Numberland

  Chapter 5: Week 21, Day 2, continued

  The pengaroos never really stopped fighting over the hat and cigar. Wilson was growing increasingly skeptical that the one he thought of as the ‘original’ owner was actually their original owner. Both items were routinely stolen, and within an hour he saw all six of the second-floor pengaroos spend at least a little time in possession of one or the other.

  On the plus side they often fell off the platform in the scuffle, so he’d made a lively business fetching them and selling them back to the pengaroos. They genuinely seemed to understand the concept of buying, and one would come to him and offer coins without fail. Interestingly, he hadn’t yet seen them buy or sell among themselves. It was possible the conditions for them to trade with each other didn’t exist here. It was also possible that the appearance of offering money in exchange was just a trick they’d been taught, their apparent intelligence was just an illusion, and they were actually no smarter than parrots.

  They were fascinating creatures either way.

  None of them had ever tried to attack him, and even when they fought each other they would abandon the fight as soon as one of the machines spat out coins. They were rational creatures, goal-oriented. He liked that about them. He definitely liked them a lot more than the aggressive rabbits in the forest area. Not that it was much of a contest.

  On the downside, he was no closer to figuring out how they were getting so many coins.

  Some of the machines just seemed to spit out coins for no reason. Each pengaroo had staked out a little territory for itself, collecting the coins that came out of the machines nearest to it. They would resist any attempts at poaching in their territory (which happened often, as the pengaroos would steal coins from each other whenever the hat or cigar weren’t available), and Wilson didn’t really want to fight one of them to steal its spot. As much as he thought he’d probably win, these animals had never done anything to him. It would feel wrong.

  The trouble was that none of the machines outside their territories ever spontaneously shot out coins. For some reason, only the handful of machines claimed by each pengaroo did that. He was sure they must be doing something to make it happen, because each bird had a handful of machines close together that all produced coins at irregular intervals, and between them there were vast deserts of dozens of machines that never did.

  But what could it be? He had resolved to figure it out. He would need a lot of coins to get back up to the door he’d fallen from the day before, so it would be worth it to find a faster way of getting them.

  He wondered if it had anything to do with the trap doors. There were twelve evenly-spaced trap doors around the donut-shaped platform, seeming to lead into the interior of the ring. They were about a meter across and slightly recessed into the platform, and they had clearly visible hinges on their inside face. They had no handles or other way of pulling them up, and pushing did nothing either, so he couldn’t figure out how to get one open.

  He wasn’t able to figure it out with the information he had, so he sat and watched them to see if they did anything else. For quite a while, they didn’t. He might have given up if not for the fact that he was earning almost as much money selling the hat and cigar back to the pengaroos when they dropped them as he would have earned collecting items around the zone and feeding them to the machines.

  After Wilson had been watching for about an hour, a change came over the pengaroos. It started with just one, one of those closest to him. Wilson had noticed that its machines had been rather stingy lately, only spitting out coins very rarely, so he’d had his eye on it. It suddenly left its territory and, coming very close to him, approached one of the unclaimed machines.

  All at once the other pengaroos seemed to notice what had happened. They all stopped what they were doing and watched as the lone pengaroo fed coins into the machine and pulled the handle with its beak.

  The machine produced a fish. Wilson was hit by a wave of disappointment. It had just been getting a snack. He’d seen the pengaroos on the ground level do the same thing many times before.

  But as he watched, the pengaroo didn’t eat the fish. It brought it back to its home territory. The other pengaroos saw this as well and instantly took offense. All at once, all five of them began to honk angrily, stomping their feet and throwing their heads back. The lone pengaroo ignored them and fed the fish into one of its claimed machines, then pulled the lever with its beak.

  Every other time Wilson had seen something fed into one of the machines, it had done one of three things: Either it would take an item and spit out coins, or it would take coins and spit out an item, or it would reject the offering and spit whatever was put in right back out. Either way, something would go in and something would come out.

  This time, nothing came out. The pengaroo pulled the lever and nothing happened. It was not discouraged, and immediately went to get another fish.

  Seeing this, all the other pengaroos burst into action. They all ran to different machines and frantically fed them coins. They collected bananas, fish, apples, oranges, bunches of grapes, and something that looked like a lime and fed them into the machines in their territory. Then it was back to buy another item.

  It was slow going. The pengaroos could only work the machines by laboriously counting out each coin with their beaks, and they could only carry one item at a time. And yet they kept at it. They kept at it until, one by one, they ran out of coins in their pouches to buy any more. By Wilson’s count, each one had bought about twenty or thirty items. Not a single one seemed to get anything in return.

  But that wasn’t true, was it? These were the same machines that periodically spat out coins, apparently for no reason. And now they were being fed, apparently for no reason. They had to be connected. Maybe the return was just delayed. Put something in now, get something out later.

