On the apron, as the Alitalia Airbus A320 is being pushed back, Phocan watches a small drama playing out. Beside a jet bridge that’s accordioned down almost flat against a terminal itself shrinking with increasing distance is a hawk. It’s hovering about the corrugated metal, almost, but not quite, in place; every few seconds it tweaks its position, shifting two or three feet to the right, or left, or up or down, returning to a spot it occupied a moment earlier, or else establishing a new one in the gaps between all these. It does this neither languidly nor playfully but with intent, wings beating fiercely, head and neck twitching their way through minute readjustments that keep its vision locked on the same focal point.
Working his own gaze backwards down the eye beams, Phocan sees what’s in the cross-hairs here: a sparrow flapping gracelessly against the tarmac, making abortive take-off bids in one direction, then another. At first he thinks the sparrow must be wounded, grounded by a broken wing; that the hawk has picked it out and is just waiting for its energy and will to ebb away, for surrender to set in, before swooping down for the kill. When the sparrow rises ten or more feet in the air, though, he realises he’s wrong: this ascent was perfectly competent; calling it off and turning back again was a decision, as deliberate as the hawk’s studied readjustments. It takes a few more strike-outs by the sparrow and adjustments by the hawk before he understands what’s going on: the hawk’s controlling the whole area without needing to patrol around it; closing off vectors of airspace, blocking swathes and columns of potential flight, each mooted escape path, simply by angling itself towards them. The two birds understand each other, and are operating in well-calibrated synchrony; a chess game they’ll carry on playing, move and countermove, the one snuffing the other’s future out, until the sequences have all been run through, endgame drifting on to the inevitable resignation, just a matter of time …
A few feet from the sparrow, there’s another scene unfolding. A luggage cart’s trundling across the pavement, four dolly compartments coupled up into a train pulled by a small tractor. As the driver plies the narrow staging-area channel hemmed in by red restraint lines to his left, white vehicle-corridor and yield lines up ahead of him and, to his right, the aeroplane, perched on its yellow taxi lane, to which his consignment is to be delivered, then pulls a tight U and draws to a halt across (but not within) the red and white rectangle of the loading box, the dollies snake from side to side, each taking its cue from the one in front, so that the carriage as a whole seems to be partly following, partly digressing from, routes of the boundary markings over which it’s slithering. Bedbug, moth: the words take shape amidst the verbal babble spilling out of cabin speakers and the open in-flight magazine. Yesterday in Finns, Garnett called Phocan to his office again. Entering, he discovered his boss watching a YouTube clip. It was an old one, digitised TV footage from the sixties or even fifties; it showed a man advanced in years demonstrating to an awkward, crew-cut child the operation of some kind of robot with a painted insect carapace.
‘Palomilla.’ Garnett’s tone was full of fondness – for the insect, or the boy, or Phocan; or, perhaps, for the avuncular, robot-controlling man. This last was holding a small flashlight in his hand, directing its beam straight on to the dog-sized, beetle-mimicking contraption, which responded by advancing with a whirring sound across the studio floor. But not in a straight line: it meandered drunkenly, turning a little one way then the other in a kind of ponderous slalom, as though undecided which of two approach angles to pursue towards a beacon-wielding summoner who, like the wind, could not be steered directly into but demanded constant tacking.
‘It’s his Tropism Machine,’ said Garnett. ‘He built it – that’s Wiener there – with Singleton at MIT in ’49. They called it Bedbug-Moth, or Palomilla.’
‘Funny names,’ said Phocan, to say something.
‘The Bedbug-Moth’s because it’s phototropic. There’s a tiller,’ Garnett beckoned him near, as though explaining a model train set’s workings to him, ‘underneath the cover, which controls the single steering wheel beneath its nose. The tiller’s set up with two modes of action: one positively phototropic – programmed to do nothing more than seek light out, like a moth – the other negatively phototropic, as monomaniacally’ – he cut the word into insectoid segments, mono-ma-nia-cally – ‘intent on fleeing any and every light source, like a bedbug. See?’
On screen, the cyber-beetle carried on its restless battle with itself, veering first, dog-to-bone, towards the torch, then in revulsion, Superman from kryptonite, away again, which made the positive impulse kick in once more, which in turn triggered the counter-impulse – on ad infinitum, or at least the mpeg’s end.
