This is Part 4 of “Root Two,” a serialized novella told mostly from the perspective of a mean inner voice which most of us will find at least partly familiar.
If you you need to catch up or refresh, find:
[Est. reading time: 9 minutes]
The office where the three of us worked was above a Two Michelin Star restaurant that none of us had eaten at. As I got out of the Uber outside the building, I stopped and stared at the entrance I had never used, and considered getting a table.
Did I WANT to eat there? Not really. I just didn't want to round the corner and use the OTHER entrance. The one with the elevator, and the ride up to the fourth floor, and the eight steps to suite 409. And the admission of an existentially embarrassing fuck-up on the other side of the door.
I heaved and slumped and trudged on over.
"Hey check it out," Hemmy said as I walked in, "I think Bert's got something."
In an instant, my dread and humiliation evaporated under the potential light of new information.
Bert shook his head.
"What?" I asked. "What did you find?"
"It turns out," Hemmy said, "If you add all the numbers together, you get 216, which is, get this, the area code for Cleveland, Ohio."
Bert's frown deepened as I turned to Hemmy. "So what?"
"So...that's something," Hemmy said.
I collapsed into a chair. "You bastard."
"What?" he asked, pure as the driven snow.
Bert turned to me. "Can I see that video?"
"THERE IS NO VIDEO," I declared to the universe.
"What do you mean," Bert said.
"I mean I deleted it. I think. I must have. Because it's gone. Gee oh en GONE." I buried my face in my hands.
"It's fine -- we have all the numbers, what do we need the video for?" Hemmy stuck his hands behind his head in a show of nonchalance.
"Because all we have is NUMBERS," I said. "I thought maybe I missed something. Some...I don't know. Anything. It was a kind of important piece of evidence. It's like the only reason Bao Lee called us into his personal office."
"You're being dramatic."
"I am NOT being dramatic. YOU'RE not taking this seriously. We're getting PAID for this! I'm gonna look like an IDIOT."
"Well then maybe we should cancel the contract," Hemmy suggested.
"Huh?"
"No evidence, no crime, no mystery. Like you said, all gone! Sucks, but oh well! We've got other clients. It's not like we're poor."
"Crime?" Bert chimed.
I waved him off. "No, nobody broke any laws. Hemmy...come on."
"Fine, what. What else do you want me to do?"
"Just...help Bert," I said. "I don't know. I'm gonna go hassle some more people."
There ended up not being too many more people to hassle. I knew how the votive code got generated, how it got run, everything. Or well enough, anyway. The problem remained: it shouldn't have happened. Might as well have been a burning bush in a mountain.
Bert would keep himself busy torturing a string of numbers that might as well have been random, and Hemmy was...unhelpful. Absent any new developments, he'd probably filibuster within a few days. Or hours.
Regardless of whether he thought I was crazy, Bert would keep going as long as we were getting paid. But I doubted that would last long, either, if we went too long without anything to show for our work. And how long did Bao think this was going to take? There certainly wasn't anything in the contract.
In an effort to do SOMETHING, I wandered through the maze of bureaucracy at CrossWorlds again until I found someone who could give me access to the entire underlying code structure of the scene.
Once I had it open in front of me, it was very easy to see how it all operated. The whole program was a veritable Russian nesting doll of subroutines. All I had to do was follow the outline, down to the smallest detail.
Those votives were some of the smallest details. But then I found something even smaller -- the flicker.
Or, I should say, the single package of code that had been duplicated three dozen times throughout the virtual restaurant. Inside that package was an itty bitty little subroutine that dictated the behavior of the flame.
Which was programmed to flicker.
I expanded the lines of code that controlled the flicker itself.
There it was. A random number generator. But no random number generator is truly random, because each of them needs some kind of input at predetermined intervals to then spit out something that SEEMS random.
SOME of these so-called random number generators use irrational numbers to hide their dirty secret. Irrational numbers like the square root of two, for instance.
My heart throbbed with the impending potential of massive anti-climax as I looked more closely at the exact line of code that randomized the flicker.
I had to stare for a long time before I was completely convinced.
But it was unmistakable.
This wasn't the answer.
"No, there's no way," Bert confirmed.
"Like I said," I continued to break it down to Hemmy, who should have known better, but was letting the temptation to solve the mystery get the better of him. "Those candle flames are programmed to be MOTIONLESS most of the time. And when they do flicker, it's only supposed to last a split second."
"And there's nothing in there to indicate a binary conversion," Bert said.
Hemmy took turns staring at each of us. Then he sighed. "OK."
I apologized to both of them, I'm not sure why, and then I left for the day.
But then at home, I messaged Bert to send me everything he'd been working on. I knew he'd send it, and I knew it would come with a disclaimer that he didn't believe anything he had found represented meaningful progress.
