Chapter Text
Over the next seven days, Ponder and Rincewind met in the library regularly to discuss. Rincewind was often unsure of what the goals of these meetings were intended to be, but he was relatively sure that they existed. Over time, Ponder had amassed a collection of notes in a thick three-ringed binder, organized impeccably with tabs and sheet protectors. There was a section in which he’d scribbled bullet list notes on the details of Rincewind’s reoccurring dreams on one side of a page, and on the other was a list of details from his own dreams, and between them he’d made criss crossing connections in red ink to similar themes and points of interest. He was so sure that it meant something. Connections that consistent don’t occur for no reason. And everything was patterns when you got down to it, leaves grew they way they did because they were programmed to from the start, and the branches were programmed to grow the leaves, and the acorns were programmed to become the trees, and so on.
It bothered Rincewind when Ponder used words like “program” to refer to nature. It seemed too formal, too clean. He supposed it was correct, but it didn’t sit right with him the way the little man felt so comfortable referencing the world around him with such callous, detached language. It was very clinical. But that was possibly the best word to describe Ponder overall, any other man with his level of crazed determination and unchecked ambition would be all ink stains and stubbly-chinned and tacking strings up on cork boards. Ponder had his strings, but he kept them in tidy notebooks with labels and neat handwriting with letters that fit perfectly into the spaces of his graph paper.
Rincewind slouched in his usual chair. Ponder had been talking for some time but he was finding it hard to pay attention. It seemed to Rincewind that Ponder had a skill of saying a lot of complicated jargon without really conveying anything meaningful. It was a skill that he saw in several professors as well. Ponder was a true university man. There was a whiteboard in front of him with some odd stribbles of notes that Ponder would occasionally pause to write down. In the first few days of this ritual, there was a fair amount of back and forth. Rincewind, having already crossed the threshold of personal insanity by coming clean about seeing the eye and having dreams about strange patterns, saw that it was futile to hold back any longer. He’d hoped the process would be like ripping off a band-aid, just a few moments of pain and then it all fades away with time, but the longer the two of them met it seemed the deeper the wound became.
Ponder hadn’t made eye contact with Rincewind for twenty minutes. He was pacing in front of the white board with a marker in his hand and another, different colored marker tucked behind his ear.
“You know?” He said finally, still pacing, but looking up from his feet for the first time in a while. Rincewind’s eyebrows arched involuntarily, but he didn’t stop them.
“Know what?”
“I mean, do you agree with what I just said?” Rincewind tucked his fists into his pockets and stretched his legs.
“I have no idea what you just said.” Ponder leaned over the table in between them with a hand over his brow.
“Please tell me you were listening to any of that.” Rincewind thought about it.
“If I say that I was, will it make this conversation any shorter?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ah, nevermind.” Ponder screwed up his face. I should be used to this by now, he thought. It was the same story anywhere he went. His aunts tended to humor him, but they never seemed to understand anything he was saying. School had been the same, he’d never had much luck making friends, but he was always told that college would be different. In college, you’ll meet like-minded people who are passionate about the things you’re passionate about, that’s the whole point! Academia is an institution founded on curiosity, right? But time and time again Ponder found himself alone. His hand went instinctively to his pocket where he kept his phone, checking for a message from Adrian. Nothing.
Rincewind recognized the way Ponder’s shoulders were sloped. When he sighed, Rincewind could feel it in his own chest. He wasn’t as emotionally ignorant as he pretended to be. There are clear signs when a small jab lands on a bigger issue, the air kind of changes around you. Rincewind shifted forward and leaned over the table.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking about that thing you’d said before, something about fractals.” Ponder’s head lifted.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yesterday, I think. I was trying to describe the patterns I saw the night before in my dream.” Ponder chewed on the cap of a dry erase marker.
“I just wish we had some reliable way to recreate them. Understanding all of this would be a lot easier if I could just put a camera in your head.” Rincewind was fairly certain that the comment was intended to be some kind of a joke, but it could be hard to tell with Ponder.
“Er, yes, well, may I?” Rincewind extended his hand and Ponder surrendered a marker to him and the two traded places. On the whiteboard, Rincewind began to illustrate.
