Free Performance Anomalies by Victor Robert Lee Page B

person who didn’t really care for people could find personalities in equations, and friends in matrices. Todd spoke of datasets as if they were current or future lovers. Cono admired him for his ability to find joy beyond the secretory impulses that controlled most humans.
    The two developed a friendship of sorts and worked together each night for weeks at sandwich shops and a joint called Michael’s Café. Cono had no money left, so Todd let him sleep on the floor of his flimsy-walled apartment, between stacks of computer magazines.
    Todd asked in a dozen ways exactly what Cono saw in the split-second images that appeared in his mind as he watched something moving. Cono explained that the stationary objects would melt into the background, and he would actively perceive only what was moving, the edges especially. The rest could be black, or empty; it didn’t matter, because, “If I see that part once and it makes no move, I don’t need to see it again. I have it.”
    Todd’s eyes pointed upward into his lids, so that Cono saw only the white sclera. When his pupils returned, Todd grinned and licked his lips. He started writing furiously on a notepad. Finally he spoke. “Stationary image fields are condensed, pocketed away by the math, so more strenuous formulas can work on the moving parts. Just think of a movie, Cono.” Cono replied that he didn’t watch movies; they gave him a headache. “Well, in movies, most of what you see is not moving much, but those pixels still choke up the data stream. So we’ll carve them out and stuff them away temporarily, and give them five-hertz updates. It frees up gobs of processing muscle.”
    “Gobs?” Cono said.
    “You know, lots, big amount, truckloads. Got it?”
    “Got it. I learn gobs of English from my friend Todd.”
    Todd smiled, briefly. “What about color? D’you see everything in color?” He thumped his bright-yellow pencil on the table. Then he twirled it around his thumb repeatedly—a little acrobatic trick he did when he was impatient, which was often.
    Cono stared at the twirling pencil against the background of the green napkin Todd’s hand rested on.
    “I know the pencil is yellow, but when it moves fast like that, it’s just gray. The napkin stays green.”
    Todd picked up the napkin and waved it quickly back and forth. “Green?”
    “Gray.”
    “And now?” Todd stopped his waving.
    “Now it’s green.”
    Todd bit the eraser end of the pencil. “Maybe normal humans are just like you, Seven Q. The color disappears when something moves fast, and they just don’t notice the color’s gone. But you, you can see the change because, well, you know …”
    “Normal? What is normal, Todd? Are you normal? And what is Seven Q?”
    “I guess the docs didn’t tell you. They nicknamed you Seven Q because they think your mutations are on the long arm of your seventh chromosome. Chromosomes have a long arm and a short arm. The long one is called Q. They write it like this …”
    Todd wrote “7q” on his notepad. “Kinda funny, huh?”
    “My name is Cono, not Seven Q.”
    Cono’s comment was lost on his friend, who was back to scribbling equations.
    Todd looked up. “If it’s true and we can cut color from any fast movement in the display, that’s a 66 percent bit reduction, limited of course to the moving parts of the field, but those are the processor hogs anyway.”
    “Hogs?”
    “Pigs. Eat a lot. We’ll have to see if it pans out in normals, but if it does, it’ll be a great data stuffer, and easy to deal with—just some eigenvector transformations.”
    Todd was immersed in his formulas again when Cono reached beneath the table, pulled a box out of a sack and placed it next to the notepad. It was a mini Sony video camera, the latest. Cono nudged it forward to get Todd’s attention.
    “What’s this?”
    “For you. To say thanks for letting me stay at your place.”
    “Hey, man, it’s too much. You don’t have the money for