Chapter 3

Olivia was quite happy for Ethan Brice to think she was nothing but a lowly Babbage machine technician, whose only purpose was to serve him and the other self-satisfied academics at the Institute. At least she had earned her position on merit. Ethan, she suspected, had benefited significantly from the reputation of his father, a celebrated professor of astronomy, not to mention his undoubtedly expensive education. That Ethan was unaware of her unlikely collaboration with Clarence Kettle was strangely exhilarating, even if she and the professor would soon be forced to stop their work.

After their early-morning encounter outside the Anderson Building, she took her habitual route through the wooded meadows behind the Manipulator, towards the bedsit she shared with two colleagues. She paused occasionally to watch the red squirrels scuttling among the leaves as they gathered their winter cache, and to admire the cobwebs that hung, heavy with frost, among the hawthorn thickets. When she reached the river, she caught a flash of blue, stark among the muted dawn tones, as a kingfisher darted along the riverbank. She lingered after it had gone, savouring the contrast with the subterranean console room in which she had spent the night.

It was here she had first met Professor Kettle, she recalled with affection. She had always been intrigued by his determination to pursue his own research interests, and his apparent indifference to the more fashionable areas of physics studied by the likes of Ethan and Taraskin. But, until that day, she had never spoken with him. It had been warmer then, the hawthorns laden with blossom, the riverbank patrolled by dragonflies ….

***

Professor Kettle was peering at an ant nest and muttering unintelligibly to himself when she came upon him. As he leaned over on his cane, a small, round object slipped out of the breast pocket of his waistcoat and rolled into the undergrowth. He did not notice until his hand reached up to pat the offending pocket, at which point his demeanour changed instantly. With a cry, he threw himself to his knees and clawed at the ground around him.

‘Professor Kettle!’ Olivia called. ‘I think what you are looking for is over there.’ She pointed to what appeared to be a black marble sitting beneath a patch of nettles.

Launching himself at the undergrowth with unlikely agility, Professor Kettle grabbed the marble and dropped it back into his breast pocket. Only when he had levered himself to his feet with his cane did he acknowledge her presence.

‘God bless you, my dear,’ he said, between heavy breaths. Producing a comb from within his jacket, he rearranged the hair on his pate. She noticed then that one of his eyes was a lighter brown than the other.

To her surprise, he proffered his arm and invited her to accompany him. Normally, she would have baulked at such a suggestion, far preferring her own company. But the incident had piqued her curiosity. She let him lead her along the riverside path beneath a row of birches, the sun glinting through their restless leaves.

Professor Kettle seemed disinclined to elaborate on the episode though, and steered the conversation elsewhere when Olivia enquired about the marble. She nodded politely as he pointed out a robin perched on a branch, a bluebell in the undergrowth, and the ripples left by a feeding brown trout, each time praising ‘the Lord’s wondrous creation.’ Nonetheless, his hand frequently found its way to his breast pocket.

She might have made her excuses and continued alone, had Professor Kettle’s meanderings not then taken an unexpected turn.

‘Of course, His greatest creations are the laws of elemental physics that allow such wonders to exist at all,’ he said, before proceeding to explain in detail the role of discretised aetherics in allowing the robin to navigate, the bluebell to attract bees and the trout to breathe.

The professor spoke ponderously and was prone to distraction, but as they wended their way through the meadow, it became clear that his languorous mannerisms belied a deep scientific knowledge.

In spite of their sedate pace, by the time they emerged from the trees he was breathing hard. Olivia slowed further, and they continued in silence.

Her thoughts had just returned to the algorithmic problem that had originally motivated her stroll when Professor Kettle touched her arm.

‘Jackdaws, if I am not mistaken,’ he said, pointing to a distant flock of birds flying towards the Manipulator.

‘How can you tell?’ she said, squinting up at them. They were little more than chevrons silhouetted against the clear sky.

‘From the ripples,’ Professor Kettle answered. ‘There is information contained in the undulations that pass through groups of animals as they move. Each species has its own characteristic. You must pop into my office for a cup of tea. I would be delighted to show you my work on the matter.’

Olivia watched the jackdaws alight on the upper flank of the Manipulator. Buried far beneath them was the stuffy, artificially-lit console room in which she had been working. The display would still be flashing, awaiting a line of instructions she had yet to compose. But here on the surface, such concerns seemed less pressing. Besides, there was still some time before the second half of her shift.

