Ken's Blog

There is so much more to say on the subject of programming without math, and it will take many more posts to even begin doing justice to the subject. But I don’t want this blog to be hijacked by a single topic. Therefore I will adopt an alternate days strategy – posting about pwm on odd days, and other topics on even days, until the pwm discussion has run its course.

Yesterday evening I was having a fascinating and exciting discussion on a far ranging set of topics, with a friend who is reliably brilliant and full of unique insights. In other words, a perfect evening. Topics ranged freely from early pre-Hayes code talkies to the plays of Alan Ayckbourn to the origins of Indoeuropean languages, while touching upon a vast array of other subjects besides.

All was well – joyous and inquisitive and freely explorative – until the topic turned to politics. Suddenly my friend closed up like a book. The arms went across the chest, the body language stiffened, and the tone became bitter and angry. Why have the bankers been given free handouts? What will become of the people out of work, and why isn’t more being done? Why are we back in Afghanistan? I no longer felt that I was talking to an individual, but rather to a representative of familiar talking points brought into the room from other conversations.

I tried to shift the discussion to something more positive, such as our president’s recent announcement of a $260 million consortium to use games to help childrens’ education (a topic I actually know something about). But my friend would have none of it. It seems that my unwillingness to share in the general community bitterness was coming across as a kind of avoidance. My friend seemed to want to know – why wasn’t I sufficiently angry?

Today, in the sunshine of a new day, after I had described my experience of the evening before as clearly as I could, my friend completely came around to agreeing with my views on this, that the “warlike stance” of political discussions seems to take us quite out of our own actual identities and into some sort of weird reflexive group mind.

Yet I have run into this dynamic before in recent times. Two weeks ago I found myself talking to some Germans who were very angry and bitter about their government. Last week I was in Sao Paulo, and encountered one conversation after another with Brazilians who were completely appalled and disgusted by their government.

Yes, I understand – politics is rotten. Nation states are self-interested and highly combative creatures whose realities are generally far less palatable than their national myths. That hero you thought you elected into office generally turns out to be – of all things – a politician. I really do get it.

But why does this obvious reality need to hijack our personal interactions? Why do we cease to be ourselves and become blind with rage when confronted with these sad truths?

Personally, I am quite happy to accept that my president and my country are far from perfect, and at the same time to throw my efforts into helping that same president to improve kids’ education. It seems to me that this is a much more productive use of my psychic energies than yet another angry conversation about how rotten it all is.

Does this refusal to be sufficiently infused with indignant rage make me a hopeless Polyanna?

There is indeed a highly innovative project to introduce children to programming. It’s called the Scratch project (http://scratch.mit.edu), and it was started at MIT by professor Mitch Resnick and his students six years ago. By now there are several hundred thousand kids around the world who play with it. You can go to the site and download it for yourself, or you can just look at the following snippet of a screenshot to get the idea:

The general idea is that you drag virtual tiles from the left side of the screen, and they snap together to build a computer program. This whole “drag and snap together” idea gets rid of the problem of syntax errors — tiles will only snap together in ways that form a syntactically correct result.

The Scratch system provides a library of building blocks that allow kids to incorporate drawings (which they can move and flip through to create animations), recorded sounds, and detect user events from the mouse and keyboard. This is enough to form a kind of kid-friendly equivalent to authoring in Flash — kids can (and do) create animations, games, interactive stories.

This is a great project. But I would argue that there are two important problems it does not solve:

(1) It’s a single integrated project, not a general way of working. You can only build things in the Scratch environment. You can’t use it in your own web authoring tool, word processor, spreadsheet, music composing program, or anywhere else that’s outside of the Scratch sandbox.

(2) There is no way to fully connect the “kid’s toy” environment of Scratch to the sorts of serious computer progamming that these kids will later encounter in their freshman year of college — a good eight or nine years later. As kids go through middle school and on to high school, their experience with Scratch does not continue to stay relevant to their evolving interests.

(3) It’s still very math-centric. Philosophically, starting kids off with Scratch is a bit like teaching English by looking at electrical engineering technical manuals. Scratch is a version of an E.E. technical manual for ten to twelve year olds — it assumes you will eventually be using programming to do mathematical things.

I think the Scratch project is wonderful. I also think we might be able to do better, in two ways:

(1) Rather than create a single monolithic program, create a flexible way of putting these sorts of tile blocks into any computer program, so that a user can assemble programming tiles anywhere.

(2) Create a “core” language that does not require the use of math. Ideally we’d want to make this language powerful enough so that it could handle many different types of problems.

Tomorrow I will describe such a language, and various ways it can be used.

I agree with all of the commenters on yesterday’s post that different problems require different tools. But God, as they say, is in the details.

To address Douglas’ point: I’m not suggesting that people learn a fundamentally weaker programming language. What I’m suggesting is that we radically rethink the order in which we teach programming. It seems to me that a K-12 computer programming curriculum should culminate in, say, a solid working knowledge of Python. But many of the features of Python need not be introduced in the earlier grades, and even then some of those features could be elective, not mandatory.

The mandatory features are the ones that focus on temporal logic, such as sequencing, conditionality and repeated/looped operations – basically the same operations you use when following a cooking recipe. That’s really the core for any use of computer programming. After that we can bring the ideas of how to do common sub-operations. In programming we call these functions. The equivalent in cooking are the sorts of things you already know how to make from another recipe.

Certainly some applications, such as ray tracing, are going to call for tools of mathematical modeling to be readily available. But other applications might require very different sorts of tools. The point is not to remove the math from the toolkit, but rather to not require learning math as a critical path on the way to learning programming.

Andras expresses a utopian ideal of being able to express things in broad and inexact strokes. Alas, I’m not sure we can deliver on that one. A statement as simple as “John is strong as an ox” would confuse the hell out of any computer program. The statement could be interpreted as saying that the phrase “strong as an ox” is an alternate name for John, or that John is strong whenever he is being an ox. And don’t even get me started on “Time flies like an arrow.” The only reason we can glean the proper sense from such statements is that our human brain performs extraordinary feats of culturally informed analysis — something that is quite beyond computer software in its current state.

But what can we do? Well, for one thing, I think we should start out by reducing “data” to the bare minimum needed for describing an interactive virtual world. As far as the program is concerned, the world consists of objects, and each object either does or doesn’t have each of various properties. We can modify objects over time by adding and taking away their properties.

Tomorrow I’ll go into more detail.

