Fiction: By the Numbers

It was Thursday, which meant that instead of going to the main office as usual, Joshua headed to the old office, on the sixth floor of a 1920s Romanesque revival-style office building in the old part of town with dodgy heat, a dodgy elevator, and the finest electrical infrastructure the 1920s could provide. He did not like these working conditions and he did not understand them, but he had accepted that neither relocation nor an explanation were forthcoming, so he chose to live with it because the work brought its own fulfillment.

He nodded to the administrative assistant whose name he did not know. He had been discouraged from interacting with the staff at this office more than was necessary, another element of his working environment he neither liked nor understood. His life seemed sometimes to be full of these compromises, accepting conditions he didn’t like or didn’t understand because of the compensation.

Four days of the week, his compensation for doing boring mathematical analyses was largely financial. The job paid well and the environment was pleasant. Thursdays, he came to the old office and suffered the stairs and the cold and the isolation because of the puzzle. He stepped into the small office with “Research” written on the door and drew the shade. He hung his jacket over the back of the chair, unlocked the filing cabinet and put his phone inside the top drawer. Then he closed the cabinet and twisted the dial to a different combination. With a muted clunk, the cabinet swung away from the wall. He ducked through the hole behind it, and pulled a strap on the rear of the cabinet to swing it back into position.

The adjoining office was similar to the one he’d entered in floor plan, but very different in its details. The paint was gray, chipping, and undoubtedly full of lead oxide. The sparse furnishings and decoration were distinctly mid-century. Steel tanker desk, low-backed chair that didn’t adjust in any useful direction. Where the door should’ve been was an unplastered stretch of brick. The computer on the desk was antiquated as well, though not nearly so much as the rest of the room. He twisted the old-fashioned rotary light switch and the old-fashioned ceiling lamp lit up. He turned on the computer and waited an impossibly long time for its startup sequence. The old computer lacked any sort of modern amenity, but was adequate to his work, connecting to some private network to outsource any significant computation, and it had access to the internet, provided by way of something called a transient virtual client which was adequate for anything other than video and showed him advertisements for shops and services in Kyrgyzstan.

As usual, there was a fresh stack of papers in the top desk drawer. Photographs of crowded public areas, accompanied by pages of metrics. He never received context for the photographs or explanations of the metrics. When one of the senior partners had offered him this assignment, the cryptic nature of the work had been part of the hook. He was to study the data and mark certain correlations and patterns. He would not be told why he was doing this or what he was looking for, as the results had to be kept utterly isolated from outside assumptions, and if he knew what he were looking for, it would taint the mathematical purity of the process. If he were somehow able to work out the meaning of the analysis for himself, it would disqualify him from performing it, but, he had been assured, it would open certain other prospects for him, currently undisclosed.

He had never actively attempted to root out the larger purpose of this work. It was clear to him from the beginning that if he were to find enlightenment, it was expected it would come from the work itself. So he had simply applied himself to it diligently. He very quickly started noticing patterns in the numbers. At first, he received terse but frequent feedback. It was rare for any of his finds to be marked incorrect, but quite often, several of them would be returned marked as false positives. Over time, he came to understand contextual clues which determined, say, whether a particular Beatty sequence or Hahn series was a near-miss or or genuine interest. He rarely received any feedback these days.

On very rare occasions, he would find a sequence of numbers or an indistinct shape in an image that seemed incorrect or incomplete. He could request more information, and the following Thursday’s packet would contain a revised document. He sometimes suspected these errors were deliberately inserted to test him. Last week, he had marked two such documents. They were at the top of this week’s pile.

“REQUEST DENIED. DO NOT PURSUE,” had been stamped over the marks he had made. This wasn’t something he had seen before, and he was a bit worried that he was in trouble. It had been an unusual decision. One photograph had been of a crowded metro station. The other, an art gallery. In both pictures, he had noticed the same striking woman, wearing a business suit and a broad-brimmed blue hat, looking directly at the camera. He wouldn’t have marked it down at all, but when he broke for lunch that day, he’d seen her again. In person. At the cafe in the four-story nineteenth-century Italianate across the street. He was so surprised that he’d had to force himself not to stare. Joshua had stopped at a convenience store on his way back and bought a cheap magnifying glass to confirm the pictures. It was indeed the same woman. On closer inspection, he recognized a man in one photograph beside her— he had been in the cafe as well. The companion was likely in the second photograph too; Joshua saw a man of similar build, but his face was obscured.

