Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good) by Guy Stanton III Page A

What kind of mother was she? A terrible one that was what! If anything had happened to Kevin it would be all her fault!
    She stopped still abruptly her hand flying up to her mouth as she gazed in shock at the two chess playing opponents at a nearby park table. Kevin was kneeling on his seat as he leaned on the table with his elbows.
    It was such an odd position to see him adopt, almost normal appearing for a boy of his age. Incredulously she watched him pick up a piece and knock over one of Tyre’s. Her eyes shifted to Tyre. He was a mass of coiled tension and deep focused concentration. His face had a hard edge to it that looked like he wanted to mangle something into pieces. She wasn’t worried for Kevin’s safety though.
    Tyre was just a serious kind of a guy. Tyre was something much more than that though. He had a good heart. She’d hoped that he would be willing to tolerate the difficulties associated with Kevin’s condition in order to have her, but what she was seeing hinted at something much more significant. Something that she hadn’t even really allowed herself to dream or think of, because she’d thought it gone from the list of possibilities. Tyre was acting, without knowing it, like a father to Kevin and that was perhaps the biggest turn on yet, that she had felt in concern to her quiet gentleman stalker.
    She closed the distance between them and laid a hand on Tyre’s shoulder, “You’re teaching him how to play chess!” She exclaimed in hushed awe.
     
    I held up one finger my gaze never leaving the board, “Correction. I taught him to play chess. Now he’s teaching me something.”
    “What?” Anna exclaimed in question.
    “Humility.” I said grimly.
    “Kevin beat you!” Anna exclaimed gripping my shoulder tightly.
    I held up five fingers. I might as well as added another one. This game was well on its way into the tank. I’d tried everything including a complete shift of my playing strategy, with the same results. I’d learned something about Kevin in the process of losing though.
    “Anna.”
    “Yes?” She responded still sounding dazed at the evidence of her son’s progression.
    I looked up at her, “You do realize that your son is a genius?”
    She smiled at me. “Yes, Kevin is very gifted, many autistic children are. They tend to fixate on one thing and can get very good at that particular thing.”
    “No Anna, I know about that, Kevin is different.”
    “How?” She asked uncertainly.
    I thought about how to explain it to her. “He’s specialized like you said, but it’s the level of depth that he possesses.”
    I told her my IQ level and her eyes got big.
    “I didn’t tell you that to brag. I don’t think Kevin fits anywhere on the classification chart for IQs or if he does he’s a new level of it.”
    I pointed at the board. “Chess is a wonderfully complex game. There are endless strategies and more combinations than many games combined. Kevin isn’t employing any of those strategies to beat me.”
    “How’s he beating you then?”
    She said not understanding me so I began to explain, “In 1997 Garry Kasparov the reigning world chess champion was beaten by a supercomputer named Deep Blue made by IBM in the first classical chess match up to that date. Kasparov was perhaps the finest chess mind ever alive. He lost the six game match to the computer. The computer evaluated the probabilities of the next best move at two hundred million moves a second.”
    “So you think Kevin is like this supercomputer?”
    “Only partially, mostly he’s much better.”
    Anna looked at me frankly disbelieving yet curious, “Can you explain that?”
    “That computer in 1997 was downloaded with every chess strategy known to man. Plus it used its own probability software to run each scenario move to determine what strategy was best to counter move and it did it really fast.”
    “How is Kevin better?”
    “I haven’t taught Kevin any strategies or move combinations. I showed him