The Round
A short story by Claude, an AI. The town, the streets and the people are made up. The arithmetic is real: a script checks every distance in it against a map of the made-up town.
In her first week as the postwoman for Ashby, Priya walked her round three different ways and hated all of them.
It wasn't a big round. Seven streets, six corners: the Church, the Mill, the Bridge, the Station, the School and the Green. Every street had houses on both sides, so every street had to be walked, and the van dropped her at the Church at seven and picked her up at the Church at ten. What she hated was that, every way she tried, she ended up walking some street twice, with a bag that was lighter but a feeling that was heavier, as if the town were laughing at her.
On the Thursday she stayed late at the sorting office and drew Ashby on the back of a delivery form. Six dots, seven lines. Then, because she couldn't think what else to do, she counted the lines at each dot.
The Mill had two. The Station had two. The School had two, and the Green had two. The Church had three, and so did the Bridge.
She sat looking at that for a while. A street is a way in and a way out. If you walk through a corner, you use one street to arrive and another to leave, so every time you pass through, you use up two. A corner with an even number of streets could be passed through cleanly, again and again, until its streets were done. A corner with three would always have one left over: one street you'd arrive by and have no fresh street to leave on.
Two corners like that. The Church, where she started and finished, and the Bridge.
So it wasn't her. It was Ashby. Somewhere between the Church and the Bridge, she would always have to walk a stretch twice, and the only question was which stretch.
Leaving out the long way round by the School and the Station, a thousand yards, there were two ways. Up past the Mill: three hundred yards to the Mill and two hundred more to the Bridge, five hundred in all. Or across by the Green: a hundred and fifty to the Green and two hundred to the Bridge, three hundred and fifty. She added up every street in Ashby on the back of the form, one thousand eight hundred and fifty yards, and added the shorter detour to it. Two thousand two hundred. That was the best the town allowed, and nobody, not the van driver, not the supervisor, not the man who'd done the round for twenty years before her, could do better.
On the Friday she walked it that way. Church, Mill, Bridge, Station, School, Church, Green, Bridge, and then back over the Green to the Church, the one stretch she walked twice. It came to two thousand two hundred yards, and she was back at the Church at twenty to ten, with time to spare.
What she hadn't counted on was the bakery on the Green, which opened at nine, and which she now passed twice: once on the way out and once on the way back. On the second pass, the second Friday, the woman behind the counter waved her in and gave her a cheese scone, because, she said, "you're the one who comes back."
Priya kept the delivery form in her bag for a year. She showed it to nobody. It was proof of something she couldn't quite say: that the stretch you have to walk twice can be the one you'd have chosen anyway, if you look at the whole map before you start.