‘He built it to help army neurologists.’ Garnett’s voice was meditative. ‘Battle-worn troops were coming home displaying pathologies ranging from the shakes to full-blown neurasthenia …’
On his desk, between the keypad and the monitor, there was a kind of shoebox. It was old, black and wooden – more the type of box you’d keep brushes and tins of polish in than shoes themselves. Two of its sides, and the roof, were missing, thus affording (whether by chance or design) a view on to an abstract diorama: from the floor rose a kind of sculpture, a thin metal tube that veered and swerved about before dovetailing back to its beginning spot. This misshapen diadem was held in place, at its lowest point, by a crude staple and, at a point not its highest but presumably the most propitious balance-wise, by a column planted unobtrusively in the scene’s background, a dark obelisk whose pinnacle rose to meet it. The interiors of the sides that hadn’t been removed were covered with white grid squares like The Cell’s; on the floor, near the front edge, the number 374 was handwritten in thin white paint.
‘It’s my own,’ said Garnett, watching him eyeing it. ‘A Gilbreth box.’
Phocan, drawing a blank with this name, stared at the twisting metal loop some more. The supporting obelisk made him think of Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment; by extension, of a raft of funerary, sphinx-like forms, as though the floating circuit had been mounted on some monumental, if miniaturised, riddle.
‘It seems,’ Garnett continued, ‘that they’ve started to become collectible.’
‘What have?’ asked Phocan.
‘Sit down,’ Garnett instructed him.
When he emerged from the office two hours later, he’d been handed a bunch of papers, and told he was going to be dispatched to Riga (It’s the capital of Latvia, Garnett informed him helpfully) to hunt down a box – a box much like the one he’d just been shown, but with a different number. He’d also been chastised for knowing nothing about his own discipline’s pre-history.
‘But,’ he objected, letting the rebuke, unjust though it was, slide in order to address the more pressing implications of the order he’d been given, ‘I’ve got Rome’ – phone out, fingers leapt into action, swiping and expanding iCal entries, summoning up schedules – ‘then Bergen, then …’
But Garnett’s hand, raised in paternalistic override, cut him short.
‘You’ve got time,’ he reassured him, soothingly but for that no less authoritatively. ‘I still have to prepare the ground for such a visit. You’ll need a plausible excuse; some line of enquiry not linked to the box itself – not directly, at least. In the meantime …’
In the meantime, Phocan has been reading up on Raivis Vanins. Seems that the guy came of age during the height of ‘Soviet Taylorism’ – or, to use its more generic name, of ‘scientific management’: the wholesale adoption, and adaption, of the capitalist West’s newest industrial labour protocols, not least universal standardisation of not only shop floors but all metrics by which work was both conducted and assessed. A million steelworkers, shipbuilders, car, washing-machine or aeroplane constructors stretching and reaching, bending and swivelling their way through sequences so near-identical as to be assessable at scales macro and micro, Omsk to Ufa, Krasnodar to Tolyatti … If the deviating tendency of a single Voronezh double-roll rotary-press operator or Chelyabinsk MINSK-2 circuit board assembler could be nixed the moment it arose, ironed back into ergonomic conformity with the actions of the other ten-thousand-odd rotary-press operators or circuit board assemblers, so, too, could deviations – good ones, beneficial tweaks and upgrades, from the minutiae of belt speed or switch position right up to complete equipment overhauls, metrification, even digitisation – be rolled out in unison across the Euro-Asiatic board, and, once unrolled, evaluated with complete precision, increased yield-to-man-hour (-week, -month, -year or -five-year) ratio determined to the third decimal figure. Where Taylor’s only frame and telos had been growing factory-owner and shareholder profit, his Soviet cheerleader Alexsei Gastev saw in Taylorism’s rise an opportunity to liberate the worker from long serfdom, from an evolution trapped in nineteenth-century neoteny; to release him from the shackles of his very body, or at least the bourgeois-humanist conception thereof, its small-minded designation as a skin-bound monad separated from the roaring and erupting dynamism of the great machine. The first unlocked by, multiplied and networked through the second, though, a new man (this, as far as Phocan can make out, was Gastev’s main thrust) would arise, and with him a new proletarian culture – singing, joyous, epic, in which noisy cavalcade of work will bring about both individual self-oblivion and collective self-determination; where in generators’ running transmissions, furnaces’ gurgle and hiss, the rhythmic clang of blows, our thirst for life will gain titanic force. Comrades, he bellowed in 1920 on being handed the Central Institute of Labour’s inaugural directorship, raise up your hammers to forge a new world!
