บท 8: Morgan Ellis (2)
Chris, Morgan, and May were having dinner in a quiet room. Neither of them could come up with a safe topic for conversation, so they spent most of the time eating.
Until Morgan couldn't keep silent anymore.
"Did you get involved with the Insurgent again?" he asked, at some point. He was visibly annoyed by May's state, and his tone hid nothing of that.
Chris choked in surprise, coughing for a while before he could breathe again. His reaction had been clumsy - for a seasoned politician as he was - but no one seemed to notice or care.
Morgan and May were busy exchanging a burning glance. They were staring at each other in the eye, neither willing to lower their gaze and give up on that battle.
"No, not again," May voiced, spelling each letter clearly.
She waited for her words to reach the desired result. Morgan did sigh relieved.
"I never stopped being involved," she added when his relief became too obvious.
"Are you mad?" he rebuked, all calm disappearing and his childish face turning red. Like that, his freckles were even more visible on his pale skin.
"Mad is such a right word, Morgan." She leaned back on the chair, solemn and ready to defend her position, just as the young man remembered she had been in high school. "Is it okay to mention it in front of your boss, by the way?"
"Isn't your presence here a consequence of your extra-curricular activities?" he asked with her same, elegant tone.
He didn't receive any reaction to that. If she was the same May as in high school, she would fume even more after that. But she had changed, grown up - even though her choice of friends didn't show it at all.
"How do you know?" she hummed, instead.
"You're trembling like this, and no one reacts. What have you gotten yourself into, this time?"
"Nothing much," she sighed.
"Either you were hurt while doing something potentially illegal for the Insurgent, or Senator Lindt caused this effect on you."
"I'm touched that you're risking your position for me, but really: there's no need. Keep your job, Morgan. Let me be, and everything will be fine."
"Let you be? You're trembling like a leaf!"
"You don't have any right to ask," she hissed. "If you didn't betray me then, you would know everything now."
After those words, Morgan had nothing to add. Silence ruled for a few minutes until Chris decided that the youngsters had had enough showtime.
"We were talking about hiring an analyst for our further work," he said. "We can give it a try, Morgan. Shortlist some names and send me the list while we're stuck at home. I can read through their CV and choose one or two to employ at the party."
"Yes, Senator Lindt."
"Any name I might know personally?"
"Of course."
"Let's hear."
"You have a potential analyst on your left, Senator Lindt," Morgan said. "May can do that kind of job quite easily."
"May? Wait, weren't you a Math student?" Chris said, furrowing his brows.
"I am," the girl replied. "I'm majoring in statistics."
"Isn't data analysis done with artificial intelligence and that kind of stuff?"
"It is."
"So?" he said, still confused.
"It's the same thing," she sighed. "Artificial intelligence is full of statistics. Some part is statistical techniques, and the rest is chaos."
"Morgan told me we could use machine learning," Chris said, remembering the words his assistant had used a couple of weeks before. "Is that right?"
"Machine learning is the most statistical of the AI techniques," she pointed out.
"Oh, is it?"
"Well, basically, you feed the computer an enormous amount of data. The algorithm approximates a function until the error becomes small. Then, to guess the output for new data, it uses the function estimated so far. It's what statisticians used to do before it had a fancy name and automated procedures."
Chris nodded at her words, in part understanding but still confused. However, he didn't add anything, for fear of angering May. He wanted to know more, but it didn't seem like something that could be explained over dinner.
"What exactly can help us, though?" he said.
"I'm not sure. It depends on what you want to do," May said. "You can cluster voting people and analyse the data to find a way to convince a new group to trust you. You can simulate the market to forecast the sales. You can play games where you don't have all the information, like poker. Or a game where the information is available but in such an amount that makes it untreatable, like chess or Go."
She noticed how Chris was listening carefully, her head tilted to the right.
"So, can you predict the future?"
"If I have enough data, I can guess anything. Future or past. I can estimate data you can't reach or that you've lost."
"I understand," he said.
"Do you?"
"Well, not the technicalities. But I get the main point. You identify the state or behaviour of a large number of individuals. If I'm correct, you can say whether a law will be passed, but not who exactly will vote for or against."
She lifted her brows, visibly surprised. Chris pretended not to be hurt by her surprise. He wasn't stupid, and he had read research papers of all kinds in his life.
"That... That's accurate."
He smirked. His grandfather's talk was not wasted, apparently. He just regretted not paying closer attention.
"I can't foresee individual behaviour except in some cases. Some techniques allow to identify outliers. It might be helpful for you too, other than for the police to catch swindlers or find people with rare talents."
"That sounds good."
"Just remember that nothing is a hundred per cent sure. That's the deal with statistics. You give up part of your certainty to open a thousand possibilities. It won't be always right, but in the end, you'll be more right than wrong. It'll be a gain in the long run."
They were finishing dinner, and Chris hadn't moved his eyes away from May for a single second. She had used much of her stamina to explain things to him, while Morgan had ignored them because he had reports to read on his phone.
Noticing how May was looking tired, Chris cut the conversation short and decided to accompany her to her room. It was on the same floor as his bedroom - it was on the wall opposite May's door - and it shared a terrace with his office.
It was a guest room he hadn't used before because it was too close to him. But, with May, he preferred to be close to his spaces. Since he had spent the whole night watching over her, having the office a couple of steps away had been convenient.
He tucked the covers for May and asked her one last time if she needed something before retreating to do his actual work. Listening to her talking about math had been more interesting than anything else, that night. He was surprised by the ease with which he had forgotten his plans.
When he took a break, it was nearly dawn. He stepped on the terrace with a glass of brandy and a well-deserved cigarette.
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