“I am not,” said Zada. She set the snacks on the dresser, schooling her features to be even more neutral. Absurdly neutral. Outrageously neutral.
Daphne sighed. “You’re making the careful absence of a face, then.”
“The room,” Zada said haltingly. “It’s not very you.”
“Ah, well.” Daphne glanced around, seemingly unconcerned. “It was like this when I was a baby, and Grandfather isn’t the biggest fan of change.” She coughed. “How do you want to begin?”
“Okay,” said Zada. “So, we have a list of ninety thousand matches. We have data from the sisters on about three hundred people. Everyone with an A last name. We start from the beginning of the nuns’ accounts, we take in each one, and we decide how happy they seem with their match on a scale of, let’s say, one to five. Then we log each one by happiness score and by year, so we get a sense of whether the problem is actually increasing or not.”
Daphne threw herself face down onto the bed. “This is going to take the rest of our natural lives,” she grumbled to her pillow. She flopped around to peek up at Zada, who handed her a fluffy blob of Cheese Breeze.
“Fuel up, then.”
“How do you intend to chart this out?” Daphne added, pausing to cram the Cheese Breeze into her mouth. “Until the moment we’re successful, if they find out what we’re doing they’ll shut it down in a hurry, and every graph-making program you can find can be accessed by the security council.”
“Not every program,” said Zada, feeling only a little smug. “Not the one I made.”
Daphne sat up straight. “Do tell.”
“I was testing my skills,” Zada told her. “Our last year at Dalrymple. I wanted to chart how the night sky would’ve looked, before the dome went up.”
“Choked with pollution, right?” said Daphne.
“Then a long time before the dome,” Zada amended. “I borrowed one of the school Gems, had to get special permission and everything. Can I show you?”
“Sure thing,” Daphne said. “Catch.” She slid the ring off her finger, cloned Gem and all, and tossed it at Zada, who instinctively ducked, and then winced. “Don’t worry, they’re indestructible.”
Zada took the ring, discreetly checking the SmartGem for damage and thankfully finding none. She slipped the ring on, feeling a brief spike of something at the feel of the skin-warmed metal against her finger.
“Gem,” said Zada. “Show program Straight on till Morn.” A pleasant beep, and then the environmental controls dimmed the lights and they were standing in a huge three-dimensional grid, projected on the walls and floor. “So you enter the position of each star, on three axes, right, because space is 3D, and then each point also gets a size rating.”
“Huh,” Daphne said, blowing out a mouthful of air. “How did you find the time to do this, on top of exams and assignments and triple cello practice and sleep?”
“I didn’t,” said Zada. “Nobody was grading me on sleep.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Daphne. “Take a jelly-swell before I cry. And we’re really gonna log all our info here?”
Well. The Founders Creed had said to be content, unselfish,faithful, honest, reasonable, patient, and grateful. They didn’t technically say anything about not showing off.
“Gem, import data set,” said Zada. She bit open a jelly-swell and shuffled through projections of Daphne’s various screens until she found the list of ninety thousand matches.
“What are you doing?” It was probably Zada’s imagination that Daphne sounded genuinely interested, but she’d take it.
“Each match can be rendered as a dot on the board,” said Zada. “X axis, one spouse. Y axis, the other. The point where the axes meet is their match. Z axis, all of the matches by year. The star will be larger or smaller depending on how happy the couple overall seems to be with each other. Now, the three axes will only take number inputs, so we’ll need some way to reduce each person to a number—”
“Birthdays?” said Daphne thoughtfully.
“Sure,” said Zada, and then on sudden inspiration. “Or school ID number. It’s in every match announcement and that way, there won’t be duplicates.”
Daphne stretched off the bed to jam a Cheese Breeze in her mouth. “Okay then. Go nuts.”
“Okay,” said Zada. She input their changes. “Gem, graph new version.”
The program hummed for a moment, and then they were surrounded by ninety thousand points of light.
Daphne laughed. “Okay,” she said, looking down at the dots illuminating her hands. “That’s pretty cool.”
“I put star size as average for everyone,” Zada explained. “Since we don’t know yet what the value is.”
