Crow Flight by Susan Cunningham

Author:Susan Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Published: 2018-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

// Twenty-Five

The last week before winter break was frigid and windy, the skies like slate and the trees leafless and sharp. Monday night, after all the kissing in the aviary, Gin had gone home and finalized her college applications, including the one for Harvard. The applications had been ready for weeks, and she was certain they were as good as they were going to get. Plus, she wanted to have plenty of time over break for Felix. And so, without overthinking it, she pressed submit, seven times.

The rest of the week had been all about the crow model. Felix and Gin started after school and worked until almost midnight for three days in a row. The work was fast and furious and good. With an agent based model, they’d have less upfront coding. But they’d have a lot more to do after the model was created, examining all of the scenarios and figuring out which ones, if any, showed an emergent trend.

Most flocking models relied on three rules of interaction: alignment, or how a bird would naturally keep moving in the direction other birds were moving; separation, or how a bird would shift to avoid other birds that got too close; and cohesion, or how a bird would move towards nearby birds. Gin and Felix decided to start with those rules, then add others based on what the data showed.

They already had an example flocking model to play around with. It was beautiful to watch: at first, the computer screen would be splattered randomly with hundreds of “birds,” all represented by little kite shapes. The birds were all heading in different directions, none of them coordinated. But slowly, as the birds moved around the screen, they began to align, moving together in the same direction, flying as if in a wave. Flocking. Order arising out of chaos.

It took her breath away every time.

Since Felix and Gin’s model would use a group of more intelligent birds—crows—there was a chance that a new pattern would emerge. And their model was coming together amazingly fast. Felix felt it, too. As they were working, he kept pausing, shaking his head, and whispering things like, “Wow. This is good,” or, “Now this is better than I ever expected.” And they’d work some more.

Their styles complimented each other. Felix, with his crazy fast thought process and unyielding logic and “bits of soul” he always wove in. And Gin, with her attention to detail and strong analytics and sense of how all the parts fit together. It felt like they were meant to be a team, meant to do this together.

But as much as Gin loved the modeling, she also loved the breaks from modeling. When, without warning, Felix would tug her close, his face so near she could feel his breath, and they’d kiss. His hands would move to her hips, thumbs pressed tight to her waist; her hands would settle at the small of his back or on his chest or in his hair. Then

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