“I’ve already tried to take notes immediately after I wake up so that it’s all still fresh in my mind, but even then it’s just impossible to get all the detail right. There’s overlapping lines and numbers in the way, and circles and angles.” Rincewind drew a triangle in red marker. “So I was thinking, what if instead of trying to draw out the whole thing I just focus on one little part.”
“Right, but the problem with that is you said when you look at one number or one line for too long it starts to move.”
“That’s true, but you’re still thinking too big. I mean, with fractals, you have a bunch of little shapes that make a big shape, right? But the little shapes and the big shape are all the same thing, that’s the whole point.”
Ponder’s eyes flickered with rapt attention.
“Go on.”
Rincewind straightened the collar of his Rush t-shirt, suddenly wishing that he had maintained a more professional appearance. “We’re trying to describe everything that’s inside the big shape, like how many small shapes there are and how many numbers and lines and things. Let’s keep it simple and just focus on one part at a time.” He knocked the whiteboard with the marker in a way that he thought was very commanding, but the cap came loose and flew over the table behind Ponder’s chair. Rincewind moved to go and retrieve it, but Ponder put up a hand.
“Don’t worry about it, just finish the thought.”
Rincewind floundered. The pathway words had to take from his head to his mouth was perilous and a lot of them made less and less sense the further along they went. But, he considered, Ponder said nonsense all day long with totally undeserved confidence, why can’t I?
“Just stay with me on this,” Rincewind encouraged. “You were saying that the best way to make sense of something big is to try and understand what it’s made of at its most basic parts.”
“Kind of a pedestrian take, but yes.”
“And the problem with all these fractal patterns is that they contain each other. It’s all turtles all the way down. So if you’re trying to see the smallest turtle, you’re really still looking at an infinite number of other turtles inside of that turtle, and trying to see the bigger turtle that contains that one, you just run into the same problem.” Rincewind expanded his triangle into several other connecting triangles. “It’s just a massive headache, really.”
“But how did you get a triangle from all of this? I mean, the main problem we’re having right now is that we can’t identify the micro or macro shape here because there’s no way to record what you’re seeing in your sleep.”
“Well, see, it reminded me of something else. I read it somewhere, you know Flatland?” Ponder shook his head. “It’s about these kind of sentient shape characters, uh, I don’t really remember what happens very well, basically this square goes to different dimensions where the way everything looks kind of changes based on how many dimensions there are.” Rincewind continued to draw, this time he made a simple dot, followed by a line, then a circle, then a cube. “There’s this idea, it’s something like the square goes into the line’s dimension and all the lines perceive him as a line as well, because they can’t possibly know what a square is. Imagine all your life you’ve been lying flat on the ground without seeing any depth to things at all, like the world were a disc.” He pointed to the flat circle on the whiteboard. “And then suddenly you were here, on the cubeworld. It would be unlike anything you’ve ever seen, there would be depth, and space. It would seem totally different, but it’s not, because a cube can’t exist without a square, and a square can’t exist without a line, and so on. All turtles.”
“Each dimension builds off of the previous one, yes, I know that.” Ponder was compulsively tugging at the hair on the back of his head. “Okay, so the cube depends upon the square to exist just as the square depends upon the line. Where’s the triangle coming from?” RIncewind snuck behind Ponder’s chair to reclaim the lost marker cap. A silence hung around them, their little nook of the library was barley lit by the flickering fluorescent strip above them. The doors had been locked hours ago, but the two of them had made a habit of staying up late nights like this.
The isles were empty, and the faded 70’s brown and orange wave patterned carpeting met the darkness in the distance that surrounded their little bubble. The snow had continued to pile on every day, the banks growing higher and less manageable. Tree limbs had fallen over, and the road in and out of the campus was blocked off while the city tried to de-ice it, but it wasn’t a top priority. There were rolling blackouts across the city, people without heat. The cold was relentless and numbing. It took over your thoughts and grabbed you like a rider stears a horse by the reigns, making it almost impossible to think about anything else but how much you’d like to jump into a hot bath. So most faculty and students stayed indoors. Classes had been canceled until the roads were cleared. The courtyard was utterly silent, any sound made by trudging boots was snuffed out under the pervasive white noise of the constant wind.
