Chapter 11
The Lab
Austen
Starlings are, statistically speaking, boring.
I sat in the library carrel, staring at a simulation of Sturnus vulgaris migration patterns. On my screen, thousands of digital dots swooped and swirled in a mesmerizing cloud. Efficient. Beautiful.
Putting me to sleep.
I checked my phone. No texts from Luke. He was at practice, likely stopping pucks or getting yelled at by Harper.
I minimized the birds and pulled up a different window—a pirated stream of the Merrimack game I’d found on a shady forum. I watched Luke move.
Shuffle. Post-tap. T-push. Freeze.
Technically, the players weren’t a flock. Luke was a single point of data navigating a hostile geometric plane.
I typed hockey as flock of birds into a Google search to see if anyone had looked at flocking behavior of hockey players.
All I found was an obscure reference to a pigeon.
I read the result, In hockey, a “pigeon” is a common slang term, usually a friendly jab, for a player who doesn’t do a whole lot on their own but capitalizes on the work of others (e.g.
, scoring a goal off a lucky rebound after a teammate did all the hard work).
Pigeons are often seen as “bench warmers” or not highly respected, much like the common perception of the bird itself.
This made no sense to me. If someone wasn’t a working part of the system, why would they keep them.
If a gear in a watch breaks down, you replace the gear with one that works.
I made a mental note to ask Luke when I saw him.
The birds were random chaos masquerading as order. Luke was order imposed on chaos.
I closed the laptop. I couldn’t write about birds. Not when I had a much more interesting variable sleeping five feet away from me every night.
I scribbled in my notebook, “Flocking behavior?” Can we apply mathematical flocking behavior to hockey players?
We already use the term to describe and analyze other forms of leadership.
Can teamwork, positioning, and coordinated movement among players on the ice be evaluated in the same way?
It is a metaphor for how individual players, without global control from a single leader (the goalie), follow simple local rules to achieve complex, collective movement, much like a flock of birds or a school of fish.
But to prove it, I needed raw data.
The Audio-Visual Department lived in the sub-basement of the Arts building, a windowless dungeon that smelled of Doritos.
I walked up to the cage. Ben, the student manager—a guy who wore a beanie indoors and looked like he hadn’t seen the sun since mid-June—was wrapping cables.
“We’re closed, man,” Ben said without looking up. “If you want a camera for a film project, fill out the form online.”
“I don’t want a camera,” I said, leaning on the counter. “I want the login for the arena ceiling feeds.”
Ben paused. He looked up, squinting. “The overheads? Those are for coaching staff only. Coach Harper locks that down tight.”
“I know,” I said. “But the server architecture for the Athletics Department shares a trunk with the AV archive. Which means you have an admin bypass?”
Ben crossed his arms. “And why would I give that to you?”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Math 304. Advanced Calculus.”
Ben’s eyes widened.
“I heard you’re retaking it,” I said. “I have the answer key for the midterm problem set. With proofs. And I’ll throw in a tutorial on how to solve the partial derivatives, so you don’t fail the class again.”
Ben looked at the papers. He looked at me. A simple transaction: intellectual property for digital access.
“You’re roommates with the goalie, right?” Ben asked.
“I am.”
“Is he good? Like, actually good?”
“Statistically above average,” I said.
Ben grinned. He grabbed a sticky note and scrawled a username and password. “Don’t get caught. If anyone asks, you hacked it.”
“Pleasure doing business.”
The Theoretical Mathematics department was located in the basement of Ridgeway Hall, far from the flashy biology labs with their glass walls. We were in the “Bunker”—a corridor of whiteboards and humming servers.
I stood outside Office B-12. My heart rate was 98 BPM. High.
Dr. Aris Thorne did that to people.
“Enter if you understand the Fourier Transform,” a voice called out from inside. “Leave if you’re looking for the registrar.”
I opened the door.
Dr. Thorne was standing on her desk—literally standing on it—adjusting a projector mounted to the ceiling.
She was wearing a silk blouse tucked into high-waisted trousers, her heels abandoned on the floor.
Six-foot-two in her stocking feet, a statuesque woman with sharp cheekbones and eyes that could dissect a theorem at fifty paces.
The smartest person I had ever met, and arguably the most terrifying.
“Dr. Thorne,” I said.
“Lovell,” she said, not looking down. “Hand me that screwdriver. Phillips head.”
I grabbed the tool from her cluttered desk and handed it up. She tightened a screw on the mount, gave it a satisfied slap, and climbed down with the grace of a dancer. She slipped her feet back into her stilettos.
“Talk to me,” she said, sitting behind her desk. “How are the birds? Have we solved the flocking algorithm?”
“Yes, but I’m dropping the birds,” I said.
Thorne paused. She leaned back, tenting her fingers. “You’re pivoting. Two months before the draft submission. That is either brilliance or suicide. Defend it.”
