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Metoo had managed not to panic twice already this morning, and it was not yet 9 o’clock. Her regular Service had tripled almost before the day had begun in earnest, and now this. She stood for a moment, facing Pitu 3, as he turned to look at her. Her hands were clasped in front of her, but she showed no other signs of tension.

  “You have specified clearance,” she said, “you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She knew what he was doing. He was reviewing the footage of the sock incident. Pitu 3 would watch Tobe sit down to his breakfast, he would hear Tobe say, ‘It’s the same’, he would watch Metoo turn back, and he would hear the squeak her sock made on the linopro.

  The event had taken seconds, but Tobe had been careful to make sure that Pitu 3 saw everything. Why wasn’t Tobe doing the maths? Tobe had instant, total recall; why waste time making Pitu 3 review the footage, work out what Tobe needed, and then do the maths? Tobe could do it in significantly less time.

  What did probability have to do with any of it?

  Metoo’s last thought was that it should have been her. If Tobe wanted to delegate, while he did something else, why had he given the work to Pitu 3, his Student, rather than his Assistant?

  PITU LEFT TOBE’S flat with a skip in his step. He wasn’t quite jubilant, but his confidence was certainly boosted. If he could get this right, and accomplish the maths in short order, he might have a chance. Metoo was not the only one who had thought about Tobe’s motives.

  Pitu returned to his room, hit his Service button, and took up the rag that hung from a hook on his wipe-wall. He obliterated everything but three of the formulae on the left-hand side, and set to work. This was real-world maths, and, in real-world maths, results were immediate and gratifying, unlike the theoretical stuff he wrestled with every day.

  Pitu 3 was not the best theoretical mathematician in Tobe’s class, but it had been his turn to have the first tutorial of the day, in rotation, and he was going to make the best of this opportunity. He had been given an Assistant’s job, and he was determined to prove that he would be a fine Assistant, that he was ready for promotion.

  The probability of Pitu 3 having the first tutorial of the day should have been one in eleven, but there were only four tutorial days in a week, so, in theory, there was only a one in eleven by four in seven chance that the sock incident would have fallen on a day when his tutorial was first. However, it could take up to twenty days to cover eleven 08:30 tutorials, cutting those chances from four in seven to only eleven in twenty. He had beaten odds of one in eleven by eleven in twenty. This was a good day.

  WHEN PITU 3 had gone, Metoo returned to Service.

  “Anomalies?” she asked.

  “Minor and monitoring,” Service answered.

  “Very well,” said Metoo.

  TOBE STOOD IN the middle of his room, examining the calculations on the wipe-wall, which stretched wildly from one side to the other, filling all the space that he could reasonably reach without stretching too high, or stooping too low. The answer should have been there. Probability should have been the answer. The calculations appeared to be correct. Tobe looked at his hands. He held a pen in his right hand, and a rag in his left. He looked down, and saw the book lying, open, forgotten at his feet. He bent to pick it up.

  “It was the same,” he said, folding the book closed, and sitting down with a sigh.

  SERVICE SENT A tone to Tobe’s flat ten times between Pitu 3 leaving, and their, noon, lunchtime.

  Tobe had missed his ten other timetabled tutorials, and, for each one missed, Metoo had reset the Student’s Schedule, and asked the question, ‘Anomalies?’ Each time, the answer had been, “Minor and monitoring”. This was by no means the first time that Service had kept her busy because of Tobe, but Metoo could not help but be concerned. What was it he had said this morning? She could always ask Service if she could review the footage, but thought better of it; she didn’t want to arouse suspicion, or give Service an excuse to bring in an Assistant. She would wait. She would wait, and talk to Tobe over lunch.

  At noon, Metoo reset the Schedule; Tobe was never late, and, in five more minutes, Service would send her another tone. She wondered, for a moment, what the record was for the number of tones in one day, but only for a moment. Why torture herself?

  At ten past noon, Metoo steered Tobe out of his office, by the arm. She had entered to find him sitting with a book in his lap, staring at the wipe-wall. It was the book she’d retrieved from the top shelf for him, but now the pages were stained with inky fingerprints, and were ragged at the edges and creased at the corners, as if from years of use.

  “Lunch?” she asked.

  “But...” he began.

  “Lunch,” she said again, more firmly.

  “Lunch,” he replied.

  METOO LED TOBE to his stool at the kitchen counter, and then stood opposite him, preparing their lunch of noodles and vegetables. She vacuum sealed the noodles into the steamer, and set to work with a knife, slicing a pepper into strips so thin that they were almost transparent, and cutting slits in the spring onions before dropping them into cold water for them to flower. She watched him as she worked.

  “Pitu 3 was here this morning,” she said.

  He looked up at her, uncomprehending.

  “The maths,” she said, “the physics of my socks.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  The room was silent for a long moment, apart from the scratch of her knife against the counter.

  “Are you content?” she asked, at last.

  He looked at her, again, without answering. At least he was looking at her.

  She arranged the vegetables on small plates, and emptied the steaming noodles into two dishes. Taking cutlery from the drawer under the counter, she said, “We’ll need an Assistant one day; it won’t be him, of course.”