Three minutes later, I had a pile of documents in my inbox, with a message floating on top: "Don't stay up all night."
I'll be damned. I mean I was expecting some kind of disclaimer, but.... I guess the guy had a personality after all. Made me feel a little gushy, if I'm being honest.
Not that I heeded him. By three o'clock in the morning, I had followed Bert's work through something like seventy different failed proofs before I felt like crawling underneath my table to cry.
What bothered me wasn't the sheer magnitude of Bert's work, or the way he so thoroughly documented all of it, or that even if I spent a whole night for every one of his hours of work, I could never keep up with him.
It was something else. And rather than crawling under my table, where I might accidentally find out what it was, I got drunk.
This had become a very expensive pastime in recent years. As I wandered around my apartment, picking things up and putting them back down again, I reflected on the way good old fashioned alcohol was going the way of cigarettes of yore. Never made outright illegal, but legislated and taxed to practical inaccessibility.
Of course there were other ways of getting wasted, but wasting money too was half the fun. I mean hey, BAO LEE was paying us FIVE A DAY to do NOTHING!
I giggled at myself until I caught my reflection in a closet door.
I looked like a buggered maniac. I stuck my tongue out at her.
I could go back and look at the motion-sensor logs in my apartment in order to tell you the approximate time I finally passed out on the floor.
But I'm not going to do that.
I can, however, tell you that a phonecall woke me up at 11am.
I grunted something that must have convinced the phone to answer, because suddenly I was hearing Hemmy's voice.
"Morning, Cyn. Up late?"
"No," I moaned.
"Well, we've got a few new potentials, and I don't know how much more attention we can afford to give this...other thing."
Half-articulated resentments flopped through my hungover brain, but all I said was, "Ssfine."
"So we're gonna take these new clients. Plus there’s the preFORMA contract."
"Mmhmm."
"And the Bao thing...?"
I took a deep breath. "Forget it. I'll handle it."
"You'll handle it."
"I'll handle it!"
There was a beat of silence, but he didn't hang up.
"Uh. You okay?"
"mfine," I mumbled, and hung up.
I was not fine.
Sometimes the trivialities of life seem to be perfectly calibrated for maximum torture. I'm sure I could dissect the reasons behind the personal deterioration that this silly problem seemed to catalyze. But self-reflection was a well-worn road to self-hatred, so I wasn't strongly incentivized.
Instead, I contemplated finding a less expensive way to get hammered again.
And then, mercifully, it occurred to me that this might be how addiction worked, and formed a personal agreement to at least wait until it got dark again before resuming the substance abuse.
What didn't occur to me is that getting back to work was just one more way to hide.
Before I bothered to shower, or eat, I spent five hours doing new client work from home. Hemmy was a badly calibrated machine. I had a running counter in my head that was always trying to gauge how much his sheer prolificacy actually compensated for his tremendous carelessness. Sometimes it seemed like he purposefully threw a bunch of parts into a big pile and then left me to build the thing.
Or maybe my hangover was making me bitter. I took a break.
Anyway I INTENDED to take a break, but a ping from Bao came the moment I leaned back.
"Heard you talked to some of my people. Any progress?"
I rubbed my eyes. How in the HELL did a guy like Bao Lee find time to care about something like this?
Throwing in for the mystery is as good a rich man's hobby as any other, I suppose.
But the fact that he was still paying me — us — didn't change the unfortunate reality that I had stalled out. Reviewing Bert's work was a masochistic waste of time, and I had basically no other leads to go off of.
In fact, it was a good bet if I reported my findings of yesterday to Bao, he would declare it a dead end himself, and wash his hands of the whole thing.
IN FACT, if I chose NOT to report those findings, it could be considered a breach of contract.
I drafted an email and sent it off.
I hadn't even finished staggering toward my kitchette in search of desperately needed sustenance before my screen pinged again. In a magnificent display of boundary-setting, I ignored it until I had eaten a protein bar and drunk about a half a gallon of peach-flavored water.
Then I looked to see the message. Bao had replied immediately:
"Keep crackin!"
Maybe he was crazier than everyone.
I needed to sit back down for a minute, and close my eyes.
A thought wandered in.
Some people keep lo-res recordings of all their VR encounters for at least a few days. Storage is cheap, so why not. You never know when it would be really useful to have proof of an online exchange in some degree of detail. The very possibility of those recordings has driven VR abuses down drastically over time.
Maybe KrisLove is one of those people. Was the thought.
That had wandered in.
"Hang on," I said out loud to no one.
I laid down. It seemed like the right repose for the kind of thinking I needed to do.
Immediately, I fell asleep.
Can you guess who I dreamed of?
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