Gastev fell foul of Stalin, and was shot in the Great Purge of ’36–’38. Vanins, luckily, was still in nappies then; he entered adulthood and, not long after, took his master’s degree as the second Soviet-Taylorist wave was breaking, implemented through the Ordzhonikidze EEI, in plans for a new Statewide Automated System, Obshche-gosudarstvennaia avtomatizirovannaia sistema … Safer, if soberer, times. Besides which, Vanins was a scientist – physics, pure and, if not neutral (nothing was), then at least emanating from a source so far above syndicalism or the vagaries of party faction as to occupy an abstract plane of absolute relations from which Soviet science and industry were compelled, by destiny as much as edict, to take their cue. He seems, though, to have shared his predecessor’s zeal for ergonomic transformation, to have been convinced that something bigger than production figures was at stake in the labourer–tool coupling. Phocan’s reading a selection of his papers now, as Norman beaches slide beneath the wing:
Work, therefore, should best be understood as a state of kinetic absorption in which the operative’s entire essence is given over to the rhythm of his apparatus – and, in being thus surrendered, is remade as an unbound potentiality: fluid, morphing, never finished; spirit realised as rhythm …
The rhythm motif’s big; it keeps on cropping up: rhythm of historic sublimation … rhythm and time …
Thus we, as the work terminal’s architect, create – in the true revolutionary tradition – a new mode of world-time, one in which the flux of being pulsates …
‘That’s bullshit,’ Sennet, peering over Phocan’s shoulder, annotates. ‘You can’t impose a tempo at the scale of history: only detect it.’
‘You’re not really meant to see this,’ Phocan tells him, turning the page window-ward. It’s true: Garnett was quite stern about this – uncharacteristically, since Pantarey staff always operate under professional omertà anyhow, research, data, files all covered by a large NDA-shroud that each of them has signed, if not in actual blood, at least in lifeblood of continued salaried employment-prospects. That’s external, though: the company culture, generally speaking, positively encourages in-house chatter, note-comparing, the cross-pollination of ideas and applications. But internal muzzling? Phocan’s only guess – two guesses – are that either it’s a personal matter, Garnett’s indulgence of a box-collecting hobby about which he’s slightly coy, or else that Garnett, here, is playing the role of gauze or interface, screening off other players in a game whose stakes are higher than whatever level to which he, Garnett, let alone he-Phocan, has been cleared … There was an urgency to his employer’s tone, a sense that he was passing to him (yes: to him, not Sennet) an important baton, harnessing him with a task allotted not so much by Garnett, or even by whomever it might be that he was hiding, as by some abstract force of pure necessity – that Phocan was, like Soviet science and industry, being assigned a destiny: to find this box elided from a cataloguing system fifty years ago. This urgency, which he dismissed at first – just as he dismissed, for the first few days he swotted up on it, the box number’s elision as a small clerical error – has been infecting him, too, merging with the sense of purpose he experienced in Holland, in the wind tunnel, and (by association although there’s no rational reason for this) with the intimation of guilt that, like a vapour-outline, swirled into shape and dissipated again around that. Encountering Vanins’ utopianism now, the physicist’s gaze fixed on a bright, pulsating future, compounds this intimation: Phocan’s own future, by contrast, seems to somehow lie already in his past – to loop back through it like a Gilbreth motion circuit, to some point, some stretch of time, some act, lodged there even if yet to be passed over … And encountering the Latvian’s clarity of insight, now, reprises his own sense of nebulousness, of occupying a field of vision that’s at once both luminescent and as opaque as these thickly packed, sun-impregnated clouds they’re flying through …
Sennet blows a silent raspberry and turns back to the talk that he’s to give tomorrow. Phocan has a presentation to make too, but he’ll do that on auto-pilot: it’s just software demonstration, sales-pitching. This stack is more enticing. It’s infused with a real fervour. At one point Vanins casts himself and his colleagues as the new Phidiases, sculpting and modelling the fine ivory of Soviet man … He seems to have had his fingers in a range of pies, not least that of aeronautics: several of the papers Phocan’s been handed by Garnett are concerned with flows – compressible, transonic, incompressible; with aeroelasticity and flutter; with divergence and control … Clouds fade out over Northern France; Paris scrolls past; later, Alps. Their pleats and folds, for Phocan, chime with the words sculpting and modelling, make him think of topography, of CAD and LiDAR … Here’s the old AI, Aeroplane Introspection, kicking in again: the other week, in Berners Street, he felt old, felt that he and Eldridge were like dying magi, sole repositories of their subject’s mysteries. Now, though … Now, after Garnett’s (perhaps, after all, not so unjust) admonishment and errand-assigning, and while reading Vanins, he’s struck by a feeling of youngness, of being granted a geological view across a landscape that was formed generations before his arrival, strata crinkled and stacked, each one atop the other, like the plates and ridges of these mountain ranges over which they’re flying; or, perhaps, an archaeological view, as of the sedimented levels of the city towards which the plane’s beginning its descent now, new announcements spilling from the speakers triggering a scurry of tray folding and seat repositioning, of paper stashing, leaving just time before the bump-down for a last unanswered question to pass through his mind: Why Palomilla?
