“Everything has a pattern,” Gin said. “From cells and trees, to the videos we watch and the food we buy—there are patterns everywhere. Life likes patterns.”
Her dad rubbed his chin and squinted up at the statue. “That is true. Patterns are important. And when looking for them, you must remember they like to be exclusive. Sometimes, there’s more than one, and if you want to see them all, you must forget about each prior pattern.”
“Which means . . .”
“Find one, and you won’t necessarily see another. For instance, if you see a line of cars that alternates color—black, gray, tan, red,” her dad motioned to the street, with its line of parked cars for as far as Gin could see, “you might miss the fact that there’s a second pattern, such as that every sixth car is from out of state.”
“So when looking for a pattern, you have to look at your data constantly, over and over, with fresh eyes.” It was a simplistic point, but interesting all the same.
“That would be a good start.”
The breeze blew stronger, rustling nearby tree branches. A cloud shifted, and the sun popped out, throwing a dark shadow of the sculpture onto the grass.
“Look at that,” her dad said. “From 3-D back to two.”
Gin studied the lines of the shadow, but her mind was stuck elsewhere: on the pattern of the crows’ flights. She had looked for one pattern without any success. That didn’t mean that another one wasn’t there.
Late that night, full of doughy dim sum and ice cream cake, Gin sat in her bedroom, her window opened wide, staring at the file of crow data.
She had studied the crow data for weeks, searching for a pattern. But what if she’d been searching for the wrong pattern?
Her plan for the night was simple: she’d brainstorm all possible patterns—not only the crows’ most common stops, but how long they stayed at different stops, impact of year and day of the week, sequence of their stops. Maybe a pattern was there—just not the one she’d been looking for. And maybe it would finally tell her what was going on.
It was nearly one. Gin still hadn’t found anything significant or meaningful. She closed her eyes for a second, feeling annoyed about all the wasted time, and suddenly an image of Catherine flashed in her mind.
Catherine. How interesting it was that the crows all looked alike initially, but the more time she had spent with them, the more distinct they had become. Maggie, Rufus, Frederick. All individuals, like people.
She lightly tapped her fingers on her keyboard, thinking, and remembered Felix saying that his dad had bred the crows to enhance certain traits. One of the first things she had done when studying the crows’ patterns of movement was to build an immense spreadsheet combining data on every individual crow. Her goal had been to find trends in the group of crows as a whole. It was a sound practice—more data points meant it’d be easier to find actual patterns.
Unless . . . She closed her eyes for a second, thinking. Unless the pattern was different for each individual. Then she’d need to look for trends within individuals, not the entire group.
She started writing a quick analysis of how often the crows visited each location. But this time, she kept individual crows separate.
She sat back as the program calculated, and a map with brightly colored dots appeared. Each crow was now represented with a different color. Most of the colors and symbols were small points, splattered around the city. But there were four colors—the ones that represented Catherine, Maggie, and two crows she hadn’t met named Storm and Ollie—that were concentrated more at three locations.
Gin ran some statistics and found the pattern was, in fact, real: those four crows stopped predominately at three locations, for longer periods of time. No other crow had a pattern like that.
Gin pulled up the address of the most common stop. Then, she gasped.
InTech’s satellite office. Where she had seen Catherine stopping on that first flight she mapped. How had she missed this?
Except, of course, she knew how she had missed it. InTech had barely registered for overall stops. But these four crows had clearly been dedicated to stopping there.
There was an altitude coordinate, and when she added that in, she found the four crows, invariably, were stopping on the twentieth floor of InTech. A quick search of InTech’s employee website showed that floor was for creative development, where much of the technical innovation took place.
It was too much of a coincidence. Specific crows owned by the CEO of Odin, Inc., hanging out at InTech’s offices.
She had to tell Felix. She posted the analysis on their message board and wrote a short note—Take a look at this. Strange, right? Can you meet?
When he didn’t write back immediately, she felt the worry swirl through her stomach. Maybe she’d been too hasty to share the finding with him.
But there was nothing she could do about it now. The website wasn’t hers, so there wasn’t an easy way for her to delete a posting.
Maybe he’d have an explanation for all of it. Gin typed in the second most-common location, which was for a set of multimillion-dollar row houses in a fancy, downtown neighborhood. According to property records, one was owned by a dermatologist, another by a couple connected with the wealthy Fireton family, and the third by the managing partner of an immense law firm.
None seemed to have any connection to InTech or Odin. Until she found the list of InTech’s board of directors online. The lawyer was on the board.
This finding was more than a coincidence. No statistical model would give any probability of this scenario actually happening. It had to be exactly what Felix’s father didn’t want her to see. And she was staring right at it.
Every hair on her arms stood up, a prickly wave starting at her shoulders and running down to her wrists. She froze, fingers poised over her keyboard. Everything was silent, but she had the strange sensation that someone was watching her.
