Mathématique: Chapter 46

P=NP. Prove.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Memory loss.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 46

The Cambridge Public Library was quiet, filled with indirect sunlight.

Rush finished his contract trigonometry more than fifteen minutes early, and so, for no reason other than that he felt like doing so, he flipped a page and kept going.

The last three days had been— yes well.

(Significantly more challenging than expected.)

For one thing, Massachusetts in August was climatologically unbearable. A miserable, humid, suffocating, stagnant heat blanketed the city. Even at night, it never fully relented. The temperature made it difficult to stay hydrated and difficult to stay clean, especially given the challenge of sleeping on carefully selected public benches.

It was difficult to remain on the socially acceptable side of dishevelment, and he was fair certain the only things keeping him from being openly questioned by resident librarians were one—the matching leather of his belt and shoes, and two—his glasses and the forbidding over-the-rim stare he coupled with them.

He felt fairly sure he was managing to look like a professor with a personality disorder rather than a vagrant, but this would be hard to maintain past day five of his mnemonic exile if circumstances didn’t change.

The slide of a found pencil over liberated printer paper and the unfolding spread of secondary school trigonometry felt simultaneously familiar and revelatory. He glanced at the clock, then at the child whose math homework he was completing.

The thirteen year-old was staring into his phone, no doubt deeply engrossed in a meaningless waste of time. Rush wasn’t inclined to complain though, as he’d been promised twelve dollars in return for Timothy enjoying the dubious pleasure of not finishing the math homework his parents had paid a tutor to assign him over the summer holidays.

Rush turned back to the smooth trail of graphite across the surface of the paper, basic mathematical exercises soothing the anxious rhythms of his thoughts, until—

“Hey,” someone whispered. “Creeper. That’s my trigonometry you’re poaching.”

He looked up. 

A well-built young man with curly hair dropped into the chair on the opposite side of the long table. His black T-shirt was printed with the word “ins𝜋ration” in bold white letters.

“I believe,” Rush said, with as much coolness as he could drape over a painful effort to enunciate, “that this is Timothy’s trigonometry, an’ he can do with it what he likes.”

They glanced in tandem at Timothy, who, having realized something unlikely beneficial to himself was in the offing, had slouched lower in his seat and was studying a distant bookshelf with calculated nonchalance.

The young man across from Rush narrowed his eyes.

Rush narrowed his eyes right back.

“You look familiar,” the young man said. “What’s your name?”

(Fuck.)

He really should’ve anticipated eventually getting this question from someone?

“David Telford,” Rush said, after a too-long hesitation.

“Eli Wallace.”

Rush said nothing.

Eli leaned forward, turning suspiciously conspiratorial. “How much is he paying you?”

Rush saw no point in lying. “Twelve dollars an hour.”

“He gets forty bucks a week in allowance,” Eli said, “so I think you’re lowballing it a little bit.”

“What do y’want?” Rush employed his over-the-glasses stare to its maximum effect.

“Whatever he’s paying? I’ll double it,” Eli said, “and I won’t tell little Timmy’s mom that a creeper Scottish guy is hanging out at the local library soliciting teens for math if—” He paused theatrically.

“If?” Rush was forced to ask, against his will.

“If you can do every problem I set in front of you,” Eli said.

“Done,” Rush replied, amused, curious, and certain there was no possible way this overgrown child could have even a remote chance at besting him in a mathematical matching of wits, if everything he’d learned about himself was true.

“Wait here.” Eli swiped Timothy’s textbook and completed homework from beneath Rush’s hands. He transferred them to the child, then delivered some inaudible commentary with a vague approximation of sternness.

Rush waited, eyebrow quirked, as Eli extracted a pen and twelve dollars from the child before allowing him to scamper off. On his way back, Eli detoured to collect a stack of blank paper from the nearest printer.

“All your base,” Eli said, as he sat and aligned his appropriated printer paper, “are belong to us.” 

Rush had no earthly idea what that meant, but the tone in which it’d been delivered was easy enough to interpret.

