“Air…” she gasped into Mako’s chest.
“Right, right. Sorry, tiny one!” Mako released her, and headed off to the workstation where Santino was fussing over a stack of stray papers.
Rachel waved to her partner on her way to the makeshift nursery. She wasn’t surprised to find Avery strapped into several full-body onesies. With a multitude of surrogate aunts and uncles, Avery was guaranteed constant adult supervision, but she was a brilliant child and had entered the phase where she had started testing limits. Lately, Avery had found that she could get an immediate reaction when she hurled her diaper at her babysitters, and that this reaction was all the more intense when the diaper was full. Mako and Carlota had begun strapping Avery into jumpsuits. She could still wiggle out of them, but it took her a minute or so to fumble with the buttons, and that was enough time to intervene (or, if Avery was especially quick about it, to scramble for the paper towels and the Lysol).
The toddler was playing with her stuffed dinosaurs, and she held one up when Rachel knelt down beside the sunken tub.
“Hello, Avery!”
“Ankle ’osaurus,” Avery said, and threw the plush toy at Rachel’s head.
“Sweet pea?” Mako’s voice was even louder on this side of the door, and Avery instantly started to pout. “We don’t throw things, and we never throw things at other people.”
“ ’orry,” the little girl mumbled.
“Thank you for apologizing, Avery,” Rachel said, as she scooped up the bright purple dinosaur. “Do you want me to play with you?”
“Yes!”
Rachel climbed down into the sunken tub. It was big enough for four adults to share a comfortable soak, and made a paradise of a playground for a toddler. Mako had lined the bottom and sides with slabs cut from gym mats until every square inch of marble was thickly padded, and filled the tub with toys and board books. Avery waddled over to Rachel and dumped one of these books into her quasi-aunt’s lap, then curled up in her arms, stuffed dinosaurs forgotten.
Rachel read aloud to Avery, something sweet about a bear in love with the moon, until the little girl’s head grew heavy. She gently slid Avery across the mats to the warm spot within the sunbeam, and tucked the purple ankylosaur beside her.
“She’s asleep,” she told Mako, as she quietly stepped out of the tub and closed the bathroom door behind her.
“Oh, thank God,” Mako said aloud, blue relief washing over him. “Poor kid’s due for another growth spurt. She’ll sleep like a champ when that happens, but right now you can’t get her to nap. You just have to try to run down her batteries until she crashes on her own.”
A television mounted on the wall just outside of the bathroom turned itself on, and a camera moved itself around the bathroom until it focused on Avery, still slumbering in the tub. The monitoring system was programmed to pick up physical cues from the toddler, and to notify the nearest Agents within a minute of when she was likely to wake. Rachel had decided that she’d invest in whatever innovations Mako and Carlota decided to take to market. They might force themselves to behave as normally as possible around their daughter, but they had also elevated cyborg-centered childcare to an art.
Rachel pulled the nearest chair out from the table, and rocked it to make sure its legs were still attached. None of the furniture in Mako’s office matched, and all of it was in terrible shape. The man’s size alone made him murder on housewares, and when he was deep in a project he became the stereotypical absent-minded scientist to boot. As he tended to crush a chair to kindling every other week, and as everything in the mansion was technically intended for auction someday, Mako insisted on filling his office with the junk nobody would miss if it happened to end up in the trash.
He had also filled his office with computers. Unlike Jason’s system, Mako’s wasn’t comprised of a series of new, polished machines networked together to form a whole. These computers were ancient, and clunked along like cars with broken axles roped together in a caravan: they got to where they were needed, eventually, but the ride was terrible.
Mako loved them. He said he spent his day around grumpy old men who made bad jokes and didn’t care if anybody laughed.
The back wall was covered in whiteboards. Rachel approved: dry erase ink fluoresced at a unique rate, and it was easy for her to read Mako’s notes.
