Peasy Easy, as One To Three 9

①

Then she called the Journalist’s attention.

“...are you ready for your interview now?”

“That can wait. I need you to go through your recordings.”

“Recording interviewers without their permission known is against the terms of their conditions.”

“I could hear when you turned your recorder on.”

“That’s impo - ” he started before realizing he’d just confessed. Maybe he could still get around his blanket denial? He hadn’t actually said he did it, just alleged that it was impossible for her to have heard that. No, judging from the stony expression on her face, she was having none of it.

“If you knew, why didn’t you call me out on it?”

“I wanted to see if the SeerSighters noticed it first. That they didn’t suggests either they knew, and chose to overlook it, or they didn’t know, and didn’t notice. Which suggests they may not be as ubiscient as thought. You can start around where you started,” she said, pointing to a specific section of the SeerSighter’s memories.

The Journalist still hadn’t moved, eyeing her with suspicion.

“I’m not going to interfere with your editing. I just want to compare and contrast. Could you check and see if their response is halting at specific times? See if the recollection of the way events played out matches with yours.”

“I’m always up for cross-referencing my sources,” the Journalist replied with effaced boredom. He looked in dismay at the ensuing slides, checking the wavy lines that seemed hauntingly familiar. It started out fine, then things started to go askew shortly from there. There were routine questions that were supposed to be asked, but had been supplanted by the follow-up questions. Were there scenes that had been skipped? No, they were there, but they came... later?

②

She motioned to get the Accountant’s attention.

“I think I might be onto something. Do you recall when you gave the questions and received the answers? And when the SeerSighters were unsure?”

“Of course I do. I remember every question asked and answered.”

“How many times do you repeat the same question?”

“Often. I’d give them a formula, and they solved it almost instantly. They then asked me for the formula I’d already given. ‘It’s purple-green times speckled grey! You already know this,’ I’d say.”

“When did you say they asked for the same question again?”

“They - ” he started and stopped. “Come to think of it, they always asked for questions to tests that they already answered before. Multiple times. I thought they either didn’t understand the question properly, or wanted to double-check the results to be sure.”

“When were the times the SeerSighters couldn’t answer your questions immediately? Does anything jump out at you?”

“Actually, there WAS something. I noticed an odd pattern over the course of a minute. For the first 10-20 seconds, they were able to predict what I was going to say before I even said it. Then for the remaining minute, they lapsed into confusion before reverting back to precognition again. At first, I thought they could only see a few seconds into the future, but that didn’t account for when they acted like they couldn’t see anything.”

“Could you show me those instances when they occurred? Look at the times when they were easily able to answer your questions, and when they had trouble.”

“Have you figured something out?”

“I’m on the verge of discovery. You recall when redundant items showed up out of nowhere, instead of helpful tools that could’ve helped us?”

“That slice of buttered toast was very tasty.”

“Rather than focus on the tools we don’t have, we should focus on the tools we do have.”

③

The Alien Woman wasn’t accustomed to doing nothing while her compatriots worked out the collaboration between themselves, so to pass the time, she simulated the moving habits of the SeerSighters. If what she suspected was right, artificially recreating their foresight ability would be harder than expected.

The Journalist was in the process of jotting down notes of his covert recording, when he noticed the Accountant’s face normally so calm and collected was now scrunched up in frustrated concentration.

“I thought you remembered every calculation thrown your way?”

“I do, yes, but I’m having great difficulty recalling just what time they happened.”

Against his better judgement, he asked, “Would this help?”, sliding a rough timetable of events across the table.

After an enthusiastic “Yeah!” in response, the Accountant started filtering through past events at rapid speed. Meanwhile, the Journalist was stalled trying to decipher just what the SeerSighter’s memories in front of him was. The Accountant absent-mindly peered over to the side and glanced at the image.

“That’s from when she was threatening everybody with a knife, wasn’t it?”

“You can read this?”

“It came right after I talked about berry candy-coated swirl. If there’s numbers in it, I can make sense of it.”

The Journalist and Accountant once working at cross-purposes were now comparing their observations side-by-side in tandem, cross-referencing every instance a mathemathical formula popped up on the timetable, pointing out inconsistencies that didn’t quite line up.

“These are the instances when you were given the right answers, and way over here is where you were given the wrong answers. Does anything significant happen in that gap?”

“That was when the SeerSighter had trouble quickly answering my questions.”

“What if you used the numbers from the previous questions? Would that work?”

“What? No! That’s - hang on, wait... This is when I gave the relevant question, and the numbers show up here. But... the timeframes are totally inconsistent.”

“So if it’s not keyed in at specific times, what could it be?”

“The only thing I can think of is...”

The Journalist looked at the memories and went over his notes again.

“Okay, from the sound of things, they’re clearly communicating with us in a chronological kind of order. There’s been no instances where they’ve resumed a conversation from a previous dialogue that could be taken wildly out of context. There’s been no confusion in the sudden switch of subjects to something already said, or not said yet. In short, all we’ve done is confirm what it isn’t.”

“That’ll get us closer to what it is.”

“The size of the memory blocks aren’t consistent either. They’re of varying lengths completely dependent of what happens inside them. They’re arranged like...” The Journalist stopped mid-sentence and looked at his paragraph summaries. The Journalist didn’t see anything unusual at first, but once he did, it was impossible not to notice.

“A pattern emerges?”

“Paragraph breaks? ...but it can’t be that. The pattern doesn’t fit.”

“Let’s break it down further.”

The Accountant’s facial features contorted as he mentally colour-swapped within the contours of his mind. The Accountant looked at the timeline, and started drawing lines using coloured markers. He started splitting up the times the questions were asked in colour-coded arrangements, then once a noticeable pattern started to emerge, started categorizing them in orange, red and yellow instead.

The Journalist drafted out his covert recorded transcript in text form to allow for easier viewing, buoyed by the unusual visual aids beside him, the once meaningless visual noise suddenly given meaning. There were scenes that jigged his memories, some scenes that he’d missed that gave fuller context, and some scenes that gave completely different context depending on when they happened.

When the two of them were finished, they compared their findings side-by-side, creating a zig-zagging pattern.

“This is how they see the world?”

“Straightforward, but not straight.”

“These are the instances when the SeerSighter gave the right answers. And these are the instances when they gave the ‘wrong’ answers,” the Accountant drew, connecting the points in time that would’ve given the miscalculated figures. If it’s cut off here and then grafted there...” The Accountant smiled a Canary smile. “Now the numbers make sense!”

“Did you find the missing pieces?” the Alien Woman asked mid-dance.

The Accountant gave a satisfied look.

“You saw this coming, didn’t you?”

{You figured it - }

At that moment, the Girl came crashing through from above, a trail of rope dangling from her midsection. She’d burrowed down through an unused hole in the floor. How had she wound up on the ceiling?

“Not that way out there either!” She spun in irritation before noticing she was surrounded. “Oh, hello there!”, the Girl casually greeted, trying to act like nothing was wrong. “What’re you all talking about anyways?”