She clicked out of her computer programs, quick. She stood up, looking around her room. It was empty. Of course it was empty. But it felt different. The light from her desk lamp glared on the wall; her worn blue quilt looked strangely neat on her twin bed; the whiteboard in the corner, covered in her compact handwriting, almost glowed.
She glanced at the window, its shade open. It was black outside, and with the light on in her room, she couldn’t see out. But anyone could see in.
With her phone in one hand, as though it offered some protection, Gin walked to the window. One step and another, trying to slow her breath and fill her lungs with oxygen.
She paused. Then she pushed up the wooden frame, fast. Before she had a chance to feel the dread churning in her stomach, she thrust her head outside, into the night air.
The front lawn was shadowy and pale. The empty street was shiny and still. Cars were parked and motionless.
No one was watching her.
Something rubbed against her legs. She jumped, hitting her head, hard. But it was just the cat. Einstein wove back and forth, stopping to press his chin into Gin’s calf. Warm and soft. He sat down, looked up at Gin, and flicked his tail.
Gin closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. And in one swift movement, she closed the window, pulled the shade down, and picked up Einstein.
“I know, that was ridiculous.” She put her head in the cat’s fur, breathing in the warmth. “That crazy data got the better of me.”
She refreshed the URL, but there was still no word from Felix. She quickly typed in the third location, but it was for a large condo complex with no obvious connection to InTech.
Two locations that were linked to InTech; one that seemingly was not. Maybe the buildings had something else in common besides InTech. Maybe they just had good roosting sites. Or maybe her calculations were off.
The Principle of Occam’s Razor flashed in her mind. She needed to start with the most sensible, least farfetched assumption. Not a wild conspiracy theory.
She steadied hers
elf with that logic and decided to look at the data later with fresh eyes. She shut down her desktop computer and her laptop, just a precaution, and lay down in bed. Her desk light still glared, but she didn’t turn it off.
Finally, the room bright around her, she fell asleep.
The next morning, Gin still hadn’t heard from Felix. Maybe her analysis had been entirely off-base. Crows stopping at a few spots in DC wasn’t a crime.
So she turned on music and picked up an optional book for English. She was a few chapters in when the door opened, and her dad peeked inside.
“Got your pancakes.” He nudged the door open, holding a plate with five pancakes in one hand and a pitcher of syrup in the other. “For a second there, I thought you had slept in.”
“Thanks, Dad. I don’t know how I forgot.” As she slid out of bed, her stomach growled. She took the plate to her desk and started to eat.
But he didn’t leave. “Everything okay? You don’t usually miss pancakes.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She was suddenly starving. Maybe she just needed food to think clearly. “I’ve been stuck on this data problem. I keep looking for something that probably isn’t there. But somehow, my mind won’t let it go.”
Her dad smoothed her comforter and sat down on her bed. “And why do you think it isn’t there?”
“It’s not logical. And numbers should be logical.”
“Hmmm . . . Illogical.” He held up a finger. “But is it interesting? Is there a pattern to the illogical finding?”
“Not really.” As soon as she said it, she knew it wasn’t the truth. “I mean, maybe one. One that’s really strange. So strange, it’s probably a silly hunch. Nothing a few pancakes and a talk with my logical father can’t take care of.”
Her dad tilted his head, looking like a spry professor, with Gin his only pupil. “You know . . .” His voice was quiet, but steady. “Hunches are important.”
She sighed in frustration. “You’ve always told me to start with logic.”
“That’s true.” He leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands. “But you also have to follow hunches. That’s how all of the great scientific discoveries happen. People set off on their logical work, doing everything in an orderly, analytical way, then they have an accident or a wild idea or a hunch.”
“But that’s not how you work.” She was feeling slightly indignant. Like a child who never believed in Santa, but whose dad was now saying he was real. “You’re always outlining and researching. Proving things. Using numbers.”
He rubbed his chin. “Yes, Yes. That is important. But so is all the other stuff. The feeling. The idea that there’s something underneath. You have to allow your brain to work. To make connections on its own. To have a feeling, or a sense of something, all in the blink of an eye. That’s why I collage.”
Gin’s mouth dropped. “That’s why you what? Collage? With, like, magazines and scissors and glue?”
“I do it at work. On breaks. I don’t talk about it much—it seems to take something away from it. But I pull out images and words and paste them together in new ways. It helps me figure things out.”
Gin was speechless. It felt like the world had twisted onto itself.
“I’ll show you sometime, if you’d like.”
She didn’t know how to answer. This was not where she had imagined the conversation going.
“So, follow your hunch. Sorry, I’m not the best at advice. But that’s a good nugget, I think.”
After her dad left, Gin forced herself to take another bite of a pancake, but it was lumpy and dry in her mouth. And slowly, like a sun rising, she realized why she didn’t want to look at the trend. It wasn’t because she thought it was absurd or unproductive or trivial. It was because she knew it was possibly the opposite of all of those things—important.
And because she was afraid of what she might find.
// Forty-One
Two places: a giant tech company’s satellite office and the home of a board member for the giant tech company. Nothing strange or odd about them. Except that, fairly frequently over the past few years, they had been visited by crows.
