Mathématique: Boundary Conditions

Relief isn’t a sentiment Amanda Perry typically encounters, let alone inspires.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Alien-induced psychosis.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Boundary Conditions

Amanda Perry gives her aide the afternoon off. She sits in her office in perfect, uncomfortable stillness. She closes her eyes, collecting herself before she’ll navigate the quotidian chaos of the corridors and the unpredictable, changing maze of equipment and people and the odd disaster that may bar her way.

She needs a moment.

A moment to create an isolation that hasn’t been imposed upon her, but one she carves for herself.

The task in front of her won’t be so easy.

Perry opens her eyes and begins the sequence of accelerations and angular adjustments that take her from her office and into the elevator, then to the infirmary. As she rolls down hallways, people make a path for her. She doesn’t mind the ones that look away. She doesn’t mind the ones that look too long.

She wishes they wouldn’t make such an effort not to touch her.

She understands the respect behind their reticence, their hesitation, their swerving. Usually, it doesn’t bother her, but the past few weeks have been hard, and there are times when she finds the prison of physicality more difficult to bear than others.

Oh, to be like the Ancients. To be capable of ascension: incorporeal transit, understanding without biological mind, her whole being converted to physical harmonies and carried on cosmic winds. Amanda Perry would give almost anything for such a destiny.

She braces for the sight of Nick Rush as she passes through the doors of the infirmary. She girds herself against the way he’ll look. She’s ready for the gown, for the IV, for the—

God. She’s not ready. Or, rather, she was ready for the wrong thing.

She almost doesn’t recognize him at first, because he’s sitting up in bed, wearing his clothes, wearing his glasses, McKay’s cortical suppressors nearly concealed by the fringed edges of his hair, revealing their presence only by their faint and futuristic glow. And, if all that wasn’t enough, when he looks at her, she sees nothing but relief.

Relief isn’t a sentiment Amanda Perry typically encounters, let alone inspires. Generally, she creates logistical nightmares with her presence that are often, but not always, worth the insight she offers.

“Dr. Perry,” Rush says, “thank fuck.” His fingers ghost to his temples, as if he hadn’t quite meant to say that last part aloud.

Her throat betrays her. She can’t speak. But her smile bursts free, wild and even. Already though, she’s wondering about those devices, what his experience is like beneath that cortical yoke of EM suppression.

She takes a breath. Waits for her throat to open. “You look better than the last time I saw you.”

“You’ll have to remind me.” Again, his fingers brush his temples.

The last time she saw him, he’d been drugged with anti-epileptics and so sedated by the uncalibrated electromagnetic power of the device attached to his head that he’d responded to nothing, not even pain, for hours. “Let’s say I prefer my men conscious,” she says. “And clothed. Nice jeans.”

The nonplussed look he gives her is worth the longing that constricts her vocal cords.

“Where’s your colonel?” she asks.

“Young?” he asks, a little slow to put the idea together.

“Yeah,” she replies, her voice too gentle.

They look away from one another.

“He’s conspiring,” Rush says. “Enquiring regarding the firing of tiring wiring. For fuck’s sake. He’s with Jackson.”

Perry pushes her eyebrows together, trying to decide what’d just happened there as she returns with, “Inspiring rhyming with flaw free timing.”

“Yes well.” Still, he doesn’t look at her.

“I’m guessing your little foray into beat poetry there wasn’t intentional?”

“No,” he admits. “It’s these bloody things.” He gestures at his temples.

“We’ll blame McKay.” Perry says. “His area is astrophysics, and it shows.”

He gives her an understated roll of the eyes.

She smiles at him. As smiles go, it feels like a good one. “We’ll clean up the code, fine tune the interference wave, and you’ll be back to embarrassingly intuitive mathematical insights and devastating sarcasm in no time.”

“‘Embarrassingly’ intuitive?” he repeats.

“Highly embarrassing.” She navigates her chair to bring her to the open laptop on Rush’s bedside table. She scans the screen, looking for evidence that Dr. Lee had left her customizable voice activation software open and waiting. “Open terminal window,” she says.

It complies. Perfect.

Rush watches her with interest and she feels self-conscious, even though he’s the one who’s not quite himself. It occurs to her that he’ll be listening to her edit his subjective perception of his cognitive experience, morphing it with mathematics into something that feels familiar and correct for him.

This may be the most intimate thing she’s ever done with another person.

Not a helpful thought.

She swallows. “Run ah—“ she breaks off, swallowing again. “Run program Neuromancer,” she says.

Rush huffs an almost laugh.

“I didn’t name it,” Perry tells him. “It was probably McKay. Maybe Zelenka.”

“I’m certain it was Colonel Sheppard.” Rush speaks with a cavalier dismissiveness and runs a hand through his hair. It’s a front, she’s sure, for deep unease.

