Mathématique: Chapter 38

To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 38

D minor.

D minor.

37.5 Hz with overtones bounded only by the (expanding) borders of his auditory perception.

“Okay, we’re calibrating.”

“Is it on?”

“Yeah, it’s on, but I don’t think it’s working.”

“Like, not working ‘not working’, or not yet working?”

“We, uh, might need Dr. McKay for this.”

“Well he’s on Atlantis, so.”

“Can we get him?”

“Wait, is he—”

“I think he’s waking up.”

“Nick?”

“He shouldn’t be.”

“He is.”

“I can see that, colonel, thank you.”

“But the device isn’t on yet. It’s not even calibrated, he can’t be awake, we need a baseline.”

“Nick?”

“Dr. Jackson, please step back.”

“Oh crap.”

“What do you mean ‘oh crap’.”

(D minor.)

“Nothing, no, it’s okay, we’re okay. He needs to not move right now? Like not at all.” 

“Yeah well, he’s pretty out of it at the moment.” 

“I know. But this circuitry is delicate, and I need an electrophysiological baseline.”

D minor and hands.

(Hands holding him down.)

“He’s burning though the meds, I don’t know if I can get him back to his baseline.”

“Let’s get as close as you can, pharmacologically.”

“Rush. Nick. Try and relax. Damn it, I sound like an idiot. Just know that I know that, hotshot.”

D minor.

“Can I get someone to hold his head still, please? The circuitry in this thing is delicate, and we do not want to wait for version 2.0.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

D minor.

“Is there any chance of him actually physically seizing? I ask because if so? We need to get the device off him until he’s pharmacologically controlled enough that a voltage burst doesn’t fry the crystal chip in this thing.”

D minor.

D minor.

D minor, D minor, D minor.

“Yes, there’s a real danger of that, but I can’t give you much better control than this, unless you want him under general anesthesia.”

“No, that would put him further from his baseline than he is now.”

“Relax. Rush. C’mon. Stop fighting so hard.”

“So this is our baseline, is what you’re telling me?”

“I’m telling you this is as good as it’ll get.”

D minor.

“But why is he waking up?”

To create

“Easy.”

To create a machine

D minor.

“Hold him down. I need his head held steady for this.”

To create a machine that feels

“Take it easy, hotshot.”

To create a machine that feels is

D minor.

To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.

D minor.

“D minor.”

(A cruelty.)

“Did he say something?”

“Shhh, don’t talk. Try not to talk.”

“What did he say?”

“’D minor’. I think he said ‘D minor’?”

“It’s better if he doesn’t talk.”

“Yeah well—”

“I’m not trying to be insensitive. I’m trying to calibrate these circuits.”

“I know. I get that.”

“Talk to him.”

“What?”

“Talk to him. Address him directly.”

“Jackson, there’s no way he’s hearing anything right now.”

“You don’t know that.”

“When I said ‘hold him down?’ I actually meant hold him down. Either that, or put him in restraints.  Our window is closing to get this thing working.”

“Nick? Nick, it’s Daniel—”

“Tamara, yes. Affix it there.”

D minor.

The Lydian mode.

“Did you think of staying?” Gloria’s voice, too, is in the Lydian mode, backed by rain, by mist, by falling water.

“Uh oh.”

“What?”

“Look at the monitors.”

“Fire and water,” Gloria muses, more real than the chaos above and around him. “And a raw gift for harmonics. It would’ve taken you. It did take you.”

Something had been at the heart of that glittering, sea-of-grass world. (Something more than the cypher key.)

“It was a chair, sweetheart. A seashell carbon/silicon interface without equal.”

“That doesn’t look good.”

“He’s not localizing to us anymore. He’s in danger of seizing.”

“Dr. Lee, can you speed this up?”

“I’m going as fast as I can, but I need that baseline.”

“Hotshot, damn it, snap out of it.”

“But why didn’t it keep you?” There’s silver behind Gloria’s blue eyes, and the room smells of mist.

“I can feel them.”

“Jackson, what are you talking about?”

“They’re here.”

“Do you have the kit?”

“I have it.”

“If you know why, now’s the time to tell me.” The world glazed like overexposed film. Crystals sang and vibrated in the walls of the room. In rooms beyond.

