User:Wmcduff/Fiction

"Hurry up and figure it out!" the girl told her brother. The more adventerous of the pair, she was eager to travel to her destination, but at eight, had little patience for the preciseness that her brother was employing.

The elder sibling, twelve, had all the authority granted by his four years, carefully measuring the distance out on the great map on the wall the distance. It was a good hash; they had been there before, but not enough to have gleaned all they good from the area. "Just a moment, you don't want to find out we were miles off like last year, do you?" he asked, doing his best not to roll his eyes.

He found the point on the map, copying down the area in light strokes of a pencil into the thick log book his grandmother had given him. In the park, it looked like. Might be a need for a swim, but it was rare enough to get one this close.

"Come on!" His sister was nearly vibrating with excitement. It was their first solo hash. Well, duo. The brother felt a pulling on his sleeve a bit, and paused, hesitanting. "I'm not sure if I got it right..." he said, teasing creeping smugly into his voice.

"You know, you're just being a pain. Mom said to be home by sundown, and we'll never get there..." The tugging was more insitent, resulting in slow progress towards the door.

The brother grinned as he allowed himself to be pulled onto the steps. "Not with your short legs, Gnat." He removed hands from his sleeve and grinned. "Race ya!"

Brother and sister exploded into hurried movement, a blur of green and brown, backpack bouncing as they ran past the fields where mother and father worked, towards where bikes rested against the fence post.

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Thick, knobby tires churned up pebbles and dust as legs propelled the two down the road, driven at a steady pace by young, inexhaustible energy. Trees grew close to the road, but the two pedalled down the center, not worried about cars approaching without being heard overwhelming the twittering and singing of birds.

"So why there?" the sister asked, coasting a bit as she repeated a question that had been asked often enough, but never answered to her satisfaction.

The brother sighed. "Because that's where the algorithm said," he noted. "You know that."

"But why the Al-go-rythmn?" she insisted as they past a ruined barn, the structure an ancient ruin of wood and weeds and began to head up a hill.

"Well, Grandma said that it's tradition. They chose the date and the Down Jones Stock Exchange as the start, then mixed 'em up. The phone figures it out, then we just look it up. Does it really matter?"

The sister made an insistent noise to argue. "It does! Sometimes it's way up in the mountains, and sometimes in the ocean and even in lakes and stuff." She dug in, pushing harder as they worked over the rise.

"Well, it needs to be random, I suppose, so they had to choose some way. At least we can figure it out in advance."

With that, they crested the hill and came to a halt, resting as they looked down upon what remained of the city, a collapse mass of metal, concrete, and building material. "I mean, when the city was new, that number changed most days."

The sister sighed, resting on her handlebars. "That's silly, though. How did they have time to plan?"

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