Michaels & Sullivan: Holistic Sudoku

INT. OFFICE - DAY

The walls are covered with clippings from newspapers. Some of them have headlines that read things like "Sudokuists Supreme Sizzle Snake Smugglers," and "Puzzle Patrons Pummel Petty Pursesnatchers." Others appear to be solved puzzle pages. One whole wall seems entirely devoted to a massive, thousand-cell puzzle. A man, MICHAELS, is slumped, asleep, in a chair behind a desk piled high with pens. His face is ink-stained and grizzled, and his breath stinks of whiskey. Suddenly, the door bursts open and a fast-talking palooka with a lot of moxie (SULLIVAN) walks in.

SULLIVAN
Michaels, wake up, you worthless son of a Quizzler, we gotta case!

MICHAELS (groggily)
What? Who is it... Marlene?

SULLIVAN
Damn it, man, do I LOOK like Marlene? We both know that two-bit hussy walked out on you the minute Big Will Shortz flashed his bankroll at her. Now get your booze-soused brain in gear, we GOTTA CASE!

MICHAELS
All right, all right, I'm up. What's the skinny, Sully?

SULLIVAN
No skinny this time, boss, this one's all fat. The Clogstein Diamond's been lifted. Filched, even!

MICHAELS
Where's the canoe factory, Sullivan? That's flatfoot business. There's no angle. No percentage for numbermooks like us.

SULLIVAN
Boss, the gumshoes are stumped. See, the only dirt they could dig up at the scene was a Sudo! They figure the crim left it behind, as a clue, Gorshin-style!

MICHAELS
You got my attention but you ain't got my heart, ya loveable galoot. The boys in blue aren't the sharpest tacks in the tack shop but they can solve a Sudo if someone throws it in their faces. Why's this our business?

SULLIVAN
That's just it, Michaels. They solved it easy, sure, but then... when they filled all the numbs in, it formed 9 smaller sudos... and when they solved that one, another 81. By the time anyone realized what was going on, four coppers were dead and another 20 in the doctor house. This ain't no normal Sudo-crim, boss.

MICHAELS
Sully! The numbs in the first Sudo... anything twig you oddstyle about them?

SULLIVAN
Whaddayamean, boss? Looked fresh to me.

MICHAELS
And a clock just looks like a sundial to a caveman. But to a space caveman.. Sully, I'd bet you a year's pencils that those numbers were all prime. He's back.

SULLIVAN
Who's back, boss? What are you chewing on?

MICHAELS (standing up, putting on his hat)
Get my gun and my erasers, Sully. We're on the case. The Cross-Hatcher's gonna pay for what he's done.

Short Fiction of no consequence II

(This is essentially Star Trek fan fiction with the serials filed off)

Security.

The word sat on his assignment slip, staring up at him with beady little letters. Was that a sneer, crossing the t? And what was a y, except a slant-mouthed grin, mocking his hopes and dreams? Mocking four years of training at the Academy. Courses in astrophysics, hand-to-hand combat, engineering, diplomacy, military tactics, languages. A captain had to know a little bit of everything, if he wanted to keep his crew alive out in the void. But his favorite classes had been the ones on leadership.

So many courses in leadership.

And now, because of one little test, a simple mistake, he was sitting in a transport ship onroute to the finest vessel in the fleet... with an assignment slip that read "Security."


They called it the "Psych Test." Oh, not officially. Officially, it didn't even have a name. If someone asked about psych tests, they'd be told that all candidates were evaluated several times during the selection process, always by qualified psychotherapists. And all those papers and notations counter, sure. But not as much as the Psych Test did.

To hear the rumors, no one's was the same. Every test was tailor made to poke you in the dark places behind your eyes, at the little weaknesses that instructors and therapists (and your friends? There was no way they could have known about the cat if Jenkins hadn't told them...) had dutifully noted down. Members of the fleet had to be better than their weaknesses. Couldn't freeze in front of phobias, couldn't lash out in irrational anger.

When he was a kid, he'd had a cat. Siamese, beautiful eyes, name of Sparky. Sparky had disappeared one day, and he'd gone out of his mind with regret. Until a few weeks later, when his older brother had given him a present, out of the blue.

They'd never really gotten along, he and his brother, but the gesture was touching. And so, happy but a little wary, he'd opened the box, and looked inside, and after that he and his brother didn't talk much. Breaking someone's jaw in three places will do that to a relationship.

So when, in the last month of his time at the academy, he'd walked around a corner, to see a cadet he didn't know torturing the cat... He hadn't reacted well.

The scene was ludicrous, of course. It was the middle of the day, in a white, aniseptic-looking Academy corridor. And there was this guy, standing there with a knife, just... playing.

He wondered, later, how they'd simulated it all so well. That cat had looked REAL. And the look on the other cadet's face... He had seen that look before, on his brother, just before he stretched himself to find some new measure of cruelty. Either that kid was a great actor, or he was well on his way to failing his OWN psych test.

In any case, he'd reacted.

Cadets were allowed to carry sidearms, but never to draw them - the idea was to get used to them at your side, and, more importantly, to get used to NOT using them. He'd never fired his before. But he'd always liked to tinker...

They asked him, at the debrief, WHY he had altered the laser pistol. They were finely calibrated not to do any lethal harm, in case someone got antsy (or freaked out when the people in charge INENTIONALLY pushed their freak-out buttons). It wasn't against the rules, he said. He'd just wanted to know how they worked. He just wanted to know, if something bad happened at the Academy, that he could protect people.

They didn't bother to ask him what he thought could go wrong at one of the most heavily defended institutions on the most heavily protected planet in the universe.

So yeah, he'd shot the guy. Cranked his pistol past the easily-bypassed governing mechanism, past "stun" (because this was a big guy, and he wasn't taking chances) but not, NOT, he kept pointing out, up to Kill. He was never going to kill the guy.

They didn't seem impressed by that, oddly enough.

And the guy had crumpled, and his faculty adviser had run into the corridor and yelled at him to drop his weapon, and there had been a LOT of meetings, and now here he was, sitting on a transport with all the command track knowledge he could ever need and an assignment slip that said

Security.