Palindrome: Traversing Fields for Planting.

Seeds

Imena  walked through the fields. The four-month planting cycles kept everyone busy and it was once again time for planting. The rains had not yet started. A gust of hot wind blew the dry soil into her eyes. She ignored it and pulled her scarf down farther to shield her from it happening again. William's arrival was on her mind. She had made a space for them in her house.

They will share a room. The walls are thick and plastered inside. That should keep them cool. And the generator is working, so he'll have electricity.

Maybe he will help with the wind turbines.

A root of a plant caught her foot and she tripped, catching herself before she fell. She barely noticed. By the time she got home her legs ached from walking in the loose soil most of the day. She wanted to look over everyone's fields before planting began so went out walking each day for a few hours.

She picked up her phone and touched the numbers. That's a strange ringing.

"Hello?" Ana waited for the other side of the call to respond.

"Ana, it is Imena, your uncle's friend".

Ana already knew who it was. But she liked the sound of her voice. Imena spoke in pieces. Ana didn't care what she was saying. She just liked to listen to it. She drifted.

"Ana, are you still there?"

"Yes", Ana tried to focus on the words.

"You're coming here Sunday. I'm looking forward to meeting you. Are you ready for your trip?"

Ana looked around her. William was still sleeping. Nothing had changed. There were no boxes or suitcases packed. Their work was still in parts, strewn everywhere. She looked at her display and noticed the array she was building. She remembered another element to add. She typed it in.

"I am." She replied without thinking.

"Ana, is William home? I need to speak to him."

Ana walked over to William and nudged him on the shoulder. "Imena, its Imena".

William held his hand out for the phone.

Ana went back to her work. The sound of William responding to Imena faded into the background as he walked to the kitchen. Ana hadn't spoken to William about the work she'd been doing over the past few days. He had spent most of that time away and when he returned he was too tired to talk. But to her it had become her house. She knew every door-like opening and wall in her code. Her fingers were constantly on the keyboard where typing a few characters could change the entire structure in a few seconds. Masorah. She repeated the name she had given it. William had told her about naming programs at the bank. It was a practice they learned from security teams who trained in law enforcement.

William had left her with the URL of a satellite view of the fields in Imena's community. And as Ana zoomed in she saw the variations of color and their collective shape. She printed it out, and began to enter the name of each family who planted across the abstract forms. And then she began to enter the data Imena had shared with William—the profits for each season. Her program generated an overlay on the satellite image, shifting the color of each field as the history of the profits changed. This had made her happy at first, but something was missing as her image of fields was only pulsing.

"Shallow breathing. No life." Ana watched

She decided to write another program to change the seed value of the algorithm with something completely unrelated. Just to see what happened. She looked through her files and books and finally settled on the numbers marked in the pages of the wax book William had shown her. Nazariy had carefully scratched them into the surface along each tracing of a meteor's path. They were measurements of something, though she wasn't sure what. But they described a curve which was useful for a varying seed value. She adjusted the numbers so they fit within the scale of her program, and then compiled.