NaNoWriMo: Day Two

One down, infinity to go

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

So follow along if you dare and see a soup-to-nuts novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide!

The Stats:

Words this entry: 2059          Words total: 3971          Words to go: 46,029

Chapter Two

When she had been a little girl in school, like many children, Eva had hated math and math homework, and like most of these children, she hated it because she couldn’t imagine any real use for it.  Through the combined failure of her own foresight (or the faulty but beautifully youthful instinct that the way things are now will stay the same way forever) she had been unable to picture a time where she would ever need to use anything in her work book once she was out on her own in the world; she didn’t need to count and exactly figure out how many oranges she had, or how far it was to the next town, or how far she had to walk along the side of a house based on the shadow of a tree along the ground.  She knew how many oranges she had, she could just look at them and see.  Her mom drove her everywhere, so there was no need to know about exact distances except for knowing when things were short trips or long ones, so that she would know how long she had to nap.  She was not Sherlock Holmes, and had no need to triangulate heights and distances of houses and trees in order to find ancient treasure and guilty butlers in the way described.  Her teachers told her she would need to know all these things, and they had all been mostly kind and completely earnest, and Eva had succeeded in disbelieving everything they’d said about the future so completely that she had never even needed to doubt.  Math was a nuisance, and she skirted it to the furthest degree she was able, while still preserving her mostly good grades.

It was only when she’d gotten a little older that math had started to call quietly to her personal sense of the interesting, just when she was getting ready to graduate and leave school altogether, hurrah.  (Or so she’d thought at the time. She had neither formed nor executed any college plans by the time she was required to, and years later would feel a sort of shameful pride at the recklessness of this plan of no-planning: the deadline had whooshed past, all her friends had been terrified, she had survived, and then later had realized the trouble she’d gotten herself into.  But while it had lasted, she had been unique, and somehow accomplished in her stubborn indolence.  Everyone expected her to go to college, and as far as she was concerned they could all keep on expecting.)

She had been taking the very last math class she would ever be required to take, a preparation class for college-level calculus.  She had no plans to take college-level calculus, but the state education board required high schoolers to take either the preparatory class or the dreadful class itself, so when she’d been picking her courses for her senior year (what a new luxury that was! couldn’t she choose not to take any math?  not much of a choice after all then, was it?) she had resigned herself, reminded herself that it was the very last class she’d have to take, and prepared to swallow what seemed the smaller pill.  It was the spring, and summer was completion and an ending, when it would be all over for good, and they had moved from the horrid matrices and their nonsense flockings, on to logic proofs, which had been tricky but not (to Eva’s uneasy and inverted distress) actually unpleasant, and had started on cryptology, the study of making and breaking codes.

The teacher had started by putting a block of unexplained characters on the overhead projector and asking the class if anyone knew what they meant.  Silence and bafflement, mixed with that complacent half-readiness of all students, to hear the answer to the question if they just waited long enough, without thinking for themselves.

Eva had stared at the block of characters in bland un-interest, resisting the impulse to look at the clock (after all, if she waited a bit longer, the minute hand would be that closer to the time the period would be over when she did look, so much the better), and the teacher at last explained that it was a coded message, and asked if anyone knew how to break it.  No one did.

Then he spent the rest of the class period showing them how it had been encrypted, and at the same time talking about the history of that particular cypher and when it had been used and invented, and by whom, and when he’d finally finished he handed out a few papers for them to look at for homework over the weekend (it was a Friday, and even worse it was after lunch, no wonder they weren’t interested), that he had worked up himself.  Not pages out of the textbook to read, codes and code-breaking was a hobby of the teacher’s and he liked spending extra time on it himself, even if the state ordained that he could only spend two or three weeks.  The students groaned when they saw that it was quite a lot of work, and the teacher had half-apologized and amended the last and longest problem to extra credit.  He had indulged, and gotten more time out of his favorite subject instead by going overboard on preparation.

One of the sheets was another encrypted message like the one he’d shown them in class that day, encoded by the same trick, for homework they were to decode it themselves or fill up the paper trying.  The second was a list of instructions for another two kinds of cyphers (one was tricky, the other just a substitution, Q for A, T for B, etc.) and example messages to be decoded by those instructions.