Continuing the thread from yesterday…

There is a reason that programming necessarily started out being very math-centered. It had no choice. Back in the 1950s when FORTRAN (essentially the first high level programming language) burst upon the scene, there was no interactive graphics, virtual reality, or real-time graphics acceleration. There were no high resolution LCD monitors and there certainly was no computer mouse. The very idea of interacting with “objects” in real-time on a computer screen – or any nascent glimmering of such an idea – was still the stuff of science fiction.

In such a world, math became central to programming because math is the great recourse when all else fails. You may not be able to see a world, to touch it or sense it, but you can indeed use mathematics to describe it. In the absence of being able to see, say, a round spherical ball on my computer screen, I can always type in the mathematical description of a sphere, and use that description to help me program my computer to make the ball roll, or bounce, or do anything else.

This was the world faced by the early computer programmers. They were literally working blind. All they had were their mathematical descriptions of things, and so naturally computer programming grew around that central, highly empowering way to describe everything. It’s no wonder that the concepts and methods of mathematical description became deeply embedded into the DNA of programming culture and practice.

Even something as seemingly fundamental to programmers as the “=” assignment operator is a math concept, not a programming concept. It basically says “give this thing a new identity.” In the real world, we rarely do such a thing. Rather, we impart new properties to things that already exist. We paint a wall, or we drive ourselves to work, or we make another person smile. Yet we take it for granted that programmers are supposed to write things like “a = b”, because we are so used to seeing the math embedded in the programming that we forget it’s math, not programming.

Programming without math would be much more likely to have operations like “make John smile”, or “drive to work” than such an abstraction as “a = b”. And that would make it much more interesting to a lot more people.

When people think of computer programming, they generally also think of math and engineering – equations, numeric variables, arrays of numbers. Both programmers and non-programmers share this association. To people who program, this mindset generally means that programming becomes associated with engineering tasks – things like running plumbing lines through a house, or building a bridge, or designing an integrated circuit.

To people who don’t program (that is, most people), this association generally has them running as fast as they can for the nearest exit. The whole conversation taps into the deep well of math-phobia that pervades much of our society.

Most people who talk seriously about “universal programming literacy” are the same folks who have no problem with math and engineering. They often wonder why it’s so difficult to get the rest of the population on board.

But I’ve been wondering recently, maybe programming has been misunderstood, abused even, the product of a dysfunctional childhood. Perhaps the same people who lovingly birthed it and raised it – the mathematicians and engineers – have also doomed it to a marginal existence within society, by declaring it to be a sub-branch of math and engineering.

In its most general form, computer programming has nothing at all to do with math and engineering. It’s really all about explaining a cooking recipe to a computer, and then having the computer go ahead and follow that recipe. The computer is rather stupid, but it’s incredibly fast, so if it manages to understand your recipe, it can finish cooking you up a batch of a million or a billion cookies around the time you’d be taking the first dozen out of the oven.

When you start talking not about cookies but about searching for a particular size LCD TV in your price range, or finding references to your favorite author in a library, or putting together a new musical passage by looking at all the songs that were ever in the top ten charts, or locating the best Indian restaurant in Pittsburgh within walking distance of an ATM, things start to get interesting. None of these tasks, or countless other tasks that might require a computer program, is inherently about math or engineering.

Rather, they are about getting the computer to follow through on making the decisions that you would have made, except the computer can do it millions of times faster than you ever could.

I would argue that programming without math has been sadly neglected – the concept of sequential logic, things like “if this is true, then try that”, or “look through all of these things, and as soon as I have found the one I want, send a message to my friend”. We shouldn’t be trying to teach kids programming as a special case of math and engineering. We should be teaching them languages that let them get computers to do the things they want computers to do for them.

And that will require us, in our teaching, to move away from the “math/engineering” mindset, and toward a new way of thinking that is centered on what is truly essential about computer programming.

Well, that’s done. 🙂

It was lots of fun collaborating on a novel from November 1 through November 30, but I am glad it’s over. I haven’t the faintest idea whether the story is any good (try asking somebody sometime for an objective opinion about their own kids) but I certainly learned a lot by going through the exercise.

The most notable thing is the way that characters have a tendency to come to life. And once they do, they clearly have very strong opinions about where they want to go. You can plot all you want, but they will follow their own instincts – and characters definitely have their own instincts. You end up hanging on for dear life, as your psychic progeny figure out what they want to do with their lives.

Ah, children.

And of course writing with a collaborator is a distinctly odd way to go about it. It’s a bit like marrying into someone else’s family. You love all the children, of course, but you only really understand the ones that sprang from your own metaphorical womb.

There is something astonishing about the process of seeing these people emerge out of words and sentences. I begin to wonder whether we each contain within us a variety of virtual selves, awaiting only the right impetus to emerge as fully formed psychic entities. As Whitman said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Perhaps this is true of all of us. Maybe the number of souls born each day is far greater than the number of bodies, and all those extra souls emerge into the sunlight only when they show up in the stories we write.

“What are you girls doing to our poor Clayton?” Francesca asked. Clay was lying on the couch, a stricken look on his face. Julia was holding tightly onto his hand, while Umbry hovered over them.

Looking over at Francesca, Umbry immediately noticed the book. “What’s that?” she asked. “Are you keeping a diary?”

“No my dear,” Francesca replied. “It is indeed a diary, but it is not mine. It belonged to my late partner Frederick.”

That got Julia’s attention. “I didn’t know it was ok to read other peoples’ diaries.”

“Desperate times, my dear,” Francesca said. “This is a most extraordinary document. It would appear that Freddie was keeping secrets.”

Julia and Umbry looked at each other. “Yes, we know.”

Francesca looked quizzically from one to the other. “If understand correctly what I have read, it should not be possible for you to know. Are you saying that you have recovered your memories?”

Clay, who had been silently trying to regain his capacity for speech since Julia had uttered that name, finally managed to speak up. “What are the lot of you talking about? What memories? Is this a game anyone can play?”

“Clayton, we have little time,” Francesca explained. “Our deluded friend Noir believes that he needs to overpower us through force, when in fact we need to help him before time runs out. We need the full use of your mind to turn the tide, and this will require some effort and ingenuity.”

Clay looked dazed. “I really don’t know what’s going on, but obviously the three of you do. Whatever you need to do, let’s get it done.”

Francesca addressed herself to Julia and Umbry. “The loss of memory was unintentional, a side-effect of a process that was only partially completed. All that is required to undo the memory block is for the victim to be pushed to relive the blocked memories, while experiencing an intense personal connection with someone in the here and now.” She regarded the two young women with admiration. “It seems that somehow or other you were able to effect this process on your own, without the benefit of instruction. I must say I am impressed.”

