image [https://i.postimg.cc/wBgcc6xt/04.png]

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. Other times, it’s the only one, so it sucks to be you if it isn’t that great. So when Roslyn looked at my tablet and merrily chirped, “Can’t!” and saw Booker starting to turn our way, I went with the option I had available to me.

I slipped under the table and crammed myself against the wall, definitely not banging my head on the way down. That would have been embarrassing.

That did resolve the immediate problem, as Booker walked down to our end of the diner without noticing my presence. If he noticed my drink sitting alone on my side of the table, then he probably didn’t think anything of it. It was far more likely that said drink’s owner had gotten up to go to the bathroom, get something from their vehicle, or was doing pretty much anything other than hiding under the table while trying to avoid the frankly sickening amount of gum stuck to the underside of said table.

“How’s it going down there?”

I could have done without Roslyn’s cheeky comment, but I especially could have done without Booker taking one of the bar seats across from our booth. I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop an involuntary whine of distress, teeth aching as too many questions and thoughts piled into my skull at once. What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he at school? He was supposed to be at school! I was supposed to be at home. Did he know I was supposed to be at home? If he saw me here, then he would definitely mention it to Mom, and she knew I was supposed to be at home.

The quiet thump thump of Roslyn gently bopping my tablet on the seat beside her leg cut through the furor of my thoughts and background noise of the diner around us, drawing my eyes like paper clips to a magnet. “Need this?”

Maybe more of my whine got loose than I thought, and she thought I was trying and failing to speak again. Or maybe she expected me to know what to do with the device after her single, quite invisible demonstration of, and little info dump about, magic that wasn’t magic except sometimes it was magic. But regardless of why Roslyn had thought to pass down the tablet, what mattered was it was not a solution to the problem at hand.

Still, it was the solution to finding a solution, which would have to do for the time being. I tugged the tablet free of her light grip and fiddled with the message on it before laying it on the seat beside again and tapping her leg. [Keep it down, or he’ll hear you! Solutions??]

“Naaah, he’s only close enough to hear some quiet whispers from us, and I’m holding my phone to my face, so we’re safe for a learning exercise!”

She was joking, I thought, teeth throbbing with pain. She had to be joking.

She was, for once, not joking. “Ooo…! Maybe it’s a pop quiz instead? Yeah… Yeah! You don’t want to be seen by your brother, so how can you do that? Pass or fail time!”

I may have been a tad vicious as I grabbed my tablet, hammered out a message, and smacked it on the seat. [You said you can’t!]

“There was an implicit ‘now’ in your, ‘Hide me,’ request.” Ooo, I could practically see the stupid grin spewing all that smug. “I have a program all prepped for hiding me. Never know when you might need one of those, after all, so it’s awfully important to have one of those ready and raring to go. Don’t you agree?”

If Roslyn’s plan was to snarkily annoy me into trying something foolish, then it was working. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to complain and give as much as I got all the way down. [I don’t know how to do that. If only I had a better teacher to show me how.]

“Ouch! Might have convinced me to be the cool teacher and give you a cheat sheet if only you had used a tad more honey, Ervinegar. I guess instead you’ll need to use…” Her phone dipped down into view and tapped against my tablet’s display with a sharp little click that had me worried for the integrity of its glass, then in the most moronic, faux dramatic voice she had affected yet, she concluded. “THE IN-TER-NET.”

I grabbed my tablet to type out, [I don’t have that here!] only to blink, dumbfounded, as the full signal icon blinked into existence in the upper right corner of its display. I was sorely tempted to look a gift horse in the mouth and demand an explanation for whatever Roslyn had done (because she had obviously done something), but what I wanted more than an explanation right then was to get out from under that godforsaken table. I might be smaller than the rest of my family, but that did not make me small, and it was cramped—not to mention uncomfortable—under there.

As I pulled up the search engine and wondered how to go about phrasing my specific need, a pair of legs sidled up to our table, and while I didn’t recognize them, I did recognize the voice they were attached to.

“What, did you scare the kid off, Roz?”

Best to keep it straightforward and direct, I thought. On Monday I had been nearly overwhelmed by millions of results from my basic searches, and I wasn’t interested in repeating the situation, much less right then.

