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He shook some of the water from his hair. I saw the droplets glint in the moment before they fell. Without really thinking about it, I raised my arm and angled my umbrella so that it partially covered us both.
“Aye, it’s…a hobby, I suppose. Well, not a hobby. I don’t sit down for a riotous evening of strategic decision making with my friends. An interest.”
“I only know a little bit about it, but it f-feels a very abstract way of looking at things.”
“Oh?” He tilted his head, curious, eyes so steady on mine.
His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure. Everybody else I know is sousedto me. I don’t think I bore them—at least, I hope I don’t—but I’m everyday, and in some very small way he was making me feel like Sunday best. “Well, in the prisoner’s dilemma I w-want to askwhythe warden keeps setting the dilemmas in the first place.”19
It wasn’t the point, of course. Just foolishness. I waited for him to tell me so.
“Well,” he said gravely, “you see, the prison is on a barren island far from civilisation, and it’s staffed entirely by people who have themselves committed terrible crimes. So while it’s day-to-day functional, the administration tends to be a little unorthodox.”20
I put my spare hand to my mouth. The taste of rain on my fingertips, something that felt like a smile. “I th-thought you were going to tell me I was being too literal.”
“I’d never. But now I think about it, aren’t plea bargains basically an iteration of the prisoner’s dilemma?”
“Only if you’re going to be all sensible and rational about it.”
“Sorry.” He grinned, teeth bright in the gloom. “I’m an engineer; I can’t help myself.”
“Why? D-do they take away your licence?”
“Yes. And then I have to spend the rest of my days working out the optimum distribution of gold coins among groups of strictly hierarchical pirates.”
I blinked up at him. “I d-don’t think I know those pirates.”
“Oh, it’s a”—he made a clumsy gesture of dismissal with one hand—“another game theory thing. You have five pirates and a hundred gold coins—”
“D-doubloons. Spanish doubloons.”
“Sorry, yes, of course. Cursed Spanish doubloons.”
“Wait, why are they cursed?”
“Because it’s traditional. And, anyway, the pirates don’t know that, they’re just trying to distribute them. There’s a strict hierarchy among the pirates, let’s call them A to E, and the way it works is this: as the most senior pirate, Pirate A—”
“Captain, I think, t-technically.” What was I doing? I never interrupt people when they’re speaking because I know only too well how annoying it is. But with my every brattish interjection, the dimples deepened at the corner of his lips. And I was half-drunk on his smiling and the power of saying things that made him smile. “And B is p-probably quartermaster.”21
“Not first mate?”
“In p-pirate”—Oh God, too manyp’s upon each other’s heels—“crews, the quartermaster is second in rank to the captain. First mate is for the royal navy.”
He tilted his head. “You really do know a lot about pirates.”
“Oh…um-uh-uh…” I closed my mouth before I unspooled into strings of unfinished syllables. At least the gloom hid my blushes.
Perhaps Iwasrather too full of piratical factoids. Though my familiarity, such as it was, existed mainly to contextualise some rather more lurid (to say nothing of solitary) imaginings.
“The captain,” the man said, blissfully oblivious to the true anddeviant direction of my thoughts, “gets to propose a distribution of the coins. And everyone gets to vote on whether to accept the distribution, including the captain, who, by the way, also gets the casting vote.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair.”
His eyes gleamed wickedly in the darkness. “Pirate. What do you expect?”
It was a good point. Well made. I swallowed.
“However, if they reject the proposal, they fling the captain into the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean, and the whole thing begins again with Pirate B in command.”
