Ratio

PART 2

Ratio Tile wakes up hungover.

It is not much of a puzzle why Ratio Tile is hungover, there being only one known cause of a hangover. However, for a few moments, Ratio is unable to process any information besides the throbbing of his forehead and the correlated pulsating of the edges of his vision, and so he focuses on those things and on that most boring of morning insights: I got really drunk last night.

Morning insights? Ratio notices that the lights are on. The last time he was awake, it was midday and the lights were also on. So it’s still floorday. Barring any extreme changes in floorday length, that means he’s either napped for a few hours, or slept for an epically long time. The former seems much, much more likely.

“Hey,” says a calming, if wavering, female voice from his left. It’s Cecelia.

Ratio suddenly remembers three things:

1) he was drinking with Cecelia to, as they put it with an injokey smirk, “pre-game” for the undoubted shitshow of a meeting with Hermes Cept to discuss Kyle (“I don’t think Cept’s explanation is going to be comprehensible to a sober person,” Cecelia had said)

2) they’d gotten a lot drunker than they’d planned and barely had any time to talk with Cept because there was a 17.8 kCept heteropneum attack and some sort of reintegration with a larger-measure branch

3) because of said reintegration, Cept had finally finally finally admitted that Soul Coherence Theory did not work, Hallelujah, Everything In Its Right Place (so many puzzles gone, but so many new ones wide open—with Cept as an ally?)

So Ratio Tile is now trying to spin off discrete individual puzzles from the broader idea of the reintegration, which is at this point a vague concept understood only at the level of orders of magnitude, which is not the kind of data Ratio prefers, and—

and it is only now that the corollary of #2 occurs to Ratio, which is

4) Jorge might be dead or pneuma-corrupted. Jorge might not be okay.

Ratio is certainly not very bored right now; there are several distinct threads going on in his head, and none of them are at all boring. He thrives on this, and feels guilty for thriving. Feels guilty for thinking of #4 after #1-#3. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Jorge, it’s just that—

This is boring. Ratio knows that his mind works this way. Abstractions come first. Wake up with a raging hangover and once the memories begin to appear it’s their most theoretical implications that hit him first. The human cost comes later.

“Shit, man, you okay?” Cecelia says. He can barely see her and her voice, relatively quiet but still unexpected and substantial, explodes in his left ear and makes him wince. He bows his head down on the table, triangle of hair splaying out into a wide isosceles.

“Is Jorge okay?” Ratio mouths into the table. Each syllable produces a new quiver of pain in his forehead and cheeks.

“Shit. I have no idea. I just woke up too. I haven’t heard anything.”

From Ratio’s right, an unmistakable voice:

“We’re all just fine. We’ve been preserved in amber.” Ratio rotates his head to stare up at Hermes Cept’s gaunt face and bald pate. He pauses a few moments to let Cept continue, but he doesn’t.

“Elaborate,” Ratio says. (This is the kind of language he’s left with, in exposed moments like these.)

“This branch should have had negligible measure. The reintegration should have left almost nothing of us here. And yet look.” Cept makes spiteful little gestures toward Ratio, Cecelia, himself.

“We’re tainted,” Cept continues. “By the branch-loop animatics of our world. Our touch will corrupt this place. We need to eliminate everything that came through with us. Including ourselves.”

Ratio’s mind is hitting a roadblock. Part of him feels that what Cept is saying must be crucially important—that he’s only now getting to see the true perspective of Hermes Cept, who, all rivalries aside, is after all a bona fide genius. And yet Cept is speaking in riddles, in pretentious code. Ratio has no idea what interpersonal rituals might be necessary to switch Cept back into Comprehensible Mode again. He is wary of doing anything, saying anything, for fear it might be the wrong thing and plunge Cept further into gnomic obscurantism or mere catatonia. And meanwhile there’s Jorge, not a puzzle, but just a pure uncertainty, the worst kind of mental phenomenon—the kind that no thought can resolve, the pure lack of data. Ratio’s mind routes around the pain as it always tends to, fleeing to higher planes of abstraction.

He leans back against the cafeteria booth. His head still throbs, but his back thanks him for a favor he hadn’t realized it needed.

As she so often does, Cecelia breaks the silence: “so you’re saying we’re all going to have to die?”

Cept laugh-coughs, mirthlessly, a geriatric performance that could indicate derision or perhaps some less definable attitude. “There isn’t much of us to die, is there?”

Ratio can’t help himself. “Hermes, please, just say something that makes sense.”

Cept looks at Ratio and—this is a surprise—there’s a sudden light in his eyes, a kind of recognition or bond. Cept will play along with this game.

“Look,” he says. “When Salim and I made our discoveries, we knew that pneumatech would produce wonders. We thought it could save the world. A clean energy source, a generator of revolutionary therapies, qualitative leaps in our paltry ability to understand one another . . . but we also realized that our theory of branches implied monsters. Branches where the rules broke down, where hideous creatures could form through feedback loops in their own perverse logic and bring about hells beyond our power to imagine.

“So we decided that one of us would go there. Would split himself again and again and leave a fragment of him in each broken world, and ensure the world’s demise. That duty fell to me. Or, to a man who split and split and left me, this flattened thing, at the end of the process.”

Ratio’s mind is now buzzing with questions about the technology that would allow Cept and Salim to direct this process—and about the broader landscape of pneuma theories, about the unified logic that could reduce to Soul Coherence on one branch and to Branch Loops on another . . .

Too much, too many questions, too many threads, too much stimulation. Ratio feels like he is about to vomit. He lurches upward, onto his feet, before he can think about what he’s doing.

“I’m going,” he says, and stumbles off.

It is still mid-floorday, and the lights in the corridors pound his head mercilessly. No Boltzmen intrude into his consciousness, though—as though they can tell his mind is already full. Little branch-loops of thought, fragmented stutters, fight for prominence in his working memory. His mind can’t wrap itself around the thought of losing Jorge, not now, and so fragmentary memories of his last conversation with Jorge, of their last night together, jangle together pointlessly, now ridged with an incongruous but intense tone of intent distress. And, curling around them, the beginnings of questions about the reintegration, about Cept, about the pneuma landscape, about this brave new world they have found themselves in.

Ratio finds himself in front of his and Jorge’s quarters. He had been so lost in thought that the sight of the familiar door comes as a kind of surprise. He hesitates, still overloaded, still in some kind of overflow state, waiting for some mental register to be reset. He waits for a good minute before realizing that there is no way out of this except to barge forward. He knocks.