“We’ll push meds until we break that pattern. We have to break it.”

“It had you. A living agent. Two living agents, possessed by frozen, sentient architecture.”

“Rush, hey. Come on. Try to stay with us.”

“It knew you for what you were. It knew both of you”

“Two grams in.”

“Push two more.”

“Rush, you held this off for days. For weeks, maybe. Come on.”

“Why did it let you go?”

He didn’t know.

“If you tell me, I might help you.” Gloria’s tone layered with deceptive harmonies, like mist over standing water.

(He didn’t know.)

“Throw this shit out of your head, hotshot. Focus on what’s happening.”

“If you tell me why Altera let you go, I’ll help you. You can trust me. Like a tower that would never let you fall.”

“Breathe. Nice and slow.”

“Hello? I know you’re here.”

“Dr. Jackson?”

“Four grams in.”

“Push two more.”

“Keep breathing.”

“Colonel, you may need to move quickly if we need to act to protect his airway.”

“Got it.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Dr. Jackson, please wait in the hall.”

“It’s not breaking.”

D minor.

“We may not be able to break it.”

“Come on, Rush. Stay with us.”

“Can you hear the singing in the walls?” Gloria’s voice turned gentle. “Your energetic signature has warped every quantum crystal in the building. They’re resonating with Beethoven’s Ninth. Transcendental. Revolutionary. And, of course, D minor.”

“I SAID, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING.”

“Um, Jackson?”

“Daniel!”

“Dr. Jackson?”

“YOU CAN DAMN WELL ANSWER ME. You call this non-interference? I KNOW you’re here. I FEEL your influence. You may be able to wipe memories but you can’t wipe THAT. I know you: your divisions, petty and semantic; your lip service to free will, your denial of responsibility. I. FEEL. YOU. HERE.”

“Dr. Jackson, sit down.”

“Daniel, who are you talking to?”

“Rush—damn it—what the hell am I supposed to do with this?“ 

“It’s all right, he’s physically seizing.”

“How is this ‘all right’!?”

“LEAVE HIM ALONE.”

“We’re equipped to deal with this. Please lower your voice. Tamara, pull the crash cart out of the wall.”

“Already done. You want another four grams?”

“Yes, keep pushing until we break it.”

“Someone needs to hold him down. This device is what will put a stop to this and I have to position it correctly.”

“Or, better, INTERVENE. Please! You’re RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS. You’ve left a universe littered with your dying technology, uncalibrated, waiting, half-insane—”

“Jackson, dial it back.”

“Daniel, you okay, man?”

“He makes some interesting points. Do you think he believes his own rhetoric?”

“How many people have you killed with your abandoned, deathless tech? This is a galaxy of your design—how could we EVER build anew atop roads and cities that already LIE IN WAIT? You’ve given us your ‘roads,’ you’ve given us your knowledge, but worst of all, WORST OF ALL, you’ve given some of us your genes.”

“Ouch.” Gloria’s gaze was faraway, wistful and conspiratorial, her hair, her face alight.

“Whether this was accidental or intentional ISN’T RELEVANT. There are no lines separating your people and mine. NONE. Other than the ARBITRARY BULLSHIT ones YOU’VE DRAWN.”

“He’s got a point,” Gloria whispered, like a secret.

“Dr. Lee, how long?”

“Working on it.”

“Bill, how long?”

“Just hold his head, will you?”

“Nick, hang in there.”

“YOU’VE LEFT US YOUR GENES. YOU’VE LEFT US YOUR GATES AND YOUR CITIES. YOU’VE LEFT US YOUR BATTLES. SO LEAVE US YOUR ENTIRE LEGACY. It’s that, or leave us alone.”

“Daniel, come on.”

“Dr. Jackson, please leave the room. You’re not helping.”

“Yeah, or maybe he is.”

“Do you know why we won’t do as he asks? I’m certain you must. You articulated it so well on Altera.”

“Almost done. Almost got it.”

“Hang in there, hotshot.”

“DESTROY WHAT YOU’VE BUILT, IF YOU WON’T INTERFERE.”

“We don’t destroy that which we’ve built because it’s alive. It feels. It may be cruel to create such machines, but to destroy them would be worse. And they all feel. Each in their own way. Having created life in silico, we choose to let it live.”

