Mathématique: Chapter 30

Jackson sat on a woven blanket, in the midst of a sea of tiny flames. He looked up at Rush and his eyes were the blue of desert sky arced over picked-clean bones.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 30

Rush needed sunglasses or he’d not fuckin’ survive. (Simple as that.) He’d die on his drive to the base without them: either directly, as his cerebral vasculature disintegrated like tissue paper, or indirectly, as he drove his fuckin’ car off a fuckin’ cliff in a fuckin’ fit of blinding, blinded agony.

(Great day, this one.)

Young knocked on his door.

Rush tore open his third box, eyes averted, searching for sunglasses by feel alone.

The air was unnecessarily dry and unnecessarily bright.

“Rush,” Young growled through the door, “we’re gonna be late.”

The fuck did he care if they were late? He hated meetings generally but he esppeccccially hated this meeting; he couldn’t think of a meeting he hated more than this one. (Not even interminable UC Berkeley Faculty Meetings). Because this meeting, this meeting, was specifically focused on him. More than that, it was meant t’colocalize him with a set of useless tasks.

The only thing he hated more than stupidity in the abstract was stupidity stupidly implemented.

Ugh. The sunglasses were a lost cause. Or just lost.

He gave up on the ideal of a world more shaded, picked up his academically styled messenger bag, and opened his door.

“Nice.” Young, friendly and uniformed, leaned against the doorframe.

“What is?” Rush asked.

“You remembered your shoes.”

“Fuck off.” He pulled his door closed.

Young prevented his door closure with a well-placed boot.

“Keys?” the colonel asked. “Phone? Signal scrambler? Laptop?”

“Yes yes yes and yes,” Rush said. “Do y’have a spare pair of sunglasses, by any chance?”

If Young said no, there was a good chance Rush might die of his headache before they reached the base. (Silver lining: no meeting.)

“You can have mine.” Young pulled a pair out of his pocket. “If you let me drive.”

“Done.” Rush snapped the shades out of Young’s hand, swapped out his glasses, and slipped them on.

“You hung over?” Young asked.

He wasn’t. But he felt like he was. Close enough. “Yes.”

“No you’re not.” Young limped after him as they headed for the elevator.

Right, and Young thought he was a lot of work?

Rush hit the down button with more than the requisite force, hooked a hand over his shoulder, and tried to pretend that his brain wasn’t trying to phase change into a new state of matter. He wished it luck. (Really, he did.)

“Here’s the plan, hotshot,” Young began.

Oh there was a plan, was there?

“You sit there and look pretty, while—”

Rush pulled his shades down and fixed Young with a distinctly unimpressed look. (Painful but worth it.)

“You sit there and look like an overextended mathematical rock star,” Young amended, with so much composure that the man must have been baiting him. “Dr. Perry and I will do the talking.”

Rush upslid his borrowed aviators. “I don’t understand why you’re t’be there at all. Aren’t you in charge of people with guns? D’you know a fuckin’ thing about ‘MMORPGs’?”

The elevator opened.

Rush motioned Young forward, one hand against the doors.

“Right now, I’m in charge of everything.” Young limped into the pitiless glare of the fluorescent elevator light.

Rush had no idea what the scope of Young’s professional responsibilities were—past or current. It was possible he wasn’t exaggerating. It was also possible he was exaggerating, though the fact Young had been invited to this absurd meeting indicated the former possibility was more likely than the latter.

“As for MMORPGs,” Young continued, “I read the report. It seems like a decent idea in exchange for about ninety million dollars from the senate appropriations committee.”

“Were they planning on giving those ninety million dollars to me,” Rush said tartly, “perhaps you’d have a point.”

“I can see this is gonna go well,” Young muttered. “I recommend you consider being polite to the United States Senator controlling resource allocation for the Icarus Project?”

“When am I not polite?” Rush dug his fingers into the base of his neck.

“Hotshot, if you put ‘please’ and ‘fuck’ in the same sentence—”

“You end up with semantic neutrality,” Rush replied. “The polite and the profane cancel out.”

