The Tree of Knowledge by Daniel Miller (room on the broom read aloud .txt) 📕

it was physically trying to escape from his chest, and his muscles contracted like they were being squeezed in a vise from which the lone escape was rest. He rolled off the bench and onto his knees, and looked into a disregarded piece of glass up against the wall. Brick stood behind him in the reflection, but Albert’s eyes rested on his own face. It was a face he barely recognized. His pale complexion had been replaced by an angry red carpet of skin slicked with sweat. Previously unseen veins leapt out from his forehead and from underneath his eyes.

“I can’t,” he whispered in between breaths. The room seemed absent of air as he gasped and clawed to get oxygen into his lungs.

Just as he was about to beg his oppressor for a reprieve, Albert felt the kind embrace of a cool towel over his head.

“Alright, we’re done for the day,” said Brick with a satisfied grin. “Now you fight.”

Albert closed his eyes, pulled the towel over his head, and let the cool peace envelop him. He had always prided himself on his work ethic, but he realized that up until this moment, he had never truly known work. His aching body simultaneously cried out for every basic need to be met. He wanted water, sleep, rest, food, air, and help, all at the same time and with such ferocity that he could do nothing but lie on the floor of the gym in an exercise-induced fog. What had the potential to be an exciting adventure had morphed into a humiliating monotony.

Brick took the next two hours to train his weary students on the fundamentals of hand-to-hand combat. Proper stance, basic defensive moves, basic offensive moves, grips, and clutches. Albert found himself surprised at how structured and systematic fighting could be. Since he was a child, he had abhorred and feared physical conflict. The raw emotion, chaotic movement, and violence had always offended his senses, but now as Sergeant Travis calmly and systematically explained the tools and objectives of combat, Albert realized that fighting—just like math and chess—could be reduced to ones and zeroes.

After Travis finished his training session, both Ying and Albert could perform a reasonable impression of fighters, if not yet able to execute in real life.

“Alright, you two, I think we’ve accomplished all we can for the day,” said the mountain of a man, showing some pride in what he’d been able to accomplish over the last few hours.

“You mean we’re done?” asked Ying, dropping to her knees and raising her hands in the air in exhausted celebration. Albert was too tired to even do that. He simply stood hunched over with his hands on his knees.

“Well, not quite yet,” said Turner, entering with Gabe Abernathy in tow as Brick exited. “Gabe and I have a little surprise for you.”

Ying and Albert didn’t even attempt to match the professor’s excitement.

“Gabe, will you do the honors?”

With that, the man in the wheelchair opened a box and removed a small pair of glasses made entirely of glass with a long plastic strip along the side and over the ear. Several buttons lined the strip.

Gabe twirled the glasses in his hands with a certain pride and gusto.

“What is it?” asked Ying.

“It’s the world’s first virtual hand-to-hand combat-training device,” replied Gabe.

“How does it work?” questioned Albert with suspicion.

Turner interjected. “It works by instantaneously computing the probabilities in real combat situations. For example, when Eva fought that security guard, if she had been wearing this wonderful gadget, she would have been able to see in real time the probabilities that the security guard would punch, kick, etcetera.”

“How is that possible?”

“That’s the best part of it,” said Gabe. “When Professor Turner explained how logic and probability could be used in hand-to-hand combat in much the same way it was used in chess, I thought to myself, ‘If you could analyze data on past hand-to-hand combat situations in the same way that chess programmers analyze data from past chess matches, then you could potentially predict future events.’ Just like they do when they create a chess program where you play against the computer. So, being the nerd that I am, I downloaded every available UFC video I could find and had a group of interns note each time an offensive move was made, what the move was, what position the person was in before they made it, and what its effect was.”

“Oh God, that must have been tedious,” said Ying.

Gabe smiled. “You don’t know the half of it. But what was interesting was as the interns watched for longer periods of time and made notes, they began to be able to predict what punch was going to be thrown. Once I noticed them doing this, I knew that we had something. From that point on, all we had to do was load the data into the computer and develop a program around it. Then I just bought a few pairs of Google glasses, made some modifications, and voilà.”

“OK, but how do the glasses operationalize that data?” asked Albert. Normally, he would have been fascinated by this newfangled device, but now he simply wanted the day to end.

“Using the data we obtained, we knew that, for example, if a man is in a crouched stance with his left foot forward, then there is an eighty-five percent chance that his next offensive move will be a punch with his right hand. This type of predictability resembles what we see in chess. For example, if a player moves a pawn first, followed by a knight, there is a seventy-five percent chance that his next move will be another pawn. Our next step was to integrate this video knowledge into the process. That’s where the glasses come in.”

“That’s cool. It’s like Pokémon Go for fighting. Does it record your opponent?” asked Ying.

“Exactly. The glasses are equipped with a small camera that records the person you are fighting. That video recording is then sent to our software program, which