“Yeah well, we’ll see abou’ tha’,” he replied.

Eli slid him the twelve dollars, brandished his pen, and began writing.

The first fifteen rounds were a straightforward progression through applied mathematics, but right at the point he’d anticipated a switch from differential equations to something more interesting, Eli pulled a sheet of graph paper from his pocket. 

The paper was folded into quarters, well-worn, and covered, front to back, with Eli’s sure, cramped hand.

“The twenty-four dollar problem?” Rush asked.

“Almost.” Eli smoothed the creased scrap in a movement that looked habitual. “You solve this one, and I’ll show you the twenty-four dollar question.” Referencing his pocket math, he wrote a careful line atop a pristine sheet of printer paper, then passed it to Rush.

The string of symbols was at once alien and uncomfortably familiar. He didn’t like looking at it. He thought of the paper in his wallet. The one from ‘J. Shep.’ He had the urge to pull it out and compare the two, but knew he didn’t need to.

He looked up at Eli.

“What?” Eli asked, unsettled by something in his expression.

Rush said nothing. He looked down at the paper. Very quietly, and only because he was listening for it, he heard a dissonant chord, not quite carried over the air. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

“Why?” Eli replied, trying to conceal his excitement. “You know something about it?”

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

“From a game,” Eli admitted. “It’s from a computer game. It’s part of a quest to unlock the Promethean Lexicon in Astria Porta.”

(From a game?)

At the vague interface where his factual knowledge faded into the depthless void where personal experience should be, the words “Astria Porta” conjured up the image of a dark arch, a blue glow.

“Astria Porta,” he repeated experimentally, but there was nothing more, and the words didn’t feel familiar in his mouth.

“Do you play?” Eli’s features lit up, then clamped down beneath artificial nonchalance.

“I don’t know,” Rush said.

“You don’t know?”

He glanced sharply at Eli.

“What?” Eli said. “That’s weird.”

Rush looked down at the paper. He slashed a line through the series of symbols, separating the equation to be solved from its preceding primer that explained the relational meaning of the variables. Other than recognition that the primer existed and was separate from the equation, it was a simple solution, requiring only algebra. He spent a few moments parsing the primer for Eli, solved the equation, then revolved the paper and slid it to him.

Eli studied it, then looked up. “Nice,” he said evenly. “Fast. Faster than me.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Very.” Eli didn’t look up. “Did you—recognize those symbols from somewhere?”

“Not that I can recall,” Rush said, half-truthfully. “You said y’had a final problem?”

“Yup,” Eli said. “This is the one I’m really curious about.” He wrote what could only be a few letters before sliding the paper to Rush.

P=NP, it said. Prove.

He looked at it, looked at Eli, and said coolly, “I’m afraid that’s outside the scope of my abilities.”

“Bullshit,” Eli whispered. “Dr. Rush.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”

“They made a NOVA documentary about you, dude,” Eli said. “They interviewed you on NPR, like, a bunch of times until you were a dick to the Monday Math guy. You can’t think you can hang out, unrecognized, doing pre-calc for cash, like, half a mile from MIT and Harvard, do you? Because, if so? What are you on, man?”

“I’m having some personal and professional difficulties at the moment,” Rush replied, “an’ I’ll thank you to—”

“I’ll say, if you’ve been reduced to offering trigonometry to teenagers in neighborhoods with astronomical property tax. Consulting for the Air Force not working out for you?” Without waiting for Rush to reply, he continued with, “NoOOoo. Surely you jest. No one would’ve seen that coming. Look,” he said. “Nick. Can I call you Nick?”

“My name is David,” Rush said icily. “David Telford.”

“Okay,” Eli replied, “Dave. Even though I need all my limited, limited resources to support my unhealthy but-oh-so-totally-worth-it MMO addiction, I’m willing to take you to dinner if you’re willing to cough up some detail.”

“Why?” Rush replied suspiciously.

“Because I’m curious, I’m not really a fan of the patriarchy, and I’m big on clan loyalty.”

