The rest of the table nodded. Claude put a finger to his lips.
“Okay,” he said, thoughtfully, “we said that for round two the rules could change. So we are agreed that, from now on, extra help is not allowed?”
“Agreed.”
Maurice raised a hand.
“Yes, Maurice?”
“Are you sure you don’t work for Social Care?” he asked.
Everyone laughed at that. The night was pleasantly cool and a party atmosphere was taking hold.
“Okay,” said Claude, “I will now teach you the eight-fold path. Take four strings in your hand like this…”
Claude taught them the eight-fold path and the reversing right fold. The bar they sat in cast a circle of light into a darkness filled with the sound of nothing more than the splash of the waves. Douglas took a break to fetch some more beers from the crate at the back, and Claude downed one before showing them the double impasse and the one-strand weave. The alcohol began to take its effect on all of them. Claude was giggling as he forgot the pattern for the eighteen plait for the third time and the rest of the group gradually joined in until they were a shaking mass, gasping weakly at nothing in particular. They drank more beer and counted the growing piles of strands and bracelets that they were accumulating before themselves. Maurice and Armstrong passed strands between themselves, trying to form a Schrodinger’s Cat’s Cradle.
“Now take the middle bit here and twist it around itself like this,” said Claude. “Whoops!” He laughed as the half-seen threads collapsed in on themselves to form a tangled mess. “I always get that bit wrong.”
Claude’s sheen of mysterious untouchability was evaporating in the alcohol haze. Maurice was coming to the realization that this was just another person, albeit one who had played the n-strings game many times before. Claude was losing the air of a sage and becoming more like a salesman: some of his comments seemed to be alluding to a deal in the offing.
“Isn’t it good to do something all on your own, without the interference of Social Care?” he would say slyly.
“What I like about these things is the way you can understand them,” he told Joanne, swigging beer from a bottle. “You make them yourselves; you know how they are made. You don’t need an AI figuring out all the details.” The comment sounded like something that Claude had rehearsed: a line he had been instructed to drop into the conversation.
“You know, people used to live on what they produced for themselves,” he had said, laughing, as Joanne and Michel had passed across a complicated double helix in return for the three hundred and six strands that Claude formed by performing a complicated twisting action on successive bundles of n-strings. “…and then AIs and VNMs came and offered them something for nothing. Are they any happier for it?”
“Show me how to do that,” said Joanne, leaning forward as she tried to follow the complicated movement of his hands. Claude paused in the action of pulling strands from nowhere.
“Sorry, single strands are too difficult for beginners.” He smacked his lips thoughtfully. “But I suppose I could show you this, instead…”
They huddled close together as Claude demonstrated a new move, and Maurice lost interest for a time as Armstrong called his attention back to their growing pile of bracelets.
“Come on,” Armstrong urged. “Donny and Craig are pulling ahead of us.”
Maurice picked up some of the strands, ready to restart the process of folding the Cradle. He ran two of the n-strings through his fingers, experiencing the odd sensation they gave of stillness, even when they moved. Twist them in the wrong direction and it was as if they weren’t there at all. They got back to the work. The splash of the waves, the clinking of beer bottles on tables, the sounds of chatter…
It was only a short time later that the whole table noticed that Joanne and Michel had come from nowhere to build up a decisive lead. The pile of double helices in front of them seemed to be growing at an astonishing rate.
