Miranda

One disadvantage of an office as cluttered as Miranda’s, for someone in Miranda’s position, is that it makes it much harder to look intimidating. Miranda sits now at her cluttered desk peering over uninterrupted mountains of paper at Ratio Tile, trying to look steely and unswayable and feeling like the act is not working.

Ratio’s hair is a vast near-triangle of shaggy curls which bounce as he fidgets. In some ridiculous way Miranda feels that Ratio’s hair is mocking her. Even Ratio’s sloppiness has its own composure; for all she knows he has probably some sort of bizarre scientific rationale for letting his hair grow out, and would expound upon it at length if asked. Meanwhile, it’s not just that Miranda has no excuse for her cluttered office; it’s that no excuse is possible.

I need more coffee, Miranda thinks, and takes a long sip.

“So, essentially,” she says after a pause, “what I’m saying is this. We are royally fucked right now. I’ve just heard that our sensor array is down indefinitely. We are blind. I am going to have to have Maria on what amounts to a permanent scouting mission to compensate, which leaves us nearly dead in the water if a heteropneum attacks the Sphere itself. Nice Try went down quickly, yes, but imagine what it would be like if a 5.6 kCept heteropneum attacked the Sphere right now. Remember Earwax? That thing was what, 3 kCept?”

“3.2,” Ratio cheerfully informs her.

“Right.” She sighs. “And now we’ve just encountered what I’ve been told is one of the strangest human pneumas ever observed, in the form of that . . . boy. He is either a blessing or a curse. I want to know if he is useful. Because he might be all we have.”

“Well, Miranda, that’s why I’m glad you’re talking to me. Because Kyle’s pneuma is a fascinating puzzle. The implications for Branch-Loop Theory are very exciting. This could be a chance to apply several of the mathematical techniques I’ve developed without hope of near-term application over the past few years—”

Ratio pauses as he notices that Miranda has put her hand to her forehead and wears a mask of pure exasperation.

“Look. Horatio.” Ratio winces; Miranda knows he hates being called by his full name. “What you are doing right now is the problem. I do not want theories that will take months to develop. I do not want you to give me things that Hermes Cept, the fucking co-founder of pneumatech, would call worthless. I am talking to you now. I just talked to Cept, who, with all due respect, is a far more accomplished scientist than you are. Anything that you two disagree about, I consider worthless. I want certainties. I don’t care if they’re trivial or simple or if they’re not”—she twists her voice in spite—“mathematically interesting. I want to hear everything we know about what will happen if we try to weaponize Kyle. Not conflicting speculation. Not squabbles between man-children with easily bruised egos.”

Ratio looks like he wants to say about three different things and is trying to decide which.

“Miranda, you—you just don’t get it. There isn’t anything Cept and I can agree on! Scientific theories aren’t just things you can agree to disagree upon. Either the Soul Coherence axioms will work on Kyle or they don’t. And I say they won’t. The data we just got from Kyle is the last nail in their coffin. Well, no, Nice Try was—or really, Nice Try was maybe the fourth last nail and Kyle is the fifth. Cept and I are going to make completely different predictions. It will be up to you who to trust. But it’s not like you can just trust some sort of . . . average.”

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t want either of your theories. I want you to put your gigantic fucking brains together, along with the whole rest of the science team, and give me a simple, cautious report on the risks and benefits of weaponizing Kyle. Based on the simplest things, the most agreeable facts. There are things you and Cept agree on, or else we wouldn’t have—all this.” She gestures around her, to the whole Sphere, to LUDWIG and the pneumatech power grid and the anti-heteropneum subs. “Don’t reach for ingenious explanations. Don’t even explain. Describe. Be simple. Be dumb.”

“I know how this sounds, Miranda, but . . . that just isn’t interesting to me.”

“It isn’t interesting? Our survival is not ‘interesting’?”

“Miranda, you know that’s just not how my mind works. I can’t control what I can think about and what I can’t. I’m not a reliable technical worker, Miranda. I’m an obsessive, a geek. When I’m not thinking about pneuma science I spend my time chatting about sci-fi on the intranet. The intersections between my interests and practicality are only coincidences.”

Miranda sighs. “Ratio. We’ve talked about this. I know. But right now, I am asking you—not as your commanding officer, but as a fellow human being—just to do what you can, as a human being, to help us survive. You talk about yourself as though you’re some sort of addict or machine, someone with no self-control. I know you’re more than that. I don’t care if it’s hard for you, Ratio. No one said life in the Sphere was going to be easy. But I think highly enough of you to think I can ask you to do the right thing.”

Ratio fidgets. “I’ll talk to Cept. I’ll . . . try.”

Miranda sighs again, slumps in her chair. “I guess that’s the best I can expect, huh?”