Mathématique: Chapter 54

“You feel like you know Mozart?” Eli asked. “Like, Mozart Mozart? Volfgahng Amadeus? That guy? The guy who made child stardom seem like a good idea when it definitely, definitely was not? The dead guy. The dead guy who you’ve never met one time in your life. That Mozart.”

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: Mkay so, here we go I guess.

Chapter 54

After a day dedicated to the pursuit of (increasingly unparalleled) latte art, Rush sat with Eli and Rob in the basement of Camera Obscura. The light in the room came from a collage of different sources: mismatched incandescent lamps, a cold cathode ray tube twisted to spell the word BEER in pink neon, and a string of multicolored Christmas lights. Portraits of dead aristocrats standing with their horses or their dogs were jammed together on the walls, intermingled with what appeared to be abstract depictions of iconic singers from the 1980s. The overall effect was bizarre, but not without a certain eclectic charm. 

The room was infested with bespectacled young people in worn, eco-conscious clothing. The homogeneity of the bar’s patrons left Rush with a desire to roll his eyes. This impulse was counterbalanced by the relief he felt at successfully blending with the crowd. His thrift store aesthetic was aligning well with emerging fashion trends amongst American intellectuals.

Their little trio sat in the middle of the room, blending into the shifting mix of undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and other peripheral academic actors. Rush and Eli had appropriated their table hours ago, when they’d met Dr. Geiszler for the express purpose of conning the man into signing a fake non-disclosure agreement for pure dead show.

Why Rush hadn’t left in the interim, he couldn’t quite figure.

There was certainly no inducement to stay offered by the current band. The group was onstage at the far end of the room, surrounded by dark towers of large amplifiers. Such a conceit was surely unnecessary in a room this size, but, Rush supposed, with a name like Cyberpunkocalypse!, gratuitous signal boosting was an aesthetic requisite.

“Maybe we should show Dave the third cypher.” Rob shouted to be heard above the so-called “music” damaging eardrums around the room. “Mock it up, back-of-the-envelope?”

Rush shook his head. “I’ll be calling it a night.” He’d no reason to stay and subject himself to hours of cathartic screaming.

His objective, such as it was, had been achieved. He and Eli had arranged to meet Newt in a few days, at the graduate student’s convenience. They’d fashed their way through a rough plan, which consisted of three parts: 1) Newt would attempt to interface with whatever it was that was attached to his head; 2) they’d assess how easy or difficult it might be to alter device parameters; 3) only then would Newt access the hardware of the device.

It wasn’t clear to Rush they’d ever reach step three. Nevertheless, as Dr. Geiszler was currently enmeshed in cutting-edge biomechanics, Rush had some hope the exercise would prove a gateway to some genuine answers.

“No way, man.” Rob leaned forward, looking at Rush. “Don’t leave. If you guys are on a tight timetable,” he gestured at Rush’s temple, “you should stick around.”

“Not that I’m arguing,” Eli shouted over the musical screaming of Cyberpunkocalypse!, “I was gonna stay anyway. But—why?”

“Because you might be able to convince Newt to take a look tonight.”

“Seriously? It’ll be eleven thirty, at the earliest, that you’re through your set? Then you’ve gotta break everything down.”

Rob shrugged. “Seven times outta ten you’ll get lucky and catch Newt in a post-Supercos science mood. He can get pretty pumped from this kind of thing. It’s annoying if you want to sleep, but if you want him to do something for you—post-show’s a good time to ask.” Rob punctuated this pronouncement by downing what remained of his beer.

Eli shot Rush a significant look.

Rush sighed.

He supposed he didn’t have much else to occupy him in the late hours of the evening, aside from sleeping on a cold and minimalist pallet from the Dickensian Tradition.

“That was Slamhound,” the front man of Cyberpunkocalypse! shouted into the microphone with much too much verve. “Next up? Acid Pit.”

Rush shot Eli and Rob a look dripping with sarcastic import. “Ah yes. Acid Pit. D’you think the acid created the pit? Or was it a preexisting pit that was, at some point after its creation, filled with acid? We’ll likely never unravel the metaphysical depths of such a teleological paradox.”