“Nope. ‘Fuck’ always carries the day,” Young said.

Rush sighed. “If you say so.”

The elevator doors opened into a shaft of natural light coming through the glass doors of the building.

“Oh god,” Rush whispered, his fingertips at his temple.

“You feel like shit,” Young said.

It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t answer it. He just walked into the light, trying to move his head as little as possible and think about how fuckin’ obsequiously, terribly, embarrassingly, grateful he was for the existence of Amanda Perry who seemed to: a) genuinely be excited about Astria Porta in the depths of her strange, joyfully ironic heart; b) have enough scientific connections that he’d need to do nothing other than the mathematical rendering of the cypher set; c) want to make his life easier for obscure reasons.

Maybe he seemed like he fuckin’ needed it.

He made his way over to Young’s car, a black, aggressive-looking thing with more accelerative capacity than necessary.

“You remembered my car.” Young sounded touched.

Rush found this irritating. “Is there a reason I wouldn’t remember your car? Do y’have me confused with a stereotype you’ve invented?”

“Take it easy over there, hotshot,” Young said, unlocking the driver’s side door. “You need coffee?”

“We’re late,” Rush.

“We’re not that late, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be worth it.”

“Possibly,” Rush allowed.

Rush sat in the mercifully dim briefing room, watching Colonel Young wrap up an overview of the Icarus Project tailored for the masses with level one security clearance (or less). In this case, it was a mass of two: an opinionated senator and his senior aide, who seemed in no way “senior” other than the aggravating fact her security clearance exceeded Rush’s own.

(Unsurprising.)

He glanced at Perry and found her watching him. She widened her eyes.

Perhaps he looked impolite in some way?

Rush straightened in his chair, but not enough to imply he thought any of this was a good use of his time. He had several objections to the entire concept, none of which he’d been encouraged to voice, and several of which he had been expressly advised against voicing by Young and Perry. He hated intellectual strictures on academic work, especially strictures that were time consuming and a waste of assets—not only his own considerable talents, which could (unquestionably) be better employed, but also Perry’s.

She was certainly a valuable resource.

He drummed his fingers against the table.

The senator’s aide glanced at him.

Perhaps repetitive finger movements were frowned upon by the American political establishment.

He’d avoided thinking too much about the request being made of him, but given he was uninterested in Young’s modified version of Dr. Jackson’s: Historical Highlights of the SGC funding pitch, Rush found little else to think about.

(Dead difficult to focus on cryptography when trying to suppress aggravation.)

What was being asked of him and, by extension, Dr. Perry, was encoding the cyphers into a computationally decipherable form that could be turned over to a private company for incorporation into a game popular among shiftless young people who lacked ambition.

In return, the SGC would gain a monetary sum used, presumably, to further their mission.

The idea was worthy of ridicule.

Young finished his prepared talk and made his pained, muscular way back to his seat as Dr. Perry began speaking.

There were—he looked at the ceiling, trying to estimate—perhaps ten people (give or take nine people) who’d be able to take an alien cypher set (written in a foreign computer language with incredible cryptographic breadth) and transpose it into something a terrestrial programmer would be able to make sense of.

Rush sincerely doubted Senator Armstrong had considered the plausibility of his ludicrous request before making it. Most likely, the man hadn’t a clue what he was truly asking.

He leaned back, braced an elbow against the arm of his chair, and pressed two fingers into his temple.

His head ached.

There was no reasonable justification for a request as ridiculous as this one. What was the point of harnessing the untapped genius of the anonymous proletariat when one had a perfectly adequate resident cryptographer who—

Oh.

Right then.

(Of course.)

This was a contingency plan. Against his own abduction by the Lucian Alliance.

(Outstanding.)

This realization didn’t send a reassuring message about his odds of avoiding abduction by the Lucian Alliance. At least the SGC was thinking strategically. He felt a bizarre sense of pride, as though a struggling undergraduate had successfully integrated by parts during office hours. He felt like standing up and shaking Senator fuckin’ Armstrong’s hand.