“You know me, Sammy,” Roslyn replied as I typed, ‘how to hide in a diner from someone I know,’ into the input field. “Big, bad, and scary. R-awrrr.”

There were still, somehow, entirely too many results for such an awfully specific request, so I blindly poked the top of the list, fingers crossed.

“He’s just in the bathroom or something, right…? I’d like to imagine you aren’t so irresponsible that you would let some kid too scared to speak in front of a stranger just wander off without supervision. Please don’t shatter my last, most basic faith in you.”

The website surprised me by loading instantly, but it ended up being completely useless, an article on something called a ‘wiki’ detailing how to hide food at a restaurant. I tapped the back button and quickly revised my search to be, ‘how do I hide in plain sight from someone I know.’ That search gave me a more appropriate article, ‘How to hide in plain sight,’ so I hurried to tap it.

“He’s doing just fine. You worry too much, Sammy.”

Again, the website appeared immediately, and again, to a completely useless batch of information. Changing my appearance and behavior wasn’t something I could do just do in the middle of… Right. Duh. Magic.

“I am worrying the exact right amount where you are concerned, Roz. Especially with you back in town long term.”

‘Code to change the appearance of something,’ was my next search. I was getting better at keeping my eyes fixed on the first result from all the practice, so in a twisted way, at least I was getting something out of this god awful ‘quiz.’ For the third time, the page loaded without any kind of delay; magic, clearly, but not the kind I was interested in right then. I was more interested in the block of text explaining the snippet of something called ‘CSS.’ Color, shape, size, alignment. I could change anything. Be anything.

“I do like to keep folks on their toes! But hey, my burger’s gonna get awful cold at this rate, so howzabout you let me get eating, hmmm?”

And there was something I badly wanted to be.

“Just… Just do me a favor, Roz? Please? Whatever’s brought you back to town… be careful. Okay?”

I copied a snip meant for adjusting a specific thing and started fiddling with it. I only had the barest clue what I was doing and was improvising more than anything, but I could figure out enough from the examples. I adjusted the name after # to ervinscrivens, took a shuddering breath, and spelled out the truth I had known for a few years by then.

gender: female;

“Mmm’kay,” Roslyn said, voice distorted by what I could only assume was her burger, “Yugothit!”

Run.

Samuel left without another word, and in the silence that followed two things happened. First, absolutely nothing. By which I mean, I ran my stupid, half baked script, felt a dim sense of something failing, and nothing else changed or happened whatsoever. A feeling like lead settled in my gut, the spark of hope that had begun to bloom in me smothered into nothing, crushed beneath the weight of reality. Distracted with my devastation, I almost missed the second thing that happened:

“Here’s that pickup order for you. Sorry it took longer than expected.”

“That’s okay, still plenty of time before my next class. Take care,” Booker replied, then he slipped off his stool and left.

With excruciating slowness and eyes downcast, I crawled back up onto my seat and dumped my tablet on the table. Roslyn didn’t say anything, so after a minute of background noise filling the silence between us, I tugged a fry free from the pile next to my sub and took a tentative nibble. It tasted like ash. Ash and failure and disappointment.

“This…” Roslyn finally said, dredging my eyes out of the depths they’d sunk to. She was pointing at my tablet, its screen still on and The Coder still open to the hastily thrown together mishmash of code I had pulled together. “… is an interesting choice.”

Numb, I reached over and pressed the home button. Each letter felt like it took an hour to find and press, like I was fighting my way out of molasses, not typing in the notepad. [Didn’t work.]

I expected something irreverent or outlandish. Maybe even a bad ‘grade,’ since Roslyn was ostensibly my teacher. I didn’t expect her to ask, “Would you like to see how I’d do this, if I were you?”

More than anything. “… Yeah.”

----------------------------------------

Roslyn may not have given out a grade for my pop quiz, but she was still undeniably a teacher. Nobody but a teacher would give homework on the first day of school… again.

“First, I want you to write a short essay about the Mandela Effect,” she told me on the drive home. When I groaned at being assigned an essay, she gave me a big grin in the rear-view mirror. “Your moans of dismay sustain me! I demand more! You must also write an additional essay—Shock! Horror!—about loops. This your teacher demands!”