Julia and Umbry looked at each other. Umbry was the first to speak. “We had the advantage of an unusually close personal connection. That was already there. I think we just stumbled onto the rest of it.” She smiled at her partner.

Julia chimed in. “Well, that worked fine for us, but what about Clay? He doesn’t have the benefit of the kind of closeness that Umbry and I have built through the years.”

“There are substitutes,” Umbry smiled mischievously.

Julia looked at her with an unreadable expression. “Oh, don’t tell me you mean what I think you mean.”

Umbry shrugged. “Why not? There’s closeness and there’s, you know, closeness. Is this going to be a problem for you, partner?”

Julia blushed. “I didn’t mean, uh, I mean, … really, it’s ok. One for the team, right?”

“Exactly!” Umbry beamed. “One for all and all for one. I’m doing this for all of us. Glad you’re ok with it.”

Clay had been sitting quietly on the couch, trying to follow the conversation, but it was all beyond him. “Could somebody please tell me what’s going on?” he asked timidly.

“I’ll explain,” said Umbry, as she climbed onto the couch, straddling him in a way that was distinctly more intimate than he would have expected. She snuggled her body close against his, and was gratified to detect that her friendly gesture was clearly having the intended effect.

Clay had a slightly dazed look on his face. “You see Clay, I feel very close to you. And I’m pretty sure, on the evidence of the other night, that you feel the same.” As she was talking, her body was saying the same thing in different ways. “You need to trust me here, go with this.”

Clay’s face was red. He felt both elated and completely out of his depth. “Yes Umbry,” was all he could think to say.

Francesca was amused to note that Julia was watching all of this with a stoic look of resignation. On an impulse, Francesca reached out and held Julia’s hand. Julia turned her and smiled. “Thank you,” she mouthed silently.

Meanwhile, Umbry was leaning her face close to Clay’s talking softly to him. Her dark hair was brushing against his cheek. She looked deeply into Clay’s eyes. “No matter how much it hurts, right now I want you to think of Bianca Renford.” Even as his face began to register pain, she placed her lips upon his, and began to kiss him. It was a long, slow kiss. She took her time about it and made sure to make every moment count. After a few moments, Julia and Francesca could see the pain and tension go out of Clay’s body. He began to kiss Umbry back, passionately. Silently Francesca squeezed Julia’s hand, and Julia squeezed back.

After several long delightful minutes they finally came up for air. Umbry and Clay were simply gazing at each other, sharing the same look of astonished delight. Francesca cleared her throat, in what she thought was a suitably diplomatic way. Neither of them seemed to notice. Finally she tapped them both on the shoulder.

When she at last had their attention, she asked Clay. “Who is Bianca Renford?”

“My wife,” he replied. “That is, she was my wife, before the bomb on the bus.”

“Excellent,” said Francesca. “Umbry, you’ve done it!”

But Umbry wasn’t listening. Neither was Clay for that matter. They would get back to the case in a few minutes. For now, they were preoccupied. Francesca looked with fond amusement at the two lovebirds, kissing each other as though kissing was something they had just discovered for the first time.

Julia was looking at them with a somewhat more impatient expression. “Excuse me, but isn’t it time we got back to the case?” This did not produce the desired response. In fact, for the next few minutes they gave no indication that they had heard a thing.

***

Francesca and Julia sat themselves down at the table, the blue diary the only thing in front of them. Julia stood up again and returned moments later with two hot drinks in her hand. Francesca smiled at the smell of espresso, and opened her mouth to compliment. “It’s okay,” Julia intervened. “You don’t need to make a compliment. I already know my espressos are wonderful.”

Francesca smiled curtly. “Actually, dear, I had planned on informing of you of how glad I am to see you back. But your espressos are indeed excellent.”

Julia blushed. “Why, thank you, Francesca.” Her face turned serious again as she returned to the diary and they opened it to the first page. Julia cleared her head and read through the pages, and found that her reading pace was about the same as Francesca. Finally, they closed the book, and Julia sighed.

“I wish I could have helped him.”

“Me too, darling. But none of us could have known of how closed he was.” Francesca placed a comforting hand on Julia’s. “All we can do for him now is help understand what he left for us.”

“In that case…” Julia said, and once again turned to the diary. “This entry here was after Bianca died, but he’s talking about how he needs her.”

“Oh? It could simply be him missing her.” Francesca read over the entry.

After all of these recent events, I find myself still in need of my beloved daughter. She has passed, but her presence must still linger here, so all of us can gain at least some peace of mind…

“No,” Julia said, shaking her head. “He’s not regretting anything – he’s speaking in the present. Don’t you agree?”

After reading it over a couple times, Francesca found herself nodding. “You’re right – he is talking about her in an active sense.”

“Who would need her? Clay, perhaps?” Francesca looked back at the quote. “No, I believe that peace of mind is the important phrase here. There’s someone who needs peace of mind, which would come from Bianca…”

“Noir!” Julia said suddenly.

“Yes, that’s it! Noir!”

They smiled at each other, their eyes holding each other’s gaze for just a moment longer, before returning to the diary. Julia bit her lip. “That’s not all of it, though. Noir needs her for peace of mind, sure, but that’s irrelevant if she’s dead.”

“Perhaps it isn’t, Julia.” Francesca pointed to the quote. “Her presence must still linger here, he says. Perhaps this means she is still alive.”

“No, that couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.” Julia shook her head. “The brain damage was too severe. The doctors said they had no chance. Frederick said–”

“Frederick, as it happens, was not always truthful, and was often withholding,” Francesca retorted. “You must think, Julia.”

Julia sighed and cleared her mind. “…You’re right. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Noir needs her. Frederick knew that, and he wanted his grandson to be alright… maybe… Noir needs her for his mind to be normal again.”

Francesca nodded. “Good job, darling. We know his secret now. With this, I’m sure we can win.”

Julia nodded. “I still feel sorry for him. He must be so confused. All he wants is his mother.” She looked down at her feet.

“There is nothing I can say to comfort you, is there, dear Julia?” Francesca asked, staring at her. Julia shook her head silently.

“Perhaps, then,” she said, smiling slyly, “there is something I can do.” Softly, she lifted Julia’s chin up with her fingers and kissed her. Julia felt a little bit like an etch-a-sketch being shaken – every worry that had once occupied her mind was whisked away. It might have only lasted a couple of seconds, but it felt like an eternity until Francesca pulled away, leaving Julia gasping a little. She blinked, and then caught Umbry’s eye. Her partner was staring at her with her mouth wide open, an expression of pure shock on her face. Julia, red as a tomato, looked away. “You know that Umbry’s right there, right?” She hissed.