He wasn’t sure how much of that Eli’d heard over the opening chords of Acid Pit, nor was he able to hear Eli’s response over the wall of sound that emerged from too many amps crammed into too small a space. He shook his head.

Eli rolled his eyes, leaned in, and shouted in Rush’s ear. “Go or stay?”

Rush opened a grudgingly acquiescent hand. Eli grinned, slapped his shoulder, and stood to get another beer from the bar upstairs. As soon as he left the table, Rob bent his head over a torn piece of notebook paper and paid studious attention to the gliding lines of his own pen.

Rush suspected the lad might be intimidated by “Dave.” Not that he’d admit as much.

Rush pulled out his pre-paid phone and texted Eli.

::If you intend to solicit assistance tonight, I’d avoid more alcohol::

::We don’t want to seem like we’re trying too hard:: Eli replied.

::That precludes YOUR involvement entirely:: Rush sent back.

::Do you think you had any friends in days of yore? You’re killing me here DAVE::

Rush looked up in surprise as Rob tapped him on his shoulder. “The first two were easy,” the lad shouted over the intolerable chords of Acid Pit. “For Eli they were, I guess. But this one—” he slid his crumpled paper toward Rush. “Harder.” He made a fist and rapped the page as the front man of Cyberpunkocalypse! screamed into the microphone, no doubt simulating death via acid pit.

Rush raised his eyebrows at the young man across from him.

Rob fiddled with his pen, flicked his eyes toward the band, then leaned forward and mouthed, “They’re kinda terrible. Unless you’re into thrash metal.”

Rush shrugged and looked at the block of scribbled text laid out from memory. He sighed. Rob and Eli were terribly talented. Perhaps they’d never received the lesson that more than sheer talent was required for academic success? Perhaps they were dubious about the value of academic success. Perhaps they’d rejected a traditional (puritanical) work ethic for personal, psychological, or social reasons Rush didn’t (yet) understand.

It would’ve been one thing if they’d simply lazed about, or at least he’d have understood such a proclivity, but they didn’t—they spent inordinate amounts of their free time on a worthless pursuit—a game, in fact. Chasing virtual objectives with more passion than anything in their actual, material lives.

“Why do you do this?” Rush’s words were inaudible beneath an elaborate guitar riff. “Why don’t you focus your attention on a real problem?”

“What’s not real about this?” Rob replied, again tapping the math with a closed fist.

Rush leaned in. “The mathematics itself is real enough I suppose, but this progresses you only in a virtual environment. There’s no benefit beyond personal satisfaction.”

“I could say the same thing about watching Random Harvest for my Psych and Cinema class,” Rob shouted back. He flipped over his crumpled notebook paper, pulled out his pen, and drew a diagram, beginning with the word LIFE and proceeding clockwise in a circle through STYLIZED REPRESENTATION OF LIFE and back around to LIFE again. Then he drew an arrow curving away from STYLIZED REPRESENTATION OF LIFE to the words CRITICAL ANALYSIS, and back again to STYLIZED REPRESENTATION OF LIFE. He titled his diagram: The Humanities in beautiful, calligraphic script, no doubt inspired by some fantasy epic.

“Mathématique,” Rob said, “goes here.” He tapped the boxed words reading STYLIZED REPRESENTATION OF LIFE. “You dismiss the artistry of the game,” Rob said, leaning close enough to shout a complicated thought into Rush’s ear, “but there’s no more complete representation of the world, than building that world from code and making it virtually navigable. Gaming fuses science, narrative, visual art, and music. This is art in its purest form. So don’t think of us as useless, man, think of us as the leading edge of a coming movement.”

“You’ve put some thought into this I see,” Rush shouted.

“Whatever. You must know all of this already.” Rob tapped the page. “Eli said you were involved with game design. Don’t you think this way?”

“Reality is too unstable for me to be sure I ‘think’ at all,” Rush said.

“Ugh, well, don’t say anything about that to Newt,” Rob shouted, “or he’ll talk your ear off for hours. He’s making a foray into metaphysics or something. I don’t know. Doubt it’ll stick.”