I threw my hands up and gave her the best look of confusion I could muster.

“You want me to teach you how to do magic? To do the real stuff, like what you were trying to do under that table? Then I better get two solid essays on those topics because knowing about them is important. Now, open up your tablet and write down this email address: [email protected]. Got that? Okay, read it back to me through the universal language of dance!”

I most certainly did not read back anything, through dance or otherwise, but after I had been dropped off at home and eaten my reheated chicken parmesan sub (which tasted significantly better with the special dessert of my promised reward on the horizon), I got straight to work on those essays. Funny how proper incentivization can inspire someone to learn, isn’t it?

I know nothing about you, dear reader, so I cannot possibly offer you a reward tailored to convincing you to read my essays on the Mandela Effect or loops. What I can offer you is the assurance that Roslyn had good reason to make me research the topics… and also the threat of a pop quiz.

Hey, if it works on students, then maybe it will work on you.

Nelson Mandela is well known for dying in prison in the 1980s, but there’s a problem with this well-known fact: It’s false. Mr. Mandela lived and actually went on to become the president of South Africa, but that story is a different essay. When a group of people misremember the history of an event or person like this, it is known as the Mandela Effect, and there are several reasons it can occur: False memories, priming, confabulation, and, in the opinion of some people, the intersection of alternate realities.

The meaning of a ‘false memory’ is evident from the name. But how does someone believe a false memory? Quite easily, according to some studies, because memory is malleable given the right circumstances and suggestion. If a trusted source tells you how something happened, you may believe them despite originally knowing the truth, especially if you want to believe what you’re being told. Scary, right?

So if I wanted you to believe a false memory, how would I do it? By taking advantage of priming and confabulation. Instead of asking you, “Do you recall what happened yesterday?” I might ask, “You recall me getting my tablet yesterday, right?” By priming you to believe I got a tablet yesterday, you are statistically more likely to ‘recall’ it happening, even if it didn’t.

This type of spontaneous memory is a confabulation, and it can present in a few ways: Filling in a gap in a memory you already have, thinking something that happened recently occurred earlier, mixing up two real memories, or even creating a new memory you believe to be real. Some people are reportedly more susceptible to this than others for a variety of reasons. If I were to speculate on examples of this in my life, I would think that people who were exposed to conflicting experiences because of factors beyond their control might qualify.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Then there is the outlandish: Intersecting realities. This explanation for the Mandela Effect requires you to believe in more than one reality, but believing in two or more realities does not necessarily mean you believe this is the true cause for it either. False memories, priming, and confabulation are all good, even likely, explanations for the Mandela Effect on their own, after all. But if more than one reality did exist, and a group of people were forced into one that wasn’t their own… Well, I imagine they might feel just like fish whose aquarium was shattered by someone taking a sledgehammer to it.

So if you suddenly find out it isn’t Monday but rather Wednesday, then you can thank the Mandela Effect for whatever justification you make up to explain it to yourself. The only question left then is whether you thought it was the beginning of the week because the brain is fallible… or because someone just smashed your aquarium.

I was wrapping up my essay on the Mandela Effect, curled up on the couch, when Booker arrived home with Mom, having picked her up from work. Though she was drained and weary from the day, she thankfully didn’t need his assistance to walk like she had that morning. Her hair, which she normally wore in a messy bun, was loosely gathered and secured by a large alligator clip with plenty of stray hairs escaping. I knew the stitches were there, but even I couldn’t see them hidden beneath.

“Hi, honey,” she said as Booker closed the door behind them, “how was your—”

I cut her off, having left my tablet on the couch to rush across the room and throw my arms around her. It only occurred after I had already done it that I might exacerbate some unseen soreness, but if I had hurt her more, then she didn’t show it, sweeping me up into a hug herself.

“Oh, honey bunch, I love you too,” she said, voice soft as she ran her hand over my hair, nails gently scratching my scalp. I hugged her tighter. “I’m okay, see? It was just a few stitches, nothing to be concerned about.”

“Where did you get that?” Booker asked, his tone one step shy of accusatory demand. Almost, but not quite.

