Chapter Thirty-Seven: Dot Dot Dot Line Line Line Dot Dot Dot

Reilly had always liked patterns. He found them elegant -- fractals had enchanted him from the time he was eight, when he'd seen them printed in between sections of a cheaply inaccurate science fiction novel.

Plans enchanted him as well -- he never made them, found them a little constraining (or at least Kyle did, and they'd been two halves of the same person since they were little kids, so Reilly did as well), but admired seeing them laid out. They were... pretty.

He liked to sketch them.

So that was the first thing he did that morning -- it seemed like a good idea -- sketched out plans in thin black-ink lines on the back of an old sketch of a bird's wing. (It looked like a raven in flight -- and what that said symbolically, Reilly didn't much want to know.)

It would be a misnomer to say he wrote them out -- the plans, the plan, the pattern. He didn't. Words had nothing to do with this -- as with every time he channeled the artistic side of his personality, words quietly stepped out the side door for a quick smoke and a chat amongst themselves while images -- images did whatever it is images do. Run around causing havoc, maybe.

He drew the pattern -- plans, really, he guessed, but there weren't really proper words to describe what he was drawing anyway.

Four dots, the corners of a square implied by negative space. Lines connecting the pairs -- so, two lines, drawn with stark confidence between dots that became undeniably members of a pair.

He leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment, looking at the pattern with an expression he'd perfected -- one that was patiently careless, in an attempt to tempt a good idea closer.

If he'd been really pressed to, he could have explained very lucidly why the dots represented the people -- why he didn't just doodle little portraits of the people involved.

One, dots were faster to draw.

Two, dots were simpler than the actual people. The more complex things got, the harder it was to draw a line between what was thing and what was not thing.

It went for people, too, he thought lazily, chewing on the end of his pen. The more complex they got -- well, the better you knew them, since the more you didn't know someone the easier it was to oversimplify them into little brief haiku descriptions and caricatures of themselves -- the more complex they got, the harder it was to separate what they were from what they weren't.

So it was easier to draw dots.

Speaking of easy, his subconscious said, and his train of thought jumped the rails like a cat pretending to be a train, landing neatly on an entirely separate set -- that still managed, somehow, to be related to what he'd been thinking in the first place.

As a natural consequence of patterns and plans, complexity had always been an attractive thought to Reilly. Things naturally linking into each other. It was soothing, in a way.

Especially the complexity of big, overarching plans -- plans that required the actions of others to work fascinated him. Because for those plans to work you had to rely on other people acting as you predicted.

It took skill to predict the actions of others to that degree of accuracy. He admired that. He didn't have it himself -- or, well, he thought he did, he just knew he didn't have it (if he had it) at a conscious level.

It was there. It just wasn't on a level he could access of his own accord -- it was like his talent for drawing, not something he could willfully bring up from the depths and use.

He bit down on the end of the pen, trying to persuade the sketch to come into form, and simultaneously saying Well, all right then, if you won't show up I'll occupy myself until you do by resolutely thinking of other things than the task at hand.

Like Kyle, for instance. Who was very definitely not relevant to sketching (although, oddly, Reilly found upon considering the subject that he hadn't had a go at sketching Kyle in years. Odd, considering that Reilly tended to sketch whatever was closest at hand -- and being that Kyle was his best friend, he was often what was closest at hand).

Kyle, who had always worn chunky cheap digital watches in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had thin wrists, just bones wrapped in skin really (which was true for everyone if you thought about it, but obvious for Kyle because you could count his ribs -- if you could entice him into taking his shirt off).

And it was the fractals that had gotten Reilly into studying bones in the first place (well, bones and genes, but primarily what he thought of was the bones -- and studying, anyway, in the academic sense, not in the sense Kyle liked) -- both were simple, the... underlying structure of something much more complex.

Plans were the skeletons of lives, he'd found. Or started to find -- the data were still inconclusive as always. (His data were never conclusive. Perhaps there was a little too much doubt in him. Perhaps there was just enough. Or perhaps the quantity of doubt needed varied depending on the person. He liked that answer best, he found -- and filed it away in the cabinet he reserved for definitive answers. It was a big cabinet, with only a few fragments floating around inside its drawers -- sad, in a way...)

So he drew the first shape of a plan, hovering between this dot and that dot because it belonged to both of them. This plan was theirs, but -- he drew a thin line connecting the plan to one of the other dots -- this other dot knew about it. He wasn't part of it, but he knew about it.

And these two -- he drew in another plan-shape -- these two had a plan of their own, one that the other connected pair didn't know about. (Even though it involved the other connected pair. Sometimes.)

He sat back and thought, letting his thoughts flow and mingle of their own accord. But they had begun to coalesce now -- so it wasn't long before he put pen to paper again.

Here. This dot and that dot, not in a connected pair, had a plan with each other (he sketched in another plan-shape). He wasn't sure they did, but he thought it was true, so he drew it. If he wasn't right, he could always redo it later. Not erase it -- he preferred to work in pen because of its permanence -- but redo it. Clean paper, fresh ink.

He stared down at the paper, pen gripped loosely in his hand. He knew what this was -- he was rationalizing all the complex plans he and Kyle and Jeb and Roland had gotten tangled in.

Here, between Jeb and Roland -- their plan of keeping Roland a secret. (Reilly sketched in a shadow. He sensed that wasn't the only plan they had, but he couldn't be sure.)

Here, between Reilly himself and Kyle -- their plan, the only one he really knew for certain, of getting to the bottom of whatever was going on at the School.

Here, between... Kyle and Jeb? (well, that was new) a plan of some kind. Reilly blinked down at it. Well, if he was wrong he could correct it later.

He had a feeling, though, that he wouldn't be wrong. Just a feeling, and as a rational man he ignored it (mostly), shoving it neatly off to the corner of his mind where ignored ideas went. But being a cautious man (and being Reilly -- Reilly feeling like himself again, his subconscious filibustered, Reilly drawing again for the first time in God knew how long) he kept an eye on it.

He capped his pen, laid it off to the side. (He needed to clean off his desk... but then again, he always did.) And he carefully tore the sheet of paper the sketch was on from his sketchbook. He liked this one.

Reilly taped the sketch to his wall, and couldn't help feeling a wisp of regret.

He'd figured something out about what was going on here at the School.

Probably not the right something, but... something.

It was a start.