Eli rejoined them, carrying three glasses in two hands. He slid into the seat next to Rush, distributed the beer, then studied Rob’s diagram. He motioned for the pen and scrawled “USELESS META” across the whole thing, smacked it with the flat of his hand, and turned it over. “Stop trying to get Rob to fly straight and take a look at that problem.” Eli glared at the block of equations with his eyes. “You owe me too many favors to count at this point.”

“Then I’ll thank you t’stop buying me alcohol I don’t want.” Rush took the paper and spun it for a better view.

“This place runs a special: three dollar PBRs on Supercos nights. Between you and Newt I’m out, like, ten bucks. I’ll sink ten bucks into this project. Ten more bucks. No problem. I’m holding my own on the tutoring front these days.”

Rush rested his chin on his hand and tried to concentrate over the sound of thrash metal. He traced the throughline of Rob’s logic, but the more he looked at the block of mathematical premises, the more certain he became that something was missing. He hooked a hand over his shoulder, trying to press away the strain of hours bent over latte art.

“Last song of the night,” the frontman of Cyberpunkocalypse! announced, breaking Rush’s concentration. He looked up to see Newt slide into a vacant chair between himself and Rob. “Academic Excess,” the frontman continued, staring Newt down with dry superiority.

Newt casually raised both middle fingers in wordless reply.

Cyberpunkocalypse! responded with a unified scream of an opening chord.

Newt stared them down with a look of bored neutrality for a good ten seconds or so, then shifted his gaze to Rob’s block of concepts and equations. “Are you coding in Latin?” He had to shout to be heard over the sound of Academic Excess.

“This?” Eli said, glaring at Newt as he reached over to snatch the scrap of notebook paper off the table. “Is not for you. Not your story. Not your field. Not any of them. Have a beer.” Eli slid Rush’s untouched Pabst Blue Ribbon over to Newt. “Leave the comp sci to the comp sci-entists.”

Newt made an ostentatious gestural flourish in Eli’s direction, appropriated Rush’s beer, then tapped Rob on the shoulder. “Time to go,” he declared. Rob nodded, and they stood.

Rush watched as they crossed the room and began excavating instruments from a hopeless pile of gear stacked against the far wall.

“I’m genuinely not certain I can take another hour of this” Rush dropped his voice as Cyberpunkocalypse!’s final chord faded to an unpleasant ambient ring.

“It’ll be better.” Eli pressed tentative fingers against his ears, as if to ascertain they were still attached to his head. “It’s more Nerd Rock than anything, but it’s a little more serious, a little more science heavy than usual. They’ve got a real following. You might not hate it.”

Now that The Nemesis was out of the immediate vicinity, the lad smoothed Rob’s set of mathematics against the table and returned it to Rush.

“Hmm.” Rush resumed his study of the paper, tuning out the high-pitched sound of auditory nerves in ringing extremis. “Have you looked at this?”

“Yeah.” Eli edged his chair closer to Rush, his eyes on Rob, who was hooking up his electric bass. “I have. I—I feel kind of weird about admitting this, but—”

Rush took in the lad’s faintly guilty expression, the unease in his tone. “You’ve solved it,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eli admitted. “Not sure why I haven’t told Rob, I just—I don’t know, man. I feel like your paranoia is rubbing off on me. That and the weird stake-out team at the physics building. If that’s what that was. I feel like the game is part of this. Part of whatever’s happening. Rob, yeah, he’s a nerd, he loves Kirk and Finwë, he’s into the game, really into it, respectably into it, but not—”

“Not like you,” Rush said.

“Rob will skate his way through his Comp Sci major until he can’t, then he’ll buckle down and do it, you know? He’ll always be good, but he’s not—he’s not a pure math guy. He hasn’t cracked a cypher.”

“How many are there?” Rush asked.

“According to Dr. Levant,” Eli replied, “there are nine.”

 “How many have you solved?” Rush asked.

“Three,” Eli said. “Officially.”

“Meaning as far as Rob knows, I take it?” Rush said.

Eli shifted his attention to the bassist in question, who was helping Newt and three other band members set up in the space vacated by Cyberpunkocalypse!. “I’m, uh, I’ve overtaken him.”

“By how much?”

“I’ve gotten five.” Eli held up five fingers.

“Including this one?” Rush tapped the paper with his pen.

Eli nodded.

“Tell me,” Rush said.