Gin set her pancakes aside, the curiosity swelling up in her like a wave, and decided to review everything again. First, she’d check her calculations and confirm that she hadn’t somehow messed up the original data. Once she knew that her model was sound, she’d see where a few more online searches took her.
But before doing anything else, she went straight to Felix’s messaging board. Her heart sank. Still nothing. Her insides felt as clammy as her hands. If Felix hadn’t known about the crows and somehow his dad found out what they’d discovered . . .
Hello? You there? I’m sure it was nothing . . . but it’d still be good to talk. Message me?
She shouldn’t worry. After all, she hadn’t ruled out a mistake in her original work. She started checking her analysis, almost hoping to find some little issue that explained it all away, but a few hours later, she was virtually certain nothing was wrong with her logic or the data.
So she started on her research. By early afternoon, she had pages of notes on InTech and Odin. There were links to articles, with key sections pasted in, photos of the attorney and other InTech board members, annual reports from both InTech and Odin.
But she still didn’t know who from InTech, if anyone, lived at that third location. And she didn’t know what the crows were doing, if in fact they had stopped at the three locations for a purpose.
Unless the crows were working as spies. All it would take was a tiny recorder to listen in on conversations happening inside. Or, with access to a wireless network, it’d be possible to download data slowly so regular security measures wouldn’t pick up the breach. If a person or even a drone tried to do the same thing, it’d be too obvious. But no one would notice a bird.
She searched “animals trained as spies” and two results came to the top. First was the CIA’s “Acoustic Kitty” project from the 1960s in which a cat was implanted with recording devices to spy on the Russian embassy. The program was considered a failure—the first time the cat was released, it walked off because it was hungry; the second time, it walked into the street and was hit by a taxi. Cats, officials had decided, were too unpredictable for that sort of work.
Unlike crows, Gin couldn’t help thinking.
The second result was about cyborg insects that had been implanted with tiny recording devices, with a similar aim: scientists could control where and how the insects moved, guiding them to stay outside a window or inside a particular room, and record what was shared, literally “bugging” the place.
There was a chance the crows were doing the exact same thing. The feeling crept through Gin, sending goosebumps along her arms. Then she shook her head, frustrated.
All of these feelings. She was tired of them. They were taxing—they fluttered through her, pulling her breath and her logic with them.
She switched back to the crow data. She examined it closer, parsing the data out by groups of birds, by time of year, even by average temperature. The more she looked at the numbers, the clearer the story got. The four crows were stopping at the three locations regularly, staying upwards of two hours at a time, a feat which must have required incredible discipline.
When she closed her eyes, she could almost see them. How they’d tilt their heads, their eyes inquisitive, or lift off into the sky, wings flapping powerfully. And she could picture Felix, out there in the middle of that field, the crows circling around him, working even then. All that training, whether Felix knew it or not, wasn’t just a hobby.
It was time for her to get ready for work. She considered calling in sick, but she knew work would be a good break. Anyway, she could bring her laptop and the crow data with her. Maybe she’d show Lucas. She wouldn’t have to give him any details. But she was curious to know whether he would see the trend.
There was still the chance that someone else would look at her analys
is and tell her she was crazy. Maybe she’d made a simple mistake. Maybe her hunch wasn’t anything more than a flip-flopped equation or a group of data points that got copied and pasted. Maybe it was nothing at all.
“Hmmm,” Lucas said.
It was the fifth time he had said it in the last five minutes. His mouth was set, and his glasses dropped low over his nose.
Gin had waited until early evening to bring out her laptop. She didn’t even feel bad about distracting Lucas from his work: the office was quiet—it was a Sunday after all—and they didn’t have any pressing deadlines. And Lucas was always happy to do her a favor.
He’d been playing around with the model for more than an hour, looking through her code, manipulating the raw data. He asked a few questions at the beginning, then hadn’t said a word.
“Okay.” He cocked his head to one side, finally looking at her. “You know, your hair has gotten long. It’s nice.”
“Oh.” She pulled her fingers through her hair. She was long overdue for a cut. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Anyway, I think I understand the model.” He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the desk. “And I appreciate that you don’t want to give me any details about it, to ensure a pure analysis process. For a thorough opinion, I’d need a little more time. However, I’m ready to tell you what I think.”
“Okay.” Gin clenched her jaw, preparing herself.
“First, it’s clear that this model is on the movements of some sort of bird. Or possibly drones . . . no, scratch that, they’re birds, right?”
“Yes. How’d you know?” Gin’s body felt suddenly chilled.
“The elevation metric was a giveaway. Anyway, I think I see why you’ve shown me this. Because, while the flocking behavior works seamlessly, the raw data has an oddity. This is real data, right?”
She nodded, her words suddenly frozen. Maybe Lucas was seeing it, too.
“I can’t exactly put my finger on it.” He narrowed his eyes, looking harder at the screen. “I’d need more time. But there’s some trend that’s a bit off.”
Crow Flight Page 22