  And then it clicked. Wilson mentally noted where the nearest pengaroo’s territory was and climbed down to the ground floor. When he circled the tower to the place where that pengaroo’s machines were and checked the vending machines directly below them on the ground floor, he saw exactly what he had expected.

  Fish, bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, limes.

  He had assumed there must be a human being coming here to restock the vending machines every once in a while. And maybe there was, somewhere at the top of the tower - the fresh fish had to come from somewhere.

  But these machines on the ground floor were being restocked by the pengaroos on the second floor. There was no doubt in his mind that if he fed 6 coins into this machine to buy a banana, 6 coins would shoot out of the pengaroo’s matching machine on the second floor. And in return, he would get a banana that had been purchased at a second-floor vending machine and fed into this one by that very same pengaroo.

  They were middlemen. They were buying food and reselling it to the other pengaroos at a profit using the vending machines. That was where they were getting all those coins. He was sure of it.

  That instantly raised the question of what happened to all the rubber ducks and pool noodles being fed into the machines at the base of the tower. If the coins were sent to the second floor, where did the rubber ducks go?

  He didn’t really need to know that. He was pretty sure that he now had all the information he needed to copy the second-floor pengaroos’ money-making scheme. It seemed like the fastest way to get the money he would need in order to get out of this place. As for the rest of the tower’s mysteries, he was willing to let them be once he had the money he needed.

  Thus resolved, he climbed back up to the second floor and did a circuit of all the machines there, re-evaluating them in light of his new theory.

  The machines were all similar, but not identical. Even two machines that both dispensed bananas for the same price might look quite different from each other. Each one was covered in a variety of symbols and markings, some obviously meaningful and others probably decorative. Because of this Wilson was only able to figure out the purpose of about a quarter of the machines. The others remained mysterious, and he didn’t have coins to spare on blindly testing them.

  From the very beginning he’d seen that half of the machines were connected by tubes to the floor above while the other half were connected by tubes to the ground floor. The machines connected to the floor above all had images of products on them, as well as a price in coins. They accepted coins to dispense products, and they always dispensed products immediately (he tested this by buying a fish for 5 coins). Like on the ground floor, the price of the same item could vary by one or two coins between machines.

  The machines connected to the ground floor were inscrutable, but seemed to be used to sell items to the pengaroos down below. When fed coins it would spit them back out again. When fed an item, it would swallow it and give nothing in return (he tested this with the fish he had bought).

  Wilson climbed back down to the ground floor, and as he did he followed the tube of his test machine down to the ground-floor machine it was connected to. Sure enough, that machine now displayed the symbol of a blue fish, and a price of 8 coins. He was sure it hadn’t before. It must have transformed itself while he wasn’t looking, the same way the Build-O-Matic had.

  8 coins, though. He frowned. That was expensive for a fish. He did a quick circuit of the ground floor and confirmed his suspicions. None of the other machines offered a fish for more than 6 coins. 8 coins was just too much. If the pengaroos could count (and he was pretty sure they could) that didn’t bode well for his fish-selling business.

  There were a few possible explanations for this. It was possible that each machine had a fixed price and the pengaroos had colonized the cheap machines to undercut each other. It was also possible that the prices changed over time, or could be changed using some kind of control or button he hadn’t found yet.

  He doubted it was either of those. He had a sinking suspicion that he knew exactly how it worked, and if he was right then it was a torpedo that was going to sink to his little get-rich-quick scheme before it even left port.

  When one pengaroo had gone to get more stock for its machine, the others had honked angrily at it. Why? Then, when the honking didn’t dissuade it, they had all rushed to do the same and get as much stock as possible for their machines. They had bought and bought until they had no money left. Again, why?

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  One simple answer explained both behaviors: The more items there were in a machine, the lower the price.

  If you assume the ground-floor pengaroos will prefer to buy the cheapest option (and Wilson had seen them do just that), each second-floor pengaroo will make an equal amount of money before their stock depletes, their prices go up, and their customers move on to the other pengaroos. That continues until all the machines become equally expensive, and the cycle repeats at a higher price (and a higher profit margin for the second-floor pengaroos).. As long as they don’t restock the machines, the second-floor pengaroos will all earn more and more money as the stock dwindles and the price rises.

  That’s all well and good, but what if one pengaroo decides to add more stock to its machine? That pengaroo will have the lowest prices and get all the customers. That means all the other pengaroos have to add more stock to their machines to compete, and the price drops and drops until they all run out of money.

  He had just seen that happen, which meant prices on the ground floor would be at a low right now. More importantly, that meant that if he wanted to participate in this little game he would have to invest a lot of money buying enough items to bring the price of his machines low enough for the ground-floor pengaroos to start actually buying his stock. Worse, since he’d never seen the price of a fish rise as high as 8 coins, he would probably end up with a bunch of fish he couldn’t sell because he didn’t have enough inventory left to bring the price down to 7 coins. However many items that ended up being, they would be an up front cost that he would have to eat in the end (possibly literally).

