Morning. Sunlight streaming in through the window. Maiden, blaring from the speakers.
Akos stumbled out from his room, dizzy and unsteady. He felt terrible. Last night... what even happened last evening? The... party...? is this how drinking too much feels like?
He was still wearing yesterday's clothes. He climbed down the stairs. Anne was there already, in a state not much better than his. Dark circles under her eyes, a drowsy expression.
"Did you manage to sleep at all?" his mom emerged from one of the doorways, with a loaf of bread in hand. "Won't give you too much for breakfast; just toast, hopefully that one will stay down."
"Well... I was thinking of... pretty much something like that."
"You should have seen how you looked yesterday! Well, partying is great and all, but... having Laci's folks drive you both home... they have a pretty big car, don't they? Laci's dad, I mean."
"Yeah, sure, I didn't really look." Akos was searching through his memories, but came up mostly empty. A vague image of.. some black Mercedes?
The toast on their plate was, in the meantime, turning into smaller and smaller bits, which both of them were pecking on slowly, morsel by morsel, seriously considering skipping even this meager meal.
"What on earth did you drink yesterday, that messed you up so badly?" their mom asked, opening the balcony door. The smell of dew-covered, sun-warmed grass wafted in.
"Well... beer. And a bit of vodka."
"There was this thing like..." Anne remembered very clearly how she was promised this earlier, so they surely had it at the party too, "... vodka, with coke, milk and orange juice."
"Splendid. That combination would definitely make anyone sick. Heard you sneak out to the bathroom later during the night too... well, it's better to get it out of your system as early as possible. Anyway... how was the party?"
"Today's episode of the show 'Hyper World' has been cancelled" the announcer read, with a bored expression. "Instead, we will be showing episode 2,324 of Pokémon."
"Darnit" Anne interrupted. "We'll have to wait until tomorrow??"
"Psst... They're just saying when it will be on" Akos elbowed her on the side, then continued watching.
"... reasons, the production company has terminated the contract. We apologize to our viewers. And now, coming up: next week's weather forecast."
They missed the bus, just by a little bit. At this rate, they'd be late from school...
They were still waiting for the next one, when Aladar joined them, emerging from a side street.
"Hey y'all", he waved towards them, a lot before he actually made it there. He shook hands with Ákos and gave Anne a kiss on the cheek. "It's great that you're both here... I mean not just because of this, but... what went down at the end of the party yesterday? I... might have drunk a little bit too much... Good thing that we didn't drive there."
"Honestly: we have no idea. Guessing... that vodka might have been somewhat too much, for real." Akos responded. "Must have been fun though... Like... I heard this saying, where... you're truly a drunkard if you only know half of your life from stories..."
"Well, that's how it ended up being like. Oh well. This time it was even more crazy though... it's not like this is my first ever time when stuff like this happens, but I don't even remember which way we took on the way there. As in... the car was parked in the garage backwards, compared to how it normally is."
"Well, you surely pulled out, realized where you were going, and then pulled back in again?" Akos remarked, jokingly. "But anyway, who cares."
They did in fact manage to be late from class. Not even by a tiny bit: half of the lesson was over already. To Anne, the quiet of the classroom was already sounding suspicious.
She opened the door, and, with a quiet "good morning ma'am, sorry for being late", she snuck to her desk, and hid behind the student sitting in front of her.
"What's going on?" she whispered to the girl sitting next to her.
"She is quizzing the entire class. Graded." came the answer.
The math teacher was flipping through the grade book with extraordinary levels of attention, back and forth. From time to time, she looked up, scanning the rows of faces, matching names to grade averages, approaching the moment of decision.
"Although we're still pretty close to the start of the school year, but... apparently, there are some who had a few, um, worse grades slide in. Who might want to get some better ones. Anyone finds this description fitting?"
Silence.
"Hmm. Anne. According to this, are you happy enough with those two F's?"
"No, Ms. Hayes, but... could we... another time?"