So he had inquired about the woman, and been denied. That was unfortunate, because it meant that the coincidence was going to linger on his mind. He flipped through the rest of the day’s papers quickly.

There she was again. This did not seem like a coincidence. He looked for the man, and eventually found him. He had to consider this carefully. He was told not to pursue the woman, but he hadn’t asked about the man. He set the photo aside.

Joshua moved the keyboard to the side, set his briefcase on the desk, and opened it. Em was another one of the compromises in his life, though what relationship wasn’t? He accepted conditions he wouldn’t have chosen for himself because of the compensations. The compromise today was an article she’d asked him to review. The abstract sounded like junk science, but he could give it ten minutes to let his mind clear.

Without any sort of engineering background, the bulk of the article was mostly meaningless to Joshua, something to do with impurities in photovoltaics and something called “micromorphous silicon”. It was frustratingly coy, aiming for a level of scientific respectability that precluded coming right out and saying what it wanted to imply. The mathematics, at least, he could understand. By this point, he was expecting some straightforward p-hacking or circular analysis, but… the calculations actually seemed pretty solid. Okay then. Obligation fulfilled. That was all he was expected to do, after all. He still thought the article was junk, but exactly what kind of junk was beyond his expertise. All he could give his expert opinion on was the numerical analysis, and—

Something looked familiar. He’d printed the article because it was more convenient than reading from the ancient CRT monitor, but he hadn’t wanted to waste a ream of paper on the raw data that was also attached. But there was something in the short table of sample data on the last page. He moved his briefcase to the floor and replaced the keyboard, then waited an interminable minute to be connected to the transient virtual client, then waited more as he pulled up the email. He nervously made a quiet ticking noise with his tongue as he painstakingly copied cells from the data file into the statistics program. The same distribution. These weren’t patterns he’d seen before but…

It was like there was a pattern of patterns. A metapattern. The patterns were different, but places where they occurred was the same. The same underlying logic, the deep pattern, that underwrote the pages of data in his special research project was here, purporting itself as the output of some kind of solar panel that could sense the “aura” of living beings.

Things clicked into place. The characteristic markers that distinguished real matches from false positives. They were delimiters that partitioned the data by— he took a page from his work queue. Now that he knew what to look for, it took only a few seconds to mark the page up. He compared it to the picture. Yes. The number of partitions was the same as the number of people in the photograph. He tried a few more, and the pattern held.

And then it didn’t. The fifth page of numbers partitioned into twelve blocks where only eleven people were visible in the corresponding picture. He inspected each block of numbers in turn. There. The fourth block matched one of the patterns he’d spent a year looking for. It frustrated him that he didn’t have old results to compare with. He went through the rest of the pile as quickly as he could. Every time there were more blocks than people, one of the blocks would show a characteristic sequence. But he couldn’t un-see it; without comparing his old work, he didn’t know whether he’d have found the same things. He couldn’t be sure he’d have found all of these sequences before. This new technique was faster, but what if it was giving him some new kind of false positive?

He didn’t have a full sense of what it meant, but the implications were coming together in his mind. The number sequences were some form of metric in the form of variable-length records, most of which corresponded to people in the pictures. The anomalous sequences corresponded to something not visible in the picture. Something hidden, perhaps? He could just about imagine this as some kind of security technology designed to find, what? Criminals? Terrorists? Fare-jumpers?

Joshua looked out the window. He was getting hungry. Maybe he should break for—

He couldn’t be certain it was her, of course, not from this angle. But given the choice of coincidences, it beggared his imagination less to assume it was her than to contemplate the possibility of encountering some other woman in the same broad blue hat. Twice in consecutive weeks.

He had three pages. Two from last week, and one new one. Joshua hadn’t even thought of her when he had been marking off the blocks that represented individual people. No two blocks were the same. No two blocks had ever been the same, for that matter. But there was a similarity. He could see it now. Or at least, he thought he could see it now. He would need to find a way to avoid confirmation bias.

He re-checked everything. Did some numerical analysis. He still couldn’t characterize it, and that was infuriating. But it felt right. A set of three blocks, one from each page, that, while otherwise unremarkable, were somehow related to each other and to none of the other blocks in any of the pages. And then he found a second set of three. The man and the woman. It had to be. One set of blocks was him, and the other was her. If he was right, it confirmed that the figure with the obscured face in the second picture was indeed the same man.

And then he found a third set of blocks.