But the library stayed warm. The university had their renewable energy program to thank for that, some experimental kind of wind farm had shot up within the past few days and had kept the whole place running, with a few limitations. Cable and internet services were out, with cell service being strenuous and patchy at best. The rest of the world had faded away for the two men, together in the library, thinking in circles.
Rincewind pulled up a chair and took a seat at the table with Ponder.
“That’s the tricky part,” He continued. Ponder studied his face. All of this was the tricky part, it seemed. That was the nature of… whatever it was they were trying to understand. It was all questions with no solid, feasible means of acquiring answers. It was a series of strange coincidences. The connective threads must be there, but they were so hard to see. It was, to Ponder, as if he were living inside of his notes, on paper, like in Rincewind’s discworld theory. They were only seeing things from a singular dimension, only lines, but there must be something outside of their perception that would pull all of this together, some lines that were really shapes. But how are you supposed to see something that, on a fundamental level, you’re not designed to? “Well a triangle is the simplest closed shape you can make, right?” Ponder shook his head.
“That’d be a circle. A triangle is three lines, connected at three vertices, a circle is one continuous line.” Rincewind’s face went blank. He threw the marker in his hand high into the air, leaning back in his chair and pulling the hood of his jacket over his face.
“Nevermind,” He said, as the marker fell back and hit him square on the forehead. Ponder tapped a little rhythm with his fingertips.
“But I see what you were getting at,” He said, encouragingly. “The simplest closed form. You were trying to say that we got lost in the weeds focusing on the details that we could see but couldn’t understand. We should step back and rethink our approach entirely, because these patterns do seem to be fractals of a kind, we can’t possibly see the whole thing unless we bring our scope outside of whatever space they occupy. We need to think even bigger before we can think smaller.”
“Yes,” Rincewind lied. “That’s exactly what I was getting at.” When he pulled his hood off, he saw Ponder’s face. He was wearing this odd, serene expression, the fluorescent light from overhead casting a warm glow over him. From the side, Rincewind could see his eyes behind his thick glasses. They were a deep honey amber color. Even with all classes canceled until further notice, Ponder still dressed in a button down white collared shirt with a loose, skinny tie tucked into his chest pocket. There was a faint line of ink on his brow from where he had rubbed it before.
Ponder had an idea, but it was slipping away from him the more he tried to put it into words. Something wanted to be built . He’d known that for some time now, those intrusive thoughts he’d had that came marching in and totally redirected his train of thought. Something needed his attention. There was something that only he could make. He thought it was the maps, he’d been scribbling maps based on Rincewind’s drawings from memory for the past few days, trying to find points where they might connect, commonalities between the sketches, anything. He thought that if he could get the orientation right, then he could start to try and make sense of the numbers. It would be easier if they were all ones and zeros, binary code had fascinated him when he was little, but from what he could tell these numbers came in sets. Sets of eight. That probably meant something.
He’d tried factoring them, going out on a limb and guessing that maybe they were all prime, but that lead went nowhere, and he still had this itch in the back of his head. This wasn’t enough, this wasn’t what needed to be made. It had to be something more comprehensive.
“Rincewind?” He said after a while. Rincewind was tired, obviously. They weren’t going to get anything productive done that night.
“Hm?”
“I have a massive headache.”
“You’ve been drinking coffee non-stop since noon. And, uh.” Rincewind tapped on his own forehead, indicating the mark to Ponder. Ponder took his tie from his pocket and wiped his brow.
“All of this just feels so desperate, and immediate, I don’t know why. I can’t sleep anymore.” Rincewind shrugged.
“I never had the best luck with sleeping, especially not now. Now that it’s every night, you know.” The wind outside was picking up, a gust shook the large panel window beside them that looked out onto the dark courtyard. There were a few lights in the distance, lamp posts and the freshman housing, but they were weak. “I just want this to be over with,” Rincewind let it slip out of him like a breath. Ponder rested his chin on his knuckles, his eyes closed.