“Consider it revenge, Julia. And hopefully you gained something else from it as well.” Francesca looked quite mischievous at that moment, and Julia couldn’t help but smile a little.

“Perhaps,” she said, returning the sly smirk with one of her own.

***

“Frederick, you see, had a secret, one he took to his grave,” Francesca was explaining. “He had developed a set of rather radical — if dangerous — techniques to revive a coma victim. It involved the use of several minds. The minds needed to be young and flexible, which — apparently — was why he never involved me in the scheme. It seems I was too old.”

Julia smiled. “You’ll never be too old for anything.”

Francesca blushed, and continued. “When the unconscious body of Bianca disappeared, he found himself in the middle of the process, with no way to continue — no way to give young Noir a complete and fully functional mind. Yes the boy woke up with a brilliant mind, but alas it was still an insane one. Freddie could not explain the problem to any of his three volunteers — Julia, Umbry and Bianca’s husband, our dear Clayton — they would promptly have forgotten the entire conversation in a matter of minutes.

“For years he was wracked with guilt – feeling he had betrayed his closest friends with his failure, and had let a young madman loose on the world. Until recently, when he discovered that he had cancer. He told nobody, the old fool, not even me. Knowing he had, at most, mere months to live, he devised this scheme to fake his own murder, knowing it was the only way to bring together the minds of Julia and Umbry and Clay. It was mere circumstance that I became involved. But as it happened, it was a fortuitous circumstance.”

“Yes,” Clay nodded slowly. “All the pieces fit together now. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that time is now running out. Clearly this insanity is beginning to take control of Noir’s mind. We need to get to him before he becomes permanently insane.”

***

Julia sat apart from the others, still deep in thought. Her thoughts had almost completely returned to her since the kiss with Francesca (thinking about it made her lose her train of thought again, but she shook herself out of it) and she kept returning to the segment of the diary. Noir needed Bianca, and she still lingered here… Noir must have realized that, right? He really cared about Bianca. He wouldn’t have just let her disappear like that. No, that wasn’t something he would do at all… and he always got very wistful when he talked about Bianca – almost impatient, like he needed to – to get back to someone.

Of course!

“Bianca’s with him!” She said, leaping up. Everyone looked at her.

“She’s still alive, and she’s with him,” she explained. “He wants to find a way to bring her back.”

“How do you know this, Julia?” Umbry asked sternly.

She paused. How would Umbry react to this? It didn’t matter, she finally realized. Umbry would have to be fine with anything if she expected Julia to be fine with the whole fiasco with Clay. Yeah, that was still pissing her off. Even though she’d done something awfully similar with Francesca, she just didn’t think it was fair that she had to –

She quickly shut out the thought before it had time to finish, and looked up at her partner. “I took a walk with Noir, the night we stayed at his place. He tried to get me to remember, but I blacked out. I think I might have gone a bit too far back, but he kept looking impatient, like he wanted to get back to her. She’s still alive with him. No – he’s keeping her alive. And I think that in his mind, we’re the ones who can help him.”

There was a long silence.

“So what do we do now?” Clay asked.

“We have to go to him,” Umbry answered. “It’s the only thing we can do. Especially if you want to save your son.”

“And how shall we go about that, Umbry dear?” Francesca asked. “If I recall your account, you were both asleep for most of the ride to the island.”

“Most of the ride,” Umbry clarified. “But I’m more observant than I look. And Noir’s mansion is located near a very blue lake. In other words,” she said, laying out a map in front of them, “A dead lake.”

“Ah! From chemical experiments. I see.” Francesca scanned the map. “Those lakes would be characterized by an intensely blue color.”

“And the only dead lake near here,” Clay said, pointing to a spot on the map a few hours outside of the city, “is this one.”

They drove for a long time, occasionally having to stop and ask for directions and being met with people very confused as to why anyone would want to go to such a desolate place. None of them had a car, but as it happened Lindsay did. It was old and smelled like something awful was living inside – Julia explained to Francesca that this was probably the smell of Lindsay, and they would just have to deal with it. As they drew closer, Julia and Umbry found the area familiar, and Umbry was able to pinpoint the turn they should make to get to the bridge. The bridge was guarded by men with large guns, but seeing Julia in the car the men let them through. One of them smiled curtly at her, and she recalled that she had been polite to him in the past. She returned the smile and they ascended the hill. Everything was completely familiar now – the smell of the wilderness and the distant lapping of the waves. They pressed their faces against the windows like eager children.

Finally the wilderness disappeared and instead they saw pavement and grass, and the mansion out in front of them. The car sputtered to a halt and they stepped out. Clay stared in awe and Francesca looked on, somewhat impressed, while Julia and Umbry reveled in the opportunity to breathe fresh air again.

There were guards waiting outside the doors for them, and Francesca approached them fearlessly. “We are here to see Monsieur LeFevre,” she informed the one who seemed to be in charge.

“Yes. He is waiting for you,” he replied, beckoning for them to follow him inside. “Please, this way.”

He led them through the foyer and back into another large room in the house. The walls were lined with books of all kinds, and in one corner there was a place where perhaps Noir enjoyed reading. After that they passed through the dining hall and the parlor, and when they were just nearing the back of the huge mansion the guard turned and gestured them toward a small staircase nestled in the corner of the room. “He is down those stairs. Good luck.” With a last nod he left, although Umbry noted that he was still standing at the door of the room, watching them carefully.

They all took a deep breath. This was it. Francesca went first, followed by Umbry, then Julia and finally Clay, all of them descending into the darkness of the basement.

The staircase started off normally but soon became a spiral. After some walking they were in a large dome-shaped room without any windows. The lighting was ambient and almost eerie, like a hospital for vampires, Clay noted. There was an odd humming noise and a slow, steady beeping that Francesca recognized as a heart monitor. As they descended further and came close to the ground, Julia saw Noir, sitting alone in a comfortable-looking chair, staring at something off to the left that Julia couldn’t quite see. It was, in fact, Umbry who first saw it – her. Her hair was long and white and flowed in waves, parts of it flowing off of the bed and down towards the ground. She was hooked up to all sorts of strange devices. Noir didn’t blink when he looked at her. In his hands was a piece of paper, on which he was drawing – it was a card of some sort, she realized.

“It’s her birthday,” he said softly, not turning towards them. They all reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I know, Noir. I remember,” Clay replied. “She always loved your birthday cards.”

“How would you know?”

“Noir, I…” he didn’t know how to say this, but he knew he had to speak his mind. “I knew Bianca. I knew her very well. She liked angel food cake and loved the month of May, and when she gave birth to you she was so happy that we finally had a child.”