"Look. I have no idea how you managed to accomplish this. I really don't want to say anything negative, but... compared to this, you'd write a better one with your eyes closed... even, you'd write a better one even while literally asleep!" Laughter erupted from the classroom. "I think... come on up and show us what you've got!"
"Well... actually..." Anne set out towards the blackboard, slowly, to postpone getting there as much as possible. Unfortunately, "getting there" ended up happening anyway.
"So! I think... you'll love this one!" The teacher started reading the math problem, smiling. "Consider a triangle ABC. Let P be the center of the excircle corresponding to side AB, and let it be tangent to the other sides at Q and R...
"Not sure what's going on with you, Anne." The math teacher stared out of the window, then turned back to the girl, standing around clueless at the blackboard, holding onto a single piece of chalk. "Well... I'll need to give a grade for... something. Let's say... here is this problem. No insights needed, just calculations, simple, but tedious. I won't even read it to you, here is the textbook, copy it over please."
She was starting to seriously worry at this point. Anne was one of her best... if not the best, math student in he entire year! And now... not barely reaching a C or D level... being late this much, too. What could be happening with her? She'll call her parents in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, Anne filled half of the blackboard with the math problem. Just half a year ago, seeing this, she would have said... "this is an ugly, tedious problem that one should rather have computers solve". And, to next class, she'd show up with a computer program, doing just that. Yet... she's dividing two numbers right now... incorrectly.
"Wait a bit. Look, up there... that's not entirely correct..."
"Just a moment... but it is! I'm dividing these two, like this, it's that much."
"Come on. We went over this already, three years ago, a pair of ratios..."
"What's... that?"
"My gosh. You do know this one! Come on... if three furnaces... five oaken logs... or... what was the exact wording in class?"
"Furnace... a furnace..." Anne was desperately grasping after every thought that stumbled her way. And then... she started having a weird feeling. As if, on the other side of a wall, there was something, she just didn't know what... she's throwing something into a furnace... she is... somewhere, and throws it... something small... and plastic... a CD? did she have a dream sometime? But it's like... it was important... And what was coming next? And she was thinking, next... that the four dimensions... but how do four dimensions come in here?
"You should at least be paying attention" the teacher quipped. Meanwhile, from the back of the classroom, a muffled hum of intense discussion.
"Yes? oh yeah, the problem..." she suddenly fell back into reality. She looked up to the blackboard, with that piece of ugliness of a math problem...
"Okay then, go to your place. Kriszti, come, finish it up.
Anne's deskmate went up to the board right away, and started working away at the problem. Although she was the second best math student in her year, it did take aa while, even for her. Meanwhile, Anne was standing around, in a corner, watching her work.
"What if..." she started again. "If... but... this is simple! It's exactly the side of... if you take a hypercube... like, a four-dimensional cube... the distance between the centers of its sides... which are themselves cubes... like, the planes emerging from there, and they carve out exactly this shape! So, it's... square root five over three times pi.
Four-dimensional cubes. This is starting to be too much.
A few moments later, the teacher was checking, worried, whether Anne had a dangerously high fever. Anne was trying to persuade her that she was, in fact, fine, but without much success; it did look like her face had an unhealthily pale complexion, after all. The class was over, in the meantime; students were filtering though the doorway, some of them sticking around to listen to their teacher bombarding Anne with questions like "how long have you been feeling sick".
"I think you should head home for today, Anne", the math teacher decided. "We'll call Akos soon to keep you company."
"But... Ms. Hayes... just because I got a math problem wrong..."
"Anyway, we'll talk about it later. In that case, you should feel happy to get out of school early."
"Ms. Hayes...!" Kriszti emerged from somewhere, too. "Is this the correct solution?" she was pointing at the whiteboard.
"Does it really matter? We'll look over it in class, next time."
"But... because Anne was right. The end result is... just what she said."
News about Anne arrived faster than she herself did. Akos was listening to the same story already, as per which... her sister is thinking in four dimensions. According to other versions, she was solving math problems while asleep. Others said she just has a fever.
She herself showed up at the end of the corridor, eventually.
"Do you now remember too...?" she whispered to him.
