like the construct was taking a lot of power. Maybe I hadn’t been capable of doing this before . . .
Well, before things changed.
“I’ll make sure someone takes care of the baby,” I said as I gathered as much of the equation as I could hold in my mental hands and shoved it into her mind like a knife being shoved into a wound. I wasn’t careful about it. I wasn’t kind. I didn’t shunt the pieces of her that made her who she was to the side the way I had with the others.
Ingrid screamed. But not for long. She sagged, no longer fighting me. I let go of her wrist. She collapsed to the ground.
I opened my eyes.
Artie, Annie, James, and Mark were standing in a rough circle around me, blocking out the cuckoos who were no longer fighting them, but were instead watching us warily, waiting to see what was going to happen next. That seemed odd—it would have been reasonable for the cuckoos to attack as soon as the others were distracted—until I noticed the bodies littering the ground, their eyes open and still blazing white. They must have touched me, or one of the people who were currently extensions of me, after I’d started offloading the equation. The physical contact would have pulled them into the loop.
The same way I’d pulled Ingrid into the loop. She was on the ground directly in front of me, still twitching, burning white eyes turned upward to the sky. I wanted to feel bad about that. I couldn’t. I’d offloaded enough of the equation that I finally had room to spin it properly, to see all its lines and angles. The longer I looked at it, the more I started to understand what trying to complete it on my own would have done to me.
The cuckoos who’d grabbed me without going through the proper chain of metamorphosis and instar weren’t going to recover from the equation’s incursion into their minds. There wasn’t room for them, the history of our people, and the equation, and of those three things, the self was what the equation would be most inclined to treat as an invader. It was a living thing. It was hungry. It wanted to expand, to devour . . . and to be completed.
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