“…Basically, you’re telling me that you’re my father,” Noir said, still quiet, almost whispering.

“Yes.”

Noir laughed to himself. “And that’s supposed to be surprising? It’s so obvious.” Finally he turned around in his chair, sporting a twisted smile. His black eyes were wide and sparkling with something almost otherworldly in its anger. “But you won’t get her back from me, dad. Mommy is mine, and so are they.”

The door locked upstairs. Julia and Umbry looked up at it. They turned back to react toward Noir, but were met with a harsh, resolute clicking noise. Noir was holding a gun, and pointing it at them. “You two, after all, are the key that my grandpa left.”

“Us?” Julia asked.

“He led you to me to you so that I could bring Bianca back, with this machine.”

“No, Noir,” Francesca said, shaking her head. “Frederick – your grandfather – wanted to bring you back, dear. Back to the way you were before, when your mind was fully capable.”

“You’re wrong!” He snapped. “See! I’ll show you! I’ll bring her back with this!” He pointed the gun at Umbry and Julia. “You two are just the sacrifices.”

“Noir, calm down,” Clay said, trying to sound soothing. “You have to think about this. You were unconscious, for a long time. Bianca died in that time. Grandpa was keeping her alive so that you could be brought back to normal, but you took her away when you woke up…”

“Shut up!!”

The room fell silent except for the strange hum and the heart monitor. Noir had backed against the wall, and now he was waving the gun shakily at the four of them.

“Noir, where’s the machine?” Umbry asked, looking around for it. “We can talk about this.”

“We can save you, Noir,” Julia added. “If you just tell us where the machine is, we can save you.”

He looked at them for a second, slightly hesitant, as if he desperately wanted to believe what they were saying. There was a battle inside of him that lasted for almost five seconds, and in those seconds he didn’t move.

“I… can’t be saved,” he spat. He reached for a lever hidden behind Bianca’s bed. Francesca could just barely see it from her place, and knew instantly what he was doing.

“The room is the machine! Noir, stop it!” She lunged at him.

He whipped around.

There was a shot. Umbry and Julia ducked. Clay shouted.

There was blood, and Noir stared in shock at what he had done. He dropped the gun.

Francesca fell to the floor, holding her side. “Francesca!” Umbry shouted.

Noir started to shake, watching as Umbry and Clay leaned over Francesca, who was bleeding profusely from the bullet wound. He couldn’t be saved. See? The only thing he could do was get his mother back… and then…

He felt pain in his head as he was pushed against the wall. He tried to breathe but instead was met with nothing. He opened his eyes and gasped. Julia’s arm held him up against the wall. “You little piece of shit,” she growled. “Didn’t I tell you what happens when you hurt people I care about?” He flailed against her, but in her anger she was stronger than he was.

Clay saw this. “Julia! No!” But she didn’t stop at that. He got up and ran to the lever. Noir was still flailing in Julia’s grip. “Julia, you’ll kill him!” Umbry shouted, but she was trying to stop Francesca from bleeding, and Julia still didn’t answer.

Clay decided. He had to do it now. If only he could trust himself with remembering how… he pressed a couple of buttons on the machine and one of the lights started glowing blue. He grabbed the lever. It could be pushed up or down now. Undoubtedly, one would bring Noir back to his senses and the other would attempt bring Bianca back — an incredible long-shot. He closed his eyes. He had to know which one to do, and it was a 50/50 chance. He took a deep breath. Heaven or Earth? Which way would he go to save the person he cared about?

He went to heaven, pushing the lever upwards.

The humming of the machine got very loud, and Julia and Umbry immediately felt dizzy. Noir gasped for air. Umbry knew they would all faint soon as the light of the entire room went to a faded blue, almost entirely dark. She got to her feet and stumbled to Julia, who was determined to kill him. “Julia, you have to stop,” she said. “Julia, please, stop… you have to. Remember us! Remember – remember the eclipse! Please, Julia!”

Julia hesitated for a second, as Noir’s flailing became weaker and weaker. Then she loosened her grip on him and he slumped to the floor. Julia stumbled back into Umbry’s arms and they both fell backwards.

“An eclipse…” Julia whispered. “So it’s true, then.” She fainted, and Umbry went out right after her.

The machine’s humming became too loud to handle, and Clay held on to Bianca’s body as everything went black.

***

It was very quiet when Julia and Umbry came to. The first thing they saw was Noir, still slumped on the floor, still breathing. Umbry turned around to see Francesca’s blood on the ground, with her still lying in it, but her wound had seemingly stopped bleeding, and she was still breathing. Julia looked up, and saw Clay, hovering over Bianca.

Their hearing returned, and the first thing they heard was a long, steady beep. The heart monitor showed no signs of life. The respirator had been unplugged. Clay was staring at the body, unblinking, just like his son had once done for hours at a time. Of course, it made sense – her face was almost like an angel’s..

They helped each other up and the blood rushed to their heads. “Did… did it work?” Umbry asked.

“We’ll have to see. Francesca is okay, but I still have a headache.” He looked up at them and cracked a smile. “And for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of that idiot college student.”

“Huh. Neither can I,” Julia agreed. “Larry? Lenny? Landon?” She laughed. “Guess he doesn’t matter much.”

“You three seem quite alright to me,” Francesca chimed in from the floor. She had regained consciousness and was looking at all three of them. Julia ran to her side, followed by Umbry.

“You know,” Julia said, “for the victim of a bullet wound, you seem pretty blase about it.”

“I have lived through such things before, Julia dear,” she said, touching her stomach. “Although I will need to go to the hospital soon, or I may suffer greatly from my injuries.”

Umbry nodded and went to the stairs. “I’ll get help,” she said. The guards had been nice to them before, and they would be again. Before she ascended them, however, she touched Clay’s cheek and smiled at him. He nodded at her and she ran up the stairs, knocking on the door politely.

Clay turned to Noir. He checked the boy’s heartbeat and sat him up, but left him alone for Julia and Francesca. “You’re still nervous about talking to him?” Julia asked, and he nodded.

“I wish I could have helped him. It would have been better if I’d remembered, so I could have stopped him from running away.”

“It is all in the past now, dear. Now you have to make amends with him. So what will you do?”

Clay sighed, shaking his head, obviously out of ideas.

Noir let out a sigh as he shook himself to life, lifting his eyelids to see four people staring right back at him. His hands shook a little bit, and he took a breath to speak.