"I'm starting to... so... but weren't they supposed to delete everything? What did they mess up? Let's wait for Aladar, I think they did it to him last... hi, we were just talking about you!"
"You too?" Aladar swung his backpack too towards the pile in the small corner of the corridor, where they were holding their little discussion.
"Yep. Any ideas how?"
"I do remember this one thing... that you're explaining something You're sitting in the armchair, and... of course! That this won't be realistic enough, if... if... we don't drink half a bottle of vodka each? Could this be it?"
"Well... theoretically, alcohol blocks memory formation... so, maybe, it blocks deletion, too."
"So... is this why the writing process wasn't working on, um, my brain, the first time I tried it?" the memory suddenly jumped into Anne's head. "OMG! It worked!"
"Of course!" Aladar added. "And that's why we felt so terrible the previous night. Even now, still... But this was quite a thing. I'm sitting around, on a stupidly boring English class, when... I suddenly realize where I was yesterday night. Epic!"
"I see! It all makes sense now!" Akos's eyes lit up.
"But then... what exactly happened, after all?" Anne asked. "Not quite clear still..."
"So..." Akos started. "I saw that... you still look like you know something. You just didn't want to look like you did. So I started thinking, why this might be the case. That's when I saw the vodka bottle, the one you were holding while the write-back was happening. It was on one of the tables. Empty. So... I made up this theory. At least then, I still had something to fight for. So... I started explaining to F. F. that they can't just send us all home, not remembering anything, after just a deletion, it would look very unusual, at home. This is only normal and expected if you're very drunk, also."
"So he gave you another bottle of vodka" Aladar finished. "Me too, of course."
"Wow, this is so cool" Anne added. "But... actually... I'm... sorry. For everything. It's because of me that, almost, ..."
"That wasn't exactly you, so just relax", Akos smiled at her.
"I was, though. Half. And I remember all too very well, how I was just flowing towards whatever had been the easiest way. I promise I won't again!"
"Sounds good... but anyway, everyone is human", Aladar argued. "Even us two are just... flowing a lot, many times, too."
"He is right" Akos added. "Anyway... I know it's weird question, but: how does it feel to be thinking about multiple things at once?"
"Well... it's kind of as if... as if you were switching between thinking about each of them, except you don't remember when you're switching over... you recognize it by, if something happens in the meantime, you have two versions of memories of it. Or even more. You know, that time when..."
Anne really wasn't the type to stay depressed for too long, Akos concluded. Which is a pretty good thing, after all.
"Hey, you! Have you heard, Laci is putting up a party, and invited me too!" Kriszti announced happily.
They ran into each other in the central hall of the school, as they were hurrying towards opposite corners of the building, during the recess that was decidedly too short. Kriszti was holding a math textbook... it has just been a week exactly, after that memorable math class.
"He told me about it just before this previous class", she continued. She was slightly surprised by Anne's concerned expression (which was not to be seen especially frequently). "I asked him about whether she told you about it too; he was like, you wouldn't come anyway. Strange, right??"
"It is, but... he is, by the way, right. I've just had my fill of partying, last week. You are surely going though?"
"Sure I am! Did I mention that Laci's actually been... kind of nice, lately?"
"How interesting..." Anne remarked. "So... it looks like... I'll have to tell you about some things. About them."
"Now? There is class in a few minutes..."
"Sure, how about after school? It's really important."
Kriszti disappeared into one of the classrooms. Anne was hanging around a bit more, thinkig. How could they accomplish, somehow, that... Eventually, she also set out towards a class.
The weather was becoming colder and colder, the wind sucking all warmth away with its claws, everything it could get to. The sun was setting already, too, its flat rays shining through the inside of the bus, from the front all the way to the rear door. The layers of warm, humid air, piling up around the mass of people, was occasionally disturbed by the blue, icy draft, pushing through the window.
The door hissed open, heavily. Akos and the others have already wrapped themselves in all imaginable hats, hoods and scarves, but were cold still, even so. The wind blew their faces all red, as they started the hike towards home, from the bus stop.
"Well, no point discussing it even more. Like... honestly, would you have believed it yourself?" Akos asked.
