Free Feed the Machine by Mathew Ferguson Page A

lengths…”
    Silver risked a glance at the ledger. The pages were covered in rows and columns of letters, numbers and dates. There was only one thing better than code and that was numbers. She came closer and Hello flipped the ledger back to the first page.
    She looked down the page and correlations leapt out. The higher the weight the larger the head size. Each column had a title written in Kaleen’s neat script. They all made sense except for one marked only with an X.
    “Next page?” Hello asked, looking sideways at her.
    “Let me just check something,” Silver murmured, picking up the ledger. On the first page were two rows that had a date marked in the X column. The first X was six days after the birthdate. The second was forty-eight.
    She turned the page and scanned down it. Three more dates in the X column. Three initials.
    “AP, GS and UL.”
    Babies born in Cago.
    Births and… deaths.
    She looked through the ledger, the numbers soaking into her mind and throwing back correlations. Low birthweight correlated with early death. Low growth correlated with early death.
    She reached the final page. The most recent entry had today’s date in the birth and death column.
    That explained the blood.
    Silver put the ledger down and closed it. Her mind was still whirring through the numbers, looking for patterns, giving ratios.
    “Anything useful?” Hello asked. He’d perched himself atop the hasdee.
    “Twelve percent of all babies die.”
    Hello lifted a wing and groomed his feathers.
    “Is that bad?”
    “I think so.”
    Mother doesn’t get enough food so the baby is low in weight and then has an increased chance of dying. Solve the food problem to solve the baby problem.
    She checked the hasdee. The number was creeping through the seventies. If it was going to brick out, this was usually the spot. It hit eighty and kept counting.
    “Four percent of all mothers die in childbirth. Mother dying in childbirth has a high correlation to baby dying within following seven days.”
    “If humans laid eggs like us crows you wouldn’t worry so much about it so much. Twenty to forty days and done.”
    “You’re right,” Silver whispered, numbers floating before her eyes.
    You’ve seen these numbers before.
    “But where?”
    “In a nest I suppose. Oh, you weren’t talking to me.”
    The hasdee gave a soft chime as the tempcube finished updating. Silver took the now-white cube out and put it in her bag.
    The answer was coming like a thunder over the horizon. Unlike the idea from earlier she knew this couldn’t be scared away. It was big and heavy and maybe dangerous. It would smack her mind out of this world and who knew how long it would be before she returned?
    “Quick, get the money,” Silver said, putting her bag on. The answer was nearly here, racing towards her, a hazel sprinting.
    Hello fluttered across to the table and picked up the note in his beak. He flew it back to her bag and pushed it into a pocket.
    “Ready to go? I could use some pap. Or some beetles if you have them.”
    “The hasdee told me!” she shouted.
    And gone.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 10
    Darkness, glowing green numbers and code on the tiny two-line screen.
    Cajoling, threatening, begging the hasdee circuit for information.
    A blur of typing, her mind leaping ahead of itself as she programmed a tempcube to cajole, threaten and beg for her, faster than she ever could.
    The hasdee talking too too much, flooding out thousands of numbers, pages of code, a torrent of information and she was standing in it with a thimble, scooping mere droplets.
    Gray light and a plate of pap cubes sitting on the table. Some of them had been pecked. Gulping them down, feeling her throat sting.
    Elisa’s toaster was gone and she’d no memory of seeing the little blonde girl. But there was two dollars on the table.
    Was it Nola who brought the food? Or their mother? Where there should have been a memory were numbers. Not Ash, he was somewhere in the