“Huh.” Perry’s eyes scan over the code unfolding in front of her. “Sheppard? I’ve heard gossip about him being a closet nerd.”

Rush shrugged. “Not sure how ‘closeted’ he is.”

“Scroll down,” Perry tells the computer, scanning for the wave functions she’ll be tweaking. She keeps her eyes fixed to the green-on-black blaze of the code in front of her. “Let’s do some calibrating. Did Bill Lee give you the packet I designed? Page one, problem one.”

Rush reaches to the table next to him and looks at the set of papers, unenthusiastic. “This is humiliating.”

“Humiliating would be not calibrating,” Perry counters. She keeps her delivery dry enough to mask subterranean rivers of sympathy and whatever else lurks at the bottom of her thought canyons, unexamined but not unguessed at.

“I suppose you’ve point there,” Rush says, a hint of a sigh beneath the words. He pages through the packet, studying the arrays of derivatives, integrals, and identities that should be as basic to him as they are to her.

“I think we can skip phase one,” he says.

“Run through it anyway,” she says. “For the sake of completeness. This is your brain we’re talking about, Mr. Fields Medalist.”

He pulls out a pen and blazes through the mathematical prompts with a bored, rapid scrawl she finds simultaneously reassuring and devastating in its unconscious appeal.

So she likes smart, sarcastic, scintillating men who are good with a fountain pen.

So sue her.

“Page two,” is all she says when he’s finished.

She’s designed this mathematical ascent for him, a sweeping survey that begins with calculus and climbs the quantitative hierarchy through linear algebra and differential equations and set theory and number theory then cycles around to the philosophical origins of mathematics before switching into computational complexity theory and basic quantum mechanics, branching into every mathematical territory they share.

He slows down at page seven. He stops at page eight: the problem of a particle in a three-dimensional box. The simplest 3D quantum system. Normally, this would be within the scope of his abilities, though it is outside his expertise.

“Nick,” she prompts, when he hasn’t written anything for minutes.

“Yes yes,” he replies. “Nearly there.”

She’s near enough to see his angled paper.

“You could sit here and reinvent quantum mechanics,” she says quietly, “but that’s not really what this is about.”

“I’m aware.” He doesn’t look at her

“I’ll be gentle,” she replies, and though she instinctively gives the words a twist of buried innuendo, they don’t come out that way, not in the face of his obvious anxiety, the weight of responsibility she feels. She tamps down the amplitude of one of the six interacting wave functions that form the adaptive interference pattern propagating through his skull. There’s no way to know, at this fine level of detail, what the cognitive effects will be.

She’s experimenting. She’s experimenting on the brain of a brilliant Fields Medalist. Whom she happens to like. A lot. Maybe a little too much. Definitely a little too much. So. No pressure.

“Ah,” he says, his hands going to his temples, “maybe not that one?” A monitor starts to chime softly, and she can see and hear the rising pace of his heart.

Hastily, she reverses her change, and the rhythm of his heart decelerates in the quiet of the infirmary.

Lam appears around a corner. “Everything okay?” she asks.

“Um,” Perry begins, high and frightened.

“Everything’s fine,” Rush says.

Lam frowns, hovering on the border of the dark hall from which she’d emerged.

“Are you okay?” Perry asks.

“Yes yes,” he says, like he’s strangling himself to pull off casual. “I’m fine.”

“Nick.” She sounds no better.

“Try again,” he says. “Try something else.”

Lam leans into the cement wall of the infirmary, her face and coat pale against the gray concrete.

Perry finds another waveform to shift with delicate, computational precision. This time, Rush looks up, indefinably sharper than he’d been moments before. “Better,” he says.

She raises her eyebrows.

He picks up his pen and starts writing again. She sees it’s occurred to him to use the boundary conditions of 𝜳 and the separation of variables to solve the problem she’s set for him.

They continue through the spread of math. She eases him into and through the stroke and sculpt of the waveforms artificially binding him until he’s worked his way, stepwise and parsimonious through the range of tasks she’s designed for him, until he’s responding verbally with a relaxed and understated snap, and until something amorphous and sophisticated unifies his choice of word and gesture and he becomes, again, the man she knows.

“How do you feel?” she asks, when she’s finished.

The packet of math stirs the air as he tosses it onto the table at his bedside.

“Possessed of a mind un-fucked with,” he replies, setting his pen atop the papers with a quiet click. “Relatively.”

She swallows.“You realize your mind,” she says, hiding behind dry, hiding behind wry, “is now being constantly…‘modified’?”

He quirks a brow, amused and pale and drawn. Like something unreal. The faint blue gloss of lights at his temples suggests a technological halo. “Thank you,” he says.

Uncomfortable, they both look away.

