S Huang - Zero Sum Game

This was why I should never care about another person’s welfare, I thought.

“Oh, Ms. Russell. Caring about others is what makes life worth living,” Dawna chastised me.

I squinted at her. I might not be psychic, but I couldn’t hear any irony in her words. She seemed to believe that.

“I do,” she said. “Now, I apologize for the less than ideal treatment you are about to receive. But you and I have a lot we must talk about.”

She nodded to her people, and I felt a gentle shove of a strong hand on my shoulder. I took the cue and walked out among the press of heavily armed bodies, out into the night and into the back of a white van that had materialized from nowhere.

As the van rumbled to life and rolled away from the ghost town, I tried not to think about what Dawna had said. She wanted to talk to me.

She wanted to talk to me.

My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t get enough air.

Dawna Polk wanted to talk to me.

Raw terror began crackling around the edges of my thoughts.

Calm down, I ordered myself. Think. Strategize. Dawna wasn’t here now, only her faceless black-clad people who surrounded me silently, armed with M4s in their hands and sidearms on their thighs, and their well-armed discipline was trivial. Eight people became nothing when I had mathematics on my side. But the sure knowledge that Tresting was in a similar windowless van surrounded by equally armed guerillas stayed me; Dawna had told me she would kill him if I didn’t cooperate, and I believed her.

I needed a way out for both of us.

But if I couldn’t find one, how long would it take Dawna to turn me inside out, to destroy everything I was and replace it with whatever personality she chose? How long before she scraped my brain free of any errant opinion, made me a parrot for Pithica’s goals? If her earlier influence was any indication, I wouldn’t even notice it happening. I would become a puppet who blithely continued to think herself a real human being.

Panic rose, flooding my brain with static, crowding out any attempts to plan. A new and unfamiliar emotion dragged at me— helplessness.

I had never been helpless. I’d never faced any threat I hadn’t been confident of overcoming eventually, not with my mathematical abilities—

My abilities. Did Dawna know what I could do? If she didn’t, if I managed to hide it, I might have just the edge Arthur and I needed to escape. Did I have the slightest chance of it? Had I already given myself away?

Dawna could read any thought off my face; I had no hope of masking any information she might seek from me. But she wasn’t seeing every last bit of knowledge in my brain, was she? Surely that would be impossible. If she knew every last fact in everyone’s head at every moment, the deluge of information would overload her. Might I potentially be able to shield something from her, something like my math prowess, if I simply didn’t think about it?

Yes, because it always works to try not to think about something!

I squashed back the panic and racked my brain for ideas. If Dawna asked whether I was a superpowered math genius who could make like a one-woman army, a twitch of my eye would tell her yes, but unless she already suspected as much, she would have no reason to ask, would she? The question would be so far outside her fundamental assumptions; it would never occur to her unless I gave myself away. I couldn’t turn off seeing the numbers, but if I refrained from calculation as much as I could, would it be possible? Mathematical connections made themselves apparent to me all the time. Letting that sense lie latent would be as insurmountable as turning off my hearing—or, more accurately, trying to ignore everything I heard. Could I damp it down enough to hide it?

Wait. What if I did the opposite? Dawna likely didn’t know a great deal of mathematics; she wouldn’t be able to tell the extent of my abilities unless I connected them to reality. If I focused inward instead—well, not thinking of something might be almost impossible, but thinking of something was a much easier strategy, and focusing on innocuous trivialities might crowd out every thought I didn’t want to have. Messy computation would provide the perfect static, which meant I didn’t have to bind back my mathematical capability—I would instead hide it in plain sight.

Not to mention that if I provided enough white noise in my brain, I might not only have a chance at camouflaging my math skills, but potentially keep other stray thoughts from surfacing, as well. If Dawna asked what I was trying to hide, the answer would truthfully be as much as I possibly can.

She might see through the guise right away, of course. But at least now I had something to try.

Over an hour later, when the van pulled to a stop after rolling downward for several long minutes into what felt like an underground parking structure, I’d filled my brain with unending computations of the nontrivial zeroes of the Riemann-Zeta function. If that ceased to occupy my full concentration, I threw in constructing a succinct circuit and calculated a Hamiltonian path in it at the same time, and also tried to keep up a run factoring a string of two and three hundred-digit numbers, one after the other. It was math—but it was normal, uninteresting math, heavy computations I hoped would weary Dawna with their tedium the moment she saw them, dry manipulations of numbers that would frustrate her as an obvious strategy to hide something else.

Most people’s eyes glazed over the instant equations came on the scene. I hoped Dawna Polk would be no different.

I kept up the computational white noise as the paramilitary troops brought me out of the van, refusing to look at the mathematics for escape routes even for interest’s sake and pointing all my concentration inward. Forcing myself to ignore the math drenching my surroundings strained my brain, but even though Dawna herself might not be in evidence yet, I was sure security cameras were recording my every microexpression. If my ploy had even a chance of working, I didn’t want to let up the effort for an instant.

The guards marched me down several flights of stairs and through a series of bare cement hallways to a door with the weight and thickness of a bank vault’s, which they manhandled open to reveal a cellblock with a row of empty jail cells. Concrete cinder blocks formed the back wall, but iron bars partitioned the cells from each other and from freedom, leaving no privacy for the prisoners. My captors ushered me into a cell near the middle of the row and surprised me by cutting the zipties around my wrists before sliding the bars closed and locking me in. Then they left—not far, I felt sure—save one guard who stayed at attention at the end of the cellblock.

I peeked mathematically and quickly discarded every option for escape; even I’m at a disadvantage when I start out locked in a cell with no assets. I sat against the concrete wall and went back to my Riemann-Zeta calculations, chugging out another few decimal places for the imaginary part of the latest s I was contemplating.

The door at the end of the cellblock opened, and my heavily-armed friends reentered, this time with Tresting between them. More bruises purpled his face than before, and a trickle of blood marked a split lip. The bruising struck me as odd somehow, but instead of trying to calculate why, I buried myself in a Hamiltonian path analysis.

I scrambled to my feet.

“Hey, you all right?” Tresting called.

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my mind whirring on my succinct circuit and another Riemann-Zeta root in the background. “You?”

“Yeah.”

He left off speaking for a minute as the guards hustled him to the cell next to mine; they cut his hands free as they had done for me and locked him in impersonally. Once they had left again, Tresting turned toward me, rubbing his wrists. “I’m sorry,” he said, all weighty and heavy and undoubtedly sincere. “So sorry. My fault, all of it.”