Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  As Dr. Gau spoke, David would recall the images from his hazy childhood and believe with every ounce of his strength that Dr. Gau was telling the truth.

  The Volpe Ness School, Dr. Gau went on, was a haven, a refuge founded by men and women of vision and faith. Here, the students were protected from the horrors of that dying world. They could spend their time pursuing their intellectual development, seeking patterns in chaos. The work that they did was intended to develop their ability to recognize important patterns, patterns that would enable them to be the future leaders of a spiritual rebirth.

  It was also important, Dr. Gau warned, to resist the temptations of the Outside. They had no need for knowledge of that corrupt world. Its maps, dictionaries, books, and photographs contained nothing of use for students of Volpe Ness. Everyone was encouraged to inform the teachers if they found anyone in possession of such forbidden material, for it threatened to derail their spiritual salvation.

  It was seven at night. David waited impatiently in the darkness of the cleaning supplies closet next to the boys’ bathroom.

  DAVID MEET SEVEN

  It was a good day, David thought. Besides getting that extra serving of dried fruit, he had finished the afternoon shift with such a high score that he was granted an extra fifteen minutes for the evening break after dinner. He had time to get things ready.

  The hour before the start of the evening shift at eight was really the only free time the children had all day. They could exercise in the gym, converse quietly with friends, read approved books (math books or Dr. Gau’s Thoughts) in the library, or play board games in the recreation hall.

  The door to the cleaning closet opened briefly, and the yellow light in the hallway spilled in. A dark figure slipped in and the door closed again.

  “Helen?” David whispered, and swallowed hard because his throat felt so dry.

  “Who else?” Her voice was like a warm breeze. He wanted to listen to her forever. He imagined the smile on her face in the darkness.

  She clicked on a flashlight and set it on one of the shelves, directing the beam to bounce off the ceiling to soften the light a little.

  She gasped and then laughed. David had spread out a napkin on the floor, and in the middle, the dried lychees and apricots were artfully arranged.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He wanted to go up and wrap his arms around her, but he didn’t dare.

  “You looked so intense this morning. I had to tap out the message three times before you paid attention.”

  “Sorry, I get like that sometimes when I’m working.”

  She scooted over closer to him and popped a lychee into her mouth.

  Wanting this moment to last forever, but aware of how little time they had, he knelt down and pried open the loose floorboard below the bottom shelf. He took out an oilcloth package, unwrapped it, and laid its contents on the floor between them.

  There was an old dictionary missing everything after wuther, three volumes from an encyclopedia set (Volumes B, F, and T), a folded world map that was brittle with age, a few paperback novels, and a stack of photographs of all different sizes of strangers in strange places.

  These were his most treasured possessions. He and Jake had scavenged them over the years surreptitiously, from teachers who were occasionally careless about locking doors or from drawers and boxes left in forgotten corners of the school’s many rooms. Forbidden objects, detritus of the world Outside, they had both thrilled the two boys and frightened them.

  But only with Helen had he discovered how much joy they could bring to two people intent on building memories together.

  Helen reached for the dictionary with her eyes closed and flipped it open. Her finger stabbed at a random spot on the page. She opened her eyes, and they looked at the word she was pointing to: soccer.

  And so they began to read together. Finished with soccer, they looked up football, rugby, goalie, touchdown. . . .

  Following crumb after crumb, they picked their way through a lost world, a past that they could only imagine through words and a few black-and-white drawings. This was how they had learned Morse code, how they had read about war and peace, how they had matched the names on that old map to dry summaries and dream images.

  As they read, their heads came closer together. He could smell her breath, warm, sweet, like nothing else in the world.

  They had looked up kiss a long time ago, and tonight the reading came in handy.

  It was almost time for the evening shift.

  He pulled away from her reluctantly. Her face was flushed. She looked so beautiful that he wanted to kiss her again.

  But she pulled back. “We have to get going.”

  Quickly, he wrapped up his bundle of secrets and pushed it back under the loose floorboard.

  They paused at the door of the supplies closet, listening for noises outside.

  “The books are nice,” she said, holding his hand. “But they’re old. I wish we could see . . .”

  “What?”

  She shook her head, refusing to finish.

  But David was very good at seeing patterns and filling in the blanks.

  David knew the snoring patterns of everyone in the room by heart. He waited until the rise and fall of snores around him were aligned just right, until he was sure all the other boys were in deep sleep.