  Wilson had no proof that this was how it worked, but in his heart he was sure that it was something like that. It explained a lot, and there was a certain weight of truth to the way it deflated his plan to earn a lot of money easily.

  Still, he was going to fully investigate. It was possible that he was wrong, and if he was then this scheme had a lot of promise.

  But in the end, it turned out that he was tragically right on all points.

  He staked out a spot on the ground floor to watch one particular machine, which offered fish for 6 coins each. Ground-floor pengaroos came by regularly to buy - they tended to snack throughout the day rather than having particular meal times. He counted them as they came, and after the fifth purchase the price abruptly changed.

  He saw it happen. The small metal plate that displayed the number 6 rotated back into the machine, revealing that it was just one face on a wheel that was mostly embedded inside the casing. With the wheel rotated the plate showing 6 was hidden inside, and a new plate showing the number 7 was exposed.

  Just as he expected, the next ground-floor pengaroo to approach the machine turned around when it saw the price. Wilson followed it as it made a quick circuit around the base of the tower in search of a cheaper option. It had to go all the way to the other side of the tower to find a machine still selling fish for 6 coins, passing several offering them for 7 along the way. Exactly as he had suspected, as long as no new items were added, the price system ensured the ground-floor pengaroos would distribute themselves evenly between the second-floor pengaroos.

  It struck Wilson that if the second-floor pengaroos could just hold ranks and stop excessively restocking the machines then they could probably get the ground-floor pengaroos to pay 8 coins for fish. Because the second-floor machines all uniformly sold fish for 5 coins each (he’d checked), the price at the ground floor had a huge impact on the profit. A price of 6 coins netted 1 coin profit per sale, but a price of 8 coins netted 3 per sale. A greedy part of him wanted to find a way to make that happen, although nothing came to mind.

  He counted 9 fish sold before he saw the price tick up to 8 coins, but he thought he might have missed one. He had to take a brief break from watching the machines to fetch the top hat, which the pengaroos had once again knocked off the platform while fighting over it (at this point he could tell when they’d dropped it from the tone of their honking). He thought he might have missed a sale, so the number could actually have been 10, and he suspected it probably was.

  He was now ready to put forward a grand unified theory of pengaroo economics, for whatever good it would do.

  He was almost certain that prices had to do with the number of items in a machine. Tentatively, he thought that the price went down by 1 coin for every 10 items in the machine. Perhaps a machine with 10 fish would have a price of 8 coins, but the 11th fish would bring the price down to 7. The first machine he had watched had probably had about 25 fish inside, which was why the price had gone up from 6 to 7 after 5 fish were sold and then up to 8 after a further 10 were sold.

  He wasn’t certain of the exact thresholds where prices changed - maybe he hadn’t missed a sale and the critical number really was 9 rather than 10, or maybe it wasn’t a simple pattern. On the basics he was pretty confident, though.

  Just as he was wondering if the price might hold at 8, honking from above informed him that the pengaroos were restocking their machines again. He quickly went back up to check that he was right about what they were doing, but once he confirmed it he ran back down to watch the machine as it was restocked. Just as he had predicted, the price dropped from 8 to 7 and then from 7 to 6.

  If the price never held at 8, then he’d never sell any fish unless he bought enough to bring the price down to 7. If his theory was right then that was 10 fish. That would cost 50 coins, and he would never be able to sell those last 10 fish. They would just enable him to sell other fish.

  In that case it would be better to use a product he could actually eat, like apples. Maybe he could buy them himself and eat them at the end of the day. Even then, it was a lot of money to spend and never get back. This whole enterprise might have been less profitable than he had thought.

  As he was thinking a new clamour of honking rose up from the second floor, and the tone was different than any of those he’d heard before. Rather than angry honks of betrayal or conflict, these were honks of excitement.

  Curiosity piqued, he climbed up to the second floor to see what was going on.

  All of the second-floor pengaroos were huddled around a single machine. It was the first time he’d see them do this, as they were normally territorial. Fortunately he could easily see the machine over their heads, so he was able to get a good look at it from the back of the crowd.

  It was one of those with a tube leading up, rather than down to the ground floor. That meant it should probably sell something. The price was an astonishing 100 coins, much higher than the price on any machine he’d seen so far. As for what item it was supposed to be selling, he couldn’t tell. There were pictographs depicting something red and hourglass-shaped, but they were so stylized he couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be the item for sale or just decoration. Or, for that matter, a warning.

  He had checked all the machines previously and he was sure he’d never seen this one before. It must have changed while he wasn’t looking, like the Build-O-Matic did.