Read? Yes. Understand? No. But that was expected, as Mako’s purpose as their resident computational physicist was to determine precisely how the implant functioned, and he wasn’t making any progress. Nearly a year ago, he had set up the wall of whiteboards and had grouped the facts under the KNOWN and UNKNOWN headings, claiming he’d start with the basics and develop a working body of knowledge from there.
He had stalled out within hours.
Patrick Mulcahy had a not-so-secret trove of documents. These were earmarked as blackmail material, and thus far had never been distributed outside of the collective. Receipts and bills of lading, mostly, with the occasional email printout between certain members of Congress on the topic of Problematic Cyborgs, Management Thereof.
Mako hadn’t cared about that, claiming the Agents already knew they had been manipulated and abandoned. What they didn’t know was how their implants worked. Mulcahy could chase after blood, but Mako would pursue knowledge. He had pored through this trove looking for data, and had found too little for comfort. He insisted that a device as advanced as a miniaturized quantum organic computer would have been developed through small incremental changes, each one building upon the successes of previous trials. There was no evidence of this. Oh, there was some data, scraps of information here and there, on the previous test subjects. There was none on the techniques used to develop the technology. As far as the record showed, the methods and materials needed to construct the implant had emerged from thin air within Hanlon Technologies nearly ten years ago, and had been used to put the first version of the implant into production soon after.
Rachel walked towards the nearest whiteboard. Items listed under the KNOWN heading took up a single board, while the UNKNOWN heading had been written across each of the rest. She paused to read the new notes added to the section on their avatars, and tried not to laugh. Mako might not swear aloud around his daughter, but he had no problem writing out descriptive profanities.
The other Agent came up beside her, and laid one huge hand against the board. “I’m about ready to give up. There’s a piece missing,” he growled. “A huge piece. I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere! I can’t explain how we can do what we do, not with the information I have now.”
She grinned. “Maybe I can get Senator Hanlon to talk to you. Think you can shake it out of him?”
“Please!” Mako stared at the board. “That’s probably the only way I’ll get answers. Nothing we do makes sense.”
“Well, yeah.”
“No,” Mako said. His colors took on a professional blue, and Rachel realized he meant what he said. “I’m not trying to be funny. The range of abilities we have doesn’t correspond to what we know about the electromagnetic spectrum.
“Here,” he said, and a puppy appeared. Like all of their projections, it was bright green. Mako waved, and the puppy wagged its tail at him and barked before gamboling off around the room, three feet off of the ground. “Just look at that thing. It’s an autoscript I wrote for Avery, so it’s essentially a computer program. Once I get it running, I don’t need to micromanage it. As long as I have peripheral awareness of what it’s doing, it’ll function. That, I understand!
“But I wrote this script for Avery, because she can see it. Now, how did that work, I ask you? She doesn’t have an ISO, and it’s—”
“Wait.” Rachel cut him off. “What’s an ISO?”
At the table behind them, Santino turned purple and squeaked.
Mako stared down at her. His colors had stopped moving altogether. Even the bright green puppy had stopped galumphing about on its too-big feet. “That would be the Implanted Spectrum Operator,” he
said. “The…uh…”
“The chip in our heads,” she sighed. “Got it.”
“Did you honestly think it didn’t have a name? Technically, it’s the ISO-157, which suggests there were over a hundred and fifty iterations before they made a successful prototype, but I can’t find—”
“I got it!”
Mako paused, and she saw the same purples appear within his conversational colors. These warred with her Southwestern turquoise as he tried not to poke fun of her.
“Mako? Honey? I shoot people for a living. Choose your next words carefully.”
“Yup.” He stared at the ceiling for a few moments. The green puppy wandered back over to the table and sat at his feet. When the purples finally dissolved, Mako patted the nearby tabletop. The puppy leapt up in a movement more feline than canine. “I made this little guy for Avery because she can see our projections. I can take a stab at how that happened: she’s the daughter of two Agents. There’s a persistent myth that brains stop changing after we turn thirty, but we got the implants when we were all in our early twenties. Also? That myth is bullshit. Our brains continuously rewire themselves based on our tasks and our environment. We’ve gradually rewired ourselves to be more attuned to frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s possible that Carlota and me, we might have passed part of this rewiring down to Avery. That’s not how trait inheritance works, but it’s the best explanation I’ve got until she’s old enough to consent to testing.
