Noise

Xero awoke, but there was no alarm, no blaring sound needed for a body so attuned to the rhythm of a day’s work. From the moment his eyes opened, at the precise stroke of the sixth hour on the clock he didn’t need nor had, a countdown began.

With a nervous sigh, he sat up, his eyes glancing across the honey-coloured teak of his wooden floor, to the perpetual display of a nature cam on the television in his modern, minimalist, and lovely studio apartment.

Alaskan bears were planted in shallow river water, their eyes tracing back and forth in search of the next opportune bite of salmon.

Xero watched them more, but the countdown began.

Next was a normal morning’s preparation with coffee, toothpaste, soap, water, and clothes. Mundane and normal until the coat, his coat was not of his time’s fashion. The coat was expensive, long flowing and open cashmere that may drag on the ground with muted disregard for its own price. With one hand clutching the coat and the other holding a remote, he looked—no, studied, the bears once more, their quiet patience in calm black fur.

Xero was a magician. He was a knowledge worker, an applied scientist, to be exact, but in every sense of the word, he was a magician, and he proudly held a coat worthy of a magician. But logician, was the term most preferred by the collective of his profession, and that collective was responsible for standing at the edge of what’s known and informedly and decidedly stepping forward with their eyes locked in a bleeding stare onto a better tomorrow.

Their recently completed quest over the last year was to understand the conditions and changes to the city’s flow of water, with a particular attention to observing and predicting the flow and depth of the main river it all flowed out towards. That was useful and meaningful work, but it was a one-year step to this what was next. And their time was preciously expensive due to the mini-supercomputer loaded onto a truck like a small ship full of diamonds, every minute that could be planned was viewed as equally precious. They had accountants for time and the next quest was expensive and important.

The countdown began!

He felt every tick of it rolling through his veins in anxiousness of the start, and the first step outside made it no easier. Blaring sirens, growling vehicles zooming in every which way, joggers, suits and ties, cyclists, students of college or lower temporarily but loudly planted at the nearby bus stop. The sounds, the noise, but even the sight so full of constant movement spurred the anxiousness in his blood. Somehow, the city made the clock move faster. Faster, faster, faster, and Xero’s hailed ride appeared before him, and onto the highway they went where the cars roared instead of growled, and the countdown had begun, and Xero was needed he felt it all.

Coat worn he didn’t enter the vastly tall glass building of his employer, he went around to the courtyard of temporarily planted vehicles and scanned a badge against the back of the diamond-bearing ship.

“The chosen one arrives!” a familiar face greeted him.

“Do not oversell me to our new colleagues,” Xero shyly responded.

Tai, his companion of the prior year, was already seated and prepared as scheduled.

From the moment he sat in the comfortable reclining leather chair next to her, all around them set into motion, some attaching strapped sensors to Xero’s arms and chest, some injecting streams of nourishment into his veins, one fitting the adjustable sizing of the helmet over his head, and the rest to their spots behind the endless screens. Their compartment of the cargo was exactly that, a few leather chairs, helmets that were headsets, wires, and screens.

The mobile laboratory was known as an analog converter, it connected to data centers or on-premise data storage to digitally create the environments in which our logicians worked. Those environments abstracted the concepts, data, methods, and tools they used to allow for greater perspective and impact. Connecting via the internet was insufficient, the analog converter needed to be as close as possible, a single millisecond of extra latency made all the difference in their ability to conduct their experiments effectively.

The truck took them all to the site while Xero calibrated, choosing the prepared handful of tools or methods or rather, spells, he could take with him.

The site was the country’s meteorological administration, now in collaboration with both Xero’s company and the country’s administration for fisheries, rivers, and oceans of the prior quest.

He opened his virtual eyes, and instead of the short grass and roiling river with a web of smaller streams he had played his role in taming for the past year, to his and Tai’s overwhelming dismay there was only the entrance to a cave in front of them. Into a mountain that dwarfed their company’s glass tower.

A beeping sound played in their ears to signal a checkpoint met on time.

“On we go then… Just like before?” said Tai with no less worry.

“Just like before…” Xero walked alongside her into the cave, his hands clutching onto three scrolls within a familiar coat as the roar of water that could turn any truck shy grew louder and louder with each step.

Their quest was simple: find a red fish greater than thirty centimeters in length. The volume of the running water’s voice was discouraging though.

