The Boring Message

The power had been out for two hours. Soren's grandmother had gone to bed with a candle, telling them the plows would come in the morning and to stop thumping the wall.

Maya and Soren were in the two bedrooms that shared a wall, one each, with flashlights.

"Okay," Maya called through the plaster. "We send messages by tapping. One tap is A, two taps is B, and so on."

"That takes forever for Z," Soren called back. "Twenty-six taps."

"Then do something smarter."

So he did. He sat on the cold floor with his notebook open on his knees and worked it out. He wrote down which letters showed up most when he scribbled a paragraph. E first. Then T, A, O. Then the rare ones huddled at the bottom. Q. Z. X.

"New plan," he called. "Common letters get short taps. E is just one tap. The rare letters can be long. Nobody uses Q much anyway."

They practiced. E, one tap. T, tap-tap. It went faster. A whole word came through the wall in a handful of knocks.

Then Maya tapped something that made him stop.

One tap. Pause. One tap. Pause. One tap.

"That's E E E," he called.

"Keep listening."

One tap. One tap. One tap. On and on. Just E, the most common letter, over and over.

"You're not saying anything," Soren said.

"I know. That's the point. Can you guess what's coming next?"

"E."

She tapped once. E.

"And next?"

"E," he said.

She tapped once again.

"I already know all of it," Soren said slowly. "You could tap that all night and I wouldn't learn one thing. I could fill in the rest myself."

"So why send it?" Maya said.

The candle light under the door flickered. Soren looked at his list of letters, the common ones up top with their short little taps.

"Wait," he said. "That's backwards."

"What is?"

"I gave E the shortest tap because it shows up the most. But E is the one you can already guess. When you tap E, you barely tell me anything. I half knew it was coming." He flipped the notebook page. "It's the rare letters that actually surprise me. When you tap a Z, I never see that coming."

Through the wall came a sound he couldn't read. He realized it was Maya laughing.

"Do one," she said. "Tap me something I can't guess."

He thought. Then he tapped out a Z, the long ugly one, the letter he'd buried at the bottom of his list. Then a Q.

"I have no idea what you're spelling," Maya called, delighted. "None. That's the most interesting thing you've tapped all night."

"Because you couldn't guess it," Soren said.

"So a message is only worth something," Maya said, and he could hear her working it out as she said it, "if I couldn't already have guessed it."

"And if you could absolutely guess it," Soren said, "if there's only one thing it could possibly be, then it's worth nothing. Like your wall of E's. Zero. I learn zero."

There was a long quiet. Snow ticked against the window in the dark.

"Soren," Maya said. "Try the other end."

"What other end?"

"You said certain things are worth zero. What's the most surprising thing I could tap?"

He sat very still on the floor. "Something that should be impossible," he said. "Something I'd have bet anything could never come through that wall."

"How much would that be worth?"

He stared at the dark wall between them. He tried to put a number on it and the number kept getting bigger. The less likely a thing was, the more it told you when it happened anyway. And a thing you were certain could never, ever come, if it came, would tell you, what. Everything. An amount that ran off the end of the page.

"It would break the scale," he said. "If the impossible happened, the message would be worth, I don't know. Infinity. You'd learn an infinite amount, because everything you were sure of just turned out to be wrong."

"So that's the whole range," Maya said softly through the plaster. "Certain is zero. Impossible is infinity. And everything anybody has ever said to anybody lives somewhere in between."

"Every word," Soren said. "Every word is worth exactly as much as it surprises you."

He looked at his notebook, at the short taps for E and the long taps for Z, and saw it was not a code for letters at all. It was a code for surprise. He'd built a machine for measuring how much each knock could startle a person, and he hadn't known that was what he was doing.

"That's why the short taps go to the boring letters," he said. "You spend the least effort on the things that surprise you least. That's, Maya, that's how you'd squeeze any message down. Throw away everything the other person could already guess. Keep only the surprise."

"Keep only the surprise," Maya repeated.

And then she went quiet, and he heard nothing through the wall, no taps at all, and he understood that even her silence was a message, because he genuinely couldn't guess what she'd tap next.

"Maya?"

"I'm here. I'm thinking about people," she said. "There are kids at school who never say a surprising thing. You always know what they're going to say. And there's this feeling, like they're sending E E E E all day."

"And you," Soren said, before he decided to, "you tap Z. People can't always guess you. Teachers can't. That's not a thing being wrong with you."

The wall was quiet.

"That's the most information a person can carry," he said. "Being hard to predict."

He heard her shift against the wall on her side, close, just plaster between them.

"Send me one more," she said. "The least likely thing you can think of. The most it's worth."

Soren closed his eyes in the dark and thought of the single thing he was most certain would never come through a wall in his grandmother's freezing house at midnight, and he raised his hand, and he had no idea, none at all, what Maya was going to tap back.

He held his hand against the cold wall and waited for the surprise.