‘Lead the way,’ she said.

Professor Kettle’s office was a haven from the sterility of the rest of the Institute’s facilities. Rugs, armchairs and coffee tables covered the floor and yellowed newspaper cuttings fought for space on the walls, an eclectic mix of stories about country churches, famed Victorian magicians, and the latest rumours about a new field discovered at the Institute.

Professor Kettle ushered Olivia towards an overstuffed armchair then produced from his desk a sheet of paper covered in shaky handwritten equations.

‘These terms represent the location and velocity of each member of the flock,’ he explained, pointing out some of the symbols. ‘And this vector represents a set of emergent quantities characterising the flock.’

It did not take long for Olivia to work out why the equations looked so familiar.

‘They remind me of thermodynamics,’ she said, recalling her own studies at the Institute. ‘You start with the positions and velocities of gas molecules, then macroscopic quantities like temperature and pressure emerge.’

‘A perfect analogy!’ the professor beamed, as he busied himself making a pot of tea.

‘In which case, what do your emergent quantities mean?’

He shrugged. ‘I have no way of actually measuring them.’

It was not until later, when Olivia had returned home, that she realised she might be able to apply her algorithmic skills to Professor Kettle’s problem. She spent the evening at her desk, furiously typing instructions into her Babbage machine. The following day, as soon as she had finished work in the Manipulator’s console room, she knocked on Professor Kettle’s door, clutching her machine.

‘It must be several dozen years since I last had an unannounced visitor,’ said the professor, his face creasing with pleasure.

She settled herself into armchair, hinged open her machine and pressed a few keys. A cloud of tiny points appeared on the screen, surging backwards and forwards and curling itself into denser regions before spreading out again.

‘A shoal of fish!’ Professor Kettle cried. ‘How wonderful!’

‘I prefer to think of it as a herd of bison,’ said Olivia. ‘After all, I only had two dimensions to work with. But I thought we might be able to use it to compute your emergent quantities.’

Over the following days, Olivia visited Professor Kettle’s office whenever her shifts in the Manipulator allowed. Nestled in the armchair, with her machine on her lap and the professor close at hand to answer queries about his equations, she amended the algorithm so that, in addition to simulating groups of animals, it would compute the emergent quantities.

When the algorithm was finally ready to be tested, she called Professor Kettle over. His hand rose to the pocket of his waistcoat as he bent down to look at her screen.

Sensing an opportunity, Olivia said, ‘The item in your pocket – is it very important to you?’

Professor Kettle dropped his hand to his side and pulled a small square object from his trouser pocket. ‘A blood sampler for my diabetes, nothing more,’ he said, then added more brightly, ‘Shall we?’

Olivia glanced at his waistcoat but said nothing. She entered the relevant commands into the machine to set the cloud of dots swarming around the screen. The machine’s cooling fan began to murmur. Before any emergent quantities could be computed, the screen went blank. The professor looked at her quizzically.

‘It’s overheated,’ she said, lifting the machine off her burning lap.

Several more times she reran the simulation, each time with a smaller number of points. But by the time she found a size her machine could handle, there were too few individuals to compute the emergent quantities at all.

***

Olivia kicked her way through the frozen leaves on the riverside path, though they yielded too easily to absorb her frustration.

She had dedicated most of her spare time since those first meetings with Professor Kettle to making her algorithm more efficient, in the hope it would enable her machine to compute the emergent quantities. But while she was working in the professor’s office yesterday, an administrator had appeared with news that threatened to halt the project entirely.

He had begun respectfully enough, thanking Professor Kettle for his years of service to the Institute since his arrival in 1954. Then, without inflection, the administrator had stated that, as was customary at the professor’s age, he was now expected to retire and that his office must be vacated in a matter of weeks.

Professor Kettle had remained silent, head bowed in resignation. When Olivia protested, the administrator had declared dispassionately that there was ‘insufficient merit in the professor’s work to make an exception.’

Fire rose in her cheeks as she recalled the incident. If only they had something more than Professor Kettle’s speculative equations to show for their work, then perhaps the decision could be reversed and he could retain his access to the Institute’s resources. She resolved to redouble her efforts on her algorithm.

Of course, if she had access to a more powerful machine, she might be able to compute the emergent quantities. The colossal Babbage engines within the Manipulator would cope easily with her algorithm, for example.

And she knew exactly how to access those.