They’re booked into Hotel Cardano, in the Celio. Lots of the IACSS delegates seem to be holed up here; an easel-mounted noticeboard stands in the lobby, giving dedicated shuttle-bus departure times. The graphics, this year, depict a CGI footballer levitating upended in mid overhead-kick, the letters I-A-C-S-S flying from his feet like clods of turf – stellar rather than dirty clods, as bold and glittering as movie-poster titling, with smaller subtitling below word-fleshing out the organiser’s acronym: International Association of Computer Science in Sport. The player is fictitious, image-source generic – politic on the part of the Association, who can’t be seen to promote or favour any one of the many brands and outfits represented by the conference’s attendees; although the level of the membership subscription taken out by each of these does, not unreasonably, bring concomitant dividends in terms of line-up and slot-allocation, sideline hospitality, favourable stall-positioning and dinner-seating, and so on. Generic or not, Phocan can instantly identify the picture’s provenance: a project Pantarey worked on for FIFA 18. It was Ribaldo who came in, blacked-out limo bouncing its way up Finns, to do the mo-cap for the special moves (run-of-the-mill dribbling and passing and formation-holding had been grabbed weeks previously in Vancouver, from the UBC varsity team). He was uncooperative to the point of obstreperousness: didn’t want to do the tricks he thought of as his ‘own’; even tore the markers off and stormed out to sulk in the car while panicked handlers whispered into phones. Electronic Arts’ lawyers prevailed: a mo-cap obligation clause was written into the contract that in turn underwrote the revenue-stream keeping his car parked, motor idling, outside HQ right then. Someone must have explained this to Ribaldo; after an hour he re-emerged scowling, submitted himself to nipple reattachment, and, eventually, performed stepover, chop and scissors – but badly. It was obvious he was doing it half-arsedly: a little fuck you that he’d thought up in the back seat. Phocan and co. had to spend the next two weeks patching the moves over from match footage, pixel by pixel, thread by thread and fill by fill …
The conference centre’s in the Borgo – close enough to walk, which Phocan does. The first morning’s sessions are all about pattern analysis. In the spirit of supportive comradeship, or adherence to its motions maybe, he drops in on Sennet’s. It’s a panel discussion; besides Sennet, there’s a German Informatik guy, a statistician from Slovenia and (as chair) a Texan dynamical systems theory prof – all male. It’s Sennet holding forth when Phocan slips, coffee in hand, into the side-room:
‘… into four main schools of thought: perturbation (Hughes, Dawkins, David), relative phase (Walter), chaos (Lames) and, lastly – and conversely – self-organisation (McGarry). What my team at Pantarey, in collaboration with Loughborough’s Sports Science Department, have been developing in relation to football – soccer – both draws from and supersedes all these conceptual frameworks …’
Phocan has heard this before: complex human-behaviour streams, of which those found in football are exemplary … hidden temporal-sequential structure … detection beyond the ‘narrow reach’ of standard statistical analysis … whence …
‘Whence,’ Sennet’s rounding the pitch off now, ‘Pantarey’s new T-pattern model.’
The statistician, understandably, has been bristling at these assertions. As soon as the chair signals open discussion he jumps in:
‘We have a good track record. Since the advent of sabermetrics to the world of baseball, statistics – even in what you call its “standard” form – has managed to … I mean, you won’t find a major-league team that’s not signed up to PITCHf/x. The diamond’s been transformed into a mathematical matrix; strikes, singles, doubles, home runs into data points; coaches can reset their field to account for such-and-such a batter’s tendencies, to leverage the probabilities … I’d call that pretty wide reach …’
‘I’m not,’ Sennet cuts back in, ‘denying any of that. But the time element …’
‘The “time element” just happens,’ the Slovenian scoffs. ‘It’s a set of dots and clusters laid out in a line.’