  The pengaroos were taking turns feeding coins into the machine with wild abandon. It was the first time he’d seen them selflessly work together like this. They seemed practically manic.

  This went on for a while. Eventually, the six pengaroos all slowed their pace in sync, as if by shared understanding. They took turns feeding the last few coins into the funnel, then all stopped together. He could almost believe they had been counting out exactly 100 coins.

  There was a sizable pile of coins built up in the funnel. With a bit of pomp and ceremony one of the pengaroos waddled over and pulled the lever, causing all the coins to be sucked inside the machine. The pengaroos were uncharacteristically silent as this went on, so the only sound was the clacking of metal against metal.

  The machine fell silent. There was a long moment of expectation. The pengaroos all tensed, their eyes locked on the funnel.

  Something small and red shot out, and there was pandemonium. The pengaroos all went wild. Three went chasing after the object, whatever it was, but the other three skipped the chase and immediately attacked. As Wilson watched in horror and fascination, the pengaroos began to fight each other with noticeably more ruthlessness than they had shown before.

  It immediately became clear that the three had formed an alliance, although they hadn’t shown any signs of this in the skirmishes before now. All three of them converged on one of the others and attacked it from all sides.

  If the pengaroos had been cleverer, they should have immediately seen that it was three versus three. The other two pengaroos who were not part of a team should have come to the aid of the one being attacked. Otherwise they would be divided and conquered. Unfortunately for the solo pengaroos, they weren’t that clever. The other two who were alone fought each other over the small red thing, as well as the hat and the cigar, which had fallen in the scuffle.

  While those two were oblivious to the larger battle, the team of three gathered around their victim and physically forced it towards the ledge. Wilson could have stepped in and stopped them, but it seemed wrong to interfere with their natural behaviour.

  If anything about this could be called natural.

  As he watched mutely, they forced it off and into the open air. It plunged all the way to the pavement below, flapping and honking as it went. Wilson rushed to the edge to see what had become of it, and to his relief he saw it get up and waddle off no worse for wear.

  The two independent pengaroos were still fighting when the team of three came for them. By the time they realized they would need to work together to stand a chance, it was already too late. Both were swiftly forced off the platform.

  With the team of three now firmly in control of the platform, they travelled together in a quick circuit of all the machines. Wilson followed at a reasonable distance so as not to spook them. At first he wondered what they were looking for, but he found out soon enough. Another machine with a 3-digit price had appeared while he wasn’t looking.

  This time he had no trouble identifying the item. This machine sold cigars for 100 coins each.

  As the pengaroos began the laborious process of feeding the machine 100 coins, Wilson doubled back to check on the small red item the others had been fighting over. He found it lying on the ground by the pool, slightly damp. It was a little red bow tie, sized for a pengaroo. He left it where it was, as he didn’t know if they would attack him if they saw him touch it.

  When he returned the pengaroos were gathering more coins. Everything in their pouches had either been spent or spilled during the fighting, so they were fanning out to refill them.

  As he watched, one of the pengaroos began to drift away from the other two. When it was far enough away it stopped picking up coins and made a beeline for the dropped top hat. It put the thing on by standing in front of it and plunging its entire head inside the hat, which worked to get it on but also left the pengaroo blind. Wilson watched the thing stumble around for a bit until it managed to get the brim up over its eyes.

  One of the other pengaroos caught it while it was trying to stick the bowtie on itself. It let out a fearsome honk to draw the other, hopping and hooting in fury. When all three had gathered back together, the two that had kept working to gather coins charged at the one that had gone after the hat and bowtie. They pecked at it viciously, working together to take away the hat and bowtie. When they were safely away, they forced it to the edge and pushed it over.

  The last two remaining pengaroos worked together to feed the cigar machine coins until they had enough. One of them pulled the lever, and it produced a second cigar.

  They set out again and quickly found a machine that sold top hats, again for 100 coins. They worked together to buy one, then stopped to gather more coins before returning to the bowtie machine. They kept at it until they had two complete sets. Two hats, two cigars, and two bowties. Finally, they each filled their pouches with as many coins as they could carry. There was no shortage, as all six sets of claimed machines had been running abandoned for some time.

  Wilson noticed that some of them were selling fish for 8 coins. It had taken a war and a purge for the pengaroos to not restock the machines when the price went above 7.

  They put the bowties on each other. Wilson wasn’t sure it was even physically possible for a pengaroo to put one on itself. When they had their pouches full, their hats and bowties on, and their cigars clenched firmly in their beaks, they finally seemed satisfied.

  Each of the two went to a different trapdoor. They each chose the nearest one, with no apparent care for which one they ended up with. With a final congratulatory hoot, the trap doors fell open beneath their feet and the pengaroos both fell down inside the ring structure. An instant later the trap doors slammed shut.

  Wilson was left alone on the platform.

  “Huh,” he said. “Neat.”