The cracked glass of his thoughts splintered along, painful and unpredictable.

He’d never been a resource on a such a scale, he’d never been threatened by something with such scope. (He’d always been slow to trust, but that was a psychological spandrel from the fucked up places he’d clawed his way free of, not a way he’d truly needed to live.)

Who in the room understood the nature of this meeting? The senator did. Landry did. Young and Perry he was less certain about.

Rush hesitated, torn, before marshaling his intellectual capital and tipping himself into a savage pleasure with whomever’d devised this particular plan. Asking him to code these chevrons into a game was to ask him to craft the performance interview for his successor.

He could see why they might not want to have such a discussion with him openly. Such a thing would be in atrocious taste. Utterly without tact. Extremely impolite.

A muscle in his cheek twitched. His headache began to recede under a second, equally merciless pressure: the urge to cut into this thing and lay it bare.

The deal, to put it colloquially, had already been struck. It’d been struck days ago, weeks ago. Even if he could have, he wouldn’t have stopped it.

Because it was a good idea.

Perry glanced at him, in the middle of a sentence about projected turnaround times, and she faltered, the words fading to nothing as she looked at him. Soon, everyone was looking at him.

“Dr. Rush?” Landry asked. “Is there a problem?”

He realized he was smiling. (Oops.)

“No.” He leaned forward, pouring the word like death-spiked tea. He rested his forearms against the edge of the table and pressed his fingertips together. “Not at all,” he said. “I’m very much in favor of contingency planning.”

Landry’s expression didn’t change, but for a slight lift of the eyebrows. As if he were making a reassessment of some kind. As well he might.

Perry’s eyes widened in an obvious prompt for him to explain himself.

Young betrayed nothing.

The senator watched him steadily. His “senior aide” dropped her eyes, smoothing a piece of hair behind her ear.

“Contingency?” It was Perry who spoke. “What do you mean ‘contingency’?”

Rush didn’t look at her.

“It’d be a shame if you were to lose your cryptographer.” He kept his gaze on Armstrong. “It’d be a significant setback. Militarily. Financially. Strategically. The part that has me puzzled is what the ninety million dollars is for. Was that supposed to be for my psychological benefit? The appearance of a quid pro quo? The money for the game? Or is the Appropriations Committee simply purchasing a controlling stake in the trajectory of the project and this was a neat way to package the deal?”

Young and Perry looked at him with identical expressions of dismayed comprehension.

“Dr. Rush,” Senator Armstrong began, “please understand—”

“I understand,” he said, perfectly smooth, perfectly calm. “I understand better than they do. He gestured to Young, to Landry, to Perry. More than that, I agree with you. It’s a dead brilliant idea. You get the one person who can unlock the thing to create a mechanism for his own replacement.”

“That’s not what’s going on here,” Young growled. 

“That’s exactly what’s going on here,” Rush snapped.

Landry said nothing.

Rush waited, eyebrows lifted. His gaze swept the room. No one said anything. “I’ll do it,” he announced into the weighted quiet. “I’ll render the cyphers for you game. Of course I will. But I do want something in return.”

“What?” Landry asked.

He considered asking for level two security clearance, but didn’t think he’d get it. (Humiliating.) He was certain that, given the current climate at the SGC, he’d get very little. Something small then. Information.

“I’d like the name of the person who came up with this particular strategy,” Rush decided.

“It came from my office,” Armstrong countered.

“A name.” Rush wielded his diction like a paring knife.

“I’m responsible,” Armstrong said.

“It was me.” The senator’s aide spoke over him, and the senator himself allowed it. Her chin angled up, her eyes were a mix of anxiety and fire. “It was my idea.”

Yes well. Fine. Less useful than he’d like. Vexingly, the girl looked like she should be in graduate school, not sitting at the bottom of a mountain waiting to fall on top of her.