ONE MONTH LATER:

“Hello, this is the SunMoon detective agency. We solve your cases, day or night, earth or heaven. How may I help you?” Lindsay held the phone on his shoulder, staring at pictures of cats. The person on the other line seemed very serious about their case, so he pretended to type on the computer to please them. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, they’re a bit busy with cases right now, but we can get back to you by tomorrow. Yes, they’re that fast. Oh, I’m sorry. Can you hold?” He clicked the button to go to the other line, simultaneously changing the cute cat picture on his computer. “Hello, this is the SunMoon–oh, Noir.” He looked away from the computer. “You won’t hurt me, will you? …Okay. I’ll get him.” He put the phone down and sighed. “Gladly,” he added, still mystified as to why Julia and Umbry had been so keen on accepting a former mob member and murderer as their sponsor. Still, they accepted him, so it was alright. “Clay!” he called. “It’s Noir.”

“Oh, Noir? Really?” Clay looked a bit bashful. Even after a month of conversation it was a bit hard to talk to him. “Ah… I’ll talk to him in a second, I’m still trying to work out this puzzle…”

“He says Francesca sent him the puzzle, and that the answer is Andrew Sixson.” Lindsay couldn’t help but smirk when Clay gave a startled look and then the puzzle pieces fit together inside his head.

“Ah! I get it now!” He said, standing up, but then looked back at Lindsay in confusion. “But isn’t Francesca still in the hospital? How could she have–”

“Hello, Clayton darling.” The bells of the door rang and Francesca entered, still a little weak but seemingly fine. Her hair was longer than before, but still beautifully curly, and she looked like she was glowing.

“Francesca!” He couldn’t help but hug her, which made her wince. Still, she appreciated it nonetheless.

“I thought Noir might be able to help with your case. I hope you don’t mind.” She smiled at him.

“No, it’s perfectly fine. Most of the time he’s smarter than me at these things, anyways.” He smiled back, a little sheepishly.

Lindsay stared at the two and finally picked up the phone. “Noir? Yeah, these two are having a bit of a heartfelt reunion… can I get Clay to call you back?”

Noir laughed on the other line. He was staring out the window from his living room, having just finished a book. “Sure, Lindsay. Just get them to mail me with the next puzzle and I’ll be sure to help.” He clicked the phone off and sighed. Perhaps he should start the next book while he waited.

Those detectives were quite strange sometimes, but he was finally a little bit happy. He smiled to himself and stared out at the blue lake far off in the distance, between the trees. Hopefully they would come to visit sometime soon.

“Does Julia know about you coming back?” Clay asked, looking up towards their apartment upstairs.

“Yes, she does. She did come visit me every day, and brought flowers. It was quite kind of her.”

“She was pretty worried about you,” Clay agreed.

“Hey, are those two still asleep?” Lindsay asked from the computer desk. “And do they really still sleep in the same bed?”

“Yes. They sleep quite late,” Francesca answered the first question.

“And yes, they sleep in the same bed,” Clay added. “…unfortunately.”

Upstairs, however, they had already woken up. Julia was brushing her teeth and Umbry was just getting out of bed and following her to the bathroom. Having finished, Julia’s teeth looked very white. She stared at herself in the mirror. She looked really mature now, and definitely happier.

She gasped as she felt arms around her, but calmed down when she realized it was Umbry. “Good morning,” Umbry mumbled, holding her.

“Mornin’.”

“So Francesca’s back.”

“So I heard,” Julia said, smiling as Umbry let go of her.

“So you two,” Umbry started, not really knowing what to say. “You’re really… you’re actually involved?”

“Pretty much.” Julia paused. “And you and Clay? You two…?”

“Pretty much.”

They both stood silently for a while, looking at each other’s reflections in the mirror.

“…so…”

“…so…”

At the same time, they both hugged each other.

“It’s okay! I won’t leave you!” “Don’t worry, because I’ll always be here for you!”

They pulled away from the hug a little bit, their arms still around each other, and looked at each other, and then they both laughed.

“We always think the same things, don’t we?” Julia sighed.

“It’s true. We do,” Umbry agreed.

They looked at each other for a while, both smiling.

When they met, it had been during an eclipse.

It was a start. They didn’t know when or where they would find the rest of those far away memories, but now they had a start.

And they had friends – people who would support them, no matter what they had to do.

And they had each other, for which they would never stop being thankful.

Neither of them had to say anything to communicate any of this – they both just took each other’s hand and left the bathroom, going towards the downstairs, to new mysteries and whatever else they might find.

They stopped at their bed, where a fluffy white cat slept. “You’re so sleepy these days, Bianca,” Umbry said, scratching its ears. Julia gave it a belly rub and it purred in contentment.

Then, nodding at each other, they walked down the stairs. Julia gave one last look at Umbry before they emerged to another day, and they both knew what they were going to say in their last moments of alone time. They smiled together.

“Let’s get cracking.”

FINI

Remembering things one wasn’t supposed to remember was a tricky thing to do. It was so difficult, in fact, that Julia and Umbry had to come up with a step-by-step plan, something that they were almost never reduced to doing. The plan, as they finally decided, was as follows:

1. Figure out all the things they logically should remember, but don’t.

2. Think of those things and see what comes to mind.

3. Say those things out loud and write them down. Headaches may ensue – try to record the memories someplace where they won’t be forgotten.

4. Deal with possible symptoms and repeat steps 1-3 as necessary.

The thing was, these steps weren’t all feasible for them to do on their own. Figuring out things that should be remembered, but aren’t, is something that requires logical thinking and a linear thought process. Yet one’s intuition could easily be thrown off before there was any time to think. Therefore, they decided that Umbry would take the lead in performing the first step, since she was the logical one. Conversely, using a form of word association takes a natural instinct and emotional connection – relying only on logic to see what comes to mind runs the risk of eliminating the very things one needs to recall. So Julia would take the lead on the second step. Of course, this meant that at a certain point they each would need to rely completely on the other.

This was, perhaps, the biggest test of their mental skills they had yet encountered. They had both realized this at the same time, and with not a little trepidation, but now, as they were about to begin, they were utterly calm. Noir’s strange and volatile actions had to have some reason in them – clearly he had a plan. He thought he knew them, and maybe he knew Julia Strype and Umbry Stykes. But he didn’t know SunMoon. And he didn’t know how formidable they could be when they fully utilized their skills.

They looked at each other and nodded at the same time. Julia took Umbry’s hand and their fingers interlocked. “You first,” Julia said softly, her eyes fixed on her partner as the rest of the world faded away. Umbry nodded again. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

And then she went into her mind.

Almost immediately, thoughts began to flood into her mind. But she wasn’t concerned with those words or the memories they implied. She made a mental list and crossed out every memory that made sense, every memory that was complete, starting with their most recent cases. Lindsay’s betrayal, the first time she saw Clay, the first time she and he had kissed, the time that she and Julia had cried together in the darkness of her office and the time they had first discussed the case.