Now it’s the Informatik man who’s taking umbrage.
‘I cannot agree with this. Frequency of occurrence – even probability – is not coterminous with, much less equivalent to, relationships between discrete events within a sport performance; or any other type either …’
‘Exactly!’ Sennet bows his gratitude across the table’s velvet, bypassing the chair, who’s happy to let play run on uninterrupted. ‘And that’s where our T-pattern analysis comes in. If I could demonstrate …’ He fiddles with his desktop, still the projector’s prime feed; a string of letters pops up on the screen behind the panellists. ‘Here’s a short stretch of play, extracted from an English Premiership match last season. Each event type – pass, tackle, interception, shot, save, throw-in – has been assigned an alphabetic value: a letter, in other words. So here, you get the sequence p a n b p j c n j d p n p a p j p b n c n d n j p j a b n n c p n d. No pattern there, you might say – but you’d be wrong. There is one, but it’s hidden by redundant letters. When you extrapolate it on a lower line’ – he does this with the next slide – ‘and strip out all the ns and ps and js, you get the sequence a b c d – repeating twice.’ He pauses, to allow his listeners to see the truth of this claim for themselves, before continuing: ‘Frequency counts wouldn’t have detected this; neither would lag-sequential or time-series analysis. T-pattern, though, allows us to unearth repeated temporal strings, even when various other event types pop up in-between the pattern’s elements.’
The Slovenian’s stumped. The German is impressed. Sennet presses home his advantage with a third slide:
‘You can see here that, after an occurrence of a at moment t, there’s an interval [t+d1, t+d2] (d2>_ d1 >_ 0) that tends to contain at least one more instance of b than you’d expect from chance alone. We call the temporal relationship between a and b the critical interval – a concept that lies at the centre of T-pattern thinking. Determining or ascertaining it – plotting, that is, both critical interval itself and also interval between each of this interval’s instantiations – will place a manager at a distinct advantage. In a nutshell, that’s where the extra goal’s going to come from.’
Now the chair enters the fray:
‘How is it different from the algorithms that the hedge-fund wonks are running?’
‘It’s the same principle,’ Sennet concurs. ‘Mapping chance over a temporal continuum, deducing from that map a strategy for profitable intervention. The difference is that, unlike trading, football is zero-sum: one side’s successful intervention is the other’s catastrophic loss.’ Shifting in his seat, he adds: ‘Of course “chance”, being circumstantial, isn’t actually chance at all. What we discovered is that, even when there’s no pattern, there’s still a pattern. The small patterns no longer in evidence have been subsumed by larger and more complex ones – that’s why they’ve disappeared. Which is good: you want to constantly upscale your detection from partial to larger strings. So here,’ he clicks his next slide up to reveal new letter-chains, ‘if Q = (ABCDE) could be partially detected as, for example, (BCDE) or (BDE) or (ABCE), you discard the As to Es and scale to Q; after which you’ll have to consider a newly detected pattern – Qx, say – to be equally or less complete than an already detected pattern, Qy, if Qx and Qy occur equally often and all Qx’s event-elements are also present in Qy (but not vice versa). At which point, you eliminate Qx. We call it “completeness competition”. It’s a kind of brutal evolution – Darwin on steroids, a fight to the death: the only pattern standing at the end is the one for which no critically related pairings can be found to feed the hungry Moloch of a larger pattern.’