The last was the part the teacher had amended to extra credit, because it was quite labor-intensive.  It was an encoded paragraph, which had to be decoded using all three of the new cyphers they’d learned between the class period and the second sheet, and also by a fourth cypher they’d have to figure out on their own.  This was bad enough, but then once it was decoded, the students were supposed to come up with a new encryption for the teacher to break, and encode the message again before turning it in.  If they completed this last part they would get a full five points added to their final exam grade.  If anyone came up with a code the teacher couldn’t break, they would win the challenge outright and get ten points.

Despite the incentive, very few students even attempted the bonus question; it was getting towards finals time and their other classes were making demands on them for points that weren’t a bonus.

Eva did the challenge, and she won, and she did it the easiest way she could think of: she cheated.

Once she got the message uncoded by the first three tricks, it was easy to see the last encryption method: it was straight out Sherlock Holmes, the story about the old sea captain who’d been blackmailed or something, and whose friend had mailed him a harmless message that had terrified him with a secret meaning and he’d dropped dead.  The secret was to take only every other word, or every third word, of the message, to find the secret meaning.  Easy enough.

Then she had to come up with a code of her own, and this was where cheating came in handy.  She took the second cypher, the one from the sheet that was a little tricky, and she changed the rules a little bit, so that the method was more or less the same, but the specific steps were slightly different.  In the end the coded message looked nothing like a message coded by that method should look, so it wasn’t obvious how to start at least, but the steps were almost the same.  She couldn’t think of anything better than that, but she realized when she was finished, essentially, and quietly trying to conjure from thin air some way to make the code better, stronger, or more original, something very surprising: she was having a wonderful time.  She’d been toiling for hours over math homework, math homework, trying to make the codes work, and she’d been loving it.  She closed her folder and handed in the assignment that Monday, and decided not to think of it any further, it was troubling enough.  Then she’d started fidgeting in a small notebook over another coded message, trying to make a better way to wrap things up and make them harder to break.

The teacher surprised her even more than the discovery that she was enjoying herself had done.  He announced on the Tuesday that someone had won the challenge and made a code he couldn’t break, and that someone was Eva.  Eva was stunned, and ashamed of herself for some reason, and had refused to acknowledge that she was being called to the front of the class.  When the teacher asked her to explain how her code worked, and show everyone how she’d come up with it, she felt her spirit plunge into her socks: everyone would know she was a cheat, and they would find out right now, when she was up in front of them.  Well, there was nothing for it, she should have considered this when she’d decided to cheat in the first place.  She steeled herself, took the dry-erase pen from the teacher, and on the overhead projector sheet she began writing out the explanation, without speaking.

Soon she’d finished making everything plain, and looked up to see that the class hadn’t followed along at all.  None of this, remember was being graded; half of them were probably trying to discretely finish homework for another class at their desks instead of taking notes.  So at least she was safe so far as they went.  Or she was until the teacher called her out, any second now.

Then the most surprising thing of all happened: the teacher laughed, and clapped his hands, and said of course of course, and said that was the cleverest thing he’d seen in some time.  Far from being outraged or scandalized that she’d essentially done as little work as she could, he was so pleased he asked her to re-encrypt something else into her code, so he could see, and asked the class for suggestions.  No one said anything, except for a lanky kid in the back who said something semi-profane and was blandly chaffed.  Then the teacher realized Eva’s embarrassment and said she could sit down.

And he said something she remembered for a long time afterwards, that what she had done was very much how codes, and in a way math in general, was changing all the time: small, practical adjustments to fit changing circumstances, whatever the people doing the work could come up with to fit the bill, as it were.  Taking existing work and tweaking it enough to do what was necessary.

And there it was, codes were math.  Eva had forgotten that in her excitement over enjoying the code breaking and her relief that she wasn’t going to be expelled for a cheat.  She had done well in math, and it had been enjoyable.  But what struck home more powerfully was the revelation that if codes were math, then math was codes: it was just a way of seeing things, of reorganizing information so that it made sense.  It was something she thought about for a long time thereafter, and had a huge impact on her way of thinking, though that came much later.

And of course, all the worst trouble of her life also stemmed from that revelation: if she’d never gotten in thick with the mathematicians in the first place, she would have been able to steer clear of the Rooters and the Dashers and trying to fix their horrible mess.  And that all came much later as well.

Privately, the teacher gave her fifteen points on her final and not ten.  Even more privately, in that she said it to no one, Eva’s first thought on hearing this was “well now I can coast the rest of the semester and still graduate for sure!”

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Chapter One      ⦽      Chapter Three