Wait — there was something Julia had said on that very first day. “…The name rings a bell, but I can’t say.”

Who had Julia been talking about? Frederick White? She remembered that name from the case files, but there was something familiar that she couldn’t place about him. She and Julia had fought quite persistently – and successfully – to establish his innocence in a case. Why would they fight that much? For the truth? No, not just that.

She knew him – perhaps in private life. She remembered his record. He was smart, and quite obsessed with inventing strange machines, their purposes not always known. A machine… she remembered a machine… and a woman with white hair…

“Agh…” She squeezed Julia’s hand, shaking with pain. Her head throbbed. She might faint soon if she kept trying to remember.

“Frederick White,,” she said through her teeth, “And the machines he always worked on.”

And then she let go of the thoughts she’d conjured up, willing her mind to be empty. She loosened her grip on her partner’s hand, gasping for air. She opened her eyes, just in time to meet Julia’s stare.

“My turn,” Julia said, smiling at her partner, silently commending her for her effort. Umbry relaxed a little more, her headache starting to disappear.

Julia’s smile faded from her face as she closed her eyes. Frederick White. They had worked on his case. She remembered wanting desperately to establish his innocence, poring through hours of evidence to prove what her instincts had told her about the crime in the first place. Why had she wanted so badly to help him? Was it because he would have done the same for her?

He was kind, she remembered, but was going through an awful time in his life. He spent all of his free time working on a machine – a big one. Why would he be sad, and what would make him want to work so much? A loved one…? Yes, someone had just died. A woman, with long white hair. That someone was very dear to him… was he trying to bring her back? No, it was someone else he wanted to bring back. But who…?

Julia’s head started to hurt. Umbry saw the pain on her partner’s face and squeezed her hand gently. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“He was trying to bring someone back to life with his machines… there was someone who was asleep, and he wanted to wake him up… but he needed parts of a mind. He needed brain activity, so things would start up properly…”

“Someone was sleeping?”

“No.” Julia took deep breaths, her head hurting more than it had ever hurt. She keeled over in pain, wanting to faint, wanting to bleed until she forgot everything, but she had to keep pushing forward. She felt Umbry’s hand and collapsed into her arms. Umbry hugged her back. She needed to remember this. Someone was asleep… no… not asleep. In a coma.

He was in a coma.

“A coma, Umbry. He was in a coma.”

“Who…?” But Umbry was already realizing what Julia meant. The pieces of the puzzle in her head all came together and the headache came rushing back in full force. They clutched each other, both shivering from the pain.

Him. The boy with the empty eyes. Frederick wanted to bring him back to life.

And they had helped.

There was a long long silence.

They remembered.

And the headache was gone.

They didn’t look up for a long time. Julia was bleeding from her nose and Umbry wanted to vomit. When they finally did look at each other, they realized that they were both crying. At the same time, in the same way, they both wiped the tears from each other’s eyes.

“Did we really give him parts of our mind, Julia…? Is that even possible?”

“I think we did. It makes sense, doesn’t it? These blank parts…”

“And the memory blocks were a side-effect of that.”

They both sighed, their hands still interlocked, and leaned against each other. And they were quiet again.
Slowly, deliberately, Julia lifted her hand up. Umbry looked up at her and was at first hesitant, then a little shocked, and then confused as Julia took the long strands of hair that covered Umbry’s eye and pushed it behind her ear. She felt a bit dizzy to finally see out of both eyes again. Julia looked at the eye that had once been hidden from the world, and smiled a little to herself.

“What do you see?”

“Take a look at mine. You’ll see the same thing.”

Umbry did the same to her partner, taking the shorter hair that had hid her eye and pushing it behind her ear. The eye behind it was strangely empty of expression, with flecks of light that reflected off and seemed to refract. It was similar to Noir’s – and Bianca’s, she added in her head, with some surprise at the new memories.

“There are still mysteries,” Umbry said matter-of-factly.

Julia nodded. “I’m a bit disappointed. Even now, after we’ve remembered, neither of us know where we’re from…”

“…or how we met each other,” Umbry finished. She brushed through Julia’s hair, smiling at her in a way that was both comforting and understanding. She pulled the hair from Julia’s ear and placed it once again over her eye. “I think it’s better that way, at least for now.

“We can’t make things too easy, can we?” Julia smiled back, pulling Umbry’s hair in front of her face. They finally pulled away from each other, still smiling from their accomplishment.

They had finally done it – remembered that strangely cruel boy with the empty eyes, and why he was so kind to them. And without telling each other, they had both already figured out what he wanted to do with the technology that had been passed down to him from his grandfather. He wanted his mother back – or something that perhaps resembled her, even if only slightly.

***

Clay was lying down on the couch, still a little dizzy from the events of the previous night. The cat slept at his feet. Julia and Umbry had just let themselves in, but he’d been too worn out to greet them at the door. They approached him and stood over him, one girl at each end of the couch. Umbry stood above his head.

“You’re back,” he said with a smile.

She returned the smile with a courteous nod. “Yes indeed. And we remember.”

“Remember?” He asked, wiping the sleep from his eyes and taking the ice pack off of his head. He started to sit up, appeared to think better of it, and then with a concerted effort managed to sit up all the way. “Remember what?”

“Clay, don’t let yourself react as usual when you hear this. You need to break the pattern. You need to remember as well.”

Julia squeezed Umbry’s hand, giving her the last bit of strength she needed. The name still felt strange on her lips. Clay looked at her expectantly.

“You need to remember Bianca Renford – you need to remember your wife.”

It had happened right as mommy bent down to kiss him. He liked when mommy him. and he liked the sound of the bus – the steady sound of the engine, the way the seat hummed. Riding the bus with mommy was very nice, one of his most favorite things to do.

Everything was good, comfy, he was with mommy and he was happy, until the moment of the loud noise. Suddenly there was panic, screaming. He hadn’t known that grown-up people could scream like that. There was a big bang, and then the bus was moving quickly, in the wrong way, sliding across the road. Not at all the way a bus was supposed to move. “Mommy!” he shrieked, but didn’t hear a answer. He saw her head, in slow motion, slam against the side of the bus, snap back. There was something strange about the way her head moved, the rapid movement of her neck. He called her name, over and over, but she didn’t answer.

When he realized that mommy was not waking up, he made his way along the bus, toward the front, trying to find somebody who could help, maybe the bus driver. Everything was at a strange angle, and it was hard to climb over the people – especially the ones who were still awake, moaning and sobbing in their seats. They kept moving, and grabbing, and he had to walk around them.