“Clan loyalty?” Rush repeated.

“You’re Scottish. Like Braveheart, but, y’know, with math,” Eli explained. “You do math, I do math. That’s our clan, man! Well, okay, technically I was ‘thinking about’ a math major before I left college for personal reasons right before a total dickhead of a biology professor was about to flunk me out of a scholarship.”

“Oh yes? Well, congratulations,” Rush said. “It shows.”

“Hey! Which part?”

Rush shrugged.

“Pro tip: don’t insult the guy buying you dinner.”

“I believe you owe me twenty-four dollars,” Rush said, unperturbed.

“But I’m buying you dinner,” Eli protested.

“I’d rather have cash.”

Eli sighed and pulled out his wallet. “Okay, but for this? You get the dirt cheap diner, not the regularly cheap Indian place.”

Rush pocketed the proffered money and looked at Eli, undecided.

“You’re turning trigonometric tricks for cash,” Eli said. “You’re not gonna say no to diner food.”

“No,” Rush sighed, “I suppose I’m not.”

“Sweet.” Eli did a passable job suppressing a grin.

The diner was an unpretentious affair with laminated menus and red synthetic material covering cushioned booths. At five o’clock in the evening, the place was deserted. Light entered, bright and angled through the windows as the sun began its slow summer descent.

Rush spent some time selecting a meal with a high calorie/dollar ratio that also carried reasonable odds of palatability. He’d no memory of preference for anything, so, in the end, after an amount of deliberation that Eli seemed to find baffling, he’d settled on the Club Sandwich. This was, certainly, the best decision he could ever remember making because—

“Um, you are attacking that thing like you haven’t eaten in days,” Eli said, impressed and uncomfortable.

Rush quirked an eyebrow and slowed his consumption of the disturbingly delicious sandwich to a more decorous pace.

Eli, making more sedate progress on his fried ravioli, asked, “You have been eating, right?”

“Yes.” Rush said, defensively. He put down his sandwich and took a sip of water.

Eli didn’t look convinced. “Are you homeless? Am I accidentally feeding a homeless person right now? Because if so, I need to tell my mom; it’ll make her SO happy. She serves the underserved.”

“No,” Rush said.

“Is that no you’re not homeless, or no I can’t tell my mom?”

“How old are you?” Rush asked.

Eli ignored his question, possibly out of conversational revenge. “You realize that, like, the chair of MIT’s Math Department would probably cry from happiness if you showed up and asked to sleep on his couch? Right after he called the head of Caltech’s Math Department to brag about it.”

“I’m not who you think I am,” Rush said. “My name,” he continued pointedly, “is Dave.”

“Yeah, and my name is HAL 9000.” Eli leaned over his plate of fried ravioli. “Get out of here, man, I watched all your interviews, plus the NOVA special where you talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson for, like, all of three minutes while looking like you were being actively knifed in the back by someone off screen.”

Rush sighed.

“Are you on the run from the Air Force?” Eli asked, in what was likely intended as a quiet whisper, but was more of an exuberant, loud whisper.

Rush took a deliberate bite of his sandwich.

(It was still extremely delicious.)

Eli dipped a piece of fried ravioli in its sauce and raised his eyebrows.

Rush said nothing.

“Or,” Eli said, “it’s cool. No need to tell me. You can go back to getting teenagers to pay you to do their math homework. I’m sure you’ve got a whole bunch of untapped resources you’re playing close to the chest.”

“Yes,” Rush said, dripping acid into his tone by reflex. “I’m on the run from the Air Force.”

“Why?” Eli mouthed, nearly silently.

He, of course, had no idea. He took another bite of his sandwich.

“Did you find out something you weren’t supposed to know? And you’re trying to do some kind of low-fi whistleblowing via your previous academic connections?”

Rush raised his eyebrows and took a sip of water.

“Are they trying to kill you? Is your brain too subversive to live?”

He tilted his head equivocally and finished his sandwich.

“Did you escape from them? Were they making you work against your will? Are they chasing you?” Eli glanced around the interior of the diner.