As they entered darkness, Tai held out a scroll and after a few moments of still focus with needlessly closed eyes, flares shot out of the scroll, following her command and illuminating the cave and their clear path ahead.

Gingerly, they trudged forward until the ledge of an aperture was ahead of them, and open paths to their left and right before it. Looking out of the opening in front of them—as tall and wide as the cave mouth itself—they expected to see only stalactites above and running water below.

One of Tai’s flaming sprites almost immediately sizzled into a puff of white vapour.

“Tai… This isn’t like before. Why is this not like before?” Xero asked, confidence quickly sizzling away.

“They warned it would be more of a challenge than the last,” she found the words after drawing forth a replacement flare, bringing the brief glimpse of the task ahead back into full vision.

“But this much? So soon? They oversold us Tai,” said Xero.

The relentless river in front of them was not confined to the ground or gravity, it flowed in full force up, down, left, and right, swerving in long meandering curves all around the vast cave, into tunnels below and above, hinting at a massive labyrinth. Their last quest was to analyze a web of streams and one river, almost two-dimensional on the ground as a river should be, while the new had thrust them against an entire country’s length of river coiled into one crusted cave of chaos using a new dimension.

“Or do we underestimate ourselves?” she asked.

After a moment to ponder despite his heart rate beating along to the ticking clock of their funding for the quest, Xero answered, “You may be correct, Tai. And the task itself may not match the scale of what we see before us. Our fish may be waiting nearby. On we go Tai.”

The jump from analytics by applied scientists to a leviathan river in a mountain cave labyrinth may be unclear, but bear with me, all we need to know right now is that our logicians must retrieve a red fish greater than thirty centimeters in length.

Running along the left path, at its end, they found a river at their feet which ran into a tunnel to connect to the rest of what they last saw. With intense gazes into the frothy flow they could only see blue and grey fish zipping by them, but they had no intention of waiting for their red while their seconds bled away.

Tai held out her second of her three scrolls, pointing at the water with the same intense gaze as spectral strands weaved out of the scroll and into the water, collecting into the shape of a ghostly red fish much like the ones they seek.

Her apparition swam forward with the rest of actual fish into the tunnel, the scroll from which it came unraveled and ink appeared in drawing a map of what they’ve seen and where her fish swam.

They had no intention of waiting for their ghostly red to find a target.

“Ready?” Tai asked Xero.

He answered by wrapping a hand around her side, and with her doing the same, hip to hip they leapt into the river. Tai’s third scroll pointed down at their feet as they stood firmly on the surface of the water, and when she pointed ahead they slid forward along the river at great speed.

Flaming flares around them maintaining their sight, two scrolls in one hand, Tai’s focus was perfect and unwavering. Though her apparition poured forward much faster, they raced through the dark tunnel, inclining off ground-level and along the water’s rapid mid-air spirals and curves in the coil of the first and huge open chamber.

Xero peered ahead, around, below, everywhere in his search, but Tai’s apparition quickly beat him to the task after completing a circuit of the chamber, a spot of red appeared on the inky map, flickering as her ghostly summoning tried to follow their target.

They skated to a halt and turned around to begin their pursuit with Tai expertly navigating a path to intercept rather than simply chase. The streak of red was faintly visible as it darted across a self-contained tube of water that was about to connect to their own in mid-air.

Tai allowed her apparition to fade away, leaning forward to increase their speed, they drew nearer to the intercepted fish. Xero clutched one of his scrolls, ready, waiting for Tai to bring them close enough, and as he raised that scroll to cast the fish burst forward instead of following the natural drop of the river. In a display of its full lengthy scaly magnificence it jumped forward and wriggled its tail as if to propel a short flight, and with a splash it fell onto a new portion of river and swam on.

Hand to Xero’s hip, Tai swung them into the turn it took to remain parallel to the target, Xero’s eyes glued to the fish while she took as many daring glances as she could at the speed they maintained.

Xero withdrew his scroll. He grabbed another from his coat, an unusual and hollow one which he peered through, and through that scroll he could see a slim red line between the fish and where it would next be. He watched the fish follow the five second prediction of its path, and he rotated the scroll as the line lengthened to ten seconds, then fifteen, twenty, thirty, growing thicker with more possible variation of movement at each lengthening turn of the scroll.

