The Tree of Knowledge

by Daniel G. Miller

  “Here’s another reason why guns aren’t very useful.” Salazar grabbed the police shield that they had used earlier. He raised the shield and handed the gun to Albert. “Shoot me.”

  Albert shook his head. “I’m not going to shoot you.”

  Ariel, now fully alert, grabbed the gun from Albert, pointed it at Salazar, and snapped, “I’ll shoot you.” Her voice seethed with fury at Salazar’s little stunt.

  “OK, lady. Do it.”

  Ying and Albert trundled behind a hay bale, plugged their fingers in their ears, and looked on as the giant woman took aim. She fired three shots. The bullets hit the shield with a clang and dropped to the ground.

  “You see,” shouted Salazar. “That gun didn’t do her a lot of good, did it, compared with my shield and stickers?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “OK, you got to go train with Brick now, but I got three lessons for you. Lesson one: The best weapon is protection, whether it is a shield or body armor or a hay bale. Like Turner says, the Tree of Knowledge is about achieving goals, and you can’t achieve your goal if you’re dead. Lesson two: The next best weapon is surprise. I’d take a beautiful woman and some poison over a bunch of soldiers any day. Lesson three: Always be unpredictable. Class dismissed.”

  And with that, Salazar threw something to the ground, and a gigantic cloud of smoke filled the barn. Ying, Albert, and Ariel began coughing and stumbled their way out of the barn, attempting to catch their breath.

  They looked around for Raphael, but he was long gone.

  Chapter 16

  The next day, Albert and Ying were subjected to a set of highly regimented meals that had been selected for them. Brick had decided that their diet and physical conditioning were completely inadequate and that he would be taking charge of their caloric intake and strength training for the remainder of their stay. Albert hated to give up his nutrition bars, but found Brick’s regulated food intake infinitely more logical than the world’s current smorgasbord.

  After wolfing down their food rations, Ying and Albert hustled to the barn for their next class, hand-to-hand combat training. The barn was barely suitable for animals, let alone human beings. The dilapidated wood structure stood on a floor of dirt. In one corner was a medieval-looking weight set and in the other the remains of a boxing ring. A single ray of sunshine streaming in through a hole in the roof provided the solitary light. Despite the previous night’s rest, Albert’s body ached with exhaustion.

  Brick began the session. His voice had a surprisingly high pitch given his large frame. “OK, you two. The professor tells me that I’ve got two weeks to whip you into fighting shape. Under normal circumstances, I’d need at least ten weeks to make real men out of you, so we’re going to have to crank it up a notch. From here on out, we’re going to treat your body like it’s a machine in serious need of maintenance. This means that everything you do needs to be programmed. Your diet, your sleep, and your workout regimen. You’re going to sleep when I tell you to sleep, eat what I tell you to eat, lift what I tell you to lift, and fight how I tell you to fight.”

  Albert and Ying nodded their heads like new recruits receiving a reprimand.

  “Let’s start with the bench. Show me what you can do.”

  “I thought we were going to learn how to fight today,” complained Ying.

  Brick tilted his head and stared at Ying for a long moment. She fidgeted under his glare, her lower lip pushing out in the closest she ever came to a pout. “Before you can fight, you need to get in shape. The way you two look, you’d probably hurt yourselves taking a swing at someone. I’m surprised you can climb stairs, drive cars, take baths.” Ying’s chin shot up and she fixed him with a glare. She was remembering when she couldn’t do those things—not without help. Brick seemed confused by the intensity of her reaction, and his voice softened slightly. “First we lift, then we fight. Now get to the bench.”

  Both of them gingerly tiptoed in the direction of the dumbbells.

  “Puddles, what are you doing?” interrogated Brick, his voice dropping into the obligatory Southern drawl of a drill instructor.

  Albert stifled the impulse to ask to be called Dr. Puddles. “Sergeant, I’ve got to be honest with you. I’ve never lifted a weight in my life. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a gym. Is this really necessary?” His fatigue was beginning to show.

