Yeah, yeah, Mette and Seo-yeon said to Andres. But maybe the unpopularity is due to the fact that no one has yet produced a branching narrative game with great 3D graphics and a kick-ass story line. Game designers have shied away from spending enough, so the examples thus far have been visually weak, and plotted in an annoyingly deceptive way so that the alleged hundreds of choices converge on a mere half dozen possible endings. Let’s make history!
Back when, etc.
Speaking of too much like reality, here she is in Seattle
without a fucking clue
what to do
The bus pulled in at 7:43 a.m., forty-three minutes late. 43 of course is prime, and 743 is a Sophie Germain prime, meaning when you double it and add one you get another prime, namely 1487. Sophie Germain was a brilliant nineteenth-century mathematician who was barred from a career because she lacked a cock and arguably therefore a brain, and who further disqualified herself by having two breasts, one of which turned cancerous and killed her at fifty-five. Sequences of Sophie Germain primes are called Cunningham chains, and it’s obvious that for prime numbers larger than 5, only those whose last digit is 9 can generate a Cunningham chain longer than three. Mette walked north on 6th Avenue because she could see tall buildings in the distance, then couldn’t resist a left on Weller, because The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a great flick of long ago, then right on 5th, then left on Jackson because The Lord of the Rings (but not The Hobbit), then right on 3rd, then left on Main, because who can resist a Main Street in the good old U S of A, and this randomish route brought her to what in any video game would be a beckoning quest destination, i.e., a fenced-in space of artificial falling water and granite-tubbed trees called Waterfall Garden Park, complete with, according to the sign by the gate, an Easter egg—it was the birthplace of the United Parcel Service. So this parcel sat down on a cold composite bench under a leafless birch and is waiting for some service and now it’s 9:19.
919 is a palindromic prime.
No one else is in the park. (It’s cold for sitting.)
It would appear that parcel service is not forthcoming.
how to get a clue
re: what to do?
It occurs to her to wonder whether 743 and/or 919 are happy numbers. She spent a couple of days when she was eight or so identifying all the happy numbers up to 1000. Take a number, square each digit, add the squares to make a new number, repeat. If the original number eventually reduces to 1, it’s happy. If it reduces to the repeating sequence 4, 16, 37, 58, 89, 145, 42, 20, 4, etc, then it’s unhappy. The implication being, it’s unhappy to be stuck in an endless loop with a bunch of other dead-end losers, whereas it’s happy to be solitary forever.
She used to be able to identify happy numbers on sight, since there’s a relatively small number of combinations of digits that work (obviously, the order of the digits is irrelevant). But her memory’s gotten a bit hazy. She does remember that of the first 1000 natural numbers, 143 are happy. So for two randomly chosen numbers from that set, the chance that both are happy is about 2 percent, and the chance that at least one is happy is about 26.6 percent. She opens her notebook and starts figuring: 743, 74, 65, 61, 37—unhappy. 919, 163, 46, 52, 29, 85, 89—unhappy. So the message from the math gods is, she’s stuck in an endless loop. Which maybe means she should get back on a bus and return to NYC, rinse and repeat.
Not that she believes any of this. Messages from beyond. It’s a sign of how empty-headed she is that she’s even pretending.
She gets up, shoulders her burden, exiles herself from the garden. West on Main, north through a park, west on Washington because Denzel, north on 1st, then soft right on Cherry because that’s her favorite pie, which her mother makes every July 4 for her own birthday and then gets teary. Munch on cherry pie for four blocks, at which point on her right is a modern glass building, which turns out to be Seattle City Hall. She has a vague feeling the famous library is nearby (she loves google-street-view-walking in random cities), and heads up 4th, and after three blocks there it is, in all its Koolhaas coolness, like a magnified head of a Rock-’Em-Sock-’Em Robot. (Andres has a YouTube channel netting him about $300 a month on which he plays and reviews toys from the 1960s.)
Now it’s 10:21 a.m. And—1021 is another prime. And—1021, 6, 36, 45, 41, 17, 50, 25, 29—it’s also unhappy. Probability of three randomly generated numbers all being unhappy, 63 percent. If it happens twice more, the probability falls below 50 percent, at which point it becomes a message from the math gods.
She continues up 4th, takes a left on Seneca because there’s a street in Ithaca with that name, then right on 3rd and left on Union because that’s what she foolishly wanted with Alex, then right on 2nd and left on Pine, because she foolishly pined for a union with Alex, then right on 1st and she’s sick of this game so she just keeps walking northwest on 1st, thinking of her father.
Her mother told Mette, when Mette was six, that she thought it wasn’t healthy for her not to know her father. Her mother had not known her own father when she was growing up, which had led to all sorts of unhealthy fantasizing and false hero worship that she (her mother)
