The Lonely Whelk (6 page)

Kaia raised her hand. “Barely,” she said.
Only two other students raised their hands.

“
Why is cognitive
mathematics so hard?” John asked the group.

Stewart raised his hand. “Because it’s like
trying to do brain surgery on yourself.”

“
Excellent analogy!” John
gave an excited hop. “It’s just like brain surgery!” He looked over
at Kaia. “Kaia, why do you think it’s so hard?”

She took a deep breath, as formulas from her
last cognitive mathematics class began to flood into her brain. “I
don’t think it is hard as much as it is weird. You have to take the
way a person thinks and translate it into a series of numbers, and
put them into prediction formulas. If you get it right, and apply
the math to yourself, it’s almost like looking into the mirror and
seeing the future you. It’s weird...” Kaia shrugged, and then
looked around the class, hoping someone would jump in and help. “I
think it’s so hard to learn because there is something in our brain
that won’t let us. It works just fine without us knowing what and
how we’re going to think next.”

John erased the bridge on his teaching tab
and began to scribble numbers and formulas. “What if you used
Abramson’s formula for psychological prediction?”

Kaia watched as the massive, never-ending
formula appeared on the wall.

“…
and combined it with the
Peach Normative Theory of Spatial Sequencing…”

A few of the students began to scribble
rapidly in their notebooks. Boris groaned loudly and Kaia stared at
the wall, her jaw hanging open.

“…
and then added Falmouth’s
Coefficient… I hope you like math… and ended with Anna’s Function
of Round—”

Kaia’s brain seemed to vibrate as she
absorbed all the numbers and variables and symbols, fitting them
together in her mind like a confusing and frustrating puzzle.

“
That can’t be real!” she
exclaimed. “If a Door like that existed, it wouldn’t just take you
to three places, it would take you to... to... a million! Billion!
As many Doors as existed in the universe! And it would be a traffic
control nightmare because all other Doors would lead back to
it!”

John looked up from his teacher’s tab. A
smile slowly blossomed over his face as he listened to Kaia
stutter.

“
You, my lovely intern,” he
said, “are a genius.”

He walked over to her desk and reached out
his hand. She shook it in a daze, her mind still analyzing and
restructuring the numbers and formulas in front of her, thinking
that she must have made a mistake.

“
Not as much of a genius as
me, of course,” John added, as he walked back the front of the
room, “because I figured it out first.”

All at once, a flurry of murmurs arose from
the students in the room.

“
Is this
possible...?”

“
How was this discovered?
What… what are the consequences?”

“
Does the government
know?”

“
We are the
government.”

“
This is ridiculous!” Boris
roared over the noise. “How can you expect us to believe that this
actually exists?”

“
Look at the math!” Kaia
jumped out of her seat and strode to the front of the room. She
began to pound her finger against the wall. “It’s right there in
front of you! It would be easy to build with this formula... well,
not easy, but it’s certainly plausible!”

“
I want proof!” Boris
demanded. “None of us can sit here and do that math in our heads!
Do the problem – prove it! Or I’ll walk out and tell the whole
world.”

“
First of all,” John said
raising his hands. The class quieted and Kaia scooted back to her
seat. “You wouldn’t get that far. Our new head of security is quite
good. He found all my hidden keys. Every single one. Secondly, no
one would believe you. The average citizen of Pomegranate City
hasn’t even heard of cognitive mathematics and they would think you
were just trying to cause trouble. Which, obviously, you were. And
thirdly, if you did that, you would be arrested and stuck in jail
for the rest of your life on charges of treason. I suggest you just
sit back and learn, and try to be a little less
stubborn.”

Boris slouched down in his seat. “Of course,
Mr. John. My apologies.” Kaia noticed that he was gritting his
teeth and snapping a rubber band against his wrist. She wished she
understood non-verbal communication better.

John turned to the rest of the class. “I
think it’s almost time... for you to have lunch! Go eat. Except
Kaia. You come with me. Someone have a pretzel for me! Now go!”

The rest of the class cheered and packed up
their things, while Kaia rapidly scribbled the formula in her
notebook so she could double check later to make sure she had
memorized it correctly. This was turning into a very interesting
day.

Kaia stood, gazing at John’s office for the
first time.

It was a massive room with five walls; the
desk squatted in the center like a giant turtle. In fact, it was a
giant turtle with four elephants standing on its shell. A giant
disk lay across the backs of the elephants – this disk seemed to be
the surface of the desk.

The walls were painted a soft green, and the
floor was tile. An entire tree appeared to grow out of one wall and
beautiful paintings hung everywhere, including the ceiling. One was
a school of freshwater whales chasing after a freshwater,
underwater bird; another was a winter snow on a small cabin in the
woods; a third was of three small girls playing in a pool; the
fourth was black with green squares which had a hundred tiny
elephants painted in each. Kaia deduced that he must like elephants
quite a lot.

“
It’s beautiful!” Kaia
said.

“
I just had it
redecorated,” John replied, grinning. “I had calculated the volume
of my old desk so many times I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m
still trying to measure this one accurately. Haven’t had time to do
it properly.”

“
What’s that?” Kaia pointed
to a small shadow box hung next to the window.

“
Oh, that’s my magic
pencil!” John replied. He walked over to the wall and gazed at it
for a moment. Then he looked at Kaia. “Not really magic, you
understand – just lucky. Sentimental.”

Kaia nodded. “We all have stuff like that,”
she said.

He began to rummage in his desk drawer, and
pulled out a small box.

“
You’ll need these,” he
told her, handing her a pair of old-fashioned 3D
glasses.

“
Why?”

“
You’ll see.” He pulled out
a second pair and slipped them into his coat pocket.

