Simple Simon (4 page)

*  *  *

The school bus pulled to the curb on Vincent Street two houses past the intersection with Milford Avenue and stopped before number 2564, a two story craftsman style home with a fading blue exterior and pretty curtains in every window. “Sweetie, we’re here,” the bus driver, a pudgy redhead, called out to her last passenger. All her ‘kids’ were ‘sweetie’.

Simon Lynch knew that the bus had stopped, so as he did at each stop no matter who was getting off, he pulled his cards through his collar and flipped to the card that said
YELLOW BUS
on top. Below that he had written, with his mother prompting him:
IF TH BUS STOPS AT A BLU HOUS AND TH NUMBR ON TH BLU HOUS IS 2564 GT OUT OF TH BUS AND GO INTO TH BLU HOUS MOMMY WIL B INSID TH BLU HOUS WITH HOT CHOKOLIT FOR SIMON
  Simon nodded to himself and returned the cards to their place, got up with Dr. Chas’s magazine still under his arm, and walked to the front of the bus. “My mother says to get off here.”

The driver winked and smiled at him. “Sure enough, sweetie. We’ll see you Monday. Bye now.”

Simon turned without acknowledging her farewell and stepped carefully off the bus, hand on the silvery rail. This was the part where he’d hurt himself some time ago. ‘When’ wasn’t in the myriad of thoughts as his foot touched the slushy ground, but ‘hurt’ was. His foot had gone out from beneath his body because the ground was slippery once and he’d bumped his head hard on the step of the bus. He cried then, and he had cried when the other doctors—not Dr. Chas—stuck him with needles when Mommy took him to them. That hurt. He didn’t like to hurt.

“Get going, sweetie,” the driver prodded from her seat, as she had every day since that first one when he’d slipped and cracked his noggin real good. Boy, the tears this one had cried then! Now, each and every day he stepped off her bus, he froze at the bottom like a statue until being urged on with gentle words. “Mama’s waiting.”

Hot chocolate
. Simon liked hot chocolate. He shuffle stepped up the damp walkway and onto the porch. At the top step the inner door opened. “Hello, honey!”

Simon smiled giddily as the storm door swung out. “Honey is sweet!”

“Just like my Simon,” Jean Lynch said. She pulled her son into a sidearm hug as she waved at the driver and led him inside. “Daddy had to work a little late tonight, so he won’t be home for a wh—” She saw the magazine under his arm. “What’s this?”

Simon held it out with both hands. “It has puzzles.”

“That’s right,” Jean Lynch said. “Dr. Ohlmeyer said he was going to give you something with puzzles in it.” When she said ‘puzzles’ she playfully pinched his nose. “That’s wonderful. Tell you what: you take that into the living room and look at the puzzles. I put your hot chocolate on the table next to Daddy’s chair.”

“I can sit in Daddy’s chair,” Simon said as a statement of fact. There was almost emotion in his voice, his mother thought. But then why not? Others might not be able to recognize it as well as she, but her son revered his father. Maybe in his own way, but equal to what other sons might feel.

“You’re right, honey.”
Oops
.

“Honey is sweet!” Simon responded.

Jean Lynch smiled. “And so is my Simon. Now go drink your hot chocolate and look at your magazine. I’ll be in the kitchen. Go on.” She sent him on his way with a gentle touch on his back.

Simon walked into the big living room that was at the front of the house and went directly to his father’s chair, a brown upholstered rocker with green towels draping the arms and the headrest. When he sat down, his head twisted until his nose was against the top towel. His nostrils flared and his face lightened. It smelled of his daddy.

His body began to rock easily. His daddy’s chair followed the motion in a delayed repetition.

He smelled something else. The hot chocolate, in his favorite blue mug, barely steamed where it sat. Simon laid the magazine on his lap and took the cup two handed and put it to his lips. He drank with a loud slurping sound in beats of three—
sssooooooop… sssooooooop… sssooooooop
—then pulled the cup away and sighed with satisfaction, “Aaaaaahhhh.” Just the way his daddy did.

He set the cup back on the coaster on the lamp table and cast his eyes to
The Tinkery
. They danced over the cover, unwilling to remain still. There were too many colors, and they bled together so that one color was not itself anymore, and then it was another color. In his mind’s eye, Simon saw pictures as unbalanced, imprecise, and unsettling. A picture of a chair was not like looking at a real chair. The world reduced to two dimensions disturbed him.

