The IRIS Algorithm, page 10
“This is fulgurite,” Simone said. “Petrified lightning.” She held up a bent tubular object that looked like it was made of gray glass. She looked through the tube and seemed disappointed, as if she didn’t see what she was looking for. “This clearing is full of it: God’s reminder of the agreement—our covenant, so to speak.”
Logan wanted to be sympathetic. He wanted to be kind and caring and understanding like a husband should be. But he burned with the wasted years, the wasted prayers, the wasted pleas and broken vodka bottles late in the night. All that wasted effort led up to this wasted moment, when he finally had to admit to himself, if to no one else, that Simone was crazy as hell.
Logan controlled his breathing as his muscles coiled in defense. He fought to batten down the watertight doors in his mind, the compartments of visceral years held in check, but the rivets were popping. Suddenly, he knew he would lose. Petulance overtook the better part of valor. His gentle hand on Simone’s shoulder turned to a steal grip, balling her shirt up at the nap of the neck. His hand locked like a vice. He shoved her down hard, pressing her face in the fallen leaves, damp with dirt and rotting things. He spoke through clenched teeth.
“You crazy bitch!”
Simone gasped and struggled helplessly against his strong forearm across her back.
“Is this some kind of fucking joke? You show up after ten years with a cock and bull story about a son? A kidnapping? Secret back door to NSA?”
She spit out a mouthful of rotten leaves. “Logan, please! You are hurting me.”
“Good! I want to hurt you. I want to beat the shit out of you! I want to slap some sanity into you for at least a few minutes so you can tell me the fucking truth!”
That he wanted to hurt her scared him senseless, but he couldn’t let go. It was the ragged thing he had become in the darkness, in the absence of her light. “We don’t have a son! There’s been no kidnapping! There is no IRIS algorithm!”
Simone didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She didn’t quit fighting to be freed from the putrefying earth.
“Stop it, you dumbass! Logan, get off of me.”
Logan saw a hand clenched tight on Simone’s shirt. He saw her struggling. Oh, my God. What am I doing? Shaking, he released her and sat back on his knees. How did he let this happen? This place. This day. It was all wrong.
Simone pushed herself slowly to her knees and raked the leaves and debris off the side of her face. He wanted to say he was sorry, but there was just too much of him that wasn’t. When it came to Simone, he never could think clearly. Her eyes wide and sparkling with adrenaline, Simone struggled to control her breathing. Her shoulders shook with a final deep breath before she spoke. “Logan, I know how this must seem.”
He started to speak, but she raised her hand. “Wait, let me finish. I’ve had thirty years to think about this, to struggle with it, to try to understand what really happened here.” She looked at the big tree and sighed. “If I were just crazy, it would be a relief.”
In the smoldering haze of his anger, Logan reminded himself that he was a used thing, a dirty tool, pitted and blemished, greasy with the unspeakable work of others. Simone was complex, unique, so troubled. There was no way to get past this without playing along. He owed her that much. His gut told him Samuel was his son and the kidnapping was real. Hell, maybe all of it was true.
“It’s been a long day, Simone. It’s been a long ten years. I don’t know how to help you. I don’t even know if I can help you, and that hurts most of all.” He forced the knot in his throat back down, fearful of the malignant memories waiting to float to the surface. “Simone, you have to help me understand what’s going on here.”
Simone stood up without brushing off. She put out her hand and he took it. She pulled him to his feet. It was awkward considering what had just happened.
“Samuel and I were up there, in the tree house.” She pointed to the massive nook in the center of the old live oak, where only a few weathered boards remained. “It was my eighth birthday. We were defending the castle that day. My little brother was six years old.”
“The castle? Why was Samuel here?”
“Not my son,” she sounded anxious for him to catch up. “My brother, Samuel.”
“Okay. And the castle?”
“Didn’t you ever have a tree house, Logan? A fort in the woods? A place where you could be anything but what you are?”
He considered what it would be like to be anything but what he was. “Nothing as grand as a castle. Certainly nothing that survived for thirty years.”
“No one ever accused Lester Dancing of doing anything halfway. Half-cocked, maybe. All treated lumber, screws, not nails, shingled roof, upper deck with rails. He spent as much time up there as we did. At least, you know, before….”
Simone moved closer to the tree and put her smooth, white hand on the rough bark. It seemed like he should, too, so he did. Feeling the immovable mass, deep rutted under his hands, brought home just how enormous the ancient tree really was.
“It could be anything,” she continued. “Samuel preferred the spaceship. He wanted to soar through the galaxy, landing on stars and planets, talking to all manner of strange beings.” Simone smiled in the saddest way. “I told him the stars would burn his feet. He did not care. Said he would wear the boots Daddy gave him for Christmas.” Simone stopped smiling. The immeasurable pain, undiluted even after all the years, glistened in her inscrutable blue and gold eyes.
“Always practical. Even at eight,” he said. “I mean, no one can stand on a star.”
“Yeah, an eight-year-old realist. Life of the party.” Simone’s face turned serious and hard. “But the numbers do not lie.” She patted the tree with reverence.
