Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [72]
The house is burnt down, everybody is dead, but in the computer I can arrange the facts according to a different logic, get into the computer myself, insert a Waldemar programme, bring the number of characters to six, introduce new galaxies of combinations and permutations. The house rises from the ashes, all its inhabitants are alive again, I turn up at the door with my collapsible suitcase and golf clubs, and ask for a room to rent…
Signora Roessler and the others listen in silence. They don't trust me. They suspect I'm working for the insurance company, that I've been sent by Skiller…
One can hardly deny that their suspicions are well founded. It's Skiller I'm working for of course. It would have been he who asked me to gain their confidence, to study their behaviour, to forecast the consequences of their evil intentions, to classify stimuli, tendencies, gratifications, quantify them, store them in the computer…
But if this Waldemar programme is nothing but a duplicate of the Skiller programme, then it is poindess keying it in. Skiller and Waldemar must be enemies, the mystery will be sorted out in the struggle between us.
In the drizzly evening two shadows brush against each other on the rusty overpass that leads to what must once have been a residential suburb, though there's nothing left now but a crooked house on a hump of ground surrounded by derelict car dumps; the lighted windows of the Roessler boarding house emerge from the fog as though on a short-sighted retina. Skiller and Waldemar don't know each other as yet. Each unaware of the other, they stalk around the house. Who will make the first move? Indisputably the insurance agent takes precedence.
Skiller rings the doorbell. ‘Please excuse me, on behalf of my company I am carrying out some research into the role played by household factors in disasters. This house has been chosen for our representative sample. With your permission, I would like to keep your behaviour under observation. I hope this won't put you to too much trouble: it's just a question of filling in some forms from time to time. In return the company is offering the chance to enjoy special discounts on insurance policies of various kinds: life, property…’
The four listen in silence; already each of them is thinking how they can get something from the situation, each is concocting a plan…
But Skiller is lying. His programme has already forecast what each member of the household will do. Skiller has a copybook listing a series of violent or dishonest acts whose probability he merely has to establish. He already knows there will be a series of maliciously provoked injuries, but that the company won't have to pay any damages, because all the beneficiaries will have killed each other. All these forecasts were given him by a computer: not my own, so I am bound to imagine the existence of another programmer, Skiller's accomplice in a criminal plot. The plot goes like this: a databank brings together the names of those fellow citizens of ours driven by fraudulent and destructive impulses; there are several hundred thousand of them; a system of persuasion and follow-ups leads them to become clients of the company, to insure everything insurable, to produce fraudulent accidents and to kill each other off. The company will have taken care to record evidence to its own advantage, and since those committing crimes always tend to overdo it, the amount of information will include a considerable percentage of useless data that will function as a smokescreen to cover up the company's involvement. Indeed this coefficient of entropy has already been programmed: not all the Abominable Deeds of the index have a role in the story; some just create a ‘noise’ effect. The Roessler boarding-house operation is the first practical experiment the diabolical insurance agent has attempted. Once the disaster has taken place, Skiller will go to another computer, whose programmer