Simon flipped quickly past the cover and to the pages of words and letters and numbers. He liked words and letters and numbers. Sometimes they were puzzles, and sometimes they were just words and letters and numbers. When they were just words and letters and numbers he could look at all of them and hear what they were saying. That’s what he did with all the books in the basement—

—
basement
. That meant something. Simon stopped and pulled out his cards. He found the one with
STORM
written on top.
IF A LOUD NOYZ SKAIRS YOU AND IT GTS LOUDR AND YU KANT FIND MOMMY AND DADDY THN GO TO TH BASMNT

Simon cast his eyes upward and listened. After a few seconds he put his cards away and looked back to the words and letters and numbers, their connection to the basement just a thought flitted away. He moved through the pages, sweeping them from right to left to reveal the next, capturing what was meaningful to him in furtive glances.

Through the words and letters and numbers, page after page, information filtered into his brain, filling the delicate and damaged neural matrix that guided Simon Lynch through every moment of his existence, referencing itself without conscious effort, indexing, cross indexing, adding to the library of knowledge that had been absorbed from reading, from hearing. Squirreling it away like nuts for a time when it might be needed, though it never was…externally.

Internally it was a very different story, with morsels of information competing with one another in a test for prominence and validation. This occurred constantly, automatically, in streams of words and letters and numbers that occupied Simon Lynch every waking moment, rolling like a waterfall of knowledge behind his eyes as his day marched on. It was less like thinking than processing. Thinking implied choice. Simon had never known a choice in the use of his mind. It functioned beyond the primal instructions for involuntary necessities as a computer. When he woke he was processing. When he ate he was processing. When he did puzzles he was processing. When his father sang to him he was processing.

When Simon Lynch slept he dreamed of words and letters and numbers.

He had no knowledge that this was happening, and as he flipped through
The Tinkery
it went on, and on, and on, and continued even when he happened upon the first puzzle in the magazine. It covered an entire page. Nothing marked it overtly as a puzzle, but Simon knew that it was.

1839956021PFYRTKLYTE3668493216KLRMAYBPKW9865749102

66829365403685943638405759376438505047638495058476

63840473538305645859857659575940362273021854058740

42083643849036354378302026436498362037463836538392

76354763826328393643839293764547392032764639829274

73937639823028373902092735456393203846498393746476

62623836484945905056985474563838936026736430003263

62534530326624222936363738881212121430578465489487

72453637849849464784904764980622025200272532439850

73535464747456465393023746404630640354395463840563

89675937915777777742525263435079787978797907853243

62432738654849463484904764662903764654945649352348

17292364375498604024845654079059654976985673502016

73879499432943964398649864949494941964941628394028

83643840463437840458352653984504573452749457367439

32638045735373038376438490457476498505674675950739

78353903026254389450476365485490476476594647459437

73984037354785904764845057647595639027850837695047

98464846498690678403847590846498450947494904849849

63438659686904639437659445223850565595393649363939

31322056290639739346393528243334996797676343982363

78365383543836538346438464846498352806097247507234

26398404363740508325743904693047494374904652849584

78363490365394363937639362920272574394723453749438

38353474950670574653783403724527629364895946485946

90221452627843940450576365484596369362920162539407

45137304329687697643964398418419688807607640642306

98743848754378478543787643986901260602106010606644

87987587549875870554398404634543784940474354749393

73638430474548404578465398393638494646749353294905

ATHDKTENVODGDLFOEGFDMFOFGDKDSPQSCBVVCJFDHDSGDSJYYQ

Simon studied the puzzle for several seconds, noting in that time that there were 1450 numbers in the body of the puzzle, and a mix of 50 numbers/letters at the beginning and 50 letters at the end. These were not part of the numbers, he saw. They told what to do with the numbers, how to split them, where to visualize breaks, the order in which they should be processed, and—he blinked quickly three times as the solution came to him—that there were three numbers of equal length—keys—that he needed to know to process the parts into a final product.

Simon had those keys, a total of 4350 digits, in four blinks.

He used the first key to process the parts of the original number. This yielded 700,833 groups of three digit numbers, with one nonsense digit after the 302,412th group. His brain discarded this digit.

The second key he used to extract a three digit number from the third— 103 —and processed the second key again with the 50 letter group at the end of the puzzle. This yielded yet another number, which told him how to determine which of the three-number groups to discard.

700,730 of them were gone six blinks later.

Simon was left with 103 three-number groups. He went back to the third key and processed it with the 50 letter group. This told him how to order the 103 number groups.