“The birds are predictable,” I said, clutching my laptop. “I found a new dataset. A closed system with high-velocity projectile variables. Specifically… the goaltender position in collegiate hockey.”
Thorne stared at me. The silence stretched for five seconds.
“Hockey,” she said flatly. “Men hitting each other with sticks? That is your muse?”
“It’s not about violence,” I said quickly. “It’s about geometry. Look.”
I connected my laptop to her monitor. I typed in Ben’s stolen password.
The screen filled with a wide-angle, top-down view of the ice. Grayscale, grainy, and perfect. It showed the crease—the blue paint—and Luke.
“Where did you get this?” Thorne asked.
“I acquired it.”
“Illegal acquisition. Good start.” She leaned forward. “Just don’t get caught.”
I hit play.
On screen, the play developed. A pass from the corner. Luke didn’t scramble. He didn’t lunge. He rotated his hips and pushed—a sharp, clean vector—arriving at the post exactly as the puck arrived.
“Watch the efficiency,” I said. “Most biological subjects in high-stress evasion scenarios exhibit panic—wasted energy, erratic movement. But Subject G…”
I pointed to Luke.
“He minimizes the hypotenuse,” Thorne whispered.
She grabbed a dry-erase marker from her desk and drew directly on her monitor screen, tracing Luke’s path in red.
“He doesn’t track the object,” she murmured, drawing a line from the shooter to the net. “He tracks the probable trajectory. Predictive topology.”
“Exactly,” I said, feeling the rush of validation. “I want to map his efficiency against the standard ‘save percentage’ model. Traditional stats reward volume. They don’t account for difficulty. I want to build a model that quantifies positional success.”
Thorne sat back, capping the marker. She looked at me, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips.
“Subject G,” she said. “Does Subject G have a name?”
My face heated. “Luke. Carter. The transfer.”
“I see.” Thorne’s eyes sparkled. “And does Mr. Carter know he is being reduced to a set of topological variables?”
“He… knows I’m helping him with accounting.”
Thorne laughed, a rich, throaty sound that echoed in the small office. “Accounting. A tragic waste of bandwidth.”
She stood and walked to a filing cabinet in the corner. She rummaged through a drawer marked Confidential/Do Not Touch, pulling out a dusty external hard drive.
“You’re lucky, Lovell,” she said. “I consulted for the Athletic Department three years ago on a biomechanics grant. They wanted to know if their conditioning program was working.”
She tossed me the hard drive. I caught it with two hands.
“That drive contains the raw Catapult data,” she said, sliding the sleek black rectangle across the mahogany.
“Catapult?”
“The GPS vests they wear under their jerseys,” she explained. “It tracks heart rate, acceleration, metabolic load, and spatial positioning to within ten centimeters.”
My mouth fell open. “You have his biometrics?”
“I have the team’s data. I consult for the athletic department on performance analytics. If your Mr. Carter is wearing his vest, his data is in there.”
She leaned against her desk, crossing her arms.
“Here is the deal. I am formally adding your name to the Kinetic Efficiency in Sport grant as a research assistant. That legitimizes your access to the video server and the biometric files. You aren’t hacking anymore, Lovell. You’re working.”
I breathed out, a weight lifting off my chest. “Okay. What’s the objective?”
“Overlay the GPS data with your video analysis and quantify Subject G’s efficiency. Prove that his ‘quiet’ movement is statistically superior to ‘active’ movement.”
“And if I do?”
“The Northeast Regional Symposium is in Boston in February,” Thorne said. “I plan on attending to present a paper on fluid dynamics. If your work is good—and I mean impeccable, Lovell—I’ll consider submitting this as a co-authored finding.”
My stomach flipped. “Me? Presenting with you?”
“Don’t look so terrified. It’s not a done deal. It depends entirely on whether the math holds up against scrutiny.” She winked. “But it would look excellent on a grad school application.”
She pointed a manicured finger at me.
“But first, bring me the code. I want the preliminary script by next week. And Lovell?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have any conflicts of interest you need to disclose?”
“Yes, ma’am. Subject G is my roommate. We were thrown together this fall.”
“Do you get along with the subject?”
“We have a working relationship. As for being a roommate, he’s quiet and learning how to be organized. Though his math skills are subpar.”
She arched one of her eyebrows. “Don’t fall in love with your dataset,” she said, her voice dropping to a warning tone. “It compromises the objectivity. If you fudge numbers to make him look good, I will scrub your name from the program completely.”
I flushed, clutching the hard drive to my chest like gold bullion. “It’s just geometry, Professor.”
“Of course it is,” she said, turning back to her whiteboard. “Get out of my office. Go calculate.”
I walked out into the hallway, the hard drive heavy and cool in my hand.
I now had legitimate access to the video along with the GPS data. And who knows, maybe a potential ticket to Boston. At least Dr. Thorne hadn’t laughed me out of her office; that’s more than I had hoped for.
Now I just had to make sure the dataset didn’t break my heart.