Rush started on his chips.

“You’re just as much of a jerk in real life as you are in your interviews,” Eli informed him. “Did you know that?”

“No,” Rush said, smirking. “I didnae.”

(Unless he watched himself, he landed kilometers from BBC English.)

Eli speared another ravioli and chewed it in silent contemplation. “If you don’t want my help,” he said, “that’s fine. I’ve got plenty on my plate what with two-timing Golden Tree with Growing Tree, not to mention the prep for the Astria Porta expansion pack, so—”

Again came the image of a dark arch, a blue light, and the angular velocity of a rotating combination lock.

“—if you don’t want my help, that’s fine with me. But this whole thing is too cinematically awesome for me to pass up without at least extending the offer. So, if you don’t need anything, stop poaching my trig students and we’ll go our separate ways.”

“How old are you?” Rush asked.

“Old enough to know you won’t be able to hang out in the public library for too much longer without attracting attention. Smart enough to follow your P=NP proof and have a mathcrush on it. With it enough to know better than to ask you about the swag you’ve got glued to your head, which, in case you were wondering, is super obvious under lighting conditions like this. Are you seriously questioning my qualifications right now?” Eli asked. “You’ve been wearing the same clothes for three days while whoring out your trig for cash. And it shows.”

Rush swept his eyes over their innocuous surroundings and then looked at Eli. The child had a point. He spent a moment trying to perform a cost/benefit analysis on involving a young person of above average intelligence and below average ambition in his current predicament, but, as he’d no idea how serious his current predicament was, it was difficult to say what the potential costs to Eli Wallace might be.

“How old are you?” Rush asked. (Again.)

“Ohhhhh, I get it. Okay. Yes. I’m twenty-three,” Eli said. “Legally an adult and a certified superfan of mathematical rockstars, especially those that indirectly screw the patriarchy. So c’mon, man. Spill.”

Rush shook his hair out of his eyes, considering.

“You know you want to,” Eli said.

“I have,” Rush admitted, “no personal memories that extend before dawn three days ago, when I woke up on the banks of what I now understand t’be the Charles River.”

Eli stared at him.

Rush stared back.

“No, really,” Eli said.

Rush said nothing.

“Seriously.” Eli said. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Rush confirmed.

“You’re messing with me.”

“I’m not.”

“But you can still do math.”

“I can still do maths,” Rush agreed, “I can speak English, and I can read your t-shirt, which I despise, by the way.”

“Hey,” Eli said, pointing at the shirt. “This is the sign of our people. What mathematician despises pi? Oh. Duh. Hilarious. But, we digress. Look, you gotta admit, this seems a little suspect, right? Biologically, I mean. Even presuming unlimited technological prowess, how would anyone achieve a demi-memory wipe that leaves skillsets intact but eliminates personal history?”

Rush opened a hand and gestured vaguely at his right temple.

“Your swag is not your swag?” Eli asked.

“I’m no’ sure,” Rush replied.

“This is messed up,” Eli said.

“I’m aware.”

“How’s it attached? Have you taken it off?”

“I don’ know how it’s attached. The mechanism by which it affixes itself t’the skin is concealed. When I tried removing it—” he gestured at his temple and grimaced. “Something happened.”

“What kind of something?” Eli asked.

“Something alarming.”

“‘Alarming’ can mean a lot of stuff.” Eli trailed off as a waitress walked past in a perfumed haze of blue and yellow.

“I heard a continuous tone,” Rush said, when she was out of earshot. “A tone I don’t believe was audible.”

“Okay,” Eli said, “on the Zero to Ten Scale of ‘Alarming’ where zero is a Disney Princess Movie—and ten is the drill and mirror scene from Pi, I’m gonna rate that a three. A weak three.”

“It was subjectively loud,” Rush said, “extremely disruptive, and unmistakably progressive. It vanished when I reapplied the devices.”

“Eh, maybe that gets you to a weak four,’ Eli said. “Is it a reproducible effect?”