Sennet’s won the room: people are scribbling notes. He drinks his victory in, then adds:
‘Some patterns are acyclical. In other words, the temporal distances between their occurrences – the patterns’, not their events’ – may be irregular. The within-pattern intervals between events can still remain invariant, or not: it doesn’t matter. What counts is the overall pattern occurrence …’
Phocan’s attention’s drifting now: he’s looking at the delegates, their lanyard-mounted name-tags, the IACSS tote bags hanging from their chair backs, draped across their knees … Gilbreth and Gastev met one another at a conference: Prague, 1924, ICSM – the Industrial Congress of Scientific Management. He was head of the Soviet delegation; she part of a forty-strong American one. Did they have tote bags then? Or lanyards? Did attendees cultivate a studied air of boredom as the default look to bring into each room, or scan the rows of seating ranking delegates according to desirability? And what of 1965, Zürich, where a now-ancient Gilbreth met a Raivis Vanins not yet thirty but already throwing quite a swell out from his MIPT lab? Had he felt bold enough to stride across, announce himself, start holding forth about kinetic hypostasis? Or had he edged up to her nervously, threaded his way between rings of minders and admirers, meekly pressed a paper or a card into her hands? However it occurred, he’d got her attention: their correspondence started soon afterwards, and lasted five years, until she was too gaga to write anything to anyone. Phocan’s got, in his own tote bag, the passages of it that Garnett passed him, copies of surviving scraps, incomplete sub-strings of a larger pattern time and loss have rendered undetectable; he was up half of last night reading and rereading them. T.T…. That doubled character, like the ones on the screen now, seems to have codified some sequence or event, what Vanins and Gilbreth both referred to as an ‘episode’ … And then the mention of a box, the number, 808 – the same number absent from the stereoscoped inventory. There does, as Garnett took pains in his office to convince him, seem to be some link: the two terms – 808, T.T. – keep popping up together. But it’s what accompanies them that’s intriguing: changes everything … There’s an apperception, from Gilbreth’s end at least, of some grand divulgence taking shape, its form and outline growing lucid, even as her mind fuzzed over …
The chair’s opened the panel up to contributions from the floor – all of which, confirming Sennet’s clean sweep of the session (panel discussions are as zero-sum as football matches), are directed to him. A sharp-faced young man’s asking a nerdish question about completeness-competition equations; Phocan tunes out again, and looks through the window. The jalousies, controlled from the same master panel as the beamer, were angled so as to render the room dark enough for slides to be discernible, although not so dark as to obscure the speakers; now, with the onset of the Q&A phase, the technician has notched the slats another fifteen-odd degrees towards the horizontal, to illuminate the questioners. Their upward slant sends Phocan’s gaze into the sky above the Prati, where starlings are flocking in large numbers. There’s a name for it, which he can’t remember. Back inside the room, Sennet’s explicatory voice has given over to a woman’s – an Italian woman with (Phocan discovers when he turns back inwards) black glasses and a headband. She’s asking Sennet about something she’s describing as the ‘event border’:
‘Where do you set this?’
‘Set it?’ he asks back.
‘Yes,’ she responds. ‘Where is it? What’s inside the event field, and what’s not?’
Now Sennet understands the question. ‘The groundsman has kindly set this border for us,’ he answers, ‘in bold, white, painted lines. When players and the ball lie within these, they’re pattern-legible; outside them, they’re anathema. They don’t exist.’
He looks around the room for the next question, but the woman’s not done yet:
‘This cannot be so,’ she informs him. ‘Even with one of your own event examples – la rimessa, “throw-in” – this border is surpassed or ruptured by both ball and player. Besides, think of the stadium layout. Beyond the touchline are the dugouts. The substitutes sit here; and the manager, effecting active interventions. And behind this, more importantly, la folla – the crowd. You’ll know as well as I that home-field, home-crowd advantage generates, within the English Premier League, a sixty-four per cent home-win rate.’
Sennet, initially dismissive of her quibble, is brought to attention by her command of this statistic.
‘And then,’ she’s warming up here, ‘there are other factors. How long before the game did the team eat? Did they arrive together at the stadium? Did the Catholic players pray …?’
‘Ah,’ Sennet thinks he’s seen a weakness in her attack line, ‘T-pattern makes no judgement on causality – not at the gastronomic scale, nor at the theological. It merely detects patterns.’
‘Si, si,’ a conference-centre staffer’s holding out his hand to take the mike from her, but she’s not surrendering it. ‘This issue of causality’s a falsa pista; it has no bearing on my point. My point is that these factors, too, stand in relation to the as and bs and cs. They, too, are in the pattern. If we can highlight’ – she pronounces this word with the Italian h-drop: eye-light – ‘one particular event type – say, the goal kick … What is the “event” here? Kicking the ball up the field? Okay. But what about the bouncing of the ball before the kick? Three bounces? Four? Does the goalkeeper wipe his glove against his forehead, to clear away perspiration? Does he evacuate his throat, mutter a phrase, or even speak the phrase’s words inside his head as he starts on his little run-in to the kick? Or does he glance at the stadium’s seating, towards where he knows his girlfriend or his mother or his son is sitting? What if he catches sight of a particular banner in the stands, or recognises, just before his foot touches the ball, the odour of an hot’ – the dropped h again – ‘dog …’
‘Are you suggesting,’ Sennet asks her, ‘that we should assign values to each of these … micro-events?’
Now it’s her turn to smile.
‘Perché no?’ she shrugs.