“The fifth cypher involves a mock-up of the quantum processing unit embedded in each Porta. It generates an output that scales exponentially with input size—specifically a 2^n output distribution across the quantum register. I was already thinking along the lines of trapped ion quantum computing, and I started looking for crystals within the game. I didn’t have to go far. The Directional Stele Device—they call them DSDs—they house the panels that allow you to dial the Portae, and, hi, they use a crystal-based system! I opened one up and jury rigged a quantum state tomography setup to monitor the quantum channel between the Stele and the Porta. Coherence times were degrading. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I tried running a Shor quantum error correction code to handle the arbitrary single qubit errors—and hey. Jackpot.”

“Eli,” Rush said, not bothering to hide his admiration, “that was inspired.”

“Ha.” Eli blushed faintly. “What? Nah. You think so?”

“Yes,” Rush replied. “How long did it take you to parse all of this out?”

“About a week. I’m highly motivated to save Dr. Levant from his 12th death. No big deal. But the next one is killing me, dude. I have no idea where to even go with it. That’s the one we should be talking about. Not this one.“

Rush looked up at the sound of a piano.

Newton Geiszler’s band was halfway through their soundcheck. The graduate student was sitting at a keyboard, playing an improvised rearrangement loosely based on an aria from Don Giovanni. 

“Mozart,” Rush said absently.

“Do not encourage him,” Eli muttered.

“No,” Rush said, “I mean he’s playing Mozart. Don Giovanni. Act one, scene four. An arrangement of an aria.”

“Wow. Okay. So, fun fact about you: turns out you’re a massive Opera fan,” Eli said. “Makes sense, I suppose. You married a concert violinist, so I guess you would’ve been pretty into dead composers and stuff?”

“I believe,” Rush said, watching Newt put a quiet decorative flourish on the end of a musical phrase before pounding out a fortissimo final chord, “I may play the piano.”

“You just realized this?” Eli asked. “Right here, right now?”

“I—” Rush began. “Yes. Watching him, I can anticipate his choices. I’m certain I must play. Or I must know quite a bit about piano arrangements of classical pieces for voice?”

“Dude,” Eli said, “let’s find out. I’m sure Newt would let you mess around on his keyboard after the show, and, if you’re any good, you can probably make way more money playing swanky hotel parties than you can as a starving barista. Enough to buy that computer to message J’Shep.”

“I feel,” Rush said, watching the piano with covetous longing, “I’m likely to be quite good.”

“It’s hard for me to picture you being bad at anything. Except for being fun-loving and carefree. Also full contact sports. Stand up comedy? Team spirit. Frame-perfect timing in an Astria Porta speed run. Making friends.”

“I befriended you didn’t I?” Rush asked.

“Yeah, I guess, but it was more like vice versa. And it’s been a constant struggle.”

Rush kept his eyes on the keyboard as Newt switched to guitar. Mozart’s piano sonatas, a set of them, arrived in his mind with motor patterns that woke, itching in his fingers—a parting gift from the man whose life he’d unintentionally appropriated.

“You’re staring that keyboard down like nobody’s business,” Eli said.

“I’ve an extensive musical repertoire of which I remember only a fraction,” Rush whispered. “It’s pure dead frustrating.”

“Ugh. But—how do you know what’s in your repertoire if you can’t remember anything? Do you have to, like, think: Mozart Piano Thing X. What does it sound like? Can I play that?”

Rush nodded.

“That’s annoying,” Eli said.

“Profoundly,” Rush agreed.

“Guess we know what you’ll be doing when you finally wire your place for internet,” Eli said. “Lists and lists of musical pieces. Do you like Mozart? Can you tell? Do you think your preferences are the same as they were? Do you like Beethoven? Do you like one better? Can you determine relative rankings? I’m so intrigued by this weird selective amnesia thing. Like what the heck, dude. It’s so interesting and biologically improbable.”

“Hello,” Newt said into the microphone onstage, before Rush could respond. “Er, how about another round of applause for the thrashiest thrash metal band in Cambridge, Massachusetts?” 