  He rose from his bunk, noiselessly jumped down to the ground, and padded his way across the room to Jake. He covered Jake’s mouth so that he wouldn’t make too much noise and then proceeded to poke him hard in the ribs.

  A few muffled screams later, Jake finally calmed down enough to glare at David.

  They made their way to the shared desk by the window, where they whispered to each other while keeping an ear out for the footsteps of teachers patrolling the halls. Being caught out of bed after bedtime was a severe offense and could subject them to a harsh public whipping. (Dr. Gau had explained that the whipping was necessary to ensure that the children were well rested for their work.)

  “You have to help me, Jake. I want to do this for her.”

  Jake kept on shaking his head, but David wouldn’t give up. They whispered long into the night.

  “You’ll both have to be quarantined for today,” Nurse Cho said. She was a kind, middle-aged woman who could be persuaded sometimes to let a child stay in bed an extra day. “No Temple for you. I hope whatever you two ate don’t make more of your classmates sick.”

  Right after breakfast, both Jake and David had complained of discomfort in their stomachs. Then they had thrown up one after the other, which caused all the boys at the same table to scramble out of the way.

  Nurse Cho closed the door behind her. On most days she was kept busy dealing with students who suffered from dizziness and migraines from staring at computer screens all day. On Sundays she preferred to take a nap while the children were at Temple.

  David waited until he was sure that Nurse Cho was asleep in her office. “Let’s go.”

  Keeping bits of hair in their mouths and then trying to swallow until they threw up had been Jake’s idea. He might have been reluctantly recruited into this operation, but once he was in, he had plenty of good ideas.

  The two boys opened the window and let themselves out of the infirmary.

  Since all the students and most of the teachers were at Temple, the exercise yard was empty. Quickly, the boys made their way around the infirmary so that they were behind it, in the narrow alley between the back wall of the building and the towering outer wall around the school.

  None of the buildings in the school were taller than the wall, and standing in that narrow alley was like standing at the bottom of a well. The boys followed the wall toward the dining hall.

  As they got closer, they heard faint voices of men talking and slowed down. Hiding in the alley between the dining hall and the recreation hall, the two peeked around the corner.

  They were looking at the loading dock at the back of the kitchen. There was a break i
n the outer wall of the school here, and a truck was parked in the gate. While a few teachers stood around and kept watch, men, strangers, were unloading crates of food from the truck. David had figured out the delivery pattern a while ago and knew there would be one today.

  The men from the Outside were dressed in dirty overalls and muddy boots. Their faces were covered by patches of grease. They looked just like Dr. Gau had described the conditions Outside: desperate, hopeless, haunted.

  Whenever men like these came to deliver food and supplies or to work on some construction project, the students were kept far away and told that they could not approach the evil strangers, who would corrupt and pollute their spiritual purity.

  “You ready for this?” Jake whispered.

  David nodded. “Thank you.” Then he grabbed Jake’s arm. “Don’t get into too much trouble.”

  Jake grinned. “If you’re going to get into trouble, might as well make it big.”

  Then he went down the alley in which they were hiding until he was back in the exercise yard, and began to scream and laugh like a madman.

  Once Jake was sure that he had the teachers’ attention, he ran toward the other side of the exercise yard.

  “I’m done with work!” he shouted. “Let me out of this place!”

  The teachers chased after him. The Outsiders, stunned by the development, wandered down toward the exercise yard to watch the unfolding farce.

  David waited until the area around the truck was clear. Then he sprinted to the truck, jumped into the cab, and began to look around for things he could take: books, pictures, anything that seemed interesting. Helen wanted to know what the Outside was really like, and he would deliver it to her.

  He picked up a few loose pieces of paper with writing on them. Underneath, he saw a small slab made of smooth glass and shiny metal, like a pack of playing cards from the recreation hall. Without thinking too much, he grabbed it. He’d figure out what it was later.

  By the time Jake had been caught and the Outsiders had wandered back to their truck, David was already in the infirmary, pretending to be asleep.

  All the boys and girls stood and watched, stone-faced, as Jake counted out ten lashes during his public whipping. Then he was taken to solitary, where he would be given only bread and water for ten days.

  David flinched with each lash and bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood.

  After ten days, Jake came back to the dorm. All the other boys avoided him, except for David.

  He stood next to Jake’s bunk, fidgeted, and tried to speak. But no words would come.

  “I think Dr. Gau rather liked that little show I put on,” Jake said, his voice light. “It’s been so long since anyone got out of line that he needed the practice.”

  David tried to laugh, but his voice choked.