“You’re welcome.” She tries not to wish she could touch him, tries to confine her desires to something more bounded, trying to wish instead that she could pick up the packet of paper, covered with his distinct script, all angled boldness and fluid arcs, and look at it, turn the pages, study it by herself, without anyone holding it for her.

That’s a better thing, by far, to wish for.

“Does this,” he asks, “fit into any rubric you’ve encountered?”

Her eyes snap back to him, and he taps a fingernail against the naquadah affixed to his temple.

“Well,” she says, trying to betray no relief, no regret at the turn of his question, “General O’Neill’s brain once got remodeled by a Lantean device, and his English was replaced with Ancient. He gained enough understanding of math and physics to alter our dialing program and transport himself to a place that could repair his mind. Soooo, Ancient technology co-opting someone’s brain isn’t unprecedented.”

“Last time I checked, my spoken Ancient was rubbish.” Rush hooks a hand over one shoulder and presses his fingers into the muscles at the base of his neck.

“Hmm,” Perry says, uneasy. It’s odd for someone to consider themselves “atrocious” at speaking a dead language when there can be no point of aural comparison…but maybe he’s been spending a lot of time with Dr. Jackson. “When was the last time you checked?”

“Proximo tempore,” Rush answers, and while there’s a Scottish gloss on the Ancient phrase, Perry isn’t at all convinced when he says, “See? Awful.”

“Maybe you should get Dr. Jackson to assess you,” Perry suggests, unconvinced by a sample size of n=2 words.

Rush shrugs. “I’m more interested in your thoughts than Dr. Jackson’s.”

She smiles, unfairly pleased but trying not to let any kind of satisfaction take hold in her mind where it might germinate into a poisoned bloom she can’t survive. “Flatterer,” is all she says.

“That’s you,” he replies.

“Touché,” she says, with a pang, then wrenches her thoughts into a more useful trajectory. “It’s probably best to divide potential etiologies for your D minor problem into those intrinsic to you, versus those triggered by an alien influence, versus those that arise from a combination of who you are and what you’ve encountered.”

“Two categories and their overlap region,” he says. “Agreed.”

“Very Set Theory,” Perry teases. “Things that don’t fall into the category of alien influence are Dr. Lam’s area,” Perry says, “but I gotta say—if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s probably a duck.”

“Where by ‘duck,’ you mean ‘alien influence’.” Rush quirks that eyebrow of his.

“Obviously,” Perry replies. “Were you just pointing that out to showcase your capacity for disdain, or do you need another tweak of your wave functions?

Rush traces the edges of the silver devices at his temple. “The former, I assure you, though I wouldn’t mind the capacity for continuous control of the program you’re editing?”

“Ohhhhh no,” Perry says. “You can look, but you can’t have real-time control without oversight. If science fiction, as a genre, has taught us nothing else, it’s that one shouldn’t experiment from the top down on one’s own cognition. Haven’t you read the cautionary tale known as The Terminal Man?”

“No,” Rush said. “Is that a narrative anecdote in one of Dr. Jackson’s innumerable manuals?”

Perry snorts a laugh, then pauses to swallow. “Um, no. It’s a popular science fiction novel written in the 1970s and a formative literary experience for at least a third of the people who make up the oversight committee for your nifty little cortical suppressors, seeing as two of them independently brought it up at our first meeting.”

“Cortical suppressors come with an oversight committee?”

“Around here they do,” Perry replies, “especially given they’re being piloted on a civilian who was in such extremis that he couldn’t even give consent before untested, half-alien tech was glued to his head.”

Rush looks at her, tack sharp.

She takes a breath, regroups. “Come on. You must know this place is bricked with reports filed in triplicate. You’ve got scientific, ethical, security, military, and administrative oversight on this, though you’re bureaucratically de-identified at your colonel’s insistence so that you’re safe from the dangers a paper trail poses.” 

“Fantastic,” Rush sighs. The set of his shoulders strikes her as profoundly unhappy.

“On the plus side,” Perry says, deliberately injecting a little hope into her tone, “it looks like, for the moment, you’re medically stable and in full control of your mental faculties, so—there’s that.”

“Yes,” he says, trying to put an offhand gloss on the word. “Pass me that computer, will you?”

Perry closes her eyes. Everyone has their own insensitivities, it’s unavoidable, but his are unique and strange and so forgivable.

Or, maybe, she merely finds them so.

“I’d love to,” she says, dry and mild.

He looks over at her.

She looks back at him.

He brings a hand to his face, embarrassed, but he doesn’t apologize. He just says, “Not part of your skillset, little Miss Brilliant?”

She can’t move. Even if she could, she’s not sure she’d be capable of closing the distance between them.

“Afraid not,” she says, swallowing against a painful pressure, “Mr. Brilliant.”