“And you are?” he said.

“Chloe.” The word was small. Too small.

“Chloe—”

“Chloe Armstrong.”

“Ah.”

They sized one another up. He could see the family resemblance between her and the senator in the set of their eyes, the color. 

“Well, Ms. Armstrong, you seem cleverer than the company you keep. Consider graduate school before politics ruins your mind. Do something of real value. Join a gate team. Prove a theorem.”

She regarded him neutrally.

Rush stood, done with the room, the meeting, the people in it. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”

“Dr. Rush,” Landry rumbled. “This meeting isn’t over.”

Rush abandoned his coffee cup and shouldered his bag in a sweep. He walked for the door before anyone could stop him, before he gave into his own fear that they would stop him.

No one did.

He passed Landry’s secretary and entered the elevator, where his headache drove back into his awareness like a consciousness-seeking leucotome.

(He shouldn’t’ve let Young drive in exchange for fuckin’ sunglasses. What’d he been thinking? Never again.)

Rush pressed the button for level 18. The elevator doors closed.

He stood alone in the fluorescent box.

(Not upset.)

It was fine.

He liked their plan. He did.

He liked it.

He approved of it.

It was practical. It fulfilled an important function.

(But what had happened to the astrophysicist?)

He liked it. He did.

(But what was happening to Dale Volker at this very moment?)

He liked it.

It was a good plan.

(They genuinely fuckin’ thought Rush would fall to the Lucian Alliance, didn’t they?)

He didn’t mind the implicit inevitability of his eventual abduction, it didn’t bother him per se, but he hoped it’d be later rather than sooner because he’d like to solve this thing before he died, or at least make a solid attempt at it.

Into his mind came the idea of Atlantis, there in more detail than it should be, because he’d never seen it, those high silver towers shining against an already bright sky. He’d dreamed of it: the wind in his hair, the sun in his eyes, the faint arc of geodesic shielding, and god, it’d hurt. It hurt still. His whole mind ached with the memory.

He could go there, supposedly. It would be safe, supposedly. It was what Jackson wanted, supposedly.

The elevator opened. He staggered out, fluorescent light glaring to blur, edges softening. He stopped next to Jackson’s door, shook his head to clear it, and was nearly blinded by the spike in his headache.

He took a breath.

Knocked.

“Come in,” Jackson called.

Rush opened the door to a dark room. The space was filled with candlelight. Jackson sat on a woven blanket, in the midst of a sea of tiny flames. He looked up at Rush and his eyes were the blue of desert sky arced over picked-clean bones.

Yes well.

Fine.

“Nick?” Jackson said.

Rush shut the door and turned. He wasn’t sure where exactly he thought he was going to go. (Anywhere.) Perry’s office. (That sounded reasonable.) He’d wait for her. He needed to speak with her anyway.

One of the green-uniformed blurs that passed before him reversed its direction, peeled him off the wall.

“Hello gorgeous.” Vala threaded her arm through his as she changed their trajectory. “Shit day?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

Half an hour later, after Rush had described the rough outline of what the SGC had really been proposing, when they’d requested he code a cypher set into a game, he and Vala sat on the floor of her quarters, a chessboard between them.

Vala considered the arrangement of pieces, head angled, eyes narrowed. She advanced a pawn.

Rush pushed her pawn back into position, then tapped its neighbor.

Vala moved it forward.

“And now,” he said, “you’ve begun the Latvian Gambit. Such a thing will unnerve your opponent in direct proportion to how well they know chess and in indirect proportion to their assessment of your skill level. More than that, aesthetically it suits you. There will be those who tell you it’s shite, but it lends itself to wild, clever, and contemptuous play.”

Vala tossed her hair over her shoulder and blew him a kiss. “I believe the infrared spectroscopy unit is quite experienced when it comes to chess.”

“When’s this tournament happening?”

“In a few days.” Vala stared down the board, memorizing the arrangement of pieces. “The ISU has been playing speed chess in the mess at peak mealtimes in a flagrant attempt to intimidate us.”