  “Stop acting so guilty,” Jake whispered. “I agreed to help you. I know I’m not pure, and I don’t care. Have you shown her what you got? Don’t make me suffer for nothing.”

  It took two weeks before David could meet Helen at the supply closet again.

  Ever since Jake’s punishment, David’s work had suffered. He couldn’t seem to find the patterns in the colored squares, the right way to fold the knots, or the best way to pack the colored pieces into the outlined space on the screen, minimizing how long the lines between them had to be. He had to work longer shifts and sometimes had all his free time taken away.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to Jake,” Helen said. “I know you were close.” She put a hand on his back and gently ran it down his spine.

  “He got caught because he was helping me,” David said, “to get this.”

  Helen’s eyes widened as she saw the tiny metal-and-glass box in David’s hands. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” David’s finger searched around the edge until he found a tiny protrusion and pushed it. The glass front of the box came to life, and a set of square tiles of different sizes began to drift across the screen, not unlike the puzzle pieces that the children sometimes worked with at their workstations.

  “I think it’s a computer,” David said. “I stole it from some Outsiders.”

  One of the tiles looked like a small map. Helen reached out and tapped it. The screen changed to a view of a swirling blue sphere filled with tan, green, and white patches. The view zoomed in, and the white patches — clouds — disappeared. The tan patches resolved into lines between states, roads, cities. It hovered over a city labeled SHENZHEN and zoomed in further. Finally, the screen centered on a small patch of land with a pulsing blue dot in the middle of a square yard.

  Awed, the children were unable to speak for a while.

  “Is that where we are?”

  “How does it know that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s still connected to the Outside.”

  “I thought the Outside was dead.”

  Two heads bumped into each other over the tiny glass green. They giggled and, leaning against each other, their hands danced over the magical screen, exploring this portal to another world.

  They saw videos of gleaming cities, of beautiful men and women dancing, of beaches full of sunlight and white sand. They saw articles, news reports — many in languages they could not read. They read posts debating the best vacation spots, celebrating the latest technological toys, urging each other to take up one cause or another.

  Much of what they saw they could not understand, but they could feel a wall crumbling, the wall that had been their faith.

  The Southern Weekend Journal, Letters Section

  [Readers are reminded that published letters to the editor do not represent the views of the editorial staff.]

  First, I’d like to thank The Southern Weekend Journal for allowing me some space to tell my side of the story.

  By now you’ve no doubt seen the sensationalistic headlines screaming SLAVERY and the dramatic pictures of children walking out of a walled compound, looking dazed and confused, and yours truly led away in handcuffs. Such images do not lie, exactly, but they also do not tell the truth.

  I grew up in Taipei, where I was a decent, if not exceptional, student. I went to the United States to pursue a doctorate in computer science at Stanford and to live my Silicon Valley dream.

  Like most of my peers, I was trying to come up with an idea for a company that would strike gold. But nearing graduation, I still had nothing. To clear my head, I took a summer vacation through China. It was my first time there.

  One day, I walked through an urban village in one of the coastal cities. My readers will know, of course, that these are unique Chinese creations, slums with Chinese characteristics.

  Once rural villages, they were incorporated into city limits during urban expansion. But the city governments, having acquired cheaply all the villagers’ valuable farmland for development, decided to leave the villagers where they were, stuck in their houses. So the villages became islands in the city with no way to survive other than building tall, rickety tenements to house the migrant laborers, the prostitutes, the lowly, forgotten men and women who powered China’s economic miracle and whom most city dwellers feared, despised, and needed.

  The authorities pretended that these places did not exist. Crime and violence were the law. A child of four came up to me and demanded that I help her. I took out a handful of coins in different currencies and asked her to pick out three and only three. She immediately went for the euros. Even at her age she could recognize the patterns in the coins that the older children favored and knew how to maximize her gain.

  And there, looking around at the squalid alleys, the piles of trash, and the destitute, hungry faces of the children, an idea came to me.

  As much as we’ve advanced the state of computing in the last few decades, some fundamental limits have not been breached. One of these has to do with the computational complexity of certain problems. Without going into too many technical details, a class of problems, called NP-complete problems, remains difficult and expens
ive for computers to solve.

  But many of these problems are amenable to human intuition, especially the human capacity for pattern recognition. These include problems such as protein folding, logical block placement and wire routing in integrated circuit design, and multiple sequence alignment in protein and gene sequencing. While pattern recognition remains difficult for computers, humans can often come up with far superior solutions without brute-force computation.