Five Urban Stories Page 10

  “Have you found the love of your life? And how old is he?” I asked with a mocking grin.

  But, as if not joking at all, she answered smiling, “Yes! And he’s just above twenty!” It was a response that left me perplexed.

  It sounded possible however. I’d noticed already in the past her questionable bent to youngsters, usually rough guys, and much younger than her.

  In turn, she was definitely younger than me, just over thirty years old but a boy of around twenty would be just a toy for her. And from her looks, she must have used them very well.

  “A bit too young, don’t you think?” I offered with the highest disregard, while bitterly regretting my old age of sixty.

  She didn’t reply.

  “So, you’ve really decided to abandon me to my destiny,” I continued. “I called you many times, but you never answered.”

  “No! I’m sorry about that, but I never had a credit on my phone to call you back, you know how it is… And then, who warned me lately not to put all my eggs in one basket?”

  Another silly excuse, but it had been smartly bundled with a sarcastic joke.

  Sonia was a woman of the working class, the only type I could lately appreciate, and she always pretended to be penniless. But not to that extent!

  The low roar of the bus engine and the traffic noise were disturbing our conversation, so I made her move to the window seat, and I took the place beside her.

  We continued talking, head to the head, of her work—the best she’d ever had, she affirmed. They treated her as one of the family and paid her well and on time. A real dream, compared to the last experiences.

  I felt glad for her. She deserved it after having changed so many humiliating and underpaid jobs.

  She asked about my children, something that had always interested her. But the silly thing is that she’d never met them, nor ever been to my house. I didn't want to expose my daughter and son to my questionable choices on my partners' age. So, Sonia knew them only as ideal entities described in our conversations.

  Our legs touched, lolling at the bus shudders and jerks.

  At one point, with a swift movement, she pushed her hand between my legs, making me jump. She held my sex with precision and strength as if she saw its exact position under the trousers’ fabric.

  We were still alone in the bus, and the driver was far off, distracted by his task. Nobody could have noticed that crazy move.

  “That one is mine! What do you think, long face?”—she murmured at my address.

  Then she released her grip, abandoning the turgor that was mounting.

  She needed to show me I yet belonged to her, I thought, that she could catch me again at her will.

  When we climbed the hill street towards the ancient small town, she called the restaurant to tell them she was now reaching the bus parking. She said she would walk to the restaurant, in the main square of the town.

  At the bus stop, we got out, and I said I should go ahead so that the restaurant people wouldn’t see us walking together. I wanted to check how she answered.

  “Why should they care?” she replied, so I concluded that the old pig wasn’t part of the new course of things.

  The sun was already high and hot, making of that deserted place an ungrateful stay.

  “Are you walking to your house?” she asked when I wore my backpack.

  “Sure!”

  “But it’s far.”

  “Lazy girl! It’s not far, I’ll enjoy the walk.”

  Then, as the last attempt, I said, “I’ll be alone in the house, and I could stop there tonight. Why don’t you come this evening when you’re free? You can sleep there, and tomorrow morning you can take it easy. I’ll prepare a luxury breakfast, and then you can reach the restaurant with a ten-minute walk from my place.”

  “Yes, no problem! I’ll let you know,” she answered while looking around the empty parking area.

  I presumed it was a safety policy even though she had nothing to fear from me. I imagined somebody else, more ruthless than me, and well before she met me, had burned into her mind the idea you never have to trust a man to the point of telling him one particular truth: that you don’t care of him.

  Hence, she must have set one firm rule: never say no to a man, and then do whatever you like.

  I had also learned that when she said, “Yes, no problem,” that would often mean, “No.”

  At any rate, I replied, “Okay, I’ll call or text you later in the afternoon. Have a good day!” Then, I walked away towards the exit of the parking area.

  Our accidental meeting on the bus seemed to be the last bus stop of our weird story. Anyway, I had set two nice challenges for the day: one with the business problem to solve, and one with the girl.

  The work problem rushed again to my mind, urging me to increase the pace of my steps.

  Solving the problem was urgent for my company’s business.

  That solution would consist in a flawless algorithm to deploy and update every few minutes a mind-blowing logistic process. The client was a multinational pharmaceutical industry that was developing a challenging optimization project in one of its production plants, in the Pharma Industrial District, south of Rome. A vast green plain of reclaimed swamps, scattered with shimmering agglomerates of spherical and cylindrical bunkers and interconnected pipe mazes, beside box-like office buildings.

  The aim was to provide a five-percent average saving on the annual production costs of the plant, which meant a total of several million Euros of cost reduction per year.

  Therefore, if I sold the solution cleverly, it would mean for my company an adequate yearly fraction of those savings. Not exactly peanuts!