“I don’t think it’s even started.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” Rincewind kicked Ponder’s chair lightly, but enough to make him sway. “I mean, we’ve gotten somewhere, haven’t we?” He motioned loosley to the whiteboard. “Got some nice shapes up there! Talked about, uh, dimensions and turtles and things. That’s progress.”
“You realize that whatever all of this is building up to, it’s big, right? Like, unfathomably big. Astronomically big. This is--” Ponder made a motion with his hands, as if he was trapping the universe between them, or holding a big melon. The gesture spoke for itself, Rincewind could fill in the gaps. This is apocalyptic , he thought. That’s what you mean. Rincewind himself had been thinking as much for a while, longer than Ponder had even been aware of whatever all of this nonsense was supposed to be. It was almost a comfort. Things will end, whether we understand them or not. Ponder was just the type for whom understanding meant everything. It was the bedrock upon which he’d built his entire philosophy on life, that things could fundamentally be understood if only you tried hard enough. That’s a very hard way to live, Rincewind thought. Especially if you’re in it alone.
“I should probably pack up,” Ponder started, closing his binder with a resonant slap. As he milled about and gathered things and straightened chairs, Rincewind kicked an idea around in his head. He wasn’t sure about it, he wasn’t very sure about anything usually. His standard operating level of uncertainty was rather high. And anyway, if everything truly was coming to an end, as he’d believed, then the consequences of his actions had a limited shelf life.
“You want to just stay at my place?” He asked. It was probably the lack of sleep that had made him so bold, that and the six pack he’d finished off himself only an hour earlier. Beer tended to invert his personality somewhat.
Ponder stopped in the middle of putting a stack of books back onto a return rack. Oh great, he thought. On top of everything, now he’s going to mess with me? For what? He turned around, expecting to see Rincewind pulling some kind of face. But there was nothing, he looked how he always did. Ponder glared.
“Really?” He asked suspiciously. Rincewind started to nod slowly.
“It’s pretty nasty out there.” He jerked a thumb towards the window and the view of the courtyard. Oh, thought Ponder, his shoulder falling out of a defensive position. Of course.
“It’s not that far,” He continued straightening the stacks of books.
“Well,” Rincewind continued, standing upright from his seat and straightening his jacket. “I mean, we’re just going to meet up for breakfast anyways, aren’t we? It’s just a bit more convenient this way.”
“Mmm.” Ponder continued gathering his things, quickening his pace, shoving papers haphazardly into his laptop bag. Then he stopped. Rincewind was in front of him, scratching his head, keeping his gaze on anything else but Ponder. He was almost a full head taller than Ponder, a height made up mostly of legs. It occured to Ponder that he’d never stood so close to the man. His eyes were at Rincewind’s chest, where he could see the work of his lungs, swelling below his ribs. “Uh,” Said Ponder, which meant I ’m currently processing how I’m supposed to read this situation. Rincewind placed a hand tentatively on Ponder’s shoulder. He hoped that it was innocent enough. “What,” Ponder started slowly, “What are you trying to say?” Rincewind’s hand flew away from Ponder’s shoulder and back behind his head as he spun away from him on the ball of his foot.
“Oh you’re really going to be that bastard, aren’t you?” Ponder laughed, he couldn’t help it, it snuck out from under him.
“Sorry? I’m just, you know I’m bad at reading situations.”
“Yes I do know that.”
“So was that a romantic thing?” The words came out of Ponder carefully, as though he were inspecting each one on its way out. Rincewind looked back to Ponder.
“Kind of? I think I definitely intended it to be.”
“You think or you know?”
“What’s the difference?” A real confusion flashed over Rincewind’s face. “It was a stupid idea, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s not stupid,” Ponder’s tone changed to a less serious one. He’d set his laptop bag down on the table and begun to fidget with his fingers. “I’ll stay if you’ll have me.”
“You would?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Rincewind’s mouth opened and closed a few times.
“Yes,” He said, finally.
It was the first time Ponder had seen Rincewind’s room. He didn’t believe that he’d had any expectations of the place, but once the door swung open, he immediately realized that he’d had at least one. He’d expected it to be an actual room. It was a storage closet with a mattress tucked in the corner. The shelved were stuffed unceremoniously with things, some of them papers, some of them books, some of them clothes. There was a very large trunk on top of on of the shelves upon which a towel was casually tossed. Somewhere in the mess, there was a small cactus. Rincewind indicated to an empty space on one of the shelves.