“I haven’t tried removing them since. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”

“Huh.” Eli speared another piece of fried ravioli and stared into the sunlit air above Rush’s head. “Well, if we’re gonna do this, Dave, we’re gonna do it right.”

“Meaning?” Rush asked.

Eli raised his eyebrows in good-natured promise. “Well, as they say at Golden Tree Tutoring: Where Teaching Meets Learning, it’s important to have short term, intermediate term, and long term goals.”

“I need to find out what was done to me,” Rush said, “and who did it.”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “But for that? You need to stop looking like the guy who made ‘polynomial time’ a household word. Two words. Phrase. Whatever. Someone’s gonna recognize you. Maybe someone already has. Besides me.”

Rush pressed two fingers against the space between his eyebrows. “What do you suggest?”

After a bus ride and a drugstore trip, Rush stood shirtless in the pink-tiled, second-floor bathroom of the Wallace household, feeling out of place beneath the bright warmth of incandescent lights.

Even without the ability to remember his life, he was fair certain this was atypical.

“Okay.” Eli furrowed his brow as he studied the fine print on the box he held. “We can do this. I mean, girls do it all the time? We can definitely do it.”

“You’re no’ a normal child,” Rush decided.

Eli didn’t miss a beat. “I’m not a ‘child’ at all. And let’s not forget: I bought you dinner and this hot little ticket to anonymity.” He shook the box at Rush, “So maybe you shouldn’t be insulting me.”

Rush wasn’t uniformly opposed to Eli’s plan and didn’t care to alienate his best hope of creating a sustainable living situation for himself while he worked out what he was to do. Nevertheless, surrounded by the reality of the Wallace residence, he felt guilty about entangling the young man in his situation, which, if not overly dangerous at that precise moment, was certainly ill-defined, with sinister overtones.

“Have y’done anything like this before?” Rush asked.

“Technically? No.” Eli frowned at the microscopic print on the side of the box. “But it’s not exactly higher level math.”

“What I mean,” Rush crossed his arms over his chest, “is have y’ever—”  He wasn’t sure how to put what he wanted to say, and he cast his gaze around the room looking for inspiration (or escape). He found himself confronted with the faded photo of a child, likely Eli, circa age one, splashing happily in the kitchen sink, accompanied by a plastic toy. He thought it might be a duck. Possibly a dragon. Either way, this did nothing for his state of mind.

“Evaded the Air Force?” Eli suggested. “Broken the law? Stuck it to the patriarchy?”

“This is a terrible idea,” Rush said, still looking at the picture. “I should go.”

“Well, your shirt is in my mom’s washing machine. I don’t really do the laundry, so we’ll see how that goes. The point is, you can’t leave yet, so we might as well forge ahead.”

“Y’don’t do laundry? I only have the one shirt.”

“It’ll be fiiiiiine. Okay, it says you’re supposed to get your hair wet.” Eli opened the box. “Stick your head in the shower. I’m assuming your technoswag is waterproof? Let’s cross our fingers.”

“For all you know, I could be dangerous.” Rush flipped on the shower and began the process of soaking his hair, gingerly at first, then with increasing confidence, as there was no indication that water interfered with the devices affixed to his temples.

“You are dangerous. Have you watched that NOVA documentary? Society’s like, three smart applications of your proof away from high profile security failures.”

“I mean I could be dangerous to you, personally. Y’shouldn’t let strangers into your home.”

“Thanks for the tip, but I could take you in a fight.” Eli pulled two bottles from the box. “For sure. Okay. Hair wet? Check.”

“I sincerely doubt y’could ‘take me’ in a fight.”

“Huh, well, agree to disagree, man. Step two: combine bottles A and B and shake.” Eli snapped the top off bottle A, and a strong chemical smell filled the room.

“Ugh.” Rush’s eyes began to burn. “It must’ve occurred to ya that I could get you into trouble by proxy.”

“YOLO.”  Eli snapped the top off bottle B, squirted the contents of bottle A into bottle B, then shook bottle B vigorously.

“What?” Rush asked.