  But it wasn’t only the expected economic gain that urged me to reach my thinking sanctuary. For sure, some big thinker, probably in the early twentieth century, had already faced and solved that class of problems, but, unaware of any real application, he had left it lie buried among the pages of an essay, maybe a forgotten corollary of an obscure theorem. I didn’t know for sure, and I hadn't a chance to discover who and when had accomplished it.

  I had to follow my way.

  And here, I couldn’t avoid starting what everybody would call stilted speculation about the root of my motivation.

  I felt sure that my first source of motivation wasn’t money, but a personal reward. It was an almost greedy expectation of the self-reward I’d enjoy if I found the solution.

  To me, it meant a peculiar satisfaction of an incomparable sweetness and intensity, something I knew would make me float in mid-air for a full week, walking without touching the ground.

  In the last period, I had thought often of that powerful mechanism of reward, after I had read that an abundant and prolonged production of endorphins inside the brain unleashed it.

  It emerged as a stable pattern in the genetic code of mankind after several millenniums of evolution. A mechanism that needed billion of confirmations to enforce it in its present genetic expression.

  I was sure this carried an essential meaning. The skill of creating logical theories, the ability to build ideal systems, even without, or before applying them to solve a material problem, had to be a strategic mission for living beings.

  Lately, I had felt confident about this theory.

  Oh, but to be clear, the problems I used to solve were just small things.

  I knew perfectly well I was last among the last ones. This mind game had seriously started around two thousand and five hundred years ago and, already in the first centuries of that long period, it led to some of the most bright and useful accomplishments of human thought.

  At any rate, another, let’s say, even more metaphysical, and stilted question puzzled me in particular.

  If discovering and understanding logical truths was so essential for us, and if we all were evolving to accomplish this better, why was it so difficult to achieve this awareness?

  I couldn't guess the exact term of my life, but I could affirm that likely, grasp
ing the existence of that principle and learning to enjoy the heavenly reward tied to it, had taken almost three-quarters of my whole lifespan.

  Too long!

  I’d been slow to achieve that consciousness, discouraged by the nonsense of life or, more often, I had been distracted, like an idiot, by a long sequence of vain endeavors.

  Now I was late for being anything else than a ham.

  I worked hard, without wasting time for food at lunchtime. At three p.m., I called the nearest bar, and I ordered four sandwiches, mineral water and orange juice. They delivered everything to my home in ten minutes.

  By that time, I’d already found what I hoped to be an analytic solution—a family of functions that could solve the general problem.

  I had partitioned the existence domain of all the solutions and defined a method to generate a solution function for every partition.

  Let’s say that, imagining the problem as a cake, I had divided the cake into slices and had outlined a safe procedure to eat the whole cake by swallowing one slice at a time, avoiding the possibility of choking to death.

  This imaginative description could give the false sensation of fried air. Otherwise, the problem and its application sunk their roots deep into the material world.

  Each partition represented one production regime among all those possible in the real factory. Which were many, but still a finite number.

  A different list of pharmaceutical specialties—pills of different colors and composition—with varying quantities to produce and deliver within a defined date and time described each production regime.

  This meant different activity plans for the small robots troop used for conveying the chemical components from the robotized multistory warehouse of the factory to the various production units.

  Just as workmen, the carrier robots would go through shared paths and elevators inside the intricate body of the plant. Some sections of the routes were critical resources because only one robot at a time could use them. It also happened with the mixing machines, which required a sterilization cycle and a new vacuum atmosphere after each use.

  The solution consisted of choosing the total number of robots, as well as their schedulings and paths, that would allow the most efficient production process. All this meant that it required the least robots and the shortest total time. This had to be computed for every and all the different production regimes, which were the slices of my cake.

  I had built the solution functions, applying my personal algorithm of maximum-flow to the different partitions of the problem.

  I was still testing the formal correctness of my first attempt when I scarfed down the first sandwich and then, in a few seconds, I pushed another one to its chase down to the stomach.

  The problem was difficult but far from unsolvable.

  Unfortunately, my first check already showed that a severe incongruence flawed my family of solution functions. I had only one straightforward way to make a logical test of my solution’s correctness.

  I already knew for sure the measure of the whole existence domain of the solution space, the full cake.

  Thus, adding up the measures of the existence domains of all the functions of my family, the cake’s slices, the result had to be the full cake. Or very, very near.

  Too bad that my family of solutions showed to cover a much broader existence domain. This meant I couldn’t know which, nor how many, of my alleged solutions weren’t solutions at all to my problem.

  I knew that with unlimited time and money, I could resort to the nuclear weapon of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with a deep enough Neural Network.

  But in practice, this was an illusion.

  Already the work to gather and organize tens of thousands of examples in an adequate training set for the Neural Net would have cost a fortune in terms of man-hours, or better, months of teamwork necessary.

  What I was forced to discover, was a dramatically less expensive and time-consuming way to determine a family of solutions via an analytic method.

