Sunny and the Algorithms of Gloom: Chapter 4.1

There was a commotion in front of the library when they finally arrived. A long bookcase of books had been set up along the right side of the square, and people were milling around in front of it.

As Sunny watched, a lady in a hat and sunglasses spoke to the older librarian Sunny had met. The librarian motioned towards a floating robot that looked like a miniature version of Robert. The robot zipped along the row, looking oddly akin to a hummingbird, and paused briefly at one location. Then it zipped in the other direction, paused there, and zipped back again. Soon enough, it stopped in front of a magenta book and chirped. An assistant slid the book out and delivered it to the waiting woman.

Sunny sighed in relief. "Are those all the books the robbers stole? They must be." She rushed closer.

When Robert caught up, Sunny was frowning at the middle of the row. "It looks like these are in alphabetical order by title. That's handy. I just need to walk over to the G section then, probably, to find A Guide to Dark Coding Magicks. That's assuming they didn't include the ‘A' from the title…"

"Or you could let the shelving bot find it for you using binary search." Robert raised an eyebrow at Sunny. "That would be the smart, efficient thing to do."

"Wait, but the librarian wanted to burn the guide, so I don't think I should talk to her…"

"I can communicate with one of the bots instead." Robert hovered closer to a small green bot and said:

binarySearch("A Guide to Dark Coding Magicks");

The bot obediently zoomed away towards the bookshelf. Sunny watched as it flew back and forth, eventually landing on the dark cover of the guide. Surprisingly, it was in the A section… "Well, I guess it was a good thing you asked that bot," Sunny commented. "I would've wasted time searching in the G section if you hadn't."

"See? Doing things the smart way is a good idea."

"Yeah." Sunny watched as a brown-haired assistant began to walk over to the bot. Her eyes widened. "But some things you need to do yourself!"

Sunny dashed towards the start of the row, weaving around library patrons milling around and waiting for their books. She ducked under a basket of bracket baguettes and used a crowd of schoolchildren to hide from the librarian. Finally she arrived at the book, a good twenty seconds before the assistant.

Sunny snatched the book off the shelf and mouthed an apology to the assistant. The assistant stared at her, but Sunny was already ducking back through the crowd.

Robert was waiting next to the entrance to the library. Sunny shoved the guide into her backpack and threw a furtive glance backwards at the librarian and the assistant, but they were both busy helping other people recover their books. She waited a moment for her heart to stop pounding before climbing the steps and flashing a grin at Robert. "Guide acquired!"

The robot hummed in acknowledgement. "Now then. You wanted to crack that code, right? I do believe the smart way to do things in this case would be to gain inspiration from other codebreakers."

"You mean eavesdrop?" Sunny wasn't sure whether or not that was against her morals as a hero, but if it was for the greater good… Besides, she'd already eavesdropped on the librarians, so it wasn't like this was the first time…

Sunny and Robert entered the library and surveyed the main seating area. At a table close to them was a group dressed in matching suits and ties, bending their heads over a paper that seemed to have the numbers copied down. Sunny strained to hear their conversation, but they were whispering.

A couple tables farther away was a group of four, each with a colorful streak in their hair. "But why can't it be a geometric sequence?" blurted a guy with sky blue in his hair, leaning back in his chair. "Geometric sequences are cool."

"That one," Sunny whispered to Robert. Sunny grabbed a large book from a nearby shelf, then they surreptitiously sat at a table diagonal to their target group. Sunny opened the book and hid her face behind it.

"Shh," shushed another member. Sunny peeked over the top of the book and saw a girl with medium-brown skin and a red streak in her hair glance around the library. Sunny quickly pretended to go back to reading.

Robert hovered slightly closer to the group as they resumed a whispered conversation. After a few minutes in which Sunny only caught the words "numbers" and "shh," both of which were incredibly unhelpful, she set down her book.

"At this rate, I think we should just figure it out ourselves," she grumbled.

"Hmm. Perhaps you're right." Robert floated down. "Well, it was worth a try."

Sunny pulled out her notebook and set it on the table between them.

113, 230, 331, 448, 549

99, 196, 311, 427, 535, 636

"So, there are five numbers on top, and six on the bottom." Sunny did some quick mental math. "And yeah, neither of them are geometric sequences. But the top one increases by 117, then 101, then 117, then 101?" She scribbled those numbers down.

Robert looked at the numbers. "Hold on." He popped open the computer in his head and pulled up the ASCII table. "Those numbers could work with the ASCII table."

Sunny leaned over to examine the table. "If we go with 113, 117, 101, 117, and 101, that would be… q, u, e, u, e?" She stuck the numbers together in her head. "Queue!" she whispered excitedly.

Just as she came to that realization, there was a shuffling as the suits group at the other end of the library hurriedly packed up and left. Sunny blinked. Had they already figured it out?

Quickly, Sunny found the number each pair of bottom numbers was increasing by.

99, 97, 116, 116, 108, 101

"c, a, t, t, l, e. Cattle!"

Robert looked at the results skeptically. "I haven't heard of queue cattle, although there is an old castle called Queue Castle on the west side of the Conditional River…"

Sunny checked her math. "Whoops. Silly mistake." She corrected the first 116 to 115, belatedly realizing she could have coded the math in Robert's computer. Ah well. She was still more used to doing things by hand. "Anyways, let's go!"