“You’re gonna need to put this stuff in your hair,” Eli said.

Rush looked skeptically at the bottle Eli held out to him.

“It worked for the lady in Twelve Monkeys,” Eli said. “Kinda.”

“Is that a film?” Rush asked.

“It makes sense,” Eli said, ignoring his question. “Black will hide your cyborg accessories much better. Plus, it’ll make you look younger. Bonus.”

“Charming.” Rush swiped the bottle from Eli’s hand with a dark look.

“And less like yourself,” Eli continued, “which is the whole point. I wish we could give you a new haircut, but you’re gonna need to grow it out more to hide your technoswag.”

“I’m so glad my difficulties are serving as a vehicle for you to play out your adolescent fantasies.”

“You think I fantasize about helping impolite Scottish guys with their hair while my mom works the night shift?” Eli asked. “Maybe if you were younger. Maybe if you were a hot girl. Maybe if you were at least a hot alien, or a hot cyborg. Either way. I’m not that picky.”

“Y’live with your mother?” Rush asked, drenching his hair with Brutal Black dye.

“You think a college dropout could afford this place?” Eli shot back. “Put this on.” He passed Rush a plastic cap. “Leave it for five to thirty minutes, depending on desired results. I’m gonna say thirty.”

Rush shoved his hair inside the cap, trying to avoid getting too much of the chemical on the devices attached to his temples. He threaded the bag above each device, then used a square of tissue to wipe each one clean.

“Can I look?” Eli asked.

“Y’can look.” Rush tilted his head, squinting at the row of small lightbulbs above the mirror.

Eli studied the device for a moment before he said, “there’s tape on there.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “It’s obscuring an indicator light.”

“Ghetto Hackulous,” Eli said. “Can I take the tape off? I’ve got more. We can replace it. We should replace it. I mean, it’s wet now.”

“I’ll do it.” His eyes on the mirror, Rush carefully peeled back the small square of tape.

“Holy crap,” Eli murmured, as a blue-white light was revealed. “Have you gotten a good look at the interior of this thing?”

“No,” Rush said. “D’you see anything notable?”

“You could say that,” Eli replied. “I can’t be sure without opening the casing, but I don’t think that’s only an indicator light. You might have a crystal-based chip in there.”

Rush angled his head to try and see into the thing via the wall-mounted mirror, but couldn’t get a good view. Eli passed him a gold-rimmed hand mirror. He angled it, using both mirrors to get a clearer view of the thing affixed to his head. Within the device, only partially visible, were several small crystals. Delicate tendrils of wire arced between them.

“Maybe you are an alien,” Eli said.

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“Okay, but when I see crystal-based tech, I think of one thing.”

“Extraterrestrial life?” Rush said absently. “How disappointing.”

“Quantum computing,” Eli shot back. “But that doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen or read about. Practical, crystal-based quantum computing is a long way away. Hence? Aliens.”

“Do a lot of reading abou’ quantum computing, do you?” Rush asked.

“Hey. You don’t know me, Scottish Guy. You don’t even know yourself. You spent fifteen minutes staring at a diner menu, trying to remember what the heck you like to eat, and coming up blank.”

“Touché,” Rush replied, still studying the crystal array. “But even if these devices are quantum in nature, I certainly don’t think that the next logical step is t’presume extraterrestrial origins.”

“Yeah yeah,” Eli said. “A kid can dream though, am I right?”

“Dream more sensibly.”

Eli grinned. “This is about the least sensible thing that’s ever happened to me. But speaking of rational plans, and us having them—”

“No one was speaking of that. You are t’be as uninvolved in this as possible,” Rush said.

“Dude, you let me buy you boxed hair dye,” Eli said. “You’re standing in my bathroom with your shirt off.”

“I only have one shirt.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. The point is, I’m already at this party. The bromance is happening. So. Back to the rational plans. If you wanna figure out what the heck these things attached to your head are doing, we’ll need more equipment than a pair of mirrors. And unless you have a secret plan regarding how you’ll get access to that equipment, I think you could benefit from knowing a guy who has friends at MIT.”