“Now, our ears and eyes? We didn’t change those. Physiologically speaking, human beings have a limited capacity for what we can perceive. There are entire bands of the EMF that we can’t detect without the right tools. This little guy,” he said, pointing at the puppy, “exists on a frequency we’re already biologically predisposed to perceive. It’s like discovering you can suddenly see a whole bunch of brand new colors that were already there.”
“Don’t forget people like Hope,” Santino added. “How do you explain her?”
Hope Blackwell was Patrick Mulcahy’s wife. She had no problem seeing or hearing the Agents’ projections. They appeared as clearly to her as they would to any Agent.
(In Rachel’s opinion, nothing explained Mulcahy’s wife. The woman was just plain weird.)
“Santino’s got his glasses, so he can see what we project—”
“—I’m making progress on the auditory hookup, too. When I get that to work, I’ll be able to hear them—”
“—so these things we create? If it were just Agents who could perceive them, I’d say they were a shared illusion. But they exist, even if they are made of electromagnetic radiation. Which begs the question: how can we shape light?”
“And why different shades of green?” Santino said, as he passed his hand through the puppy’s head. “If you can control the EMF to the point where you can generate constructs, you should be able to render in every single color in the spectrum.
“Really, the only explanation is that we don’t have an important chunk of data,” Santino added. “I think the implant gives you access to a part of the EMF nobody knew about.”
Mako’s colors glazed over in irritation.
“You two have this argument a lot?” Rachel asked him.
“All the fuckin’ time,” Mako muttered. His colors shifted towards Santino’s cobalt core, and Rachel caught the hints of the sharp-edged blues and yellows of intent within them. “Actually, this is relevant to your case.”
“Motive or device?” she asked, and when a confused orange appeared, she clarified her question. “Would this be relevant to why the item was stolen, or how the Mechanism works?”
“Maybe both,” Santino said. “This is what we were talking about before you got here.”
“Great, she said, and claimed a chair at the table beside her partner. She pulled Jason’s metal copy of the fragment out of her suitcoat pocket, and dropped it on top of a stack of papers. “I’m dying to know why a chunk of an old clock was worth robbing the White House.”
“The inscription,” Mako said.
“We’re not done translating it,” Santino said. “The fragment is conclusively from the Mechanism. The forms for the text match—”
“The size and shape of the letters,” Mako explained.
“—but there’s so much erosion that we have to fill in the blanks.” Santino pointed to Mako’s computers, chugging and whirring along as they crunched the data.
“It might take weeks!” Mako, delighted by the scope of the problem, banished the puppy to the aether with a wave of his hand.
“How much could they write on a small chunk of metal?” Rachel muttered.
Santino was glowing. “Definitely enough to fill in some of the gaps in its history,” he said. “If we’re lucky, enough to fill in the gaps in the math it uses.”
Rachel closed her eyes. Anything that came out of her mouth was sure to backfire on her, she just knew it.
“Penguin?”
“Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll bite. Why are there gaps? Isn’t math just…math?”
Both men’s colors took on a semi-opaque glaze, a phenomenon that Rachel associated with persons trying to manage a sudden confluence of stupid questions and civility. “Humor me,” she told them.
“Right,” Santino said, his colors weaving blues and greens and oranges together as he tried to think of the best way to explain the problem. “What’s your opinion about math?” he asked. “Gut response.”
“Study your math, kids. Key to the universe,” she said in her best Christopher Walken.
“Good. So, why does that quote come to mind?”
Rachel went with the safe answer. “It’s the only universal language that exists. It’s fixed, constant. The rules never change. If we ever bump into an alien race, we’d be able to communicate with them using math.”
