Читать книгу UniteDead Kingdom - Stuart Irving Irving - Страница 5

Several months passed. Zan travelled, drank, played video games, went to archery club and tried to establish, once and for all, a new fitness regime. That failed when he realised, quite simply, he had nothing specific to get fit for. His plan to form his own trading firm crumbled for a similar reason; once he sat down and did the sums he lost the appetite for more risk and stress in his life. He'd worked for over a decade with little more than a week off and, despite squandering most of it, particularly in his time with Angela; the diligence of overpaying his mortgages had saved him. The champagne years were over but after he sold his two investment properties and paid down his debts it gave him the option to concentrate on quality of life. The five percent of his last day’s trading profit - which would have been sixty million pounds - never came. Let's face it, he thought, the money would have been good for my financial freedom but not so good for my state of mind. I didn’t expect to get it anyway. Maybe I should be thankful.

Predictably, Angela didn't take to the new low-powered, slothful Zan and high-tailed it for her next banking Alpha-male. He mourned her loss for nearly a month, then slowly but surely distracted himself with the search for a new girlfriend. As time marched on he thought less and less about her; once an hour became once a day, then once a week. He ended up missing her much less than he thought. Maybe the drama of my exit from the bank has killed my spirit for good, he thought, in one of his many days of reflection afterwards. Then as time passed, slowly and insidiously, reflection became isolation and then depression.

On one of his rare positive days, Zan got the urge to walk the streets of South-East London, hoping his next adventure would come to him. He didn’t have to wait that long. On an exceptionally hot summer’s day in July 2030 Zan nursed a coffee in the local Starbucks. The window read his unemployed status and science background, and flashed an advert only he could see …

“YOUR LOCAL SCHOOL NEEDS YOU.

As you are no doubt aware, tragedy has struck the local school maths department and we have lost three of our talented maths teaching team. We cannot let their passing prevent us from carrying on the educational needs of the school. We urgently need someone with a maths/science/engineering degree to help our local children pass their ULs (University Level exams). Salary starts at …”

The salary is shocking, Zan thought; about the same as my annual spend on booze and party powder in my trading days. But it would mean being productive and doing something good for a change. The idea of being intellectually challenged but not working from dawn to dusk had a novel appeal too. He typed the contact details on his sleeve and carried on his day.

Just a week later, after the excessive form-filling of the application, the first interview proved to be tougher than imagined. There were question marks on his commitment. And, according to the deputy head, the other candidates were fully qualified teachers with long track-records. They’d been flooded with candidates due to the emotional job advert and the media attention on the tragedy. But ultimately, the school committee couldn’t spurn the marketing opportunity of hiring the ex-head of derivative trading at the world’s most famous investment bank.

So, barely a month after seeing the advert, he found himself on a Sunday night in late August 2030 anxiously preparing his only formal clothing (which had doubled as his interview suit) for his first day of teaching. He looked at himself in the mirror and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time; at peace. He looked forward to passing on what he knew to eager young minds. He felt relieved at not having to do battle with the markets while colleagues screamed at each other. Most of all, he no longer felt haunted by the past, both immediate and distant.

Despite all the high-pressure moments he’d been through, Zan was somewhat daunted by the first morning of high-school. Not dissimilar to how pupils probably felt moving up from primary school, he reflected. They gave him a gentle start; three maths classes a day in the first term. Teaching proved to be unusually varied and immersive. Standing in front of rows of naïve, expectant young faces who hung on his every word was more rewarding - and at times tougher - than he expected. Along the way, there were pupils whose insight on the subject gave him some pause for thought. That was certainly the case on April 8th 2031, some seven months after he started: -

“… so as I was saying, the idea of the normal distribution is quite simple. Much of life is random and unpredictable so the best we can do is to estimate things as having a likelihood. This likelihood has to be parameterised. By ‘parameterised’ I mean it has to have its elements defined, such as confidence level of the estimate and—”

“Sir, why don’t you just admit this is all bullshit?” The voice came from the back of the class. Zan froze. For just a fraction of a second Zan had an acute sense of being exposed. It was a momentary disquieting feeling of having been called out as a fraud and the palpable sense that not only was it true, it was only a matter of time before EVERYONE FOUND OUT.

Who am I to be teaching them, he thought, when only a few months ago all I was doing was gambling disgusting amounts of money on the markets. I was heralded as the ‘New London Whale’ in the papers because of my trading size. Wasn't that the best day of the year when I read that article? And now I’m teaching. Any anyway, I always thought children were a fucking annoyance. And teenagers? One of my best years was a decade ago, a year off after university to pork and smoke my way round the Pacific Rim. Those girls were barely older than the ones in this class weren't they? The trophies I kept; what am I, a teacher or a soulless predator? Shut up! SHUT UP! I don’t—

“collect their panties anymore!”

Zan suddenly realised his eyes were shut and had been muttering to himself in front of the whole class. Did I say any of that out loud? Shit, shit, SHIT! He slowly looked up. The uneasy quiet in the classroom made the front row shift uncomfortably in their seats. They weren’t gasping in horror, thank god, so they couldn’t have heard me. But they do think their teacher was having a mini mental breakdown. Zan grimaced. One cheeky question should not have put him through this. The kid who asked the question was, as expected, the troublemaker Clive. Zan composed himself and looked straight at him.

