3 . The scent of hot bread drifting from the shops along the Street of Flour was sweeter than any perfume Arya had ever smelled. She took a deep breath and stepped closer to the pigeon. It was a plump one, speckled brown, busily pecking at a crust that had fallen between two cobblestones, but when Arya’s shadow touched it, it took to the air.

Her stick sword whistled out and caught it two feet off the ground, and it went down in a flurry of brown feathers. She was on it in the blink of an eye, grabbing a wing as the pigeon flapped and fluttered. It pecked at her hand. She grabbed its neck and twisted until she felt the bone snap.

Compared with catching cats, pigeons were easy.

She tied the pigeon to her belt and started down the street. A man was pushing a load of tarts by on a two-wheeled cart; the smells sang of blueberries and lemons and apricots. Her stomach made a hollow rumbly noise. “Could I have one?” she heard herself say. “A lemon, or…or any kind.”

The pushcart man looked her up and down. Plainly he did not like what he saw. “Three coppers.”

Arya tapped her wooden sword against the side of her boot. “I’ll trade you a fat pigeon,” she said.

“The Others take your pigeon,” the pushcart man said.

The tarts were still warm from the oven. The smells were making her mouth water, but she did not have three coppers... or one. She gave the pushcart man a look, remembering what Syrio had told her about seeing. He was short, with a little round belly, and when he moved he seemed favor his left leg a little. She was just thinking that if she snatched a tart and ran he would never be able to catch her when he said, “You be keeping your filthy hands off. The gold cloaks know how to deal with thieving little gutter rats, that they do.”

Arya glanced warily behind her. Two of the City Watch were standing at the mouth of an alley. Their cloaks hung almost to the ground, the heavy wool dyed a rich gold; their mail and boots and gloves were black. One wore a long sword at his hip, the other an iron cudgel. With a last wistful glance at the tarts, Arya edged back from the cart and hurried off. The gold cloaks had not been paying her any special attention, but the sight of them tied her stomach in knots. Arya had been staying as far from the castle as she could get, yet even from a distance she could see the heads rotting atop the high red walls. Flocks of crows squabbled noisily over each head, thick as flies. The talk in Flea Bottom was that the gold cloaks had associated themselves with the Lannisters, their commander raised to a lord, with lands on the Trident and a seat on the king’s council.

5 . In this issue, as part of our ongoing Century of Science project, we dig deep into how the extraordinary advances in computing over the last 100 years have transformed our lives, and we ponder implications for the future. Who gets to decide how much control algorithms (算法) have over our lives? Will artificial intelligence learn how to really think like humans? What would ethical AI look like? And can we keep the robots from killing us?

That last question may sound imagined, but it’s not. As freelance science and technology writer Matthew Hutson reports, lethal autonomous drones (致命自动无人机) able to attack without human intervention already exist. And though killer drones may be the most dystopian (反乌托邦的) vision of a future controlled by AI, software is already making decisions about our lives every day, from the advertisements we see on Facebook to influencing who gets denied parole (假释) from prison.

Even something as basic to human life as our social interactions can be used by AI to identify individuals within supposedly anonymized data, as staff writer Nikk Ogasa reports. Researchers taught an artificial neural network to identify patterns in the date, time, direction and duration of weekly mobile phone calls and texts in a large anonymized dataset. The AI was able to identify individuals by the patterns of their behavior and that of their contacts.

Innovations in computing have come with astonishing speed, and we humans have adapted almost as quickly. I remember being thrilled with my first laptop, my first flip phone, my first BlackBerry. As we’ve welcomed each new wonder into our lives, we’ve bent our behavior. I could download a productivity app that promises to train me to stay focused, but using the phone to avoid the phone seems both too silly and too sad.

Not enough computer scientists and engineers have training in the social implications of their technologies, Hutson writes, including training in ethics. More importantly, they’re not having enough conversations about how the algorithms they write could affect people’s lives in unexpected ways, before the next big innovation gets sent out into the world. As the technology gets ever more powerful, those conversations need to happen long before the circuit is built or the code is written. How else will the robots know when they’ve gone too far?

8 . Of all my girls, I always felt the closest to Yo. My wife says it is because we are much alike, knocking her head with her knuckles as she says so. But that is not why I feel closest to Yo, no.

She looks at me, and I know that she can see all the way back to when I was a boy in half trousers raising my hand in that palm-wood schoolhouse. What color is the hair of God? When you reduce a sum by its shadow and multiply it by its reflection, what will you get? Our teacher, who called himself Professor Cristiano lluminado, spouted his wild questions. Soon after I passed on to the higher school, the professor was taken away to an asylum to contemplate the mathematics of the stars. But, and this is the point of my anecdote, I was the only child in that classroom raising my hand to answer those impossible questions.

And Yo sees that one hand waving when she looks into my eyes. So that I am blessed — and sometimes cursed — with a child who understands my secret heart. I should not say child anymore, for she is a grown woman who is already preparing herself. When she looks at me these days, she can see that fresh-dug hole in the mountain cemetery near the town where I was born, the flash of the river between the trees.

She writes me one, two letters a week. Sometimes she includes an old black-and-white photo with those scalloped edges as if all memories deserve a little lace doily to lay on. A young handsome man sits with a young lady in a crowded booth in a bar sixty years ago. With those pasting papers which were invented for her because she always has to put her two cents (发表意见) on everything, she writes, Where was this taken? Who is the girl beside you? Were you really in love? She strikes right for the secret heart of that young man!

Most of the things she asks I tell her. I run the past through a sieve (筛子) of judgment in my head, and if there is no harm, I give her the full cup of my life to drink from. Some little things catch in that fine net, and I leave them out or I make a broad statement. But then the next letter arrives full of questioning: Papi, you say you had to escape the island because you were in a revolution in 1939 and I can’t find any mention of it in the book. You say that you were in a log-cabin hospital at Lac Abitibi near the Laurentians and look on the map and Lac Abitibi is nowhere near the Laurentians. Are these just lapses of memory or did you make the whole thing up and if so why?

And then I have to explain, sieving everything over again. Until the next letter arrives, and I explain some more, and after a while, I lose that quality control. Before I know it, I’ve told her the whole story I did not want her and the others to know.

Is that really so? I ask myself. Don’t I want to be known before I go? And perhaps Yo sees that secret desire, stronger than all the other secrets in my heart, and that is why she keeps asking.

9 . There is growing interest in East Japan Railway Co. ltd, one of the six companies, created out of the privatized national railway system. In an industry lacking exciting growth ________, its plan to use real-estate assets in and around train stations ________ is drawing interest.

In a plan called “Station Renaissance” that it ________ in November, JR East said that it would ________ using its commercial spaces for shops and restaurants, extending them to ________ more suitable for the information age. It wants train stations as pick-up ________ for such goods as books, flowers and groceries ________ over the Inter. In a country where city ________ depend heavily on trains ________ commuting, about 16 million people a day go to its train stations anyway, the company ________. So, picking up commodities at train stations ________ consumers extra travel and missed home deliveries. JR East already has been using its station ________ stores for this purpose, but it plans to create ________ spaces for the delivery of Inter goods.

The company also plans to introduce ________ cards—known in Japan as IC cards because they use integrated circuit for ________ information ________ train tickets and muter passes ________ the magic ones used today, integrating them into a/an ________ pass. This will save the company money, because ________ for IC cards are much less expensive than magic systems. Increased use of IC cards should also ________ the space needed for ticket vending.