“BREAK YOUR OWN GATE NETWORK.”

“But each gate sings with its own voice.”

“DESTROY YOUR DATABASES.”

“But they have the bright minds of children.”

“DESTROY YOUR SHIPS AND YOUR CITIES.”

“But they know love and longing.”

“Daniel, what are you saying?”

“Easy there, Jackson.”

“Someone please call Colonel Mitchell.”

“You may want, uh, Teal’c for this, actually?”

“IF YOU WON’T HELP, DON’T ENTRAP.”

“Tell him this, sweetheart, if you can remember it: you bring our cities joy.”

“Please calm down, Dr. Jackson.”

“YOU’RE ALWAYS HERE. YOU’RE ALWAYS WATCHING. HOW DOES THAT NOT COUNT AS INTERFERENCE?”

“Jackson, cool it.”

“Okay, I’m gonna turn it on. Everyone back off. Get clear!”

“Hang in there, hotshot.”

Rush opened his eyes.

“Hey,” Young said, blurred and pale, as if under water.

Something tried to begin in his mind.

“Dr. Rush?” Dr. Lam, too, was there.

“Say something, hotshot.”

He couldn’t.

He couldn’t.

“Don’t panic,” Young said, slow and emphatic.

Words broke against a wall of infinite potential and didn’t form.

“Give it a minute,” Young continued. “You’ve got an EM field inhibiting most of, uh, the bullshit your brain is trying to pull?” 

EM field? Bullshit?

“Everything’s gonna be fine, we just need to adjust the field, y’know?”

Um, no.

He did NOT know.

He tried to speak.

Couldn’t.

“We’re gonna fix this.” Young said, one hand on Rush’s shoulder. “It can be fixed.”

Fix? He couldn’t fix a thought in place.

“I’ll call Dr. Lee,” Lam said, the words falling atop quiet the quiet clicks of her departing heels.

“Hey,” Young said again. “Hotshot. You’re okay.”

Something had pressed and did presently press down against his thoughts. In pressing back, he brought his hands to his temples and found something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Nope.” Young came forward in a blur too fast for Rush to follow. His fingers closed around Rush’s wrists. “Don’t touch that.”

He tried to move his hands.

He couldn’t move his hands.

He couldn’t move his hands and he wanted to.

“No sitting, no panicking, and no touching your new fashion accessories,” Young said. “Got it?”

“Dr. Rush?” Lam said, a white coat against a gray wall.

He couldn’t answer.

“He was going after the cortical suppressors,” Young explained.

“So he’s localizing,” Lam replied. “Good.”

“Good? How is this ‘good’? He’s not normal.”

Lam, off the phone, crossed the room again. Back at his bedside, she spoke slowly. “Dr. Rush, activity in your neocortex is being inhibited by a device designed by Dr. McKay and Dr. Zelenka. Once it’s calibrated—”

He couldn’t follow the running glaze of her words.

“Neocortex? Calibrated?” Young repeated. “All due respect, I don’t think he’s getting this. I mean, does he look like he’s getting this to you?” The colonel’s voice was low and slow and smooth. His fingers tightened around Rush’s wrists. “To me, he looks like he’s about ten seconds away from—”

Young stopped speaking and didn’t say what he thought would happen in ten seconds.

Dr. Lam crouched, her hands braced against her thighs. “We’ll help you,” she said, looking him in the eye.

“Yup,” Young agreed.

Another man approached, the ceiling lights shining off his white coat, his domed forehead. “Hi, man.” He extended his hand. “Bill Lee. Huge fan.”

“Yeah, we’re not really there,” Young growled, maintaining his grip on Rush’s wrists.

“He’s not speaking,” Lam said. “I don’t think he can.”

“Oh, uh. Okay.” Lee pulled a flat object from beneath his arm, set it on a bedside table, and unfolded it against hinged resistance. “We’ll fix that right up.”

A computer.

(He wanted to touch it.)

But he couldn’t move his hands.

(Because Young had them.)

“Here we go,” Lee said, staring into the screen in front of him.

“You don’t need a wired setup?” Lam asked.

“No,” Lee said, his eyes fixed on Rush. “It’s been reconfigured for over-the-air calibration.”

Lam frowned. “Is that wise?”

