Markov Chain Norris |work| May 2026

To his astonishment, she laughed—a small, broken sound. “You’re such an asshole, Dad.”

He remembered her at age five, building towers of wooden blocks, then knocking them down with a shriek of joy. He remembered her at fourteen, crying in the kitchen because a boy had called her ugly. He remembered the last fight—the one about her mother, about his emotional absence, about the word conditional used as a weapon. markov chain norris

For the first time in his life, Professor Norris allowed his chain to have a memory. And he found, to his quiet astonishment, that it did not break. It merely became human. To his astonishment, she laughed—a small, broken sound

This was the Norris method: a man as a memoryless process. It was clean. It was mathematical. It was, he believed, the only rational way to live. He remembered the last fight—the one about her

He was a man who believed in the elegance of forgetting. Not memory loss, but conditional independence : the future should depend only on the present, not the past. It was the central tenet of his life’s work—the Markov chain. And for twenty-three years, he had applied it to everything: the movement of gas molecules, the rise and fall of stock prices, the shuffling of a deck of cards. Even to himself.

The rain over Cambridge was the kind that didn’t fall so much as seep—into coats, into bones, into the very margins of notebooks left too long on park benches. Professor Alistair Norris, aged forty-seven, holder of the Chair in Stochastic Processes, stood at the window of his college rooms and watched the students scatter like particles undergoing Brownian motion.

“I should have come sooner,” he said. “I should have never stopped.”