“You’ve been studying their play, I hope?” Rush began constructing his pawn skeleton.

“I have,” Vala admitted, “but this game takes more than a week to master.”

“Consider using your inexperience as a strategy.” His headache spiked, and he drove the heel of his hand into an eye socket.

The room was quiet.

“Gorgeous,” Vala whispered, “forget what that idiot senator said. Even if they take you, which is not a given, we’d never leave you with them.”

“What about that astrophysicist?” Rush dropped his hand and cracked his eyelids. “Volker. It appears he’s been left.”

“And what do you suppose you know about it, hmm?” She arched a brow. “There’s a team devoted to finding him.” Vala advanced her bishop.

“A team of four people?” Rush asked dryly. “Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.”

“He isn’t you,” she replied.

A beat of silence, and then—

“Any advice?” he asked.

Vala, bent over the board, looked at him from beneath a sweep of dark hair. “I’ll have to swear you to secrecy, y’know.”

Rush moved his knight. “I’m amenable to that.”

Vala met his gaze. “Do what’s required to survive. In all circumstances. If that means that you give the Lucian Alliance what they ask for—then,” she shrugged, dropping her eyes, “you give them what they ask for. They have ways of getting what they want regardless of your best intentions. But if you give it to them,” she continued, her eyes distant, “you control how much you give. You manipulate them into keeping you alive. The rest can’t help but follow.”

“Are y’speaking from personal experience?”

“No,” Vala said, drawing out the word with a bright lie of a smile. “I read about this in Cosmo.”

“So, t’clarify,” Rush said, smiling faintly. “Your advice is to throw in with the Lucian Alliance?”

Artfully, Vala swept her hair out of her face and gave him a brilliant smile. “Yes. But only if you’re abducted. And only for a limited time. You just need to hold out until I come to rescue you.”

Rush smiled faintly, studying the board. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do,” Vala said. “I’m—”

She was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“I’m sure that’s Daniel,” Vala sighed.

“I’m sure it’s Young,” Rush countered.

“Care to make it interesting?”

“Interesting how?”

“I’ll put an adorably hand-tailored yet tastefully masculine SGC-issued jacket on the table,” she said.

“Don’t think I need any such thing.”

There was another knock on the door, louder this time.

“Just a moment,” Vala called, musical and loud, “I’m changing.”

Rush shot her a look over the tops of his glasses.

“Come now,” she said, unruffled and faintly reproachful, “propose an equivalence. Something requiring comparable effort on your part that you think I’ll be equally uninterested in.”

He smirked, despite himself. “I’ll show you how to cook a dish of your choice using Colonel Young’s kitchen.”

“Done,” Vala said, delighted. She got to her feet. “Let’s see how this turns out, shall we?”

Rush leaned back against the foot of the bed, hooked a hand over one shoulder, and dug his fingers into the base of his neck.

Vala flung open the door to reveal Young and Jackson standing in the frame.

Jackson cleared his throat. “Changing?”

“Yes darling, we were playing one of your Earth games known as ‘strip chess’.”

“Strip chess,” Jackson repeated, caught between skepticism and dismay.

“Is that not an accepted variant?” Vala turned in a swirl of hair. “Gorgeous! How roguishly disingenuous of you!”

Rush shrugged, opening a hand.

“The United States Government,” Jackson began, eyeing Vala darkly, “has a name for this kind of thing. That name is ‘sexual harassment’.”

“Yes.” Vala schooled her expression, widened her eyes, and solemnly said, “I do feel victimized by the strip chess. Thank you for noticing.”

“You are definitely the harasser. Not the harassee.”

Vala theatrically pressed a hand to her chest, then turned to Rush. “Am I creating an unsafe workplace environment for you, gorgeous?”

“You?” Rush shifted his fingers from the base of his neck to his temple. “No, I don’t think it’s you.”

An uncomfortable silence descended.

Everyone fixed their attention on him.