I knew what he was talking about before I had even turned. He had moved to the couch and picked up my tablet, eyes tense with suspicion as he looked from it to me. I waved him over, pointing at my mouth while pantomiming talking. He blinked, bemused, and came back over, handing it to me.

I switched from my essay to a blank note. It was time to see if I was right about why Roslyn had me look into the Mandela effect. [It’s my tablet from school, the one Mom got from my computers teacher, Ms. Yorran, the other day.]

The truth, though neither of them knew that, but also priming them for confabulation. Booker just stared, uncomprehending, but he had never seen the tablet that first day, so that made sense. The real test was Mom, and miracle of miracles, she didn’t disappoint.

“Oh! Oh, yes, I’d almost forgotten,” she said, eyes distant for a moment. “I met her… I think it was Friday when I ran by the school? Interesting lady… But yes, with us still making arrangements for your disability, I thought it would be good for you to get a jump start on your schoolwork. The assignment she gave you was an essay then, was it?”

Technically, Roslyn had assigned me essays. They just weren’t the assignment Mom was thinking of. [Two of them, yeah. I was about to do the other, but look at what else I can do!]

I waited for Mom to read the message, Booker peeking over her shoulder with interest, then I pressed the home button and opened a new app, an array of squares filling the screen. Nothing Roslyn had asked me to look into; this had been for me. If my tablet was going to be my voice… then I wanted it to be my voice.

I tapped the box labeled ‘Hello,’ and in a soft lilt, my tablet said for me, “Hello!” I then pressed ‘Explanation,’ so it added, “I can’t speak, so I use my tablet to do it for me.”

I had expected Mom to be happy, but she wasn’t. She was thrilled, sweeping up in another hug, even tighter than before. “Ervin, honey, that’s amazing!”

I couldn’t recall the last time Booker had said genuinely a nice thing about me, but even he admitted, “That’s really cool. How does that work?”

I double clicked the home button, switching back to the notepad. [It’s something called text to speech, TTS. I type up things I expect to need to say, and it reads them for me.]

“My smart little man! I can’t believe you thought of that all by yourself!” Mom said, starting to choke up by the end, overcome. She pulled me in for yet another hug, and even I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed from all the physical affection. “I just… I am just so proud of you, honey…”

Whether he meant to or not, it was Booker who brought us back to normal territory, “Nice job, man,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “When is dinner? I am starving.”

“Oh! Yes, I better get that lasagna started,” Mom said, giving me one last squeeze before letting go and bustling into the kitchen.

Booker retreated to his room, leaving me in the living room alone. For several long moments I just stood there by the TV, stunned by my own success. It worked. It had really worked. That more than anything affirmed that Roslyn was the real deal. I could have been mistaken about how easily she had unlocked the door earlier, and the sound magic she claimed to have spun in the diner had been exclusively pointed outward, impossible for me to verify. Even the trick where she had given my tablet internet by tapping it; who knew what new technology existed that I hadn’t heard about in a backwoods town like Meckleville.

But what I had just done with Mom? What Roslyn had clearly known would happen? It wasn’t magic in the sense of what I was going to learn in the coming months, it wasn’t thaumaturgy, but it was proof positive that Roslyn held the answers I needed.

And to get those answers, I had a second essay to write.

Loops are everywhere in our day-to-day lives helping us solve problems. Even tasks as basic as counting items and searching for our missing keys are actually loops in disguise. Is it any surprise then that for a programmer, implementing loops is one of the most common tools they’ll use, if not the most common?

But not all loops are the same. A program might use a for-loop to iterate through a list a set number of times, searching for or manipulating items in the group. But what if you didn’t know how many times you needed to loop because the end was some other condition that needed to be met? In that case, a while- or a do-while loop would be used to keep looping and processing items until the condition was finally met. You wouldn’t beat a nail into wood with the end of a screwdriver when you could use a hammer, would you? Using the right tool makes a task easier.

And then there is the recursive loop. If a for-loop is a hammer, and a while-loop is a screwdriver, then a recursive loop is breaking out a nail gun; extremely effective when used right, and extremely dangerous when it isn’t. A recursive loop can be simple and elegant when used correctly, but it can cause awful errors and fail to get you to your solution if not constructed properly.

