Vlad and the Patterns
An excerpt from Path of the Spirit Runner, to whet your appetite.
This is from Chapter 8. Vlad the kazera is the point-of-view character.
“It isn’t the hindsight.” Esfir burst in brandishing a tablet. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong.”
Vlad opened an eye from his perch in a far corner of the sleek, stark room they’d long ago designated as the library. He closed it again, getting back to his attempt to catch some shut eye. He’d been out scouting for two days straight, and whatever had Esfir’s hackles up fell beyond the bounds of his assignment.
“What are you ranting about now, Esfir?” Fedor scraped back from his desk.
Vlad stifled a derisive grunt. Way to handle your female, boss.
“It isn’t the hindsight,” Esfir repeated. “It’s the patterns.”
“The patterns, of course,” said Fedor. “Calm yourself, love. Tell me what’s ruffled your feathers.”
They weren’t bad, for a couple of eggheads. Vlad had known worse, though none for so long. They tended to get worked up over the minutia of the game, though. Vlad shifted his weight on the stool and tried to shut out their chatter.
“Hindsight lets them observe the past. Vision unconstrained by the continuum of time.” Esfir’s explanation came out fast and clipped. As usual, her words had trouble keeping up with her mind. “Collective subconscious. I know we’ve been over that ground a hundred times. There’s no point arguing hindsight goes beyond genetic memory.”
“The patterns, dear,” Fedor herded her back to whatever brought her to the library.
“The Firstborn, Fedor. They sense it.”
“They sense what?”
“Probability,” she said as if that explained it all.
“I’m afraid you lost me,” Fedor admitted. “Slow down and try again.”
Vlad shoved his weight off the stool and snatched it up. He set it in the path of Esfir’s pacing. He was tired, and he’d have no rest until Fedor pulled answers out of his mate. Esfir sank to the stool like a pat of butter flicked to the edge of a warm skillet.
“The patterns they keep going on about,” she said. “Hindsight provides input to complex statistical algorithms. Socioeconomic statistics, political demographics, population shifts, even weather trends.”
“Yes, of course. The patterns,” said Fedor. The boss was accustomed to faking it until his mate tossed out enough puzzle bits that he could fit a few together.
“A form of synesthesia,” Esfir insisted. “The Firstborn are like mathematic savants. Maybe that’s a better analogy.”
“Maybe,” said Fedor.
Still faking it, as far as Vlad could tell. Esfir chattered on, oblivious. Vlad helped himself to Fedor’s desk chair and shifted his bulk until he got comfortable again.
“It must be a genetic adaptation. A mutation that does for calculation what earlier evolution did for language. Fedor, I’m convinced they can recalculate a probability model with no more effort than it takes us to string together a sentence.”
“They sense probability—”
“As we hear a symphony,” she said. “Or see a lush landscape. The world around them is an unfolding pattern of potential.”
A tic twitched in Fedor’s neck. The boss was getting himself worked up about this latest bit of theory.
“How far out can they predict?”
“Why, it’s the same as with any model, dear. It depends on event space and distributions. Standard deviations and outliers, of course.”
Meant nothing to Vlad, but he understood one thing clearly. The patterns the nenes kept harping about sounded like they’d be damned important to the game.
“Oh, to experience such beauty.” Esfir sighed. “A rich, shimmering tapestry of statistical probability.”
It didn’t sound appealing to Vlad, but what did he know? They stuck him here for his brawn, not his brains.
And his tendency to rebel just for the hell of it.