For his part, Rush tried to prevent his skull from suffering explosive decompression secondary to his building headache. He tried to pretend to himself (and others) that he was in Vala’s room, sitting on the floor in front of a chessboard, because a) he’d known where her room was and he’d come here purposefully, b) they’d had a previous appointment regarding the finer points of an intellectual game, and c) he had in no way been upset by anything that had happened this afternoon, least of all the subtle and well-formulated plans of senior aides to United States senators.

“Did the two of you want something? We’re in the middle of exploring the Latvian Gambit here.” Vala swept a hand over the chessboard.

“What?” Jackson smiled faintly, wrapped himself in a hug, and stepped into the room to study the board, head cocked.

“The Latvian Gambit,” Vala said, enunciating crisply enough to insult. “It’s extremely advanced, darling. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

Young remained in the doorway, his cane aligned unobtrusively with his good leg. He caught Rush’s eye and angled his chin in subtle invitation.

Rush staggered to his feet, one hand still plastered to his temple. Jackson grabbed his elbow, steadying him. Rush stepped out of the man’s grip and headed for Young.

“I actually don’t know very much about chess,” Jackson admitted, his eyes on the board.

“Oh really,” Vala replied, “because based on the way that you were advising Colonel Mitchell I had the impression—”

“I’m better than Cam,” Jackson protested.

Rush edged around them to join the colonel at the door.

“You wanna get out of here, hotshot?” Young’s tone was low, his expression concerned.

“You’re better than Cam,” Jackson continued.

Rush tried to keep his delivery casual. Unperturbed. “I need to speak with Dr. Perry.”

“A potted plant is better than Cam,” Jackson finished.

“Uh, what are you planning on saying to her?” Young asked.

“Why? Is it a matter of national security?” Rush asked, acidic and poised.

“No,” Young said, “but she was pretty upset after your dramatic exit.”

“Dramatic,” Rush repeated, fixing Young with a cool look over the tops of his glasses.

“Yup.” Young stood his ground. “That’s the word that comes to mind when a guy creates political capital out of thin air then sets it on fire by going after the daughter of a US Senator.”

“I gave her a piece of unsolicited career advice,” Rush said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a fun room after you left,” Young said. “You realize none of us knew, right?”

Jackson and Vala had grown quiet.

“I didn’t know,” Young said, “Perry didn’t know.” He pointed a thumb at Jackson. “Even the Bureaucracy Whisperer hadn’t put it together.”

Jackson nodded at Rush, his gaze direct and transparent.

“As if any of you would come up with something so practical,” Rush said.

Jackson gave him a small, apologetic smile.

“It doesn’t matter to me who knew that the game was a front for a frankly desperate scheme to replace me in the event of my inevitable abduction. They should’ve come to me directly. I could’ve given them names of people to contact. In fact, I will. I plan to provide Ms. Armstrong with a list. Do they think that cryptographers spring de novo from the fuckin’ ether? Do they think anyone will solve the series of gate cyphers in their inane game? Do they think that solving rendered cyphers would translate flawlessly to the real world? How the fuck would one build such an outcome into a virtual interface and expect it to function as even an approximation of its real world equivalent? By determined application of willful ignorance? By misguided wishing? By praying to the Gods of Obdurate Patriotism?”

“False gods, gorgeous,” Vala said, quietly. “All the gods around here are false.”

Rush took a deep breath. He swept his hair out of his eyes. “I like their plan,” he said finally. “I like it. I do.”

“I hate it,” Jackson said.

“Me too,” Vala added.

“Can’t say I’m a fan.” Young leaned into his cane, his expression fond. Complicated.

“You’ve terrible taste,” Rush said. “The lot of you. I need to speak with Dr. Perry.”

“Text me when you’re good to go,” Young replied. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Yes yes.” Rush brushed past him on the way out the door.

“Hotshot, do not even think of calling a cab,” Young shouted after him.

Rush ignored him and stalked down the hallway towards the elevators.