There was a round of applause in which Rush participated only half-heartedly. His eyes were still on Newt’s keyboard, his thoughts retracing the man’s arrangement of the aria, then fanning organically into other things he might have played. Simple chords, melodically conjunct. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20. Beethoven’s Eighth Piano Sonata. The one in C minor. That last one pulled something with it—almost, almost, almost—

“We are The Superconducting Supercolliders,” Newt said, with winningly anxious reserve, shattering Rush’s near revelation.

A round of applause and catcalls erupted around them.

Eli rolled his eyes, clapping sedately.

“And we are sad that the Desertron is dead.” Newt settled the strap of his electric guitar over one shoulder.

At the back of the stage, someone strummed an acoustic chord, ringing, open, sustained. Initial feedback resolved as Newt signaled the sound woman to back off the gain, a hand pressing slowly down against the air. The vocals came in with the percussion, and the whole band entered in unison, with two precise hits on the dominant.

Rush furrowed his brow, listening to the lyrics. “Is this a song about particle accelerators?” he asked Eli.

Eli sighed. “Eh. Yes and no. Ask Rob about it. He could write you a treatise on the intersectionality of metaphysics, popular conceptions of American science, the fabric of the universe, the empirical versus the theoretical, and iconic irony versus sincere iconoclasm supercolliding with Dr. Newton Geiszler’s urge to play overdriven electric guitar while getting the crowd to sing the name of his own band in the structure of a musical round. What? Don’t give me that face. Nerd culture is my skillset. Arguably my only one.”

“That’s untrue,” Rush said.

“It’s a little bit true.” Eli tapped his fingers in time with the driving percussion.

“It’s not. If you’d like to castigate yourself for something, don’t pick your skillsets. If you’d simply apply yourself in some direction, any direction of societal value—”

“I,” Eli shot back, “am an artist. Of math. And of gaming. As I explained, I hate The Man. For real. Not for fake.”

Rush waved a dismissive hand. “Fine. You’ve made your point. Several times. A point with which I don’t happen to agree, but when it comes to confounding skills with choices, y’can tie it a chuck.”

“What?” Eli said, grinning. “What does that even mean.” 

Rather than answer, Rush turned his attention to Dr. Geiszler’s comparatively unobjectionable band.

At the end of the show, Rush sat down at the electronic keyboard.

He did it without permission, sliding into place on the minimalist, collapsible bench, his hands finding their way into the third movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11.

Written in Paris, in the key of A major, the syncopated crash of fortissimo passages juxtaposed with the delicate rattle of intricate, rhythmic builds—it was fair fuckin’ brilliant and pure dead Mozart. Playing it felt like meeting someone he’d known; identifying someone, finally, after weeks and weeks alone, knowing him at a distance, recognizing him by his walk, by the tilt of his head, by the way he’d begun to flout convention, by the way he threw over the allegro everyone would’ve expected for set of variations on a slow theme with unsettling right hand octaves, by the way he’d turned a second movement into a minuet, the way he’d turned the third movement from A minor back to A major at the end.

This was the closest he’d come to knowing anyone, and it was a dead person, a person dead for over two hundred years, but he knew this piece, this dead musical prodigy. Mozart had been personally tied to huge swaths of whomever Rush had been.

He slammed his hands down on the double A chords that ended the movement, then looked up, shaken, to a round of applause from a thinned-out crowd. Eli caught his eye and grinned, but there was a note of wariness in his expression that he couldn’t conceal.

“Shit, dude,” Newt said, his hands jammed into his pockets, standing at the center of a tight cluster of The Superconducting Supercolliders. “You are good.”

“So I knew you were gonna be amazing,” Eli said, arms crossed, leaning against a locked door.  

Rob had keyed them into the building where Newt’s lab was located and they stood in a dark hallway, waiting for the scientist to make an appearance. 

“But I was creeped out by the amazingness. You just sat down and banged that out, man!You haven’t played a piano for at least—how long have we known each other? Seven or eight weeks now? And I mean, sure, once you get to a certain level, playing an instrument is kinda like—okay well I don’t think it’s like riding a bike at all. It’s probably like coming back to calculus or something. Or maybe if you were a champion seamstress, you could sew the crap out of a dress? My mom makes her own clothes, mostly. Anyway. Um? It was pretty incredible for a guy who hasn’t played in eight weeks or more. But beyond that—dude, you were like, into it into it, you know? More into it than I’ve ever seen you get into anything, including, like, your own life and your own future. That was the creepy aspect, I guess.” Eli yawned. “This was a terrible idea. It’s one in the morning. I’m too tired to think straight. He’s not gonna show. Or, worse, he’s gonna show at, like, a quarter til three.”