With the right amount of foresight decided, Xero drew a third and final scroll—Tai pulled him close and tight as a sudden turn almost left him flying off like the fish—he aligned the third scroll to the hollow scope of the second. A light of brilliant radiance began to blast forth from the third scroll, Xero tensed his muscles in strained control to resist the recoil of its cast and with his strength he maintained the beam through the scope of the foresight scroll.

The light shone forth onto the portion of river their target swam through and illuminated the thirty seconds of predicted path for Tai to see and with a single glance of that and her map their new path was determined.

She brought them close. Close enough that Xero withdrew both scrolls, readied the first, and with a striking motion he aimed ahead of the red fish. The water erupted like the blow of a whale and the fish was ejected towards them. Heavier than expected it wriggled and writhed to maneuver a sooner drop to a current below.

Frustration twisting his lips, freshly soaked from the spraying splash of his cast, the fresh scent of their target still in the air, Xero pulled away of Tai. “Catch me!” he shouted.

He threw himself to the side and off, and as he fell, eyes down at the fish below and to his right, with a grunting cry he dragged his soaked water scroll from right to left, and with that movement the river itself bent to his will.

The entire flow of the water moved across the open air of the cave’s chamber. Tai followed the current at the fastest speed, grabbing Xero just before he fell in to be swept away by the water. His focus remained strong after the complete trust that she would manage the feat and with vigorous blows he erupted sprays of the water ahead to lift out their target. With it mid-air, and as they slid through the white shower of his spell’s aftermath, Xero whirled around his scroll to gather the water in the air around the red fish, and held it tightly in an orb of his control.

They slid along the chamber’s circuit back to the tunnel from which they began with their focus just as tightly taught as the invisible magical tethers between them and the flares and the floating orb of water containing a fish which they controlled to follow them.

When their feet touched land again, wobbly, their heaving breaths were heavy, but their wet smiles were light in a shared glance.

The fish was thirty-four centimeters in length, thick and strong, with red scales that glimmered white at the edges, and pink glossy eyes.

Xero used whatever breath he had in his lungs for the eruption of a loud victory cry, and Tai struggled to catch her own breath in her joyful laughter.

“I’ve heard no beeping, Tai, we finished with time to spare,” said Xero as they reversed their steps towards the cave’s exit.

“And after such a costly mistake, too. This tricky one of scales had swam right by where we first stood,” said Tai.

“Is patience not just as expensive?” Xero found his soothing logic as they exited the cave, and Tai wavered her hand in doubt over their urgency-fueled choice.

Their helmets were lifted off, and they blinked through the adjustment of their eyes to renewed sight of their mobile laboratory, and applause from the team greeted them.

“Even better than expected. One big red fish, one meaningful insight. Now we only need to automate the entire process into a single scroll’s cast, but there’s time, right?” Someone’s joke from behind a screen turned the applause into worried groans.

As they stepped out into their company’s courtyard, “Early finish or not, dinner might still be best for tomorrow. Do you agree?” asked Tai.

“Agreed, see you tomorrow,” said Xero.

From a truck to a car, the city’s noise did little to help the scheduled rest of half-open eyes, and the countdown continued. Xero stepped into his apartment, and turned on the perpetual view of Alaskan bears. Paws planted, one of them was there again, a female, he had learned, and she looked left and right through the water slowly while licking her lips, looking frighteningly docile. She stayed there for several minutes, and so did Xero, at his door watching. The black bear took one step forward and dipped her head for a bite, lifting out a salmon the length of a bear’s arm with ease. Then, strolled to the side to enjoy a meal.

Xero exhaled, finding the slowness that seemed to only exist in his apartment, “One day… One day I’ll find the wisdom of your patience.”

Appendix

For your convenience, a list of our lead duo’s selected spells and their meanings:

Tai’s spells: (1) fire flares for light -> asking the right questions to show the path forward (2) sliding across the surface of water -> familiarity with a particular domain or data type to progress in a chosen direction quickly (3) fish apparition/ghostly creation -> an imaginary/hypothetical mimic of the answers they’re looking for.

Xero’s spells: (1) foresight of a fish’s movement -> forecasting meaningful values (2) projecting the image of the fish’s future path -> communication and visualization of forecasting (3) controlling water -> data transformation and manipulation.