“That’s right,” Mako said. “Now, what if we told you that’s wrong?”
“Wait,” Rachel said, holding up her hand. “Am I right or wrong?”
“Yes,” Santino said.
“Holy Jesus,” she sighed. She got up and raided an old mini fridge that held Avery’s snacks, looking for something harder than a soda. Nothing. She returned to the table and passed out three juice packs in silvery pouches.
“Perfect,” Santino said, holding out his pouch. He took a Sharpie from a cup on the table, and sketched out a triangle on the side of the pouch. “So, say your alien race shows up. Which one of these ‘rules’ of math will you use when you want to talk to them?”
“The…uh. The right ones?”
“Okay. How do you decide which ones are right?” he said, showing her the triangle. “Seventh-grade geometry… In triangles, all the angles add up to 180 degrees, right?”
“Sure.”
“That’s basic Euclidian geometry—”
“—or normed vector space—” Mako added, trying to be helpful.
“—but if you move a triangle onto a curved space, the angles don’t add up to 180 degrees anymore,” Santino said, squeezing his juice pouch to bend the triangle out of its flat plane. “So is that basic rule of math right or wrong?”
“Depends on the situation?” Rachel hazarded.
“That’s the easiest way to say it. It’s also incomplete,” Mako said. “It’s a rule that can be simultaneously proven both wholly accurate and inaccurate.”
“Here’s where Mako and I disagree,” Santino said, his colors turning orange and yellow with annoyance and confusion. It had the hallmarks of an ongoing battle between the two men. “I say all rules of mathematics are conditional. They can either be proven right, or proven wrong, depending upon strict conditions of application. Like my trick with the triangle, and changing the conditions in which it exists. You have to have these conditions, or there’s no reason to have these rules at all because they’re of no practical use. But Mako? He believes all rules of mathematics exist in some philosophical state in which they’re both right and wrong.”
“Not true,” Mako s
aid. “I believe that mathematics is an evolving set of constructs, and the rules which can be used to explain them—not define them!—evolve along with them. Like the dinosaurs.”
Rachel put her head in her hands.
“It’s not as confusing as it sounds,” Mako said.
“Santino is orange,” she said without bothering to pick her head up. “And if Santino thinks this is confusing bullshit, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to explain it to me.”
“Don’t be such a defeatist,” Mako said. “Did you know we’re closer in time to the Tyrannosaur than the Tyrannosaur was to the Stegosaur?”
“What?” Rachel sat up, and threw her scans towards the bathtub. Avery was still sleeping soundly, one arm draped comfortably over her plush Ankylosaur.
“We hear the word dinosaur, and we think of a single period in time,” Mako said, as he picked up Santino’s marker and sketched a thick black line across the old wooden tabletop. “As if all of the dinosaurs that ever lived were a single lump sum of animals. But that’s not the case at all. The timeframe during which they occupied the planet stretched over millions and millions of years. The Stegosaur lived 150 million years ago,” he said, marking one end of the line with an X. “We live here,” he said, as he marked the other end. “And the Tyrannosaur lived 66 million years ago. That’s 84 million years between the Tyrannosaur and the Stegosaur, and only 66 million years between the Tyrannosaur and us.”
Mako’s third X was slightly closer to humanity’s end of the line. It was big enough so Rachel could see it without adjusting her vision. He tapped on it with the marker’s tip, dotting the table with permanent confetti. “In evolutionary science, we have rules which explain the Stegosaur, the Tyrannosaur, and us. Since we generally think of both the Stegosaur and the Tyrannosaur as dinosaurs, we assume the same set of rules can be applied to explain both of them. But they lived millions of years apart. The planet had changed substantially during that time.
“See what I’m getting at? If this is an analogy for math, we can use one set of rules to explain a Stegosaur. Some of those rules can also be used to explain a Tyrannosaur, but we have to add some rules and take away others to clarify that explanation. And then we get to our end of the timeline, and we have to change the rules again if we want to explain human beings. See?”
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