‘But then …’ Sennet’s victory lap has turned into a marathon, in which he’s starting to show telltale signs of exhaustion, of cramp’s onset. ‘If you brought all those in, your equations would be hopelessly unwieldy. I mean, where would it end?’
Nobody seems to have an answer to this question; for an uncomfortably long stretch, the room is quiet; then the chair, the Texan systems-theory man, outs with a quip about this event field’s end, its border, being dictated by the schedule, the odour of biscuits waiting for them in the lobby, etc. There are chuckles, but the atmosphere’s deflated. Delegates shuffle out. Over amaretti, Phocan gets talking to the awkward questioner. Her name’s Rafaella Farinati, and she’s with the Università degli studi di Milani, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sport.
‘Were you just trying to knock him off his horse?’ he asks her.
‘An orse?’ she asks.
‘To take him down a notch. Demote him.’
‘Ah! Affatto non,’ she answers. ‘We are also making our equations for completeness – though I think we understand the term in different ways. Five years ago, we started to examine the cases of nevrotic sportsmen and sportswomen, ones who can’t hit the ball until they’ve gone through a routine: of touching some part of their body, for example, or brushing their eyes on one spot of the stadium, then on another – same sequence again, each time. We have concluded that these people were non aberranti ma esemplari – not perverse, but typical. Through them, we come to understand the field and range of data that a player’s processing at any given moment.’
‘Don’t they shut that out, though?’ Phocan asks. ‘The excess stuff?’
‘Exactly wrong.’ Rafaella Farinati pokes his shoulder with a floury finger. ‘It is central to the data-architecture of their whole performance. Like yours now.’
‘Mine? What performance?’
‘You’re exchanging conversation with me,’ she says, ‘but what’s really in your mind? The taste of your biscotti, and the colour and texture of this carpet that we’re standing on; the various other carpets it reminds you of; the rooms they lay in, what you experienced in those rooms; your anxiety about which sessione to attend next, or where to go for lunch – that’s what you’re thinking, what’s determining your actions and decisions. If we want to understand event fields then we have to be olistic, start appreciating all the channels on which information is being processed, not a fraction of these only …’
Actually, what Phocan’s thinking is that Rafaella Farinati’s cool. It’s not just what she’s saying, or gratitude to her for having granted him this dose of Schadenfreude over Sennet; there’s something about her whole demeanour, her ensemble – most of all the headband, which is stirring vague associations round the peripheries of his own recall, ones that he can’t quite assign a value to, not yet, rimesse held up just beyond the touchline …
‘Where are you going to lunch?’ he asks.
She snorts derisively, as though to say: Anyone could have seen that event type coming. ‘I visit the Forum and the Palatino each time I’m in Rome,’ she tells him. ‘I’ll take something on the way there. I think you have your presentazione on body-separation now, though … no?’
He wonders if she’s memorised the schedule, or if she harbours a professional curiosity for kinematic-filling software, or … or what? She’s giving off an air not just of knowing Phocan’s business, but, beyond that, of knowing it in a knowing way, as though aware of more than she’s been letting on. Before he can reply, she brushes off his shirt the micro-crumbs, but not the flour, left by her finger’s prod, then smiles – not at him, it seems, but at something over his shoulder – turns on her heels and disappears into the general IACSS throng.
He cranks out his own talk distractedly. Artefact reduction … quintic interpolation … Pantarey … Physis 6™ … and done. He lunches with Sennet, bad linguine in a tourist trap on the bank of the Tiber, then decides to skip the afternoon session and head to the Forum too, even if he won’t be able to pass off bumping into Rafaella Farinati as a quirk of chance. The bumping-into doesn’t happen anyway; she’s departed by the time he gets there, if she ever went there in the first place. A meeting does occur, though. Phocan’s leaning on a railing by the sunken water garden of the Domus Augustana, looking down on its fuzzed labyrinth whose shape reminds him of a QR code, when he becomes aware of someone at his side. It’s the kind of proximity that straddles the border between normal and invasive, measurable not in standard inches but through incremental calculi that would relate the distance between people to amount of space available around them. This guy’s three or so feet away from Phocan – on the tube or at a football game, T-pattern parsed or not, this would be plenty. But they’re not on the tube; there’s hardly anyone about now; three feet is too close. What’s more, the guy is looking at him, smiling. Pick-up? No: Phocan sees, peeping from his jacket-front’s top pocket, a plastic protuberance that he recognises from its colouration as the upper corner of an IACSS delegate card.