  Brick hung his head, and Albert didn’t know whether the sergeant was going to hit him or break down and cry. “Yes, it’s necessary. You think Eva Fix is going to take it easy on you because you dress nice?”

  He pointed to the bench twenty feet away from the dumbbells. “Puddles, you see that bench over there? Lie down on it. Koh, you go grab some dumbbells and come back here.”

  Albert obediently lay down on the bench and grabbed the weightless bar sitting overhead.

  “Don’t we want to put some weights on the end of this thing?”

  “Puddles, the bar weighs forty-five pounds, and given that you’ve never lifted a weight in your life, I’m not sure you can get it up eight times.”

  Albert scoffed, gritted his teeth, picked up the bar, and with his spindly white arms brought it down to his chest and back up again. “See, no problem.”

  Brick closed his eyes. “Now show me seven more.”

  Albert repeated the exercise, counting out loud, “Four, five,” but as he continued, he could feel the exhaustion seeping into his muscles. By the sixth repetition, he knew he was in trouble. “Seven.” Summoning all his strength, with arms shaking and face as red as an apple, he pressed upward. “Eight. I told you it would be no problem,” he gasped.

  Brick smiled. “Good, Puddles. Now give me two more sets.”

  For the next hour, Brick taught Ying and Albert the weight-lifting program that they would be using throughout their training. Ying took to the weight-lifting far better than Albert, regularly punctuating the silence with strained grunts and shouts of “Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhh!”

  Albert grunted out as he raised the two fifteen-pound dumbbells above his head and dropped them to the floor.

  “C’mon, Puddles. You can do better than that,” shouted Brick, his face hovering inches from his trainee’s head.

  Albert could feel the sergeant’s hot breath as sprinkles of spit rained down on him. His heart jumped like it was physically trying to escape from his chest, and his muscles contracted like they were being squeezed in a vise from which the lone escape was rest. He rolled off the bench and onto his knees, and looked into a disregarded piece of glass up against the wall. Brick stood behind him in the reflection, but Albert’s eyes rested on his own face. It was a face he barely recognized. His pale complexion had been replaced by an angry red carpet of skin slicked with sweat. Previously unseen veins leapt out from his forehead and from underneath his eyes.

  “I can’t,” he whispered in between breaths. The room seemed absent of air as he gasped and clawed to get oxygen into his lungs.

  Just as he was about to beg his oppressor for a reprieve, Albert felt the kind embrace of a cool towel over his head.

  “Alright, we’re done for the day,” said Brick with a satisfied grin. “Now you fight.”

  Albert closed his eyes, pulled the towel over his head, and let the cool peace envelop him. He had always prided himself on his work ethic, but he realized that up until this moment, he had never truly known work. His aching body simultaneously cried out for every basic need to be met. He wanted water, sleep, rest, food, air, and help, all at the same time and with such ferocity that he could do nothing but lie on the floor of the gym in an exercise-induced fog. What had the potential to be an exciting adventure had morphed into a humiliating monotony.

  Brick took the next two hours to train his weary students on the fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat. Proper stance, basic defensive moves, basic offensive moves, grips, and clutches. Albert found himself surprised
at how structured and systematic fighting could be. Since he was a child, he had abhorred and feared physical conflict. The raw emotion, chaotic movement, and violence had always offended his senses, but now as Sergeant Travis calmly and systematically explained the tools and objectives of combat, Albert realized that fighting—just like math and chess—could be reduced to ones and zeroes.

  After Travis finished his training session, both Ying and Albert could perform a reasonable impression of fighters, if not yet able to execute in real life.

  “Alright, you two, I think we’ve accomplished all we can for the day,” said the mountain of a man, showing some pride in what he’d been able to accomplish over the last few hours.

  “You mean we’re done?” asked Ying, dropping to her knees and raising her hands in the air in exhausted celebration. Albert was too tired to even do that. He simply stood hunched over with his hands on his knees.

