AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He nodded, growing more serious now, drawn irresistibly—as he always was—by a puzzle.
“But,” I went on, “there’s a strategy they can adopt that gives them the best possible chance of surviving. What do they do?”
“Every prisoner,” he said, without hesitation, “needs to go in and open the box with their number on it. Assuming it’s not their number, which it probably isn’t, they should then open the box with the number they just found. And so on, until they find their number. If every prisoner does this, that gives them about a thirty percent chance of success.”
I should not have been surprised. This was Adam, after all, with his quick, complicated, ever turning mind. “That’s right.”
He smirked, just a little. Andthatshould have been unbearable. But of course, it wasn’t. “I know.”
I looked up the solution while looking up the problem. Unfortunately, this was one of those occasions where the answer meant even less than the question. I pressed my lips together, willing myself not to ask.
Adam watched the road, his fingers jaunty upon the wheel, satisfaction wafting off him like smug cologne.
“Adam,” I asked plaintively.
“Yes Edwin?”
“Why the fuck is that right?”
He laughed softly. “Honestly, petal, the maths is a bit hairy.”
“When is mathsnothairy?”
“It doesn’t have to be. Mostly we just bring hairy assumptions to it. But in this case, there’s a definite hirsuteness.”
“A hir-hir…” Oh dear. To translate a made-up word, one full of tricky corners and sharp turns, into breath and sound and reality. “Hir-hir…”
Adam’s car moved smoothly down narrow roads, between the hedgerows, past knotted woodland, fields flowing around them like water. A child’s world, crayon-coloured, in deepest greens and boldest blues, from a time before doubt taught you subtler hues.
“Hir-hirs-s-utery,” I finished.
“That sounds like a place you go to buy hair.”
“You mean like…like charcuterie?” Something else I’d never had occasion to say aloud. Once I wouldn’t have dared, not without practice, not without having learned the shape of the letters before I tried to place them in the world. Now they took flight as heedlessly as sparrows and I did not fret for them or fear their faltering.
“Exactly.” Adam sounded amused again. Laughter, too, was something that came easily to him. It should not, then, have made me feel so accomplished when I drew it from him. And yet I did. I always did.
“And the f-f-flocculent m-mathematics?”
This he had to think about longer. There was something especially entrancing about Adam in thought. The crease in his brow. The faint wrinkle in his nose, that made his many—and now oft-kissed—freckles dance like dust motes. A little glimpse into the past, where a marmalade-haired boy hunched over a protractor, concentrating fiercely, and perhaps into the future, to a stately,earnest grey-haired man who could still be mine. “Probably,” he said at last, “the simplest way to break it down is: suppose it’s just you and me—”
“You’re your own prisoner now? That’s v-very existential.”
“Suppose,” he said again, “it’s just you and me.”
I gave a soft, contented sigh. “Supposing.”
“And you’re one and I’m two and the setup is just the same. A room with two numbered boxes, each containing our number, and we’re allowed to open one of them.”
“Surely we might as well just pick randomly?”
“If we pick randomly, then we each have a fifty percent chance of choosing correctly, which means—since webothhave to find our own number—we have a one in four chance of not getting executed.”
“Non-ideal.”
“Indeed. So what we need to do is make sure we don’t both open the same box. Which means we follow the same strategy as before.”
“I pick the box that has my number on it?”