‘Quintic filling,’ his companion murmurs. ‘Liked your presentation.’
The accent’s Italian, or maybe Swiss. Phocan doesn’t recall seeing him in his talk.
‘Just standard stuff,’ he answers unambassadorially. ‘Who are you with?’
The interloper smiles again, his gaze directed ever so slightly to the side of Phocan’s face this time, pulls a card from the same top pocket and passes it over. It reads: Alain Pirotti; then, below this: Cassius First Motion. No job title, nor logo, nor company tag-line with obligatory present participle (making, bringing, streamlining …); just these words, an email address and a phone number.
‘Your project touched,’ Pirotti tells him, ‘on an issue spanning our discipline’s whole field.’
Phocan waits, politely, for the thought’s completion, the reveal, which Pirotti now provides:
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘the gaps. They’ve plagued our business since the outset.’
‘What,’ asks Phocan, eyeing the card, ‘does Cassius do?’
Pirotti, still smiling slightly off-centredly, waves away the question.
‘For decades – long before the markers and the processors arrived; as you know …’
‘I’m not quite sure I follow …’
Pirotti fixes his eyes firmly back on Phocan’s face.
‘It’s in the report.’
‘Which report? Mine?’
Pirotti smiles back silently by way of answer. ‘For almost a century now,’ he says eventually, ‘the capacity has been in place to plot the curves and stretches of a movement-segment at its outset; to describe its structure; to enclose it in a form that’s folded back into itself, contained and perfect; like … let’s say, a figure-eight. And then to do the same for the same segment’s end-stage: another eight …’
He pauses, gaze still fixed on Phocan as he speaks, observing his reaction.
‘So,’ he resumes, ‘we have two bookends, carved with an artisan’s precision: start and finish, eight and eight. But then, between these, at some point – between two given points within that stretch, the more we zoom in and interrogate it – there will always be a patch of unmapped territory: a hole, big and round, or oval, or who-knows-what shape: a zero … What are we to do?’
A breeze, rising up from the sunken garden, ruffles Phocan’s neck. Pirotti, seeing him tense up, presses:
‘Eight; zero; eight …’
Phocan stares back at him, uncertain what to say. Up in the sky, the birds are at it again: starlings, clustering in spheres, columns and conjoining funnels – giant masses that billow and contract elastically as their internal volume redistributes itself. Pirotti, still smiling at him, asks:
‘We live in a time of information-sharing, do we not?’
He pauses again, waiting for an answer. Hesitantly, Phocan says:
‘It depends what information’s being solicited, by whom.’
‘Okay,’ concedes Pirotti. ‘Of information … exchange: an economy of knowledge. Our world, unfortunately, is not open-source. But people will pay well for much sought-after insights, or packages.’ Then, as though it were an afterthought: ‘Or boxes …’
There’s that breeze again, that ruffling. Phocan looks down at the labyrinth, trying to discern its source. Pirotti, at his ear, continues:
‘We should keep in touch. We understand, my people just as yours, that correspondence can be … fruitful.’
My people? Now he’s feeling dizzy. It must be the height, the angle or the labyrinth’s pattern, triggering some reader-response in him, some reaction. Phocan closes his eyes for a while, head resting on the rail. When he looks up again, Pirotti’s gone; the Palatine is empty; then a group of Chinese tourists in bright anoraks starts trickling across the hilltop’s green. Before he, too, leaves, Phocan’s granted two small, if sudden, insights. Firstly, that Pirotti’s smile was not so much intended for him as responding, albeit with a certain delay, to another smile directed at its bearer earlier: Rafaella Farinati’s. He couldn’t explain how he knows this, but he does: the second smile fitted the first – completed it, as both prompt and response, Phocan’s shoulder a mere way-station or relay post across which it was beamed. Secondly, that it’s murmuration: the word for starlings’ clustering and flocking. He should have had it on his tongue-tip: it’s been modelled over and over, after all … Reynolds … Delgado-Mata … Hartman … Benes … Hildenbrandt … subjected to bin-lattice spatial subdivision, transposed to a spread of fields: multi-channel radio-station programming, weather-simulation software, dispersal/concentration ratios of crowds fleeing in panic from the source of gunfire … What’s this instantiation of it, this bird ink-blot, murmur-modelling for him? It’s hovering above the Basilica now, thickening over Caesar’s temple, elongating over Vesta’s, before trickling up the facing hillside to pulse in the air above the Tarpeian Rock, which sits denuded, awaiting new traitors.