Rush set the hand mirror on the countertop, undecided.

“You need to know what kind of signal that thing is putting out,” Eli said. “I say ‘what kind’ and not ‘whether,’ because it’s attached to your head, glowing, and probably contributing to your selective amnesia. Which seems ominous. Ominous and also actively, currently bad.”

Rush grimaced.

“So unless you want to call up the Air Force hotline for lost experimental subjects, which I do NOT recommend, or find one of your comp sci groupies at Harvard or MIT and pray they don’t ask too many questions or secretly call the federal government, then you’re gonna have to trust me. And I am awesome. Just so you know.”

“You’re an overgrown child,” Rush said, already defeated.

“But doesn’t everyone seem like a child to a superior, pretentious misanthrope?” Eli asked.

Rush smiled faintly. “Well, you’ve a point there.”

After half an hour of hair dyeing and speculation about how to best interrogate a crystal-based device without breaking, or, ideally, removing it, Rush showered in the upstairs bathroom of the Wallace household. He did his best to avoid getting black dye on white towels. 

(This was, alas, impossible.)

He pulled on his jeans and temporarily donned the “Cambridge Junior High Math Team: Gettin’ Trig-y with It!” T-shirt Eli had leant him while his own shirt was drying.

He finger-combed his black hair, put on his glasses, and went in search of Eli. 

Passing along the quiet hallway, he couldn’t help but notice the photographs of Eli and the woman Rush assumed must be his mother. He paused in front of a picture of Eli, much younger, in the center of a cluster of intolerably small children, holding a trophy, which, based on the look of the bespectacled group upon which it’d been bestowed, was likely for mathematics, chess, or something equally cerebral.

They did not look like a cricket team, he was fair sure on that point.

Hesitating, Rush pulled out his wallet and looked again at the business card of Colonel David Telford, then replaced the card and repocketed the wallet.

“Rob,” he heard Eli shout, from a not-too distant room. “You triggered a respawn. Yes. When you opened that canopic jar! God. Oh yeah? Well, wrong jar, man.”

Rush rounded the doorway and found Eli in his bedroom, seated in front of a computer, the screen before him lit up in a high resolution rendering of crisp silver-blue rooms, overlaid with—

“Yes you did,” Eli insisted, into a headset. “And are you set to bind on pickup you ass? That Lens of Illumination is mine. Don’t touch it.” 

—overlaid with angular symbols. Symbols he could read. Symbols that weren’t English.

Vitality.

Gold.

Experience Points.

Hit Points.

Searching for a name, it came as easily as the word “English” had. The symbols he’d seen in Eli’s problem, in ‘J Shep’s’ drawing, on the screen right now—they were letters in a language. 

A language called “Ancient.”

He ran a hand through his damp hair and, deeply unsettled, stepped back a pace, unable to ask any of the thousands of follow-up questions already pressing against his thoughts.

“Eli,” he said.

“You done?” Eli kept his eyes on the screen. “Because I wanted to ask you about—”

“Eli,” Rush said, ignoring him, “where did y’ find that game?”

Something in his tone made Eli say, “Be right back,” into his headset. He froze the display, then turned to look at Rush.

“Where?” Rush repeated.

“Uh, the normal place?” Eli frowned, his words at half tempo. “It goes with a popular franchise. Wormhole X-treme? Maybe you’ve heard of it, though I’m not sure if you’d remember if you had? I still don’t get this whole ‘I remember math and how to talk but not my life’ thing you have going. The franchise is, like, really underrated. It has such a corny name, y’know? But it’s got great characters. Especially Dr. Levant. He’s, like, the Ambassador of Nerds Everywhere. Like a socially awkward, space-faring Indiana Jones mixed with, like, a religious martyr? He always dies and never gets the ladies. Why do you ask?”

“I can read that.” Rush pointed at a glowing block of text, emblazoned onto a futuristic silver wall, frozen in the center of Eli’s screen.

