” when the kid got to the point of toddling. Yeah, we had one by then. I hadn’t even wanted a child, or at least not at that point. I was busy. There were other issues. But Laura demanded, and so Laura got. And when he started lurching around the grounds on his own two feet, Laura wanted a fence built around the pool. I told her that wasn’t going to happen. Put a fence around the pool and it looks caged. It would ruin the effect of the landscaping, and I don’t give a crap whether it’s code or not. Why was I already paying for swimming lessons for the kid, if it wasn’t precisely to make sure he’d be safe?

Still “not good enough,” apparently.

That evening we had quite the conversation. I did most of the talking, because I’d had enough. Her response was sufficiently loud to wake the kid up, unfortunately, and the two of them spent the night in the guest wing, Laura locking herself in. I could have unlocked the doors, of course—she didn’t realize the entire system had been centralized by then, and I could lock and unlock anything in the house from a custom app on my iPhone—but I let it lie. Sometimes you’ve got to let the lessons sink in, as with Ross, who’d tried to set up a competing business after we parted company, and only realized the key patents were mine after I had my lawyers actually turn up on his doorstep. Fast, incisive, final. It’s how I operate.

Laura spent that night pretty uncomfortably—the air-con and underfloor heating was also under my control, and I had some fun with that, dropping the temperature right down and turning the fan on noisily every half hour—and emerged contrite the next morning, still unaware that I could have gone in and talked further to her any time I wanted. You never play all your cards at once.

It turned out okay. Better than okay, in fact. It indirectly led to the creation of Benny—and Benny was what put me into the very-rich-indeed bracket. Benny did everything Bill did, but was stronger and far more capable. To get around the whole fence issue, Benny could detect sudden and chaotic disturbance in the water, and swim fast enough to get to a small child, maneuver itself underneath and support it back to the edge, meanwhile broadcasting signals over wifi to set alarms blaring on every qualified device within the house (and your phone).

Benny came with a shitload of disclaimers, as I’m sure you can imagine. Benny would not even be installed on your property until you’d signed some extremely carefully worded waivers. No guarantee was either given or implied, and it took longer to get that down in small print than it even did to get the search-and-rescue mechanics right.

But Benny worked. And after it saved the life of a TV star’s child (a TV star who, moreover, was between shows and desperate for all the publicity she could grab: she went
nuts
on Twitter about it, and all her brain-dead fans retweeted it to the skies) I started shifting units as fast as my Far East colleagues could manufacture them. They were not at all cheap, but, as the old ad line goes, you can’t put a price on piece of mind.

You can, however, put a price on “quality of life.”

Even though I’d done everything she wanted, Laura
still
wasn’t happy. She didn’t like Benny, she said. Specifically, she didn’t like having it in the pool the whole time. To be fair, the machine was pretty sizable by then. Bob had been a foot wide and eighteen inches long—not much bigger than the conventional chlorine bobbers you see in any pool. Bill grew to a shade over two feet long, due to the arms. Benny was two feet wide and a full three feet long. He had to be, for the increased power required to move decisively to a child and stand any hope of keeping him or her afloat, involving much stronger arms and sturdy anchoring to the body (and I’d also amped up his cutting and compacting abilities, after our home model got borked trying to dispose of a huge, woody palm tree leaf that fell off one of ours into the pool).

Within these constraints, Benny was as sleek as several ex-members of Apple’s product design division could make her—but that wasn’t good enough for Laura. Even though he’d been programmed to monitor the pool for evidence of human presence—regular, recreational presence, rather than the frantic splash and flailing of a child who’d fallen in—and trigger a task override which would delay whatever skimming or chemical task was next in his schedule, he still had to basically live in or right by the pool—and that’s what she didn’t like. The big white shape, lurking at the end. She said he creeped her out.

Of course she called it “he.” That is women all over. Imputing feelings and personality where there are none.

Mindful however of the fact that if it hadn’t been for Laura’s whining he/it wouldn’t exist at all—which didn’t mean I owed her anything, but did prove that sometimes dealing with annoying things could induce creativity—I got the team to experiment. I tried enhanced audio monitoring to augment the splash sensors. It didn’t work. It was too hard to distinguish the relevant sounds accurately. Kids suddenly submerged in water could not be guaranteed to shout or scream in a predictable way, or indeed at all. If they were to bang their heads on the way into the water—as they might if they’ve been running up and down the side, regardless of how many damned times their parents told them not to—then after the initial splash there would be nothing but a deathly silence anyway. I tried a lot of things, but none worked well enough to put into production.