Page 93 of Imaginary Numbers

No, I thought, and felt the equation curve and writhe, looking for places to sink its teeth into the chain, for breaks in the processing loop.

I couldn’t hold it forever. I wasn’t even sure I could hold it long enough to do what needed to be done.

Artie and the others were an echo in the back of my mind, a comforting hum of presence without awareness. There was no room left for awareness, not with the equation sucking up every spare neuron they had. Their core selves were still present, neatly bundled up and tucked away, but that wouldn’t be the case forever, not unless I hurried.

Mark was in the most danger. Like the cuckoos who’d touched us without being invited in, he had the history alongside his self, and that meant he had less room for other information than the rest of us. Something was going to give.

Mom—Angela—had been able to go into my head and remove the buried time bombs of cultural history before they had the chance to rupture and spread their poison across my thoughts. I could potentially do the same for him. Even as I thought about it, I knew how it could be done, what turns and tweaks I would need to make to clip those hereditary memories away from his core self and then excise them, freeing up more room for the equation to flourish. I could almost feel it panting with hungry glee at the idea, like all it wanted in the world was to spread.

Equations shouldn’t want things. They shouldn’t be big enough or complicated enough to have opinions or desires. But that’s what people are, really. We’re equations that have grown large enough and complex enough to have opinions about the world. To want to change it.

This equation wanted to change the world. It wanted to swallow the world alive. And I had to stop it.

I clenched my hands into fists and screwed my eyes shut, locking myself into the darkness behind them. Not the flash-white landscape of my mind, no: that would have been too easy, and would have meant missing variables I needed more than anything else in the world. Because this was the world, every complicated, complicating inch of it, and it all mattered, and it all needed to be taken into account.

When working complex math, there are factors that can be used to cancel things out. If you’re adding two to six and then subtracting five, you’re really adding two and one, at least as far as the end result is concerned. That’s so simplistic, so simplified, that any of the professors I’ve ever talked to would roll their eyes and scoff at the idea of explaining things that way, but it works, it works, it takes the weight out of the final figures, and I needed to cancel as much of this world-breaking equation as I possibly could. I needed to cancel things that had never been questioned, to reduce and refine and prevent it from doing harm.

Even with all these other minds running interference, the equation knew I was the one who had to finish and unleash it. It pressed in on me, and I began to frantically run the numbers, trying to find the answer that did the least damage possible.

The weight of all the lives on Earth, human and nonhuman and intelligent and nonintelligent. The weight of plants and fungus and bacteria, all the pieces of the biosphere that were so easy to discount, to ignore, to leave behind. They needed to be factored in as precisely as possible, and so I reached through the cuckoos who had been ensnared already and grabbed the next tier of minds, sending their mental fingers questing outward, ever outward, cataloguing and naming and numbering everything we found. There was too much data. I couldn’t hold it consciously without starting to delete pieces of myself—and that was what the equation wanted more than anything, I realized numbly. It was willing to let me bargain because it thought I would inevitably overload the processing centers of my mind and need to start choosing what to cut away.

Either I let it run wild and break the things it yearned to break, or I pruned myself down to the cuckoo queen Ingrid had shaped me to be, and the equation would have its freedom regardless of my desires.

I couldn’t be the first person who tried to tame this thing. I might not be the last. I still had to do whatever I could.

Quiet, I told it, and kept reaching outward, picking up more and more minds that weren’t mine to use, looking for more ways to cancel out the numbers.

The air was growing thick around us, crackling with power that had to come from somewhere, but didn’t feel like it was coming from me. I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t dare. I grabbed and grabbed and pulled and pulled, refining, reducing, penning the howling demon of the cuckoo’s core equation into a cage of subtractions, until there was nothing else to subtract, nothing else to take away, nothing else to do but let it run.

I stared at the equation written on the inside of my eyelids. If I was correct—and I had to be correct, I had to be, any error could be the end of everything—then I was still looking at a blast big enough to destroy Iowa, punching a hole into the planet’s crust and triggering a chain reaction of destruction that could wipe out the entire continental plate.

There was only one thing left to take away. Only one thing left to lose.

Artie, I’m sorry, I thought, and opened my eyes, tilting my face toward the sky. It was bruised black with clouds, swirling in a slow counterclockwise spiral, like a hurricane getting ready to form. I had never seen a storm so big.

It was mine. It belonged to me. With all these cuckoos yoked to my will, I could do virtually anything, and I didn’t understand a thing about what I was doing. We had never belonged here. We had never been intended to be a part of this world.

It was better this way.

I took a deep breath of the ion-charged air and began to speak, babbling polynomials and monomials and terms as quickly as I could, looping them back around one another to prevent errors from creeping in. Numbers merged into letters into operations, stacking one on top of the other, becoming bigger and more difficult to wrangle.

The sky grew darker and darker still. With a vast, furious crack of thunder, it began to rain. The equation rejoiced. Rain would distract me, keep me from finishing it the way I wanted to, leave it with openings to exploit.

I raised a hand and the rain stopped before it could reach me or the people immediately around me. It pattered against an invisible dome instead, sliding down the sides and trickling into the grass. Mark was halfway inside and halfway outside the dome; part of him was getting soaked. That was fine. Other peoples’ discomfort didn’t—

No. That was a cuckoo thought. I slapped the equation away from the parts of my mind where I stored my carefully learned and hard-won empathy, forcing it back into the box I had drawn for it, and expanded the dome enough to cover Mark completely before I resumed my recitation of the factors to the storm-drenched sky.

Was it enough? Was anything, ever, going to be enough? Because that was a subtraction, too, even if it was only an estimated and hence low-balled figure: the damage the cuckoos had done since arriving in this world, where they had never truly belonged. How many broken families? How many deaths? How many children smothered in their cradles to make room for a cuckoo-child who should never have been there in the first place? The damage was incalculable, and still I did my best to calculate it, and the area of impact shrank, again and again, until it was almost small enough. Until it felt like it might be fair.

I couldn’t loosen my grip on the equation for even a second, or I’d lose it. It was furious at what I’d done, thrashing against my mental hands as it tried to break free and restore some of its original scope. This wasn’t enough damage to satisfy what it had been built to do . . . but I thought I could see, buried under piles and piles of junk modifiers, the core of what it could have been, if it had been designed by someone kinder. Someone who cared about what it did to the world. The equation the cuckoos remembered forgetting . . . it had been a subtle thing, a scalpel. This was a sledgehammer.

I glanced at Artie, who was standing perfectly still as I used every spare neuron he had to power this ridiculous, impossible attempt. Every spare neuron, and a few he technically didn’t have to spare.

“I love you,” I whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear me. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe he’d have an easier time letting go. I closed my eyes, shutting him out, shutting everything out except for me, what I had to do, and the unfinished equation.

Then I finished it, and the conclusion slammed into me so hard that it was like a bullet to the brain, and I went down hard, with no way of knowing whether I’d done what I set out to do, whether I’d defeated my last and greatest opponent . . . or whether I was going to survive this.

Please let it be okay, I thought. Please let them walk away. Please.