  Silence.

  Tobe’s eyes were closed, his head tilted back slightly, and his lips were moving, almost imperceptibly.

  Metoo looked at him. She reached over and touched the back of one of his hands, as it lay, supine, on the counter.

  “Eat,” she said, and then, again, “eat.”

  Tobe’s eyes remained closed, his head tilted, and his lips moving. Metoo reached across the counter, and took his face firmly between her hands. His lips stopped moving, and he opened his eyes. She let his face go, but made eye contact, and kept her gaze on him.

  “Lunch,” she said.

  SITU 3 ATE Repast with the other Students. He wanted to tell someone about what had happened between him and Tobe in their tutorial that morning, but he didn’t want to jinx his luck, and, besides, he didn’t really have anyone he could confide in.

  The Students all had their own thoughts on why they had not had tutorials, the consensus being that Tobe was busy with something of his own. His Students expected very little of their Master, and were never surprised for long when their studies were suspended; they invariably began again, soon enough, and often with renewed vigour. The best mathematicians among them were always eager to make progress on their own, and most of the rest were content to take extra Recreation, which often included sleep. Pitu was the only member of the class who had work to do that day: a real, honest-to-goodness job, set by Tobe. He had no desire to share either the work or the credit he expected to get for it, and so he kept quiet.

  WHILE TOBE NAPPED, after lunch, Metoo went back to his office. She flicked through the book that he had been referring to, checking back and forth through the pages to follow his reference points while she scrutinised the maths on the wipe-wall.

  “Probability,” she murmured to herself. This was kid’s stuff, mandatory in the School’s maths class, but soon finished with. She followed Tobe’s working. One way or another, he had extrapolated every formula in the canon to try to move probability on, to get an answer, but she could not divine what he was trying to find the answer to. She scrutinised the wall again; if she could work out the mathematical problem, perhaps she could set Tobe back on his path. Much mo
re of this and she would be creating anomalies. Much more of this, and she would have to answer to Service for her actions as well as his.

  Metoo flicked through the book again. The title page and the end papers were the only pages in the book not sullied by fingerprints and ink spots. She had read the title page this morning, to ascertain that she had found the right book. She turned to the end papers and read, ‘Probability extends beyond the mathematical. In the real world, probability has no memory.’

  Chapter Three

  A SEA OF thready lights formed a haloed globe on the screen in front of the Operator, pulsing, connecting, receding, and then repeating patterns in random order.

  The screen at Workstation 2 then blinked out, fizzed and blinked out again. The Operator moved the flat bottom of his curled left fist over the counter-top, back and forth, before lifting it and thumping hard. The screen blacked out entirely, and then throbbed back to life

  The Operator left his fist where it was, in readiness, and continued to watch the screen for several minutes. His other hand rested on a grubby rubberpro sphere set into the marked beige counter in front of him.

  “Reset zoom to 38, 42,” said the Operator, rolling the sphere left, right and then left again in ever-decreasing increments. The screen zoomed in, and the threads of light began to look like a piece of string, woven with various shades of blue, in a tangled mass.

  The Operator rolled the palm-sized, rubberpro sphere again, and said, “Hover.” A length of thread came into sharp focus. It was a cool grey colour, pale among the stronger blue lengths, and its pulse was barely visible.

  “Anomaly at sector 38,” said the Operator, hitting a button. “Tone sent.” The screen in front of him blinked, and he tensed his fist slightly, as if flexing to deliver a second thump to the counter. He waited. The screen blinked again, and thrummed. When it came back up to full resolution, the threads on the screen were green.

  The Operator pushed his chair back, threw a switch on the facing edge of the counter, and raised his hands.

  COLLEGE SERVICE WAS run from a building at the North-East edge of the campus. It recruited directly from the College Students, but the Operators were a group apart, living and working away from the Student body.

  When Service had been set up globally, almost two centuries before, it quickly became clear that there were no benefits to Operators fraternising with Students or Civilians; it was not only pointless, but also counter-productive. Even entry-level Operators could not talk about Service, and they certainly couldn’t bend the rules for anyone, and that was what most Students and Civilians would want from them.

  Selection for Service worked in much the same way as any selection process. They were Drafted as Students to the School, but their family groups tended to be made up entirely of future Operators. They were, generally, the most private people, with the lowest natural adrenalin and cortisol levels, and the highest boredom thresholds. Most were solitary in their habits, but when they did form bonds it was invariably with others like them, so there was very little hardship in being segregated.

  Incoming Students never knew what they were being Drafted for, but all assumed that they were being groomed as Assistants and Companions, and that the remainder were wastage, fed back into the system, as Seniors, or moved on.

  The system had endured for two centuries, and the same pattern was employed in each of the 987 Colleges throughout the World. There had been a 1,000 Colleges originally, but one had famously failed, several had amalgamated, and others had become redundant. Service Central believed that survival depended on a little over half of the Colleges having an Active in residence at any given time. There were currently 742 Actives in residence with close to three hundred more in their teens.