“I suppose I feel like I know him,” Rush mused, his ears still ringing faintly in the aftermath of Cyberpunkocalypse!.

“Newt?” Eli said, confused. “You both have a puritanical work ethic, that’s for sure. You probably got yours from Scotland. I have no idea where he got his.”

“No,” Rush said, “not Dr. Geiszler. Mozart.”

“You feel like you know Mozart?” Eli asked. “Like, Mozart Mozart? Volfgahng Amadeus? That guy? The guy who made child stardom seem like a good idea when it definitely, definitely was not? The dead guy. The dead guy who you’ve never met one time in your life. That Mozart.”

“Yes,” Rush said.

“And just when I thought it was impossible for you to get weirder,” Eli said philosophically, yawning again, “you go and prove me wrong. Ugh. Where is this guy. Seriously. Of the three of us, he has the craziest day tomorrow. We shouldn’t have let him out of our sight. Why did we listen to Rob. Never listen to Rob. That’s one of my cardinal rules, actually.”

“He said he’d meet us here,” Rush replied, “and I’m certain he will. He seemed quite enthusiastic.”

“He has the attention span of a puppy,” Eli muttered. “I’m gonna be pissed if—”

Eli broke off as Newt rounded a dim corner, silent in his Converse sneakers, cutting an unremarkable profile against the dark. He’d replaced his guitar with a messenger bag, its strap crossed over his chest.

“Hey.” Newt picked up his pace. “Sorry. I always underestimate the time it’s going to take me to unload my car. Well, load and then unload. Anyway, who are you people? Why do you want to do this now? Don’t tell me. I don’t care. I’m pumped. I can never get anyone to hang out with me at 2 AM. I hate sleeping. It’s a grinder. Just a slow horrible grind and regrind of your day, of the movie you wish you’d never seen or that postmodern novel it’s too late to haven’t have read, of awful memories, of the roots of weird phobias you’d rather forget. Shit no one needs. Ever. But nooooo. Science says sleep is ‘good.’ Science says that. Supposedly.” Newt unlocked the door of the lab and flipped on a light. “I mean, we’ll see, right?”

Rush and Eli eyed one another skeptically.

“Ummmm,” Eli said, as they followed Newt to his bench space.

“Oh sure,” Newt replied, the words an ironic tee-up for a coming swing. “And you dream of what?”

“Math,” Eli said. “Astrophysics.”

“Eli. For the love. Come back to MIT. What are you doing, dude?” To Rush, he said, “Please, have a seat.”

“No chairs for the dropouts, I see,” Eli observed.

Newt pulled his messenger bag over his head and looked at Rush. “Is he trying to pick a fight with me?”He flipped the bag open, pulled out his laptop, the long snake of an unwound power supply, a voice recorder, a phone, a pen, and a notebook. “I think he’s trying to pick a fight with me.”

“You may be correct,” Rush replied, “but I don’t presume to understand the inner workings of young Mr. Wallace’s mind.”

“I’m not picking a fight with you.” Eli’s friendliness had a forced aspect to it. “Why would I pick a fight with you?”

“We occupy the same sociological niche, and I’m the alpha nerd?” Newt suggested.

“We’ll see,” Eli muttered.

“Boys,” Rush said dryly, “play nicely, if you would.”

“Well,” Newt said, staring at his laptop screen, “in the spirit of playing nicely, or not, your wearables aren’t answering any over-the-air pings or declaring itself to my local network, so that’s great. You wanna tell me how to interrogate this thing?”

“I’d rather you made the attempt first,” Rush replied. “I’d like to see if you’re capable of getting in on your own.”

“Well the answer to that is ‘no’. I’m a biologist, dude, not a hacker,” Newt replied. “I wouldn’t have the first clue about—”

“That’s why I brought Eli,” Rush said archly.

“Sweetness,” Eli said.