“You can put your bag here.” Ponder slid the bag tentatively into the nook while Rincewind took off his shoes and jacket and tossed them up onto a shelf somewhere. “It’s small but it’s efficient. Everything just goes up.”
“Efficient,” Ponder repeated, goggle eyed at the disarray of the place. “That is a word that you could use to describe it. It would be wrong, but you could still say it.”
“It’s cozy, it’s basically a tiny house. Better Homes and Gardens would describe it as quaint.” The delirium of actually getting Ponder to even agree to this arrangement was playing seriously on his already beer sloshed brain. Out of all of the things that had happened to him recently, this felt the least realistic. “Should I, uh, take your jacket?” Ponder slid the wool cardigan off of his shoulders and handed it to Rincewind, who in turn sent it flying up towards the ceiling where it landed expertly on top of Rincewind’s jacket.
“I guess that is a kind of skill. And it is good and warm in here.” Rincewind sat on the mattress, thankful that he’d had all of his sheets cleaned only a few days prior and they still had that fresh detergent scent. Ponder sat beside him. “How long have you lived here?”
Rincewind scratched his chin, “Well I enrolled in spring about six years ago, I used to live in the city and I would just commute on my bike, but I was living with my Grandfather then. He passed away four years ago, been living on campus ever since, but I couldn’t afford the housing, so I worked out a deal with Henry. That’s the head librarian, I don’t think a lot of people remember his name.” It was true, Ponder thought about it and realized he’d never actually known the man’s name.
“You two are friends then?”
“I wouldn’t say that, we’re colleagues.” Ponder looked accusingly at Rincewind.
“I’ve been bringing him bagels from the cafeteria for nearly a week now. Every time I’ve seen him he’s worried about you. That’s friendship.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s a pointless concept, that whole nobody in academia can ever truly be friends because we’re all ultimately in direct competition with each other thing. It’s a lie, we’re competitive on an individual level, sure, but in the grand scheme of things we’re all working towards the same goals.”
“I think Karl Marx said that,” Replied Rincewind, reaching for a crumpled bottle of water that he’d been keeping on the shelf just above his bed. In doing so Ponder again got a good look at Rincewind’s chest. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the end of his tie. “Collective action.” Rincewind continued, after gulping down the remains of his water. “Or something.”
“Say,” Ponder started, “I actually am very tired.”
“Oh, sure.” Rincewind laid back as if remembering suddenly where he was. Ponder found a place next to him and placed an unsure hand on Rincewind’s chest. Rincewind, in turn, slid one of his arms behind Ponder’s head. The little heater behind the door humed sweetly. After a while, Rincewind reached for a yardstick that he kept beside the bed and used it to flick the lightswitch off.
“That’s ingenious.” Said Ponder lightly.
“It’s just lazy.” Rincewind could feel Ponder’s stomach shaking with a laugh that rolled through the both of them. After a few more minutes in silence, Ponder’s breathing slowed down. It was a soft, even tide that came in and out effortlessly. With his free hand, Rincewind maneuvered Ponder’s glasses off of his face and placed them beside the bed before closing his eyes. Somewhere close by, though they had no way of knowing it, Only You by Yaz was playing.
He opened his eyes. All around him the patterns began to appear, lines moving in and out of each other, numbers, that strange undefinable color. But this time there was a voice. It was the same voice he’d been hearing all along, only now it was clear, like it was right in front of him.
You have to keep going. There’s not much time left.
Where are you?
In three days this will end.
Why? Can I get an extension? What are we supposed to do?
Ponder knows. He’s already done it.
Look, if its really that important then I don’t see why you can’t just give me a straight answer.
It’s collapsing.
What?
And then it was red. All the lines, all the numbers, and the spaces inbetween.