"But... this level of denial?" Aladar shook his head. "Why, do you think it's a simpler theory that... Anne has a crush on Laci, and now is jealous of her, Kriszti... and..."
"Well, compared to them wanting to load the contents of her brain into a computer: yes?"
"Great. So we'll have to head back, playing Special Ops, on the 13th again. From today's episode: three high schoolers save little Kriszti from the claws of F. F. and his 400 pound security guards, half of the building explodes, and our minds will be stored by F.F. in a pickle jar. But worry not... last scene: Kriszti starts thinking, after all, and eventually realizes that we were right..."
"... come on. Seriously. You remember when we presented that story, with the vodka, to Fenyes? That's when it occurred to me, what if we fail here. I knew that Kriszti would be next. And that's when I finally got to the solution. So... no matter what, we just can't let this happen."
"Wait a bit!" Anne piped up, suddenly. They almost forgot she was there too, she was tagging along so quietly, behind them. Like someone who is... thinking.
"... is it an idea?"
They went to Akos's place. Anne dug up the keys, icy and frozen, from her pocket, and unlocked the door. The warmth of the inside streamed out, greeting them.
A couple hours later, they had a plan.
They drove along the main road, with some urgency. It was dark already, the kids are surely hungry already - worried the mom. It's crazy what's going on in this city, every time there is just a little snowfall.
"It's all right, if they're hungry, they'll just eat something" the dad reassured her. "And... by the way, actually... we never get the time to talk about them a bit. Aren't they a bit... weird, lately?"
"Well... Akos has been tinkering with those circuit things a lot, instead of hanging out with his classmates... and Anne is acting like as if she... knew something. And she's not glued to the TV all the time.
"Of course not, they stopped airing that favorite of hers. Poor Anne. Just about when... did you notice that Akos was about to join her too?"
"I'm telling you, this is what we should get them for Christmas. Still better than... math problems, soldering, or... they should really go partying instead!"
The Christmas ornaments were up already on the street lamps, casting a warm glow in the twilight, as the large snowflakes were slowly covering the trees along the road.
They turned left, onto their street. No one has driven down that way since the snow started falling, they didn't quite even know where the asphalt was hiding beneath them. Not that it counted much. The Saturn, winter tires or not, was definitely not designed for a road like this.
Loud music could be heard from the outside.
"See? Even our neighbors are having a party..." the mom remarked, unsatisfied. "And our kids are just... lazing around instead. Typical."
"Well, yeah." their dad added. He got out, to open the gate... he stopped, listened... and got back into the car.
"You. These are not our neighbors. This is at our place..."
"Hey! Pretty cool weather, right? Come on in..."
Anne was standing in the doorway, smiling. Geza and the others threw their shoes into the pile of numerous other ones, and looked around, curious.
"So! Here, downstairs, we have more disco-y music, the basement has heavy metal" she pointed at one of the doors, somewhat pointlessly, as it had a sign on it saying so already - "upstairs, Akos's room: mini LAN; there is Activity, Catan, so... don't just... laze around."
"Wow. That's a lot."
"Food is downstairs; also, beer, a bit of wine. Look around!" She hung around just to see them take a few steps towards the inside, then disappeared into some stairway, upwards.
"You. What the hell is this?" Geza was looked around in confusion. "Not quite sure what's going on anymore..."
This is when Akos's folks showed up too in the doorway, inspecting the ruckus in a similarly surprised way. Akos showed up a few moments later.
"Hi Mom and Dad! Did you get the text? Sorry for the late notice, we didn't know either this was going to happen..."
"Great. We should have discussed this beforehand still?"
"It was... really very important that it would happen right now."
"Well... you know what? We wanted to check in on our lake house at some point anyway..."
"... thank you!!!"
They set out on the snowy street, towards the main road. It was still snowing, they were barely making progress, slowly, carefully. The windshield wipers were clacking back and forth, monotonously.