He waited to see if she would go on. An owl hooted somewhere in the woods, sad and lost, full of regret.
“I always preferred the castle,” Simone finally said. “We defended it from marauding bandits and grumpy dragons. When things got too bad, we’d raise a righteous army and go forth with swords made from yardsticks and duct tape to vanquish evil in the name of the Kingdom of the Great Oak.” She smirked and glanced at Logan. “Stupid, I know.”
He leaned back, looking up into the mighty tree. “No. It sounds like what normal kids do. No harm in that.” Even with half of it torn away, the oak tree was the biggest one he’d ever seen.
“I was never normal.” Simone picked her way around the base of the tree. “The thing with numbers started from my earliest memories. I am not sure how much I actually remember or which parts were stories told repeatedly about my special gift. Special. What a farce. By first grade I was regarded as a mathematical prodigy, which is just another label for freak.”
He watched her brood over the painful memories, sorting them, categorizing, and cataloging them. If the thoughts were unhappy, they certainly were not debilitating.
“The afternoon thunderstorm came early that day,” Simone spoke dispassionately. “It was lunchtime, and I’d made Samuel’s favorite picnic lunch: peanut butter and cheese nip sandwiches with bottles of Coke from my father’s antique, soda machine in his shop. You remember the kind you had to open a narrow glass door and pull a bottle out by the neck. Daddy kept a Mason jar with dimes in it next to the machine.” Simone cleared her throat. “Like most of my father’s ventures, it lost money.”
He nodded, not knowing what to say. It was strange to hear Simone talk about her father. A person he’d assumed was long dead. Of course, he was assumed long dead by Simone’s colleagues.
As the memory replayed in dreadful detail, Simone’s brow knitted into a tight weave. “When the sky went black, the air suddenly got cold. So cold and unfriendly. We could smell the rain about to burst the clouds. Samuel wanted to run for the house. It was 457 steps to the house—the 88th prime number, by the way. Probably only 397 steps now that my legs are longer.”
“A prime number, also?”
“Yeah. The 78th prime.”
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, looked around at the terrain, up at the big oak, down the winding deer path they had walked. He tried to imagine the scene thirty years ago. Two scared children, alone in the woods. “You decided not to make a run for it?”
“I did the math. The statistical probability of being struck by lightning in one tree—not the tallest tree mind you—versus making your way through 457 steps of ninety-foot-tall, long-leaf pines. It had not lightened yet.” Simone’s right eye twitched, her living soul provoked to madness by her memories. “Samuel begged me to take him home. I held him and patted his back, like Mom did when we were sick. I told him it would be all right. I told him the numbers do not lie. I held my brother close, like a little mommy, while God Almighty struck us with lightning.”
Simone shook her head. “The numbers do not lie.” Apparently, that day they did.
CHAPTER 24
As we picked our way back down the deer path toward the car, I could not see the sun. It too was sinking, looking for a place to hide, ready for this day to mercifully end. It took more than thirty minutes to explain to Logan how I killed my little brother. Jason was probably halfway to the airport.
Logan listened patiently as I painstakingly described what happened in this place thirty years ago. How that first bolt of lightning, the one you always assume will hit somewhere else, struck the big tree with Samuel and me in it. I was a little vague on how, but at the exact moment the lightning struck, I became aware of the true nature of numbers. Logan already thought I was a nut case. Too much information about my conversations and covenants with the Almighty might irrevocably confirm his hypothesis.
The hideous gift that God imposed on me at birth and the consummation of that gift when I was yet a child, were secrets I held delicately and cautiously near my heart. Who would believe God made a compact with an eight-year-old and violently sealed it with a bolt of His infinite love?
To say I explained these facts to Logan was more than an exaggeration. It is impossible to explain something you do not understand. I hoped telling Logan, as best I could, would inspire him to trust me, not try to choke me to death.
“So, let me get this straight,” Logan held back a springy branch blocking the path. “You’re saying there are no numbers except prime numbers. These numbers have shapes, and that explains why you can do all these insanely complex mathematical calculations? Oh, and God told you this.”
“You never slept with your eyes open before. I actually thought you were paying attention back there.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to reduce this down to a concept a mere mortal can understand.”
“Is that a joke about God?” I said. “I am not saying I mind, but you should be careful. His sense of humor is a little suspect at times.”
Logan sighed so long I thought he was going to pass out. I have that effect on people. We plowed through the woods.
“Okay. Yes. I guess that’s basically correct,” I attempted to repair his man-patience. A woman can lose her patience and recover five times every twenty minutes. Men, on the other hand, take an insufferably long time to finally, and thankfully, lose their patience. Problem is, when it is gone it is gone. If they recover at all, it will likely be years later. We did not have that kind of time.
“It kills you to admit I’m right doesn’t it,” Logan smirked.
“Yes, especially, when you aren’t.” The statement was nothing more than factual. “All numbers greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes. So, ten is not really a number. It is just a seven and a three combined together. Not a new shape, just two shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces.”
“Isn’t that a new shape?”
