Chapter 6

After a hard night carving chambers from solid rock, with strange winds blowing rock dust out into the forrest, to settle into drifts, breathing made easier by other strange breezes bringing fresh air to the creative trio, they decided to call it a night.

Freaky took his leave, and they promised to meet up at school the next day.

Hardcase and Steetch walked to catch a late night bus together, to go catch at least a few hours of sleep before having to face their classes.

"I have solved one of the millenium conjectures, with mathimatical proofs," stated Hardcase.

"Which one?" wondered Steetch.

"The one with the fourth dimentional conversion- the Poincare Conjecture. And I already know your next question, I invented a new process which I call Hypertensive Calculus. It takes a quantum shortcut- you would be surprised at how acurate a truely random output generator can be. You wouldn't think that flipping a coin would give you an accurate mathematical output, but as long as you never know if it was heads or tails, then plugging it into the equation gives you an accurate answer."

"You aren't seriously considering submitting something like that to peer review, are you?" said Steetch intently.

"No, even if it gets the right answer every time, as long as you don't peek at the input the truely random generator produces, it smacks too much of magic for a pure mathamatician to accept. The quantum Physicists would buy it, but it would never get past the Millenium board's award process, despite being a valid proof.

They wouldn't be able to resist peeking at the mystery variable."

"Damn, there goes a perfectly good million bucks." groused Steetch. "Is it useful?"

"Yes, I can solve almost any 'unsolvable' problem, as long as I let chance select the input variable in my hypertensive quantum calculus shortcut."

"Let me see your work, I have an idea for a little answer program..." pondered Steetch, already deep in thought. Hardcase handed over a memory stick, having already anticipated Steetch's reaction. She really respected his mind, he had a way of integrating that was miraculous.

For three days, Steetch was a walking automoton, not responding to any questions, muttering to himself, and if an obsticle was in his path, he stopped, and waited staring into space until someone took pity on him, and steered him around it gently by his elbow. Most of the students at school were familiar with his occational fuges.

At home, he disappeared into his room, and only ate when his mother lovingly put a plate of food in front of him, took the whiteboard marker out of his hand and replaced it with a fork or spoon. Any glasses of liquid were only drank if they also contained a straw. On the evening of the third day, Steetch came out of his trance, and started to write code furiously, hardly looking at his copious notes. For eleven and a half hours he coded, and at five thirty in the morning, he fell asleep on his bed, fully clothed and still clutching his computer mouse to his chest.