  “Well, not quite yet,” said Turner, entering with Gabe Abernathy in tow as Brick exited. “Gabe and I have a little surprise for you.”

  Ying and Albert didn’t even attempt to match the professor’s excitement.

  “Gabe, will you do the honors?”

  With that, the man in the wheelchair opened a box and removed a small pair of glasses made entirely of glass with a long plastic strip along the side and over the ear. Several buttons lined the strip.

  Gabe twirled the glasses in his hands with a certain pride and gusto.

  “What is it?” asked Ying.

  “It’s the world’s first virtual hand-to-hand combat-training device,” replied Gabe.

  “How does it work?” questioned Albert with suspicion.

  Turner interjected. “It works by instantaneously computing the probabilities in real combat situations. For example, when Eva fought that security guard, if she had been wearing this wonderful gadget, she would have been able to see in real time the probabilities that the security guard would punch, kick, etcetera.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “That’s the best part of it,” said Gabe. “When Professor Turner explained how logic and probability could be used in hand-to-hand combat in much the same way it was used in chess, I thought to myself, ‘If you could analyze data on past hand-to-hand combat situations in the same way that chess programmers analyze data from past chess matches, then you could potentially predict future events.’ Just like they do when they create a chess program where you play against the computer. So, being the nerd that I am, I downloaded every available UFC video I could find and had a group of interns note each time an offensive move was made, what the move was, what position the person was in before they made it, and what its effect was.”

  “Oh God, that must have been tedious,” said Ying.

  Gabe smiled. “You don’t know the half of it. But what was interesting was as the interns watched for longer periods of time and made notes, they began to be able to predict what punch was going to be thrown. Once I noticed them doing this, I knew that we had something. From that point on, all we had to do was load the data into the computer and develop a program around it. Then I just bought a few pairs of Google glasses, made some modifications, and voilà.”

  “OK, but how do the glasses operationalize that data?” asked Albert. Normally, he would have been fascinated by this newfangled device, but now he simply wanted the day to end.

  “Using the data we obtained, we knew that, for example, if a man is in a crouched stance with his left foot forward, then there is an eighty-five percent chance that his next offensive move will be a punch with his right hand. This type of predictability resembles what we see in chess. For example, if a player moves a pawn first, followed by a knight, there is a seventy-five percent chance that his next move will be another pawn. Our next step was to integrate this video knowledge into the process. That’s where the glasses come in.”

  “That’s cool. It’s like Pokémon Go for fighting. Does it record your opponent?” asked Ying.

  “Exactly. The glasses are equipped with a small camera that records the person you are fighting. That video recording is then sent to our software program, which determines what stance your opponent is in and then sends back the data regarding what their next offensive move is most likely to be, as well as what areas of the opponent are most vulnerable at any given moment in time.”

  “Isn’t that a lot to look at while you’re fighting someone?” asked Ying. “I mean, I feel like I would be looking at what I was supposed to be doing and then get slapped in the face.”

  Gabe laughed. “Yes, that is a problem. Keep in mind that Professor Turner has been my lone test subject up to this point, but what we’ve found is that, at first, it is a distraction, but over time, your brain adapts and you start to absorb the probabilities on an almost subconscious level. Your body just reacts almost as though you were playing a video game. In addition, we’ve color-coded the probabilities such that so-called safe areas are coded in blue and danger areas are coded in red. Pretty quickly, your brain will learn that if a man’s fist is red in the glasses, then you should watch out for it. The main challenge is that the action of fighting is so quick that it takes incredibly quick reflexes.”

  “Shall we give it a try?” posed Turner, clearly getting bored with the question-and-answer session. “Ms. Koh, why don’t you put on the glasses and grab a helmet and some gloves. Albert, you can be her sparring partner.”

  After some light protest from Albert about the ethical issues associated with punching a woman, the two of them donned their protective gear and stepped onto the mat. Albert couldn’t help but laugh at Ying. Her gloves were about two sizes too big, and the small girl looked like a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot.