Kaia looked closely at the glasses – one
blue lens, one red lens. They weren’t used anymore; she wondered
where he had found them.

“
John.” Quin’s voice boomed
behind her.

Kaia jumped, startled. She hadn’t noticed
the door opening.

“
Rock has an interviewee in
a bit. He wants to throw a few different tricks at him to see if he
breaks under pressure and thought we would start easy
first.”

“
Ah, fun!” John grinned and
his eyebrows began to dance again. “I love fun!”

A few minutes later, they all stood around
Rock’s desk in the room with all of the screens. It was like
looking through the multi-faceted eyes of a kry-ma bug that was
looking through the windows of every room of the Globe. Kaia
carefully kept her eyes averted, so she wouldn’t become distracted
and miss everything that was being said. A few other security
guards in black suits and glasses stood silently in the back of the
room; she tried to avoid looking at them as well, particularly
because they scared her just a little bit.

“
I was hoping for two
things,” Rock stated. “One, I would like for you to hide some
keys.” He held out a handful of keys to John. “When I say, ‘go,’
you run around and hide them. They aren’t real,
obviously.”

“
Easy!” John
replied.

“
And Kaia,” Rock said,
turning to her, “I was hoping you would play the role
of…”

“…
a distraction!” John
finished. “Perfect, genius, splendiferous, positively
magnificent!”

Rock’s buzzer buzzed.

“
He’s here,” said the
receptionist.

“
We should make him wait
fifteen minutes,” Rock decided. “To test his patience. Then we’ll
run some tests, and afterwards send him to your office, Quin. You
may need to take over at some point too, in case I get called in to
deal with Mad Jack. The nurses said he was having a bad
day.”

“
No problem,” Quin
replied.

“
He looks nice.” Kaia
shrugged. “Aren’t security guys supposed to look
meaner?”

All three men turned to look at her.

“
Sometimes the nice-looking
ones are the scariest,” Quin replied.

“
How good are you at
flirting?” Rock interjected.

“
Um… not very. I don’t
really date.” Kaia made a face. “Just that one guy that John
doesn’t like.”

“
Great. It’ll be really
awkward then,” Rock said. “We need you to go out there and just be
awkward.”

“
Sit in the seat next to
him.” Quin pointed at the lobby screen. “Even though there are a
bunch of seats available.”

“
Hand on his knee, maybe…”
John climbed up on a chair and began to gesture as though he was
declaiming. “Or glance up from under your eyelashes.”

“
Ask him what he’s
reading,” Rock said.

“
He’s not reading
anything.” Kaia crossed her arms. “But I guess I can try. What’s
the point of this?”

“
We’re testing his mettle.”
Quin clasped his hands behind his back.

“
What if I end up working
with him? He’ll think I’m a horrible person,” she
argued.

“
No. If he’s hired, we’ll
explain everything. It will be fine,” Rock answered. “Now get out
there.”

Kaia took a deep breath a stomped out of the
office. She plopped down in the seat next to the young man, leaned
over, and put her hand on his knee.

“
Look,” she whispered, “I’m
supposed to flirt with you to distract you, but I think it’s stupid
and manipulative and unfair, so I’m just pretending.”

“
I see.” He looked at her.
He had nice eyes. “I anticipated something like this.”

“
If you’re any good, I’m
sure you’ll do fine on the interview.” She moved her hand in a
circle on his knee and smiled a little. “Also, they’re
watching.”

“
I assumed as much. And
thank you for the vote of confidence.” He sat up straighter,
smiled, and reached out his hand. “I’m Clyde Brothard.”

She removed her hand from his knee and shook
his. “I’m Kaia.”

“
Would you like a business
card?”

“
Thanks!” She looked at it
closely. It was black and said, “Clyde, Security
Services.”

“
I had better get going.
Good luck on your interview!”

“
Thanks!” He smiled at her
and leaned back in his seat.

“
That’s lame,” John was
saying as she strode into the room. He frowned slightly. “He just
gave you a business card.”

“
I think it was perfectly
professional of him.” Kaia replied, crossing her arms.

“
I have to agree.” Rock
crossed his arms as Quin strode from the room. As soon as Quin
reached out to take Clyde’s hand, he said, “We’re a go. John,
please go hide the keys. Kaia, stand behind the curtain over
there.”

After Kaia left, Clyde tried hard to keep
his face from showing any emotions. He thought using a girl was a
cheap trick on an interview, but after a moment’s thought he
remembered that in one of his history of security classes his
professor had included an entire unit on women who were able to
sneak into high-level buildings by using their wiles. This was a
government facility, so it probably made sense. He hoped he had
passed this test, but felt a little bad for Kaia, that they would
make her do that.

He looked up as a tall, muscular man walked
towards him.

“
The name’s Quin Black,” he
said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

Clyde stood and took Quin’s hand. “Clyde
Brothard.” He nodded. “Here’s my business card, and a copy of my
resume.”

“
Thank you,” Quin replied.
“Follow me, please.”

Clyde followed Quin into a room filled with
screens. A short gentleman stood in front of him, hand
extended.

“
My name is Rock,” he said,
“and I am head of security here at the Globe. Before we begin, I
would like for you to fill out some quick paperwork.” He handed
Clyde an envelope.

“
Of course, sir,” Clyde
responded politely. He took a deep breath to calm his pounding
heart; Ivanna the Bard once said,
A calm heart and a calm mind
can work together to achieve the goals of the soul,
so he took
another deep breath and willed his beating heart to slow. He smiled
at Rock and glanced at the screens.

A gentleman in a nice grey suit and rather
interesting tie appeared on the screen that looked out on the back
lawn. He put his face close, winked, and then the camera went
dead.