To make a recursive loop the right way, you need to start with finding a base case, something simple where the solution is known. That base case gives the loop an end to work towards instead of infinite repetition, just like a for-loop repeats a set number of times or a while-loop repeats until a specific condition is no longer true. The other pitfall of a recursive loop is the price of it. Computers only have so much memory, and more and more has to be given up until either the base case of the recursive loop is reached or the program crashes.

Loops are tools, and like any tool, there are right and wrong ways to use them. Used poorly, loops can make a problem worse than it was, but the right loop used the right way can make a masterpiece.

Crashing. That was a horrifying thought. If we couldn’t break the loop, then would it keep going and going? Would it break? Break me? Make me pay more, something worse than just losing my voice?

I shivered as I opened the email application loaded with my assigned school email and sent Roslyn my essays along with the message, [Please tell me you know how to end the loop??]

I waited a few minutes for a reply, just in case Roslyn saw my email and immediately answered, but nothing came in. Needing a distraction more than ever, I set my tablet aside in exchange for a book, but it was no good. Normally they were a refuge from the madness in my life, but I just couldn’t get my mind off of the loop and the Price I had unwittingly paid to make it happen. It wasn’t fair! I lost my voice because of a mistake, and what did I have to show for it?

I had only made it a few pages by the time Mom declared dinner was ready, and even those I imagined I would need to reread. With a sigh, I flipped back to where I had been and put my postcard back into place before setting the book aside and grabbing my tablet. It was only once I got to the dinner table that I realized there was an elephant in the room—or not in the room, rather.

Dad wasn’t home. He wasn’t home, and the phone hadn’t made so much as a peep.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Mom said, answering the question everyone was thinking but nobody could find the courage to ask. “Just got held up at work or something. You boys go ahead and start eating while I set some aside for your father.”

She might as well have ordered us to eat toxic sludge, judging by our enthusiasm. I had eaten a large, not to mention late, lunch and was still riddled with worry besides. Booker managed better than I did, but despite his earlier claim that he was starving, he barely had three bites. Mom made two or three valiant attempts to kick-start some conversation but gave up when it just wouldn’t take.

Eventually Booker managed to eat half a serving instead of his usual seconds. “Thanks for dinner,” he told Mom, quiet as he finally pushed his plate away. “It was good.”

I fumbled with my tablet for a second to bring up the TTS app to follow suit, tapping the button to make it chirp, “Thank you,” with more enthusiasm than the situation really called for.

Mom gave us both a distracted smile, one perhaps a bit softer when she turned to me. “You’re wel—”

The phone rang.

For a moment, the world stood still. All of us—even Mom, I think—had been hoping for that call. Waiting for it, even. It still caught us all off guard, like watching a balloon you know is going to be punctured and still flinching when it happens.

“Oh!” Mom stood, catching her chair a bit as she stood, the wooden feet lifting briefly before thunking into the linoleum again. The phone rang again. “Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t bring it in here.”

It rang a third time as she hurried out to the living room, muttering, “Should have thought,” to herself as she went.

As she answered, “Hello?” an awful question of my own reared its head.

What if? God, just thinking it made me start to sweat, an ache welling up in my teeth. What if what everyone was afraid of but didn’t want to say had happened…? What if Dad had been badly hurt—or worse…?

“Yes, this is…” Mom trailed off, the left behind silence sharp enough to cut.

If something had happened… I could do something about it, couldn’t I? My loop could, the one still in place. I had fallen asleep on the roof last night and woken up in the house, the loop putting me back onto the couch for the following morning despite having been nowhere near it. There was no way I had been found and carried in, right? I would have woken up. It had to be the loop… Had to be!

“Okay… Okay.”

The car! The car that had nearly hit me. What if it had? What if I had been the one hurt? What if I had…?

“Okay… Thank you.”

What Price would I pay?

Mom set the phone back down into the base with a clack of plastic on plastic and called out, “He’s safe!”

I heaved a sigh of relief, a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding set free. Booker did the same, rubbing his face with both hands, elbows on the table.