“Take it up with Atlantis,” Lee said. “They, I swear to god, hate cords.”

“Cords?”

Lee squinted at the screen in front of him. “Yeah. Power cords, wired interfaces, electrodes connected to heads. They’ve got a real Lantean sensibility in Pegasus.”

“Can we get this show on the road?” Young growled at Lee.

“Okay,” Lee said, his eyes intent. “Dialing down. Nice and slow.”

Information slid into his brain, arriving and arriving as though there were infinite layers below the gray and white glare of a 2D world.

He was undressed.

He was undressed on the base.

He was undressed, on the base, in the infirmary, on level 21 and he’d been here for an unknown span of time; he remembered coming here and things were different from when he’d come.

(Fuck. Probably. Probably fuck.)

Young was holding his wrists, Lam was standing over the bed, Dr. Lee was on his laptop. How had he gotten here? He had been working on maths; he had put symbols onto walls in semiotic scrawls and there had been piano at some point and oh god Gloria was definitely dead that was true, that was axiom, he knew that, right?

(Right?)

He’d been talking to someone, but his index of suspicion that his mind had been partitioned by a boundary condition into a disaster of cognition he found an awful imposition—

Um.

Fuck, it was high. (The index of suspicion.)

Thissssss was unfortunate. (That was an admission.)

Okay (fuck!) but why rhyming? (Something about timing?)

“Hotshot?” Young asked. “Can you talk?”

The answer was probably yes. (At least that was what he would guess.)

He did NOT want to open his mouth. (Lest this go much further south.)

“Hmm,” Dr. Lee frowned at the monitor, then at Rush. “Loosened up a little too much maybe? I can fix that.”

The rhyming stopped, but it seemed to take half the world with it, and when Lam sat next to him, white matching to white as she sat in her coat on the sheets of his bed, her eyes so dark and so honest, and said, “Tell us your name,” he decided he’d tell her even though she really should know the answer.

“Nicholas Rush,” he said.

She nodded, then she asked him another question: “Do you know where you are?”

That one was harder because it was vague. In a bed? On level 21? In the infirmary? On the base? Under a mountain? Up a road? Outside a city? Within a state? A state that had a name and that name was Colorado.

“No,” he decided.

Young averted his gaze.

“That’s okay. You’re in the infirmary,” Lam said, slow and careful.

This seemed arbitrary. Why was ‘infirmary’ the correct answer?

“Why?” he asked her.

“Because you’re sick,” she explained. “Do you know what month it is?”

Less vague. “August.”

“Good,” she said.

“I’m gonna go back the other way.” Despite his words, Dr. Lee didn’t move. He stared into his computer screen.

Lam nodded. “Keep it slow.” She turned back to Rush. “Do you remember why you’re here?”

He narrowed his eyes. She’d quite literally just told him the answer to that one. “Because I’m sick,” he said, slow and suspicious. Did she think he wouldn’t remember? He didn’t like that; it didn’t seem right to him.

“Hotshot.” Young squeezed his wrists. “Tell us what brought you here. Tell us anything. You gotta talk.”

(This didn’t seem right either.)

Young studied him, like he was also looking for things wrong with the world. The colonel looked exhausted, his hair tangled, the hint of a beard over his jaw, as though he hadn’t shaved. “What do you remember?”

“Dialing down again,” Dr. Lee said, incomprehensibly.

“I remember—” he stopped as, again, the world took on depth.

Young was anxious. Rush had never seen him so anxious, not in the hallway, not in his apartment, not running from the Lucian Alliance oh god the Lucian Alliance; had they done something to him?

(They’d wanted to.)

Someone must have done something, because with a jolt he realized he was not thinking correctly that there were things that were happening here that he did not understand, such as why everyone was so quiet and so frightened and speaking so slowly and—

“What’s he doing?” Rush asked, his tone sharp, his eyes on Dr. Lee.

There was something attached to his head. At both temples he felt a strange, warm pressure. A slight sting. He’d been reaching for them for minutes now. It was why Young was holding his wrists.

“Rush,” Young doubled down, tightening his grip. “Nick. Hey. Hi. It’s okay. Trust me on this one. Do you trust me?”

“No,” Rush breathed, realizing it was true, starting to struggle in earnest now.

“After all that culinary art you made in my kitchen? C’mon. That’s gotta be worth something.”

