The Dice That Split Tomorrow

A Different Shape Seven had rolled under Leo’s wardrobe three times in eight minutes and was refusing to admit that the accidents might have something to do with its new shape. A faint tapping came from the gap behind the wardrobe leg, followed by a small, indignant voice announcing that its latest journey had been an experiment. “An experiment in what?” Leo asked. He lay flat on the carpet and put his cheek against the floor, where he could see a pencil, one of the trainers he’d been looking for since Wednesday and the white point of a die peeping out of the dust. “Falling off my desk?” “Controlled mobility,” Seven said. “And you should be pleased. Your record-keeping is improving.” Leo hooked two fingers around it and drew it into the light. He was still getting used to picking Seven up. That afternoon it had been a cube, comfortably small and almost round at the edges, despite Six’s insistence that roundness was a matter of definition. Now eight triangular faces met in sharper points. One of those points had snagged a thread from the carpet, which Leo pulled free before placing Seven on the open maths book he was using as a landing mat. Perhaps the people who owned complicated board games had little velvet bags for their dice because otherwise they would spend all their time retrieving them from underneath furniture. Six stood beside the battered tin, white and square and perfectly steady. “The desk slopes approximately zero point six degrees towards the wardrobe,” it observed. “Repeated trials conducted on an inclined surface have limited value.” “My desk doesn’t slope.” Leo pushed down on the corner with his thumb. It didn’t move, which he considered fairly good evidence. “That would be consistent with a fixed incline,” Six replied. “Or,” Leo said, taking Seven away from the edge of the book, “Seven keeps rolling in the same direction.” Six agreed that this represented an additional variable. Seven sounded rather pleased by the attention and suggested that more trials might help them distinguish between the possibilities. Leo said he was not going back under the wardrobe unless something valuable fell there. He put Seven in the middle of the diagram of an equilateral triangle. Its points were still rearranging themselves in his memory: the pale casing shifting without a crack, new edges forming from a surface that should have been solid. A few hours earlier he had been fairly certain he understood everything the dice could do. They calculated probabilities, talked far too much, occasionally moved when they had no business moving and came from several centuries in the future. That already seemed quite enough for two things which could fit inside a biscuit tin. “What happens to you now?” Leo asked, setting Seven back on the maths book before it could roll into the pencil case. “Further diagnostics would be appropriate,” Six answered. “I asked Seven.” “The diagnostic results will concern Seven.” Six managed to make the distinction sound like a useful contribution. Seven, meanwhile, rocked on one point, tipped onto another face and declared itself in excellent condition, apart from a slight disagreement with gravity. The house had begun its Saturday evening noises. Mum and Dad were watching something downstairs with the sound turned low enough that Leo could hear the music but none of the words. Ivy had been padding about on the landing for the last ten minutes, apparently unable to decide what she was searching for. Twice she had come into his room already: once to borrow a rubber and once to ask why he wanted it back when rubbing things out only made it smaller. On both occasions the dice had stopped speaking just in time. Leo kept his bedroom door shut now, although that was scarcely an obstacle to Ivy when she believed somebody was doing something without her. He turned Seven over in his palm. Its familiar pips came and went across the white triangles, but one face remained different. On it, fine branching lines spread from a mark no bigger than the tip of a pencil. The symbol had appeared at the very end of Seven’s transformation. It was nothing like the crossed circle scratched inside the tin, the mark that usually appeared when Six decided a question was restricted. “Could you make that one disappear?” Leo asked. He tipped Seven towards the desk lamp, trying to decide whether the strange mark was printed inside the casing. Seven shifted against his hand. “The new face? That seems rather unfair. I only just acquired it.” “The symbol on it.” “Oh. I had almost forgotten about that.” Six rolled sharply against the tin. It advised Seven not to attempt anything involving the unfamiliar mark until they understood its function. When Leo asked how they were supposed to understand it without doing anything, Six began explaining the difference between passive observation and interference. Seven suggested that passive observation sounded like watching paint dry, then wanted to know whether Leo actually did that. “It’s just an expression,” Leo told it. “And I’m drawing the thing before it changes again.” He found a piece of scrap paper beneath a worksheet and copied the little branches as carefully as he could. He had filled an entire notebook with theories about Cleo’s Tomorrow Fair project and the Certainty Engine, and the notebook had caused him enough trouble to last the rest of the school year. Scrap paper felt safer. Unfortunately, the result looked rather like a snowflake that somebody had stood on. Seven leaned towards the drawing. “You have omitted a line.” “I couldn't see that line.” Leo moved the scrap of paper into the brighter patch of light, but the symbol had already changed its shape. “Then perhaps you require a better viewing angle.” It offered to hold the pencil for him, apparently forgetting that it had no fingers, and Six interrupted with a warning about allowing an untested shape-changing machine to borrow human motor controls. Leo was trying to imagine explaining that arrangement to his parents when somebody knocked. “Leo?” Ivy called. “Why’s