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