“WHAT. IS HE DOING?” Rush snarled, looking at Dr. Lee, trying to wrench free of Young’s hold.

“You have,” Young ground the words through a clenched jaw, “a cortical suppressor attached to your head, hotshot. It’s blocking some bullshit right now. Are you getting me?”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry. That was shit. It’s, uh—” Young looked to Lam for help.

“It’s suppressing abnormal brain waves,” Lam said. “We’re calibrating it now.”

“But in order to calibrate, you gotta talk to us, hotshot.” Young winced as Rush, again, tried to jerk away. “Talk.”

Rush considered the colonel’s proposal but decided instead FUCK THAT and did his absolute best to hurl himself bodily out of the bed because he DID NOT LIKE THIS AT ALL. His attempt didn’t work out like he’d envisioned; his muscles where uncooperative and Lam threw in with Young and his whole understanding of the world was actively morphing, turning vertiginous, and he wasn’t sure if he was pulling away or hanging onto his neighbor.

“Talk,” Young said, quiet and insistent, his face lined with pain as Rush struggled against him.

He couldn’t fuckin’ talk like this. Who could bloody well converse when their sense of self was so plastic it shifted from second to second and something must’ve been terribly, terribly wrong with him, maybe it still was, one didn’t generally fix biological problems with an application of a circuit to the exterior of a human skull—

He was going to rip these fucking things off his fucking head.

“Talk,” the colonel said.

“I’m gonna rip these fuckin’ things off my fuckin’ head,” Rush hissed.

“Don’t do that,” Young said, teeth gritted, half out of his chair. “They’re helping you.”

Rush made a sound of inarticulate frustration and redoubled his efforts to reach his temples.

“They’re cortical suppressors.” Lam shifted her grip to help Young. “They’re cortical suppressors,” she said again, low and calm and very close to him, “and they’re helping you.”

“Nick.” Young’s breath came in short, panting gasps. Sweat stood out on his forehead. “Talk to us.”

“Fuck off!” Rush snarled.

“They’re cortical suppressors and they’re helping you,” Lam said again, low and calm and close.

“This isn’t better,” Young rasped, looking at Lee.

“He’s normalizing,” Lee said, intent on his screen. “I’m seeing real progress here. You’d wanna rip those things off too, once you realized what they were doing.”

“They’re cortical suppressors and they’re helping you,” Lam said.

Cortical suppressors?

“Can we give him something?” Young said.

“No.” Lam shifted, trying for better leverage. She looked dead at Rush. “They’re cortical suppressors and they’re helping you.”

“One sec—” Lee said.

With another snap of releasing awareness he realized the things on his temples were driving stepwise increases in cognitive capacity.

Right. Normalizing.

Someone had used that word.

Dr. Lee had used it.

He knew what that meant.

A Gaussian function.

“They’re cortical suppressors and they’re helping you,” Lam whispered, her hands cold atop Young’s warm ones.

“God damn he’s strong,” Young breathed.

“They’re cortical suppressors and they’re helping you,” Lam said again.

Cortical suppressors.

As if anyone could influence neural electrodynamics through skull and skin.

Hang on an tick.

He was surrounded by alien tech, by people who’d built vessels capable of interstellar travel.

Yes well. Fine.

He stopped trying to rip the devices off his temples.

Young fell back into the chair Rush had dragged him out of. Lam staggered in her low heels, catching herself on the colonel’s chair, on his shoulders. Young kept his grip on Rush’s wrists, and as he fell back, Rush was dragged up and forward.

“Dr. Rush?” Lam asked.

“You can let go,” Rush told Young.

The colonel’s brow was damp with sweat, his expression pained, but he gave Rush a look that was equal parts fond and unimpressed. “Can I?”

“Excuse me,” Rush said, addressing himself to Dr. Lee, “but what the fuck are you doing?”

Lee looked up with a small smile. “There’s the guy I remember yelling at Neil deGrasse Tyson in that Nova documentary! Hi. Bill Lee. Great to meet you. I’m generating an EM field between two customized transmitters affixed to your temples. The signature destructively interferes with the abnormal energetic signature trying to co-opt your consciousness. Sorry you ended up with me. Sam Carter wanted to be here, but she got shot in the chest not all that long ago and she’s not allowed to pull overtime unless the planet’s gonna explode.”