your door shut?” “Because it’s a door,” he answered, which was quicker than thinking up an excuse and considerably less successful. Ivy informed him that it was a stupid answer. Leo tucked Seven inside the empty pencil case beside his knee and rested the maths book over Six. There was a muffled complaint about weight distribution, so he shifted the book an inch before opening the door. Ivy was standing in the hallway in her pyjamas with one of Dad’s socks pulled over each foot. The toes hung well beyond her own, making her look as though she had borrowed two very tired animals to wear as slippers. When Leo asked what she was doing, she demonstrated by pushing herself across the carpet. It was extremely slow skating. “Mum says there’s cake,” she told him, using the doorframe to turn round. “You have to come before Dad chooses the biggest slice.” “What cake?” Leo asked, watching Ivy inch towards the open doorway while he kept his foot against it. “The one from the fair.” “There wasn’t cake at the fair.” “Mum bought it afterwards. That still counts.” Ivy peered past Leo into the room, where his maths book was sitting in the middle of the floor for no reason a normal person would understand. “Have you got Cleo’s robot?” He shook his head and asked why. Ivy wanted to test whether FloodBug would detect the water in her bath, and Leo had to explain that Cleo’s new robot wasn’t supposed to go into baths. Ivy claimed she intended to put it beside the bath, which seemed to Leo the sort of distinction somebody made immediately before a robot went into a bath. “Anyway, Cleo's got it,” Leo said, pushing the edge of the maths book back under his chair. “She's changing the wheels.” “What have you got in there, then?” Ivy tried another little skate towards the gap in the doorway. Leo moved to block it, and in doing so nearly knocked his bedroom door against her enormous socks. “Homework,” Leo said. He made sure the maths book lay over the strange drawing he had been copying. “You finished your homework yesterday.” “It’s new homework.” “On a Saturday?” She considered him with the disappointment usually reserved for people who voluntarily asked for extra vegetables. “You’re weird.” Leo accepted this because arguing would only make her more interested. Ivy skated towards the stairs, shouting that she would tell Dad to leave him the smallest slice. On the top step one sock slipped sideways, and she had to sit down and sort her feet out before continuing. Leo waited until she was safely going down on the carpeted part before shutting the door. Six emerged from beneath the maths book with an objection to being used as stationery. Seven had somehow climbed halfway up the side of the pencil case and was calling it a substantial improvement in mobility. Leo put both on the desk before either could attempt another escape. “Your sister’s method of locomotion is inefficient,” Six said. “She’s wearing socks over her feet. You saw.” “Yes. I identified the cause.” Seven wanted to know whether Ivy always asked so many questions, and when Leo said she did, announced that it liked her. Leo reminded it that Ivy would ask considerably more if she knew the things in his pencil case could answer back. This gave Seven something to think about, which was not necessarily a good outcome. His phone lit up with a message from Cleo. She had sent a photograph of FloodBug Mark Two wearing wheel guards fashioned from plastic bottle tops. The guards were at least twice the size they needed to be, making her little leak detector look as though it had stolen wheels from a farm machine. Underneath she had written: DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A VERY SMALL TRACTOR? Leo told her that a tractor would be insulted. Another photograph arrived almost immediately, showing the machine without the guards. BETTER? she asked. He was still deciding how honest to be when a third message appeared: WHAT’S SEVEN DOING? Cleo knew about the transformation. Leo had sent her a hurried photograph that afternoon, and she had replied with twenty-three question marks, followed by several more specific questions about mass, shape, the new faces and whether Six was jealous. He sent another photograph now, showing the familiar cube beside Seven’s white eight-sided form on his maths book. It was a peculiar thing to take a picture of, given that they looked almost like ordinary gaming dice. Cleo’s reply was immediate: SEVEN LOOKS POINTIER. DOES SIX LOOK ANNOYED? “Always,” Leo read aloud as he typed. “I do not possess facial muscles,” Six said. “That would make an annoyed appearance difficult.” “You seem to manage.” Seven rocked contentedly from point to point. It had discovered that the soft cover of the maths book made a better surface than bare wood, and appeared ready to spend the rest of the evening repeating the discovery. Leo could hear Dad asking where the remote control had gone; Mum suggested lifting the sofa cushion he was sitting on. There was a pause downstairs, then the distinctive noise Dad made when Mum turned out to be right. Leo looked at the tin. “Do you still both fit?” Six proposed a controlled test, naturally. Leo placed it inside first and settled Seven diagonally beside it. The new points made arranging them awkward, but after a little turning the lid closed properly. Seven declared the accommodation cosy. Six observed that they had shared the container for as long as their accessible records extended, which Seven described as an unnecessarily cautious way of saying they were used to one another. Leo left the lid loose enough for them to speak if they needed to. Downstairs Ivy had begun a noisy argument about which slice counted as the smallest, and Leo had a feeling that if he waited much longer nobody would remember to save him any at all. He put the tin at the back of the desk, carried his phone out and went to intervene. Later, when he returned with chocolate icing on one sleeve, he found Seven awake in the tin, trying to work out how to sleep comfortably in a shape it had possessed for less than an evening.