  “OK, Albert, I want you to assume a fighting position just like Sergeant Travis instructed you.”

  Albert raised his arms, pivoted his legs, and assumed the position.

  Immediately, the screen over Ying’s eyes lit up. It was transparent so that Ying could see Albert and her surroundings clearly. Standing in front of her was Albert, knees bent, with his left foot and left hand forward. Just as Gabe had predicted, his right glove glowed red with “85%” pulsing on top of it. A soft blue shade surrounded his left fist and both feet.

  Just as Ying glanced at Albert’s feet to assess the likelihood of a kick, his bright-red right fist snapped at her head, knocking her to the ground.

  “Oh my God! Ying, I’m so sorry,” cried Albert, dropping to his knees to aid her. “I thought the glasses would tell you what to do. Gabe, what the hell—”

  “No, no,” Ying interrupted Albert as she jumped to her feet. “The glasses worked fine. I was just looking at your glowing blue feet when you swung at me. Lesson learned. Let’s go again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, you hit like a girl,” said Ying, resuming her stance.

  Albert grimaced and took the same stance as earlier. Once again, Ying could see his right fist glowing red, but the number had changed: “86%.”

  Ying bobbed her head back and forth, preparing for Albert’s first punch. “Hey, Gabe, how come it says ‘86%’ this time?”

  Gabe turned from his computer monitor. “The computer updates the probabilities in real time based on the past actions of your competitor. Because every fighter has a different style, it’s critical to—”

  Albert’s glowing right hand snapped forward at Ying again, but this time, she easily bobbed her head to avoid the punch. As she did, she noticed that Albert’s stomach glowed green as he was throwing the blow.

  Ying goaded Albert, “Is that all you got, Professor? I knew you were getting old, but I didn’t think you were that old.”

  Albert’s patience evaporated, and he took the bait, taking a full windup and throwing a roundhouse hook with his glowing red fist. But before his fist could even reach its intended target, Ying had ducked and sprung to the left. She t
hen gathered her weight just as Brick had taught her and delivered a hook to Albert’s exposed stomach.

  Albert felt the air pop out of his lungs for the second time in two days and immediately crumpled to the ground. Ying danced around with gloves in the air mimicking Muhammad Ali. “I am the greatest.”

  He pulled himself to his feet. He could see Gabe and Turner congratulating Ying with a loud round of applause like proud parents at a sporting event. The small woman was beaming, her round cheeks cherubic red.

  Albert ripped his headgear off, tossed his gloves to the ground, and stormed out of the room.

  Chapter 17

  Albert jogged and then ran out into the broad green expanse of the farm. He wanted to run forever, past the hay bales and out into the forest where he could hide from Turner, Brick, and Ying, from his embarrassment, from his vulnerability. But he couldn’t. His body had nothing left. Travis and Turner had taken every ounce of energy from him.

  After a minute of running, Albert collapsed onto the trunk of a fallen tree. There was not a person in sight, and the only sound that could be heard was the steady chirp of birds that occasionally swooped across the range. He looked back at the hay bales standing like soldiers under the fading fall sun. The crisp, fresh air invaded the chinks in his clothing, riffled his hair, and blew into his ears. The sun glared against his warm, salty face.

  In this open yet stifling expanse, Albert Puddles cried.

  As the tears streamed down his face, he intellectually understood the absurdity of his weeping. He knew that crying served little functional purpose and would do even less to solve his problems. He disdained his weakness. Ever since the days of being teased by the neighborhood boys, Albert had worked with single-minded purpose to build an impenetrable edifice of rationality that would give order and security to his life. He enjoyed the sturdy protection that scoffing at the emotions of others provided. While regular people battled heartbreak, disappointment, fear, and insecurity, Albert hovered above, comforted by the knowledge that he was nothing more than a machine, a collection of cells intermingling together to form a sentient being. One that could resist bursts of random feeling and conquer deep-seated emotions with logic.