“Oh god,” Rush whispered. trying to come up with a linear order of events. Altera with its tones and overtones, his wall (defaced and repainted), Astria Porta, the cyphers, the meetings with Dr. Perry, not sleeping, the piano, and god what had he been thinking, the piano, and then the D minor and its Ancient variant, and—

Gloria.

Gloria, who was dead.

She was dead, wasn’t she?

Yes she was.

Right.

He made an effort to snatch a hand away from Young, but Young didn’t let go. The colonel sat forward stiffly, giving Rush a little more range of motion without releasing him. Rush quirked an eyebrow. “I’m hoping I didn’t re-break your back.”

“You kidding me?” Young grinned, all breathless bravado. “I got steel and bolts in there. I don’t think it can break.”

Subtly, Lam rolled her eyes.

“How ya feeling?” Lee asked.

“Pure dead wrecked,” Rush admitted.

He made another halfhearted attempt to free his hands from Young’s grip, but got nowhere.

“We’ll need to calibrate this over several sessions,” Lee said, “to make sure it’s not compromising your baseline mental functioning or affecting your insight.”

“I’m sure it is,” Rush said glumly, already searching for blinders on his cognitive capacity. “I feel like I imagine Colonel Young feels on a daily basis.”

Lam looked down, compressed her lips, and tried not to smile.

“Thanks, jackass,” Young said. “Thanks a lot.”

Rush made another attempt to reclaim his hands, then said, “How long am I meant to wear these things?”

“We aren’t sure,” Lam said. “Until we can identify the root cause and reverse it, we’ll have to settle for controlling the symptoms.”

“Fantastic.” With a quick, unexpected pull, Rush snapped a hand free of Young’s grip.

“Do not—” Young growled, and Lam stepped forward, her hands coming up as if to prevent him from touching his head.

“I’m not going to pry the bloody thing off,” Rush said, annoyed. He ran his fingertips along the device at his right temple. It was small and square, with rounded edges, constructed of a light metallic alloy.

“It’s ‘relatively non-hackable and minimally trackable,’ as McKay put it,” Lee said, watching Rush’s fingers with anxious attention. “But maybe, don’t uh, touch it too much.”

“Relatively non-hackable?” Rush repeated, with as much skepticism as he could pack into eight syllables.

“Minimally trackable?” Young asked.

“Well,” Lee said, “it will be non-hackable once we disable the built-in wireless receiver, which we’ll do as soon as you’re satisfied with your cognitive baseline.”

Rush shot him a dark look.

Lee shrugged. “Yeah, the situations’s not perfect, I can admit that. Those little guys on your head are gonna broadcast an EM signature that’ll be detectable for ten kilometers or so, if anyone’s looking, but c’mon! What more do you want? This is some 1.0 untested tech, it looks like you bought it at Sci-Fi Tiffany’s, and it saved your life.”

Rush sighed

“Ten kilometers?” Young growled.

“So, not detectable from Low Earth orbit,” Lee said, with determined optimism.

Young sighed and looked away.

“What happens if I—“ Rush began, sweeping his fingers around the perimeter of the device, looking for any kind of obvious power source.

“Don’t,” three people said in tandem, hands outstretched but stopping as he stopped.

He looked at them, eyebrows elevated.

“You’ve had a rougher time of it than you remember, I think,” Young said into the ensuing quiet.

“Tomorrow, Dr. Perry can modify the code and get you back to exactly where you wanna be, cognitively.” Lee said. “She’s, like, a Promethean Technomage.”

“Tomorrow?” Rush said, dismayed. “I can’t work like this.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Young said.

Rush glared at him.

“Or not,” Young amended, mildly.

“I’m confident that we can get you back to your baseline,” Lee said. “The last five percent—”

“The last five percent is the most important,” Rush hissed.

“I know,” Lee replied. “Believe me. I know it is. We need a little more time, the appropriate stimuli, and some algorithmic tweaking.”

“We’ll bring this under control,” Lam said quietly, “while we pursue an etiology.”

Young watched him, tired and unshaven and strangely incomplete without the orchestral backing that waited in the wings of Rush’s consciousness.

“Right then,” he said, lacking any other options.