“Not to me. If I drew a triangle with a circle inside it, you probably would not look at it and say, ‘Hey, that is a new shape I have never seen.’ You would probably think it looked like two rudimentary shapes you were familiar with and combined. Imagine a three dimensional pyramid with a ball inside, then—”
Logan butted in, “I get it already. I would easily recognize the new combined… thing as simply two common shapes merged together. If I recall from the deep recesses of my brain where I tossed high school algebra, a prime number is only divisible by itself and by one. And there are an infinite number of them because, I don’t know, numbers go on forever? Back there you said you knew all the shapes of numbers. Are you saying you’ve memorized an infinite number of shapes?”
I was officially on shaky ground. Apparently, Logan had been listening.
God, if he figures this out on his own, then I am not breaking the agreement. Right? And I am still waiting on an answer about my proposed renegotiation of the deal. The whole point of coming here, to the first, last, and only place where you bothered to talk to me, was to hear what you thought about that.
“Euclid’s Theorem says there is an infinite supply of prime numbers,” I said. “That has been the standard for about twenty-three centuries, but, keep in mind, when people say they are talking about numbers, they are usually talking about the symbols that someone invented to represent numbers. What they mean is the discreet set of objects equivalent to the number that symbol represents, not the number itself. Think about it. What is an actual number?”
“So, now, you’re saying there aren’t an infinite number of primes?” Logan’s face glowed with frustration.
Caution, Simone. Approach with caution.
“There are an infinite number of numerical symbols, like Euclid said.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He looked so handsome, so noble, standing there, holding another whippy branch back for me. He was here, despite his reservations, despite my confusing and odd inexcusable behavior, despite my ignoble abandonment of our marriage. I could not love him any more if my life depended on it, which as it so happens, it did.
“No. There are not an infinite number of shapes of primes.” I looked beyond the gently waving pine tops, intermingled with God’s wild hardwood and scuppernong vines, to where the blue sky lay. I waited for lightning to strike me dead. Instead, Logan let go of the branch.
It smacked me across the midsection.
CHAPTER 25
A nervous glance at his slender wrist confirmed for Jason it had been more than thirty minutes since Simone and Logan disappeared into the woods. In fact, his fine Swiss timepiece told him it had been exactly forty-three minutes and counting. Simone said to leave if they weren’t back in thirty minutes. That’s exactly what he should have done. He seriously considered leaving after twenty minutes but decided to stick it out. This whole thing was out of control. Nobody said anything about kidnapping.
Going in, Jason knew it was high stakes industrial espionage. A lot of money was on the table, some intellectual property, maybe a few trade secrets here and there. Hell, technology companies did that all the time. Piracy in the technology world was a high art and noble tradition.
It all went wrong when they started pushing him. They just wouldn’t be patient and let him work out the engineering on his own time schedule. You would think they knew this shit took time. If he hadn’t taken the upfront money, he could have told them to cool their jets. Chillax. Better yet, piss off. I quit. But they paid him cash—a lot of it—and he’d spent it all.
This fiasco was Martin’s fault. Sure, Jason used some bad judgment, made some poor choices, but he was tired of being jerked around. Ultimately, it was that lofty, cheap bastard’s fault. Jason’s big promotion out of engineering was supposed to be just that—a big promotion. Lots more money. However, the complex commission structure and a few major deals that didn’t come through, left him with less money than his old job and a big hole in his personal budget. Some promotion.
A fortuitous encounter with Martin during the company’s annual this-is-not-a-Christmas party, gave Jason the opportunity to share directly his screw-over to his boss’s boss. Martin was doing his man-of-the-people shtick, mixing and mingling, spreading the organic fertilizer of seasonal charisma when he pulled Jason aside to see how things were going with his new position. At the time, Jason thought he’d arrived, the CEO singling him out.
Stafford had the gift of getting people to spill their guts and feel good about it. After three drinks, Jason spilled his, going back to his earliest memories since birth. Eight months later, he could still hear himself babbling like a kid with Santa Claus, an infuriating and embarrassing memory.
For some unimaginable reason, he divulged that things were tight financially, and he would do whatever it took to move up the ladder. He needed some real coin. Stafford slapped him on the back of his charcoal Valentino suit purchased on credit and offered up one of his stock-in-trade platitudes.
“No matter how bad it seems, it’s never as bad as it seems.” Then the bastard walked away to rain his benevolence on another unsuspecting clown. No chance for a raise. No advance on commission. No nothing.
A week later, Jason got a call from the other bozos that now wouldn’t stay off his back. He was still seething and trying to find a little more room on one of his several maxed out credit cards. He thought their offer divine intervention. Yes, this was definitely Stafford’s fault.
At first, Jason thought losing his job at VTI was the worst that could come of his lucrative side job. But when Simone got the phone call about Samuel’s abduction, he envisioned a jail cell. After the last call with those psychos and meeting this other psycho, Logan Ranes—who was supposed to be dead—he realized that losing his life had moved up on the list.
How did this go so wrong so quickly?
Jason reached for the car keys when, unfortunately, he heard voices. Soon, Simone and Logan would walk out of the dark woods. His brain said run. His heart pounded. His nostrils flared. An acrid smell hovered around him.
Then, a gift from heaven. He had an idea.
