Giselle stared at the readout. There was a pattern here, she could feel it. Unfortunately, the head of the lab didn’t accept ‘feelings’ as valid data, even when they’d proven correct every other time.
It was there, but she had no idea how to find it, what it was, what it meant. Even an inkling on either of those would be a place to start, instead, she was metaphorically throwing things at the wall and hoping one of them might stick.
She stared down at the numbers, a jumble hiding a message. What would make it look tidier? That was what her nanny had always said, ‘tidy room, tidy mind’. That Giselle being neat made Nanny’s life better was, of course, irrelevant.
What if she extended the table? Made it nine columns instead of eight. It was just an arbitrary layout anyway, for all her lab head made grand pronouncements about the mathematical significance of the number eight. Giselle had never seen any evidence of that, but, much like her feelings for patterns, it was better not to mention it.
She re-keyed the format parameters and re-output the data. As it scrolled up onto the screen in front of her, she froze. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be that simple, and it couldn’t be that ominous.
At that, precisely wrong moment, her lab head walked into the office. “Any progress on those bloodline tracks?”
“Nothing yet” As of now, that was a lie. She switched screens to the old layout. “If you could tell me a little more about what you’re looking for…”
“It’s confidential information.”
“So you’ve told me. Confidential information about our family, which I’m a member of, for all you’d rather I wasn’t. So why are you refusing to give me the tools I need to do my job?”
“Really child, here’s no need to get huffy. You know I value you as a granddaughter, I just don’t want your research to be biased.”
“So you’d prefer it to be wrong.”
The DNA of Stories 