“OK, what do you mean by that, Clive? What makes you think you can use language like that with me? Be VERY careful what you say next …”

“Sorry sir. Well, you’re talking about life being random, right? Then you said that we fit a probability to it, so that we can guess … eh … estimate things. But isn't that what gets us into trouble in the first place?”

“What trouble do you mean Clive?” Zan cleared his throat and felt annoyed at himself for taking this little troublemaker so seriously.

“Well just look at the news,” continued Clive, warming to his theme. “Human beings. We’re a mess! We seem to just lurch from one crisis to another. First it was the Caliphate, then Argentina, and now the entire Mediterranean is being over-run. It’s just one disaster after another! So, pretending that life can be described statistically is a joke! It's nothing but deeper and deeper crises, again and again and again …”

“Clive, no one is saying that we can use statistics to accurately predict complex behaviour and socio-political events. But we have to start somewhere. Statistical distributions can be illustrative and very useful for simple processes, later on we'll learn …”

“What’s simple about life, sir? It’s the most complex thing there is. We think we’re smart because have created it in a lab, yeah? But we still can’t forecast the next terrorist attack or which part of the Internet will fall to the Caliphate. In fact, let's take your field. No-one knows what type of investment will suffer the next financial meltdown. Why? Because of peoples’ greed. You of all people should know that!”

There was a room full of “oohs” from the class on his zinger. Then there was a pregnant pause whilst Clive beamed smugly and Zan considered how to respond. Why is this fucking kid so goddamn insightful in class but in constant trouble for being late or never returning homework?

“Clive, in fact, everyone … do you remember when I was introduced to the school at your assembly at the beginning of term?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, do you also remember the reason given for me being your new maths teacher?”

“Because you were semi-famous for a short while last year, sir?” one girl answered. Some nervous laughter.

“Not just because of that, Karen. It’s that I have seen the very worst of situations right in the epicentre. And because these situations are driven ultimately by the intersection of maths, science and human … frailty … it gave me a unique insight into how maths can affect all of our lives. Now, Clive is correct in saying that we cannot predict human crises. Very well done for that timely insight, Clive, it’s true; the worst events in the world cannot be firmly predicted. For example, who could have predicted you wearing such feminine socks?” There were a few gasps and shrieks of laughter at this and immediately Clive's face went bright red. They all moved to look under the table to see what Zan could see and the laughter grew. His socks were mauve with a yellow butterfly. Clive looked down at them in disbelief.

“AWWW no way! That was my sister pranking me. IT WAS! She knows I just wear the same socks every day so I don't look. They're her socks!”

“We all know it Clive, you love gaying it up in your sister's socks, homo!” shouted Ralph, the dim-witted class bully at the back.

“Yeah, Clive you cock-socker!” another kid shouted. It was Derek, his face beaming with pride at his crude pun.

“Right everyone that's enough! Ralph and Derek get out! Stand either side of the door until I came out to have a chat. A joke's a joke, but that again, is unacceptable language. Now, on with the lesson.”

Clive glared at everyone, still red-faced. He’s some sort of burgeoning computer genius apparently. Well, nothing wrong with being taught a lesson in humility.

“So yes,” continued Zan, “part of maths is starting with what we DO know and seeing if that can help with stuff we don't. We don’t necessarily know that taking certain illegal drugs harms us … calm down, stop sniggering, this is serious … unless we collect the evidence and use the statistics.” Am I right though? How did my advanced degrees help when it came to my final trading blunder? I didn’t see my last tumultuous day coming or how to cope with it when it did. My new career should be easier now that I’m no longer chasing money. But shouldn't I be chasing

[the truth about my Dad]

at least something?

Zan felt out of sorts the rest of the day. He couldn't let himself think that a seventeen year old boy had gotten to him. It felt like he bested Clive at the time. But afterwards the victory felt hollow at best. He barely looked up from his feet walking to the car park to go home, a caricature of a man down on his luck. Only once did he, to glance over to see a beautiful pond in the school grounds he hadn’t noticed before. Why do swans always looks so graceful and yet haunting? he thought morosely.

When he got home he felt drained and ill-at-ease. He started to doubt his change of career was going to work out. Later that evening, he still felt groggy and so lounged around watching the news. Reports grew about a ‘mass poisoning’ in Slovenia making people sick and violent. Zan was a sucker for information when it came to a breaking story and decided to stay up late to see how it developed. He had been barely six years old in the Canary Islands on holiday when the terrorist attack hit the twin towers in New York. He remembered watching it like it was a movie. When his Dad called from the lab and explained what had happened, he felt sick with fear that he was next in line for attack from suicidal jumbo jets. In his mind the planes themselves were somehow complicit. And when Buenos Aires was reduced to ash he stayed in the office overnight, just like everyone else.

He unrolled his TV and threw it at the ceiling so he could go to bed and watch whilst he drifted off to sleep. The news described the “grave civil unrest” in a market square in North Slovenia. ‘Grave’ thought Zan idly. What a strange word to use. He drowsily considered the possibility that he had imagined it. It was only quarter past nine but he started to feel himself drift off. Onscreen there was iSelf footage of people randomly attacking each other. It looked like a disastrous flash mob stunt.

In the corner of the square there was a young bearded man moving towards an elderly couple standing cowering at the surrounding mayhem. The drone-cam zoomed in on the man. He wore a torn hospital gown which trailed behind him as he moved slowly towards the elderly couple, presumably to move them away from the riot. Zan almost drifted off again, but then saw something which jolted him awake and made sleep impossible.

Something, in fact, which changed everything.