Rincewind woke up before Ponder did. There was a cold spot on his chest, and as he stirred he realized it was his own dribble. There wasn’t much he could do from his position without waking Ponder, and looking down at the sweet fellow dreaming happily beside him was stirring up some sentimental feelings that he’d thought he’d repressed years ago, but he really had to pee. Carefully, he freed his arm from behind Ponder’s head, flexing his fingers to get the blood flowing again, crept over him carefully, closing the door behind him as lightly as he could manage. And then Henry’s face was directly in front of him.
“Damn! Think you could warn me? Forchristsake.” Rincewind shouted. From the storage closet, it sounded like Ponder fell out of bed. Henry squinted behind a small pair of glasses.
“Is there someone else in there?”
“No no, of course not, um, what is it?” Rincewind attempted to smooth his hair out a bit but it was still bed tousled. Henry shook his head in obvious disbelief.
“Anyway,” He continued, “The city has asked that we use the library as a temporary shelter for some of the families affected by the blackouts. I just wanted to let you know so that you don’t walk around without your pants on.”
“That was one time and it was during a holiday break.” Henry scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“Oh that’s right, that was the same Christmas that you pissed on the statue in front of the Dean’s office.”
“Well I clearly have pants on right now so, if you don’t mind.” Rincewind pushed his way past Henry, a gesture that, had Rincewind been anybody else in the world, would have sent Henry into a kind of primal rage, but Henry knew better. Rincewind didn’t mean to be rude, he was just very stupid sometimes. Harmless and stupid.
“Tell Ponder too,” Henry called after Rincewind, who responded with a rude gesture.
The library had filled up overnight, or day rather, as it was about noon when Rincewind woke up. There were cots stretched out with people in thick parkas huddling together on them, children running around, lively conversations, several groups of people reading comfortably and quietly, essentially the worst possible scenario for a university library. They were supposed to be silent, save for the occasional sniffle, and nobody was really supposed to read, they were supposed to stack a bunch of books that they needed to read next to them, open one of them up, and then just let their eyes gloss over the words and listen to a podcast. That was how university libraries worked. This? This was chaos.
And standing proudly by the front door, ushering people inside, was the archchancellor. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a well-kept beard and a well-fed stomach. Typical of university staff, he was talking at a group of people rather than talking to them.
“We’re glad to have you all here with us,” He said, boisterous voice reaching effortlessly through the crowds, “Feel free to take advantage of our full library facilities.” Behind the grey whiskers, there was a smile spreading across his face, something Rincewind had not often seen. He stuck to the corners, keeping his face hidden as best he could, heading toward the back exit of the Library. Before he could reach it, a hand landed on his shoulder.
“Excuse me, but I wonder if I could have a word with you?” Dreading the encounter, Rincewind’s head turned around slowly with a cringe. The face he saw before him was not that of the beardy archchancellor, but the wiry, tent-pole-draped-in-cheesecloth frame of the university’s bursar. The bursar handled all the numbers when it came to budgeting, while the archchancellor handled all the budgeting when it came to budgeting. This meant that, while the bursar had the most direct and true authority on the university finances, he did not actually enforce them in any tangible way, nor would he ever care to, not when there were archaic spreadsheet algorithms he could be writing. Rincewind let go of a weighty sigh.
“I would, but I’m really rather busy at the moment.” The bursar fidgeted with a very large graduate ring on his middle finger.
“I think everyone is, only I’ve been asking everyone the same question all week and I can’t seem to get a good answer.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Rincewind made another break for the door, but the bursar called out to him.
“Did you see anything strange in the sky a few nights ago?” Rincewind paused. He looked at his feet, and then at the bursar.
“No,” He lied, then he pushed his way through the back door and trudged his way through the snow to the cafeteria.
Ponder rolled off the side of Rincewind’s mattress and landed with a crack and a thud. The crack was from his glasses that were on the floor, which he had bashed his head against, and the thud was from the rest of him. Rubbing the back of his neck, he could hear the voice of the head librarian on the other side of the door. Still shaking off sleep, he couldn’t quite make out what was being said, but he got the words pissed on the statue and concluded that the conversation must be about Rincewind.