“Went out over to a friend’s house for some drinks after work and forgot to call,” Mom told us as she swept back in. Even with the talk of divorce, she was also clearly relieved to hear from him. “Too drunk to drive, so he’ll stay there the night.”

Relieved of the worry that had pooled in me in unawares, I found myself questioning. Drinking wasn’t something Dad did much, and certainly not on a work night. It was ostensibly a Monday, and if the loop weren’t distorting people’s perceptions—or however it worked, exactly—it would have been Wednesday. So why had he been drinking, much less to the point of getting drunk? Dad had his problems, but drinking to excess wasn’t one of them.

I almost questioned Mom, tablet at the ready to express my confusion and concern, but as she set about putting away the leftovers, I hesitated. Maybe I was just imagining it, but her movements looked almost mechanical. Precise and withdrawn, like she was following a set of instructions. A trickle of dread and fear wormed its way into me, my thoughts returning to the loop. Was that it? Or was I missing something?

Booker stood to put his dishes in the sink to soak, and after a second’s consideration, I followed suit. The only way I could eliminate the loop as a concern was to stop the loop altogether, and that meant checking if Roslyn had replied. With Mom cleaning up and Booker retreating into his room, I returned to the couch for a measure of privacy. I dismissed the thought of using my room almost as soon as it occurred. The concentrated smell of smoke was too repelling to entertain.

I opened the email app and saw Roslyn had indeed replied over dinner, the app apparently not set up to notify me. I spared a thought to make sure I rectified that, but tapped her reply instead. The issue of notifications could wait until I had resolved the far more pressing concern of the loop.

I had expected a snip of code to run or the instructions for how to assemble the same myself. I had even considered it might be something more traditionally magical, like the precise steps for performing a ritual to cleanse unwanted magic or for crafting a potion from otherwise normal foodstuffs. I got none of those things. In fact, I got almost nothing at all. A reply barely longer than the desperate plea I had sent her earlier.

[Nope, but you do! You wrote a whole essay about it.]

Roslyn was actually as crazy as she seemed. There was no other explanation, I thought. What else was I supposed to take away from her message? She claimed to not know the answer and that it was in my essay, but that made no sense. How could she possibly know I knew the answer if she didn’t know what the answer was to begin with? And how could that possibly be the case when all I had done was some spotty research on the internet then cobble together a simplistic summary of information from sources on the internet?

I was doomed, wasn’t I? I was stuck in a loop, and the person who was supposed to get me out, who might well be one of the few magical people I would ever meet, had no idea how to stop it.

I pulled my knees up into my chest, tugging a blanket tight around me with eyes drifting closed to go to sleep. If I couldn’t break the loop, then there wasn’t any point in delaying it.

“You know, I meant what I said earlier.”

I looked up, eyes lidded. Mom stood where the kitchen met the living room, hand resting on the frame that lined the opening, a smile on her face. I was used to those smiles—knowledgeable in all the ways she used them. Shields against a callous, indifferent world and all the ways it sought to bring us down. Swords for killing with kindness, for claiming the high ground when people were bent on being ugly and hateful. But that smile? That smile was a fire, a hearth lit by love that warmed me just by being there.

“I’m proud of you, Ervin.” She crossed the room and settled down next to me. “I am so — proud, and you should be too.”

I shrugged my shoulders, face scrunched in confusion, an unspoken, Why?

“You really don’t see it?” She chuckled, the sound soft and wistful. “Anybody can give up. It’s the easiest thing, just— just stopping. And I… I think I would have, if I had been in your shoes.”

“But you didn’t.” She slipped her arm around my shoulder and pulled me into her, giving me a gentle squeeze. “I couldn’t be prouder of you if I tried. So whatever you need, however I can help you? I may not be able to do much, but I’m here for you while you figure things out.”

I would like to say that Mom’s faith in me was enough alone to break me out of the hopelessness that had started to seep in. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? A mother saving the day with only her kind words is the sort of sappy, inspirational sentiment the world could use more of. And maybe it really would have been enough. I really do wish I could say it was, but it’s impossible for me to say for sure because it wasn’t Mom’s faith or her love or anything like that ended up saving the day. It was pure, dumb luck; happenstance that she used one particular word.

While.