Everything is darkness and everything is light. There is a flash of pink in the distance, at the contradictory edge between the two states, and Roger knows that he is, at least on some level, sharing headspace with Dodger: his memory of the colors he can’t normally distinguish from one another has been getting fuzzy as the years slipped by, the distinct shades beginning to blend together into something beautiful but indistinct.
“Roger?” Her voice is inside and outside his head at the same time, coming from far away and from so close that it’s as much a part of him as his own skin. It’s unnerving. It’s so welcome that it’s almost like a physical ache, a cruel reminder of how alone he’s been these last seven years, even with Erin by his side.
“I’m here,” he says.
“But where’s ‘here’?” Dodger sounds frustrated. “What happened? All I did was touch you—”
“After seven years of not touching me, when we were close enough to whatever it means to manifest that we nearly leveled Berkeley,” he says. It’s amazing how reasonable he can sound when he has someone else to worry about. Maybe that’s the real reason there had to be two of them. So he’d always have someone else to worry about, and couldn’t just run rampant, revising the world to his liking. “I think this is the Doctrine trying to force us back together.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. How would I? This is as new to me as it is to you.”
“Couldn’t we be the living proof of Euler’s identity? That seems a lot less dangerous.”
“What’s Euler’s identity?”
“It’s basically the prettiest equation in the world. It’s the Helen of Troy of mathematical ideals.” She sounds like she’s getting closer as she speaks, like the math is drawing her to him. He doesn’t interrupt, and she continues, almost dreamily, “It contains three of the basic arithmetic functions, it links five mathematical constants . . .”
He turns and there she is, standing behind him on this endless black-and-white plane. She blinks, and pink and red lines flare around the edge of the horizon. Wherever they are, they’re sharing visual inputs. He can see the color of her hair, the shadings of the freckles on her cheeks, and when she smiles, he sees how pale she is. Nervousness has stolen much of her color, and even its absence is a revelation to him now. He smiles back, matching her anxiety with his own.
“See, I always knew we’d figure out how to find each other again,” he says.
“But is it safe? A lot of people died last time, Roger. No matter what some weirdo mad scientist built us to be, we can’t bring those people back. We can’t change what we’ve done.”
“You and I both know that’s not true.”
Dodger is quiet for a moment. Then, finally, she says, “Posit a timeline in flux.”
“Done.”
“If we can modify our pasts to change our futures, who’s to say we haven’t been doing it all along? That everything that’s happened, good or bad, hasn’t been changed because changing it would result in an even worse overall situation?” She catches her lower lip between her teeth, worries it for a moment, and finally says, “Erin says if either one of us dies, the other dies too.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t call from the future and tell me not to kill myself. I didn’t call from the future and tell me it was going to be okay, we were going to wind up in the same place for grad school, and you wouldn’t be better off without me. What if . . . that’s because we needed to know she was telling the truth? So neither of us would say ‘forget this, you’re on your own’ and refuse to go? We’re taking a lot on faith, but we’re taking it partially because it matches what we already know. She isn’t contradicting the existing numbers, she’s adding to them by putting the equations we have into context. Conservatism bias writ large.”
Roger frowns. “What’s worse than that quake, Dodge? We killed so many people because we didn’t know what we were doing. What could possibly be so bad that letting the quake stand is necessary?”
“Letting the sort of people who’d build biological weapons and put them out into the world to experiment with their powers have control of the fully manifest Doctrine of Ethos,” says Dodger, and there’s sudden steel in her tone, like she’s figuring out the shape of the problem one function