He snapped one of the legs of his glasses back into place and rolled his neck around on his shoulders. That was the first sound sleep I’ve had in months, he thought. Sticking his round lenses back where they belonged on the bridge of his nose, the world came back into focus. There was a mattress beside him with a patchy red quilt and a lumpy down pillow, and all around him were tall shelves packed with eccentricities. Rincewind’s things, the thought casually rose in his mind, all of this stuff belongs to Rincewind. Above the mattress, on the bottom of the lowest shelf, was a sleeve from a book that had been pinned up. It seemed like a personal little detail, the last thing that Rincewind probably saw before he went to sleep every night. Oh, but I slept with him last night, he thought. It took a moment, but soon Ponder had his knees to his chest and his fingertips on his temples trying to recall the events of the previous night.
I did sleep with him last night, He repeated. I just curled right up next to him and fell asleep. I even put my hand on his chest. Oh god, nothing about that was very professional. He must think I’m some… affection-starved… desperate idiot.
Amid Ponder’s overthinking, there was a knock at the door. He wasn’t sure whether he should answer.
“It’s Henry,” Said Henry, “Just wanted to warn you that there’s a crowd out here,” And then his footsteps trailed away. A crowd? What kind of crowd would be in a library?
With an armful of Doritos and two Gatorades shoved into the pockets of his denim jacket, Rincewind snuck his way back through the library. He paused in front of his door, and for a moment considered that Ponder might not be there anymore. He decided to knock.
“Hello?” Came a voice from inside. Rincewind opened the door a crack.
“I have b-- well, it’s not really breakfast, but I have food.”
“Come in,” Ponder replied, unsure of why it was on him to invite Rincewind back into his own room. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the space heater with his laptop balancing on his knees. Rincewind shook some melting snow off of his hat.
“The cafeteria was slammed so I got what I could from a vending machine. It truly is dark times when we have to skimp on breakfast.” Rincewind had clearly intended for the comment to be mostly humorous, but there was a very real and chilling truth to it. From his laptop, Ponder spun a little 3D model of a sphere around in a modeling program.
“I had an idea,” He said between mouthfuls of cool ranch Doritos, “I was thinking about your theory of a discworld.” A very neglected sense of pride welled up in Rincewind at the words your theory . “That would account for a flatworld, and our world would be a roundworld, what would the next world down that line look like?”
“You mean, what comes after a sphere?”
“Yes! In that diagram you drew the other night, it was sort of like a linear progression of simple components becoming very complex ones. Obviously, it’s very hard to imagine, but in our world we have x, y, and z coordinates.” He spun his laptop around to reveal his little grey model sphere to Rincewind, which was now covered in a latticework of graph lines. “But in theory, there’s more dimensions than that. Directions that we can’t perceive within the limited framework of just thinking about things with only these three dimensions. So that lead me to this.” He clicked something, and suddenly another shape appeared next to the sphere, something that resembled a sphere at first, but it turned and folded in on itself, looping around and around, the graph lines overlaid on top of the shape being the only way to tell what bits were going where. “That’s a hypersphere, it’s the next step up from a sphere.” Rincewind looked on suspiciously.
“All this before breakfast?” Ponder shrugged. After shaking off his coat, Rincewind took a seat next to him. Ponder continued to fiddle with his laptop.
“It feels like I’m getting somewhere now. I’ve been scanning through the lost media archives and I’ve found a few different texts referencing hyperspheres but they’re all just conjecture. The only model of a hypersphere we have is virtual, obviously.” He scratched the back of his head. “I really don’t know why, but this feels like the right direction.” He looked up at Rincewind, who was looking very pale. “Something wrong?”
Rincewind didn’t like the way the grey mass on the screen was turning. It looked a lot like how his stomach felt. It was confusing and hard to focus on, and in that sense it bore a striking resemblance to the dreams he’d been having. There was a word on the tip of his tongue that he was trying to remember.
“Ponder,” He said.
“Yes?”
“I had a dream last night. It was different this time.” Rincewind’s focus stayed on the twisting, turning figure. It pulled itself out of itself and fell back into itself again, shifting uncomfortably under the layers of graph lines, a revolting, undulating mass. There was a ringing in his ears. It was as if he could hear the thing beating like a heart. The word he wanted to remember was clawing at his throat, trying to escape him, trying to pull itself out of him. The figure on the screen went in and out of itself.
It collapsed.