At half-past three in the morning, Rush sat at Newt’s bench, chin in hand, thinking longingly of his cold, dangerous, unfurnished apartment. Eli, too, was showing signs of fatigue. Newt dragged the pair of them along, powering the attempt with a well of depthless energy that had begun to strike Rush as having an element of subtle pathology to it.

“Why’d you type that?” Newt hovered next to Eli. “What are you trying to do? Are you trying to get around the constraints of the software? I’ve never seen anyone come at it like this before. Obviously. Maybe you should write your own program. I can give you the hardware specs. We’d have to table this for now, but we might have better luck that way, rather than brute forcing our way through code that wasn’t designed to—”

“You’re sure your transmitter is working?” Eli snapped, clipped and irritated.

“It was working this morning,” Newt said. “Yesterday morning. Whatever. From a hardware standpoint we’re fine. From a wetware standpoint we are also fine. Ha. Software’s the problem. If you’d spend two minutes explaining what you’re trying to do, I can probably—”

“I’m trying to interface remotely,” Eli said through politely gritted teeth. “I’m pretty sure it’s a transducer problem. Maybe if you wouldn’t use a 4GL program that makes debugging impossible—”

“What do you want from me?” Newt asked. “I’m not a computer scientist. You said you wanted a biomechanics person to take a look. At no point was facility with a terminal window specified as a prerequisite. Why are you involved at all?”

“I’m involved because you don’t have a prayer of getting yourself to the point where your expertise will be of any use,” Eli shot back. “The whole point of this is to subject this thing to high-level, over-the-air hackery using a combination of my ingenuity and your prefabbed bioomechanics control program. You—” 

“Now now,” Rush said mildly, before Eli could irrevocably insult his only hope of re-admittance to MIT. “You’re both making an excellent effort I’m sure.”

They sent him identical glares of outraged indignation.

“I don’t understand why taking them off your head is off the table,” Newt said, addressing himself to Rush. “This would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to ask these things for their data so politely.”

“For now, I’m afraid that’s non-negotiable,” Rush replied. “No direct mechanical interference and no dermal separation. The purpose of this exercise,” he waved a hand at the interface between Newt’s rig and his laptop, “is security. The idea is to ensure our product isn’t amenable to external influence.”

“Meh,” Newt said. “This would be a lot easier if you’d give me more tech specs than the broadcast band.”

“Oh I am gooooooood,” Eli interjected, his gaze glued to Newt’s laptop. “You know, sometimes I amaze even myself.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Newt replied tartly, crossing his arms.

“Thanks Leia,” Eli replied.

“Eli.” Rush said, tried to coerce himself into some semblance of alertness. “Are you in?”

“Yes and no,” Eli said. “I transformed Newt’s output into something that plays nice with whatever transducer you’ve got in your technoswag. In other words? Newt’s setup is talking to your wearables. At this point, it should be user friendly enough for even a biologist to handle. So.” Eli turned to Newt. “Do whatever it is you do with your cute little MATLAB program.”

Newt pushed his glasses up, elbowed Eli aside, input a few commands, then said, “Huh. This does NOT look like anything I’ve seen before. I—I think I might have write privileges? Oh, nope. Nope, I do not. It’s letting me see a limited selection of code but not taking any input. What language is this? It’s gotta be a weird one. Is this a proprietary thing? This is clearly code but these aren’t—this isn’t—”

“Dave,” Eli said, looking over Newt’s shoulder. “Check it out.”

Rush leaned over to look at Newt’s screen, not particularly inclined to get out of his chair at the back of three in the morning. 

The display was covered with Ancient code. 

He and Eli locked eyes. The lad was fair vibrating with excitement and unease. Rush tried to keep his own concerns off his face.

“May I?” he asked Newt, already pulling the laptop laterally, falling into this with the same ease he’d fallen into Mozart’s eleventh piano sonata. When faced with an Ancient prompt, he knew what to type to bypass the software wall that had locked Newt out.

Discovering an ability to code in Ancient was significantly more troubling than discovering an ability to play the piano. To be this facile with the programming language, he must have worked with it intensively. Over a prolonged period. 

“What is this?” Newt snapped. The words had a worrying steel to them, and Rush glanced at the neuroscientist to find the man eyeing him, with more than a trace of confrontation in his expression.