“What do you mean,” Eli said slowly, “you can ‘read it’.”

“I mean,” Rush replied, anxiety tightening up the lapses in his diction that no amount of concentration could reliably fix, “that it’s written in a language I can read.”

“What does it say, then?” Eli replied in skeptical challenge. He pulled his folded sheet of graph paper out of his pocket.

“It says, ‘If you would open a cyphered lock, you must demonstrate the skill to use that which it conceals. Take the Promethean Lexicon to the Temporal Shrine and—

“Whoa!” Eli held up a hand, his eyes on his own scrawled paragraph. He scrambled blindly for a pen. “Whoa. We’re taking the lexicon where now?”

“The Temporal Shrine. At which point you’ll place it atop the Sidereal Spire and wait for a falling spark before examining the thing. ‘Falling spark’ is vague. Could be literal spark. Could be lightning. Could be mechanical. Difficult to say, other than stepwise energetics are involved. I’d say it was meant to be ambiguous, but this is very poorly written. The grammar’s atrocious, word meanings don’t stack—”

“What?” Eli said, laughing delightedly. “Shrine? Spire? The spire’s in the shrine, presumably? What does Sidereal mean? Also, how are you getting ‘examine’ out of the verb—ah, that’s probably decorare? I mean, it’s a Latin variant, but it’s also definitely not Latin, so—”

“Eli,” Rush said, grasping for patience that didn’t seem to come naturally. “I feel you’re missing the salient point here.”

“Oh. Right.” Eli put down his pen. “So, yeah, you can read this…how?”

Rush opened his hands.

“You must play,” Eli said. “Or. You must have played, before you had your Air Force run-in. That’s probably the best explanation. You must have played and found the Lexicon and cracked it and studied it to the point of relative fluency?”

“Do I seem like the kind of person who’d waste his time in any such manner?” Rush asked.

“It’s a pretty cerebral game,” Eli said, “but, yeah, when you put it like that, not really. But the other, far more awesome, explanation is that you picked this language up somewhere else, which, can I just say as an aside? Is unbelievably cool. Maybe Wormhole X-treme really IS a front for the Air Force! Oh god, my motivation to beat this game just increased to mind-destroying levels.”

“What is the name of this language, in the game?”

“Promethean,” Eli said. “Does that match what’s in your brain?”

“No,” Rush admitted.

“Innnnnteresting,” Eli said, full of barely contained glee.

Rush shot him a disapproving look.

“Okay, okay. What do you think it’s called?”

“I’m not sure I should say.” Rush suppressed the desire to pace the short stretch of floor in front of Eli’s closet.

“I can only help you to the extent that you trust me,” the young man said.

Rush looked at him skeptically.

“Dude. I am one of THE highest ranked Astria Porta players. Ever. When it comes to this game, I’m an international baller. And you happen to speak a language that was just revealed to be part of a lexicon quest that’s a pre-req for THE most anticipated expansion pack of the decade? I mean, I like to think that’s more than coincidence.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “Maybe you’re having a psychotic break.”

“Like Fight Club,” Eli replied agreeably, “though I’m pretty surprised my alter ego is a tiny, frowny Scottish guy who loves homework and hates fun. Huh. Aaaaactually that makes a lot of sense. Whatever. Sounds awesome. I’m in. Pull up a chair, man. Let’s play this game to uncover more fun facets of your secret alien identity until my mom comes home and I have to kick you out.”

“This doesn’t reassure me that you’re serious,” Rush said, “in any way, about any of this.”

“Well,” Eli said, “if I don’t, this should.” He pointed at the computer screen, where glowing blue letters stood out in bright relief against a silver wall. “You’ve made more progress toward figuring out what happened to you AND toward not starving to death in the six hours you’ve spent with me than you did over days on your own, where pretty much all you managed to do was Google yourself, evade the Air Force, and steal my trigonometry students.”

This was, unfortunately, true.

“Ancient.” Rush ran a defeated hand through his hair. “It’s called Ancient.”

“Coolness,” Eli said.