He saw them in order after four blinks.

There were 103 groups of three numbers left. Simon twisted his wrist and looked briefly at his watch. The time did not concern him.

Simon knew what to do next. He looked back to the 50 number/letter mix at the beginning of the puzzle. There was a shift key in this.

He saw the 103 groups in order, processed them, 087 first, shifted, and on.

The 103 groups yielded letters and numbers in a logical order.

Simon looked at the puzzle’s body again. He saw a string of 103 letters and numbers.

IFYOUSOLVETHISPUZZLECALL18005551398ANDTELLTHE

OPERATORTHATYOUHAVESOLVEDPUZZLE99

YOUWILLTHENBEISSUEDAPRIZE.

The string needed spaces. He saw them, and read ‘IF YOU SOLVE THIS PUZZLE CALL 18005551398 AND TELL THE OPERATOR THAT YOU HAVE SOLVED PUZZLE 99 YOU WILL THEN BE ISSUED A PRIZE’.

It had taken Simon twenty seconds to yield what he saw as an instruction not unlike those written on his cards. He stood and walked in short steps to the telephone in the far corner of the living room. His mommy had shown him how to dial 911 if something very wrong happened. (Simon understood
wrong
; he did not understand
bad
) He knew how to dial his daddy’s work if something was wrong. He was supposed to push the buttons.

That was
calling
someone.

He was supposed to call someone. He lifted the phone and held it next to his face like his mommy had shown him. It was cold plastic and it hummed in his ear. It was supposed to do that.

Simon knew what to do next. He used a very straight finger and pressed the numbers the puzzle told him to press.

He was calling someone.

*  *  *

Leo Pedanski was mid bite into the warm bearclaw when the buzzing of the phone brought his eyes up from his linguistics text in a start. Through his thick glasses he looked at the phone. The light above line 2 was flashing. Recording machines to his right began to hum.

The thirty year old let the sugary pastry hang in his mouth as he slid his activity log close. It was where he was to record any happenings during his thrice-weekly shift at the ‘Puzzle Center’. He looked briefly down at the near blank form. He’d written nothing there in six months.

“Shee-it,” he said past the bearclaw, then set the tasty morsel aside as line 2 buzzed a second time. Line 2 was the outside line. He could recall distinctly the last time it had showed signs of life. The previous year, just before Halloween, when some Jethro from COMSEC-T had had his wimpy subroutine busted clean. Pedanski had joyously passed the news on to the wannabe that he was no Z-man, and Pedanski should know; he
was
a Z-man.

He grabbed a pencil and noted the time quickly on his log, picked up the receiver, and, certain that all the gear was up and running, pressed the button next to line 2 in expectation that he was going to be able to ruin another T-boy’s day. “Hi!” he said excitedly, just as he and his fellow Z-men had practiced. “You’ve reached the Puzzle Center.” At this point Pedanski wanted to laugh.
If only they knew how close that was to the truth…
“You have solved one of our hardest puzzles, and having done so you will be awarded a
two-year!
subscription to the magazine of your choice. I’ll need your name and address, phone number, and the number of the puzzle you’ve solved.” Pedanski stared at the trace gear to his front in silence. The silence persisted. “Hello?”

Stiff paper rustling, then, “I can’t tell strangers my name.”

What the hell…
“Uhhh.”

“You’re a stranger.”

Was this a kid? Pedanski wondered. It spoke like one, but in an older voice. “Uh, this is the Puzzle Center. Where did you get this number?”

“I solved puzzle ninety-nine.”

Pedanski snatched the glasses from his face, his gray eyes bugging.
WHAT!?
He steadied himself as best he could and swallowed before speaking. “Again, what puzzle?”

“Puzzle ninety-nine.”

No. It could not be. This had to be a razz. It had to…

But it couldn’t be. It was line 2, and if anyone in Z was pulling this as a stunt, the boss would have their ass in a federal pen before they could spit.

It had to be a joke, and it could not be at the same time.

“Who is this?” Pedanski asked seriously.

“You’re a stranger.”

“Listen, I need—” Click. Dial tone. “Hello…dammit!” he swore as he slammed the phone into its cradle. With the hand that held it he covered his mouth. It, like the one holding the pencil, was trembling.
Oh, man, this can not be happening. It is im-possible.

But something had definitely happened. Something terrible. He did not know exactly what, yet, but one thing was quite clear: a single phone call had just cost him and his comrades five years of work and Uncle Sam ten billion dollars.

Chicken Little would have been proud.