“A proprietary programing language.” Rush returned to scanning lines of code with a casual interest that (hopefully) didn’t look forced. “You’ve done well, Dr. Geiszler. Now that you’ve made it in, I’ve—elected to streamline the process for you.” He passed the computer back to Newt. “I’d be curious t’know what y’make of this.”

“Not a whole lot,” Newt said, oblivious to the way Eli was vibrating over his shoulder as he watched him scroll. “I mean, this is a programming language I literally can’t read, do not know, have never seen. It doesn’t even use, like, letters I recognize. Numbers. But—” he broke off. The rate of his scrolling increased, then doubled back and slowed as he made an effort to verify or test a working hypothesis. “This looks like the core of the running program right here.” Newt identified a set of six equations. “This, I think, is gonna be crackable. Like this—this right here? It looks different from the rest of it. Right here is where—” Newt frowned, staring searchingly at the screen.

“Where what?” Eli asked, unable to contain himself.

“Well it’s weird, right—I could almost—I think I might be able to crack this thing. Translate it, to some extent. Because I think it’s based on a communally available program used to interface transduced electrical signals from the human motor cortex with, say, a robotic appendage. That’s not what your devices are doing, but this chunk, right here—” He gestured at the screen. “This is a set of equations that drive the operations end of your technoswag.”

“You think you could crack it?” Eli asked, guarded. “As in, translate this stuff? No offense, but how?”

“Maybe,” Newt said. “Then again, maybe not. Technically it’s not my area, but do you see these, er, popsicle-shaped things that are partitioned into nine blocks? Or, rather, I guess it’s like, there’s sort of the popsicle frame, which can be filled with up to nine blocks, making a complete popsicle-thing? That seems like a base ten numeral system to me. Right off the bat. Like, this popsicle that’s missing one block is probably eight. The empty popsicle frame would be zero—”

Rush didn’t need a translation, he needed an assessment of what these six equations were doing. “Yes yes,” he broke in over Newt’s free-form parsing of Ancient code, “I’ve no doubt, based on all you’ve said, that you’d be more than capable of translating our internal code and parsing these equations. Very impressive. We may as well skip that step, then. Do y’have a pen?”

Newt pulled a small notebook from a back pocket and handed it to Rush, who made short work of transcribing the six equations on the screen. He studied them, attempting to determine what they were. He didn’t immediately recognize what their purpose might be. He angled Newt’s notebook so they all could examine the mathematics.

“What the heck?” Eli said.

“Ha.” Newt smacked the notebook with the back of two fingers. “Piezoelectric production of an EM field. They look weird, but that’s what these are.”

Rush looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Pardon me, but how do you—”

“Piezoelectrics are my jam. I make my own piezoelectric guitar pickups. I get my hands dirty a little bit. In the math. What can I say. I dabble. My best guess? Your proprietary wearables are powered by minor mechanical disruptions that occur naturally when you move. That power generates an EM field governed by these six functions. Why? I have no idea. I think we could probably modify that field using my setup. But that seems a little pointless to me because you already know what the devices are doing. I mean. Unless you want me to see if I can screw with them for reasons of—”

“No,” Rush said, “not tonight. It’s quite late.”

“It’s early somewhere,” Newt said, studying his MATLAB interface.

“Who are you?” Eli asked.

“Future you?” Newt suggested.

Rush ripped the page out of Newt’s notebook, more than ready to call it a night. “I’m afraid I’ll have to keep this.”

“Same time tomorrow?” Newt asked.

“I’ll be in touch,” Rush said evasively.

“Don’t call us.” Eli shouldered his bag. “We’ll call you.”

“Hey,” Newt snapped. “Where’s that CV?”

Eli sighed dramatically, but pulled a crumpled set of papers out of his bag and handed them to Newt.

“Much appreciated, Dr. Geiszler,” Rush murmured.

They left the building in silence. Rush, who’d been expecting a torrent of overexcited prose from Eli, was surprised to find the lad relatively subdued as they began the walk toward the car.

“It’s stopped raining,” Eli said, looking up into the dark. “I think—um, given the code your technoswag is running—we may wanna rethink a few things.”

“Agreed,” Rush said.