He had tried talking to mommy, but mommy was just not answering, no matter how many times he called her name. The bus driver wasn’t moving either, and that was when he had started to cry. After a long time there was grandpa, he hadn’t been on the bus — maybe he came after the — after. He was with daddy. They were arguing, shouting back and forth. Grandpa was saying “yes, we have to, it’s the only way.” Daddy was shouting back “it’s too soon, it’s not ready,” Even long afterward he remembered that. Then they were looking at mommy, and they were looking at him, they were saying something about he was bleeding from his ear, and it was kind of funny, like watching a dream. Except instead of waking up, everything went blurry and after that he couldn’t remember anything.

***

Francesca read through the newpaper a third time, to make sure she had missed no detail. The pages were yellow with age, but the paper was still perfectly readable, even after all these years. Many people had died on the bus. Apparently a madman had set the explosives, nobody was quite sure why. There had been no way to find out, since he had blown himself up with the bomb.

The mother — Bianca — was listed as deceased, killed in the explosion. The boy had ended up in a coma, that much was clear, apparently for several years. The oddest part was that after three years he had mysteriously disappeared. His grandfather had called for an investigation, but it hadn’t gone anywhere.

She still found it hard to believe that Frederick had kept something like this from her. They had always shared everything, or so she had thought. She found herself realizing that she might not have known Freddie as well as she had believed. Those weekends when he went on his business trips. She had thought it was something harmless — another woman, or another man perhaps, not that it would have mattered — but there might have been something else going on entirely. She realized that the part of the record she now needed to see was not in the office of municipal records.

As she was walking out, she could see the blue flickering of the monitor in the little office where the clerk sat. She decided not to disturb him, watching his blue movies. He had been more than helpful, simply by allowing her to spend so much time looking through the old files. Besides, there was much to do, and she did not have any time for the idle chitchat.

When at last Francesca got back, she did something she had promised herself she would never do. But now it was different — there were lives at stake. The blue notebook was old — it had not been opened in years. Slowly she unwound the string that bound it. Just before she opened the book, she took a moment to stare at the cover. “Frederick,” she said softly. “I am doing it, the thing I promised I would never do. I am not such a good keeper of your secrets after all. But you are dead my dear, and the living must continue to live. I hope you will forgive me.”

And then she opened the diary and began to read.

The morning came, and finally Umbry woke up, feeling slightly woozy but otherwise ok. Her leg had mostly healed by now, so at least she could walk properly. Julia woke up just a few minutes later, and they sat together on the couch, each of them trying to pull their thoughts from their fading dreams and back into the world. Something about a scary story, they both remembered… but they didn’t talk about it. It was too strange for words, and had an eerie feel to it.

Julia wasn’t surprised to find Noir sleeping across from them on the chair, but Umbry eyed him with suspicion. “What’s he doing here?” She asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes. “I didn’t hear him come downstairs.”

“You slept pretty deeply,” Julia replied softly. “He came in the middle of the night. I heard him come downstairs, but I guess I must have fallen back asleep…” She yawned.

“You trust him now?”

“He’s not all bad.”

“He knifed Lindsay.”

“People do bad things sometimes…” she didn’t know why she was defending him. It wasn’t as though she had any reason to be on his side.

They both stood up and stretched, slowly, at the same time. Noir still slept soundlessly on the chair. They occupied themselves by looking at the pictures on the wall. Umbry took another look at the very-blue lake out the window. Julia thought the pictures looked awfully familiar. This whole house was very familiar, actually. One picture in particular caught her eyer. It was a photograph of a beautiful young woman, with almost white-blonde hair and dark blue eyes. She was smiling with a sort of thoughtfulness that reminded Julia of Umbry. This woman… what was her name?

Umbry seemed attracted to it too. She stared at it for a long while. “She looks like you,” she said, smiling. Julia nodded. “I thought she looked like you, but…”

They both noticed Noir standing behind them at the same time. “She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?” He asked. “That’s Bianca. The woman from our story last night.”

Julia gave him a quizzical look last night. “I don’t recall anything like that.”

“Neither do I,” Umbry agreed, puzzled.

Noir stared at them for a second, and then figured it out. He looked a little sad. “Ah, I must have been dreaming. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Julia smiled at him, “that happens to me a lot too.”

“Do you want any breakfast? If not, I can simply get my guards to drive you back to your agency.”

“We’ll be fine without any food, thanks,” Umbry said.

Noir went to leave the room.

“Why are you being so nice to us?” Umbry asked. He stopped in the doorway.

“…You wouldn’t understand right now,” he replied, not looking back at her. “But you will, in time. For now I’ll just say there is something of yours that is very precious to me.” After that, he left, and he must have retreated into another area of the house, because they couldn’t find him before they were taken to leave.

The ride home was long and quiet. Umbry and Julia each stared out a window of the car.

“I wonder what he’s looking for,” Julia finally said.

“Hmm.” Umbry seemed to be thinking about the same thing.

Silence, again.

“Hey, Umbry.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think that maybe we’ve forgotten something?” Julia held her head in one hand. “My head hurts whenever I think about these things, but there are just all these blank spots, and…”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Julia looked up at her partner, and Umbry was looking almost too serious.

“Really?”

“Well, for one,” Umbry said, staring sternly at Julia, “you have blood on your shirt. You didn’t last night. Do you know why?”

“I don’t remember…” Julia looked at the blood on her shirt. “It seems like we have a mystery on our hands. And something tells me that maybe that’s what Noir is looking for–”

“Our memories,” Umbry finished. “And you know us. We solve any case…”

“…Night or day,” Julia smiled. “So let’s get cracking.”

***

Noir walked down each step, slowly, deliberately. The room was large and dimly lit, and only one corner was saved for the important things – an IV drip and a heart monitor, which was beating softly and steadily. A respirator, and feeding tubes. And a woman, with long, off-white hair and grayish skin, lying unconscious under the blankets, hooked up to all the equipment around her but still retaining some sort of angelic aura. Surrounding her were pictures that chronicled the growth of a strange child, separated from the rest of the world by something that no one could name but everyone noticed. There were get well cards, and come back cards. Sitting on the bedside table were the three music boxes she had once loved so much – all three were open. When they were opened like this at the same time, a soft melody came out, every box creating harmony with the others. The woman was deeply asleep, and Noir sighed as he regarded her tenderly.

“You’ll be okay, mother,” he whispered to her, taking a stray lock of hair and pulling it behind her ear. “I promise. Once I get your soul back, you’ll be fine.”