  The lifespan of an Active could not be pre-determined, but genetic combinations were researched constantly, and potential Actives were being discovered at increasingly early ages. Breeding programs for selectable children had proven unpopular, but blood-testing all pregnant women had led to early detection of all group types. Balance did not need to be imposed. Initially, parents were told their likelihood of producing selectable offspring, and this had led to a certain pride in the status of their children, and a strong desire to provide balance. More children were being born selectable, and raised balanced than ever before, but the natural incidence of Actives seemed to be static.

  NAMED OPERATOR STRAZINSKY wove his way across the Service floor, between equipment racks, heading for the Operator’s raised hands. The Service Floor was circular, the centre taken up with hardware, equipment racks for peripherals, and Techs, assessing and making repairs and replacements. The Service screens faced into the space, set eight feet apart, in an arc covering 270 degrees of the room. Operators did not often speak to each other, and could only see the screen in front of them: one Operator, one screen.

  Their job was to calibrate the system, check for anomalies, and send tones. One of the nine Workstations on this Service Floor monitored the resident Active. The other eight monitored, variously, four Masters, two Companions, one Assistant, and one neutral control from the Seniors. Only data for the Active was relevant, but part of the learning curve when the system was first run involved the Operators’ stress levels. Originally, Operators that had known they were working with Actives had high stress levels, despite their natural dispositions, so the system was set up to include non-Actives. As a consequence, Operators weren’t kept idle for long periods of time, but could work regular hours, rather than waiting in the wings for their big moment. It also meant that Operators lived in larger communities, rather than in twos and threes, which also improved mental health.

  With nips, and tucks over the two centuries since its inception, Service ran fairly smoothly across the globe. There were problems with ageing technology, and some environments proved particularly corrosive to hardware, but ongoing data showed that the entire system worked better if full Service was run at every College, regardless of whether there was an Active in residence.

  It had also proved beneficial to run Colleges at the local level. No Student attended College outside his national borders, so language and customs were not an issue. Locality proved more important than colour or religion in placing Students.

  Several dozen Colleges had not had an Active for more than two generations, but they were maintained, none-the-less.

  STRAZINSKY HANDED THE Operator a pair of worn, stained neoprene gloves with cotton liners, and waited for him to vacate the chair. Strazinsky sat in his place, and keyed in his Morse signature, using the switch on the facing edge of the counter in front of him. Then, he pulled in his chair, which still carried his predecessor’s body-heat, and rested his right hand on the rubberpro sphere.

  He rotated the sphere slowly, checking the halo around the mass of green, throbbing threads. Having completed the corona, he moved the sphere methodically left and right, and up and down, covering the entire surface of the screen, checking one sector at a time. False positives were not uncommon, but Strazinsky was scrupulous in his line-check. Thirty minutes into the procedure, he had found nothing of note, but the lights remained green. The previous Operator was still standing behind his chair, awaiting instructions.

  “Get me a headset,” said Strazinsky.

  “Verify,” said the Operator.

  “Verify headset,” said Strazinsky, and the Operator turned and made his way quickly across the Service Floor to the equipment racks at its centre. There was no headset on the first rack, so he moved to the second. Still, there was no headset.

  “Tech,” said the Operator.

  A Tech popped up from somewhere on the floor to the Operator’s right, and asked, “Sir?”

  “There are no headsets on these two racks,” said the Operator. “Get me a bloody headset.”

  Seconds were passing, and the Operator could be penalised if he took too long; he could be demoted, or even removed from Service altogether. No Operator ever left his station without his replacement on hand, an
d no Operator of Strazinsky’s grade would ever turn his gaze away from the screen for even a moment. When the Operator thought he could feel Strazinsky’s eyes boring into the back of his head, after another 45 seconds had passed, and he still didn’t have a headset in his hand, he was mistaken, possibly deluded.

  After two minutes, Strazinsky was finally inserting the earpiece on the headset and adjusting the mic before saying, “Receive audio.”

  He listened in.

  “Anomalies?” asked a woman’s voice, apparently calmly.

  “Minor and monitoring,” said Service.

  Strazinsky pulled the headset’s view-screen down in front of his left eye, and said, “Receive visual.”

  The three-inch screen filled with drifting snow. Strazinsky waited.

  “Receive visual,” he said, again. The screen in front of his left eye blinked into life.

  It had taken thirty-four minutes from the Operator’s alert to Strazinsky getting full audio and visual: thirty-four minutes. There was nothing to see, now, or hear.

  “Void visual,” he said, lifting the screen away from his face. He examined the swirling, pulsing green strings of light in front of him for another sixty seconds, and then said, “Void audio.”

  Strazinsky took off the headset, and handed it back to the Operator, who still wore the neoprene gloves, even though his hands were becoming uncomfortably warm inside them.

  “Rack 2,” said Strazinsky, “and stand down.”

  The Operator turned his back on Strazinsky, and began to peel off the gloves. He walked over to rack 2, and placed the headset on the hook provided. He breathed once, long and slow, and left the Service Floor. The debrief on a stand-down would take a minimum of an hour, and could take much longer if he didn’t remain calm.