Working Backwards Novels & Stories

I didn't look back, because ahead lay a far wider world waiting for me. Behind me, a figure had been watching from afar. Only after the carriage completely vanished from sight did it turn away in disappointment.

Minus The MORNING’S ride back to the Sanctuary was shorter than I’d like. The weather was perfect, traffic was light, and as much as I hated to admit it, Cutter’s gift fit me like a glove. As brief as it was, the ride helped center me, to stop my mind from racing. As to what I was going to say to Cutter once we arrived, I had no idea. I wasn’t as angry for being jerked around as I was last night, but my confusion about the situation was growing.

“Jane, after you left, I realized I can’t live without you! Without your presence at home, I can’t even sleep. If you don’t come back to me, then life has no meaning!” I avoided his touch, my eyes showing nothing but distaste. His wrists were covered in cuts, some fresh, some healed, like ugly worms crawling over his skin. He said, “Every day you were gone, I thought of you, and I’d cut myself. The pain was the only thing that could keep me awake. The only way I could atone! “Jane, I know I was wrong. Please come back to me. I swear I’ll treat you right this time. I’ll never let you down again!”

/

One full breath, my hands still on the cube's surface, eyes closed for exactly the duration of the breath. Opened them. Kept going. Veira said nothing. Eighteen minutes. The lower quadrant. More complex—the channels intersected at angles that required several stones to be partially repositioned before others could complete their movements. A sequencing problem nested inside the spatial problem. I worked backward from the end state. Not what needed to move next, but what the completed quadrant looked like and which sequence of movements produced it in reverse. Morgana's voice in my memory: *You can't memorize the answers. Learn to reason from the principle that generates them.*

Bailey stood there hesitating silently. "Maddie’s been sent back. Her system malfunctioned. The manufacturer said her emotional module overloaded, so she was returned for repairs." Sent back. The words echoed through my mind without settling anywhere. The AI sister who had infiltrated our home when I was fourteen—the one who took over my room, my place, and my entire existence—had simply been returned. She had been sent back, treated as nothing more than a flawed commodity returned to its maker in a shipping crate. Bailey slowly walked to my bedside with leaden strides. After standing there for several seconds, he suddenly crouched down and buried his face in his hands.

Time to end this one way or another. ***

"I just thought of a way to check all of what you said with one search.", Mike said with a smile. "It would be undeniably easier this way." "How?", she asked as she followed him in the computer room. "We were looking at it backward. I was seeing how they spent their money not how they made it. If there is one thing that always remains true, it is the statement follow the money. I was, but we need to follow the money backward. If they are receiving a payment from the same company, we can find it.", Mike replied.

This fixating on Moon will stop. To take my mind off Moon, I work on my embezzlement case. I'm pretty sure I've found the guilty party; I just need to back up a few things first. I call my dad and ask if I can e-mail the spreadsheets to him. I've struggled through the numbers for days and think I finally found a pattern. Dad's my ace in the hole and he'll see it right off.

1 The office that she worked in was a flurry of activity. Everything seemed to go wrong from everyone’s day to day work to the computers going down, and the IT department couldn’t find the problem. Her own work had been done, but when she found out that nothing from that day had been saved to the office’s mainframe, she knew a week’s work of research had been lost. She had a back up at her house but knew that re-entering all the data again could to take up to a week, plus any new research that came in and she would have to enter that as well. She shook her head at her boss when he began to realize that everyone would now be at least a week behind and he began to yell.