  Besides, my company’s gain would be substantially higher with the quick development of an analytical solution.

  There was only a drawback in my approach.

  It needed a human with a well-trained analytical mind, who still remembered enough of his math.

  But hiring somebody else with adequate skill would lead again to unpredictably high costs with no assurance of success.

  In a nutshell, I was exploring the only way to achieve a good gain in a reasonable time from such a project.

  Otherwise, it could lead to a so-called bloodbath: a massive loss of time and money.

  The reasonable time and cost to discover all that was the single day I was spending on it.

  After gobbling the last sandwich together with the remnant of orange juice, I felt helpless. When you immediately sniff a solution, but it turns out to be crap, you’re in deep trouble.

  I thought better to take a break, and I faced the other riddle of the day—the date with the girl. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the last bus to go back home would leave from the parking at seven p.m.

  It was time to choose whether to stop for the night or go back home. I decided that I would call Sonia and tell her I had to remain for the night, then I would ask her if she wanted to come.

  I dialed her number, hoping she’d answer.

  “Hello, can I talk?” I asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t finish my work by today. So, I’ll stay here for the night and finish tomorrow morning. Will you come tonight?”

  “I haven’t decided, yet. I would be late, anyway. My work won’t end before half-past eleven.”

  “No problem. I will work and wait for you.”

  “Okay, let me check something. If I can free myself, I’ll call you back.”

  It wasn’t exactly the result I wanted. I was sure she already had an appointment with my present competitor. But she still gave me an opportunity. I couldn’t hope for more, given the situation.

  “Sure. You’re always the best, whatever you decide.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Take care.”

  I went back to my work, and I had an intuition. I fixed my attention on the ghost doubt that had flashed when I had defined the initial hypotheses of the problem to then disappear in the blink of an eye.

  I had assumed that the solutions defined a proper partition of the total solution space, like the slices of a cake. In other words, that the cake’s slices didn’t overlay.

  But who said it had to be so? My ideal cake was under no obligation to behave like an ordinary cake! There existed so many different types of cakes in the ideal and in the real world!

  Now, I had a suspect. The solutions could overlap around the partition’s boundaries, and this could dissolve the incongruence of my method.

  Yes! I felt that blissful excitement!

  I had found the crux of my problem, and now I would crack it.

  The boundaries between different solutions weren’t clean lines. They were blurred borders, regions where the solutions morphed into one another.

  And this would cause precisely the supposed incongruence that I’d gotten.

  Of course! The slices were overlaying one on another, then their sum was more than an ordinary full cake. No incongruence!

  To get a first confirmation of my hypothesis, I had to test it on real data.

  Stored in my notebook, I had enough sets of experimental data from the factory’s production batches of the last three months.

  If my solution was right, for each production batch I would get one new scheduling of the robots, granting me a total execution time and cost lower than the ones experienced in reality, but yet possible in the real-world factory.

  If I met these conditions, I was on the right track.

  Meaning: the client would save money thanks to my solution. While I was preparing a rough software procedure to perform the heavy-duty validation task, my phone rang.
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br />   I watched the display, expecting to see the name of Sonia, but it was my son, Aldo, calling.

  What on Earth, I wondered, hoping that nothing wrong had happened. A call from my son was more than a rare event.

  “Hello, Al! How’s everything?”

  “Fine, Dad! I wanted to ask you if you’re staying out tonight.”

  Strange again, but I felt relieved it wasn’t bad news. “Yes, I’ll remain here tonight. But why are you asking me that?”

  “Oh, I wanted to invite some friends of mine at home for dinner, if you’re out.”

  “Okay, the playground is all for you, but I don’t want to find a devastated battlefield when I’m back tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry, thank you, Dad!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m on the highway, driving back home.”

  “Well! Then switch off that phone and be careful how you drive! See you tomorrow.”

  “Fine. And, are you coming back for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Are you telling me what to do? Yes, I think so, and if you prepare something for lunch, it won’t disappoint me, anything you prepare.”

  “Forget it! I’m busy tomorrow morning.” He hung up.

  After that odd phone call, I asked myself what my son was planning for the evening. I hoped he wouldn’t organize an in-house rave party, destroying furniture and staining with coke or other unknown fluids every sofa in the living room, like two years before.

  I shivered, regretting my excessive liberality. I couldn't even rely on the discrete surveillance of my daughter who was out of town, busy with exams at the university until the end of the week.

  I finished arranging the test environment, and I pushed the run button. Then I remained in wait, while the number crunching evolved slowly, with minimal, ill-formatted reporting displaying on the screen. I would find a complete report in a file, at execution’s end.

  The phone issued an exotic fluttering sound: it was a message where Sonia said she couldn’t meet me that night.

  She had to go back home, and one of her colleagues would take her by car, as usual.