An odd but mathematically gifted child named Niall understands the people around him by identifying their central "equation".
I have put the word in quotes because it seems that what he is really thinking about is not an equation but the graph of a function. For example:
| (quoted from The Equationist)
Niall’s mother was a wavy line. At the peak of each wave, Lori Skinner started writing epic historical fiction novels, or made plans to remodel their house (and once began the remodel herself, with safety goggles and a sledgehammer). At the trough of each wave, his mother spent most days in bed and cried a lot, while his father heated microwave dinners and installed drywall.
|
| (quoted from The Equationist)
The most disturbing thing was that his father’s life was no longer a predictable square root function.
|
As you might expect, this simplistic and ridiculous way to understand people does not work terribly well, at least at first. In the story, it begins to work better once Niall applies it to himself and once he realizes that he can change people's "equations".
Published in the January-February 2018 issue of Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. |