Suddenly, a pair of headlights emerged from the whiteness. A few moments later, a sizeable, gray BMW swooshed past them, with clouds of disturbed snowflakes swirling behind it. They could still see, in the rearview mirror, how it takes a quick turn, drifts sideways for thirty feet, and comes to a halt, exatly in front of their driveway.
"Animal" the dad remarked.
Laci slammed the gate shut and strode towards towards the entry door, the fresh snow screeching under his boots. "What the hell..." he thought, hearing the music filtering out through the open windows.
He trampled through, right into the middle of the living room, his snow boots leaving neat white prints on the carpet. His gaze nearly pierced through those who were standing there, before pulling Istike out of the crowd.
"What the darnedest thing is going on here?" he asked.
"What would it be? A party!"
"What???" Laci was, at this point, not only real angry but also somewhat confused. What is this guy talking about?
"Well... the text you wrote? But I heard that even your dad's company entry road had a sign, in case someone doesn't get the text."
"Darn. Now... First. That wasn't me. Second. The party is not here; it's where it usually is! So... we can go now."
"But wait. So it wasn't you? But then who was it? By the way, I'm going upstairs, they're starting... you know? that movie, where the mutant sheep and the central heating system..."
This will not do. What the actual flying fuck should he now tell his dad? Look, it's Kriszti, right there. Holding a cookie. How cute.
He swung around and stormed out of the door.
They were sitting in Anne's room; warmly lit for atmosphere, walls covered in posters.
From the direction of the basement, Maiden and similar bands thumped forth; in the room next door, some others were fragging each other to pieces in a LAN, swapping in and out for the few machines, shouting there opinions into the world. There was also a projector, borrowed from one of the guys in school, on which a movie was playing. Real loud.
It was just the three of them, inside. As they typically are. Akos holding a laptop on his knees; on the screen, some command line interface.
"Laci just left", Aladar concluded, standing by the window. She pulled the curtains shut, and sat down into an armchair, too.
"Anne, do you know any passwords?" Akos asked.
"If they're lazy enough not to swap them out, then yes."
"OK, listening!"
"The letter 'a' five times; every second one is uppercase."
"Creative and unique. Nice! They're lazy indeed..."
"So... how does this work again?" Aladar asked.
"If I remember correctly, it has a test interface, where you can give it a search trigger, and a reaction for it." Anne explained.
"As in...?"
"So if I put in, as a trigger, that particular symbol, and as a reaction, that I'd like an apple, then... you do know what happens then. The entire thing is pretty simple, by the way. You just, of course, need to know what those simple things are."
"Great. How about you taking over this instead? I'm not very much inclined to look into F. F.'s brain anyway."
"So... um... there is no party."
"Could you delight me with a slight bit of additional detail, please?" This style Ferenc Fenyes had, quiet, refined word choices, "quiet before the storm", was already not boding well.
"Akos's crowd did something tricky to my phone number, and... they did who knows what other things. So... the party is at their place, right now."
F. F. stood up, slowly.
"Congratulations. These guys are smarter than I thought. Only if I knew why they care about Kriszti so much, they know it all too well that she's next. But... anyway. When is the next party?"
"I guess I could put one up for next week."
"You know what? It's OK. They should think they got away with this. That... it's something they accomplished."
He began pacing up and down in the room.
Why does he feel like... this isn't the way to do this?
He just visited the system. Isn't it great that there is a terminal here, too... he glanced at the newest development, the neural transmitter system, cramped into the corner of the room. And yet... he was just there, in the system, about 10 minutes ago, to check on everything. Everything working and nominal. But... as he was standing, on the big, wide, green field, as if... he had this thought. Maybe just a hunch. Just that... this is not great. It's bad.
It was so much better, in the good old times, when movies were made by people... Sure, he did enjoy the top secret AI project, but.. this wasn't the right thing. It's so... murky. Not clear. Not as clear as people actually doing the job or not and then he either fires them or not...
"I have a better idea" he finally spoke. "To hell with this entire thing. Even though... we could become fancy brain scientists at this rate. Well, not my thing. Let's make a normal movie instead. No AI. If we need extra margins, it's much simpler to do a little tax evasion or something..."