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Sho never stopped running.
He pounded up the steps two at a time, the long winding flights up the inner stairwell of Pork City. Uneven, not in exacting right angles. He didn't have time for the lift. He barely had time for the stairs, barely had time for this factoring meeting H had called at all. He could see the end of the number line from here, the imminent convergence of the series, the end of his harmonic progression.
Δ𝑡 = 18𝑦, and he had miscalculated.
He hated the hectopascals of pressure in his chest, the floundering of his heart, the harshness with which it beat against his bones. No matter how much force he expended, pounding the cement steps, the tiny surface area of his heart's inner lining meant increasingly high values of pressure. His limits were simple arithmetic. Coping with having to exist within them was not. But at least his limits had expanded since H had finally—correctly—convinced him to stop burying himself in medication. Since he'd rinsed the salt from his tongue, the bitterness from his lips, indulging only in the sweetness of the magna opera he had finally, finally converged on again.
Without H referring to him in past tense. Without H shaking his head at him. Without H putting his hand on the back of his neck and letting out that mmmmmm that he'd come to associate, like a Pavlovian bell, with the sickness indolently seeping through the mortal marrow of his mortal bones, about to hit its inflection point on the graph of its logit function.
His nails scrabbled against the rough material. The capillaries bursting in his lungs brought the sickening taste of iron. He hated it. He hated it.
He couldn't stand it, but as much as he could fish out the pork out of his ramen to set it aside no matter how much Pops worried about what he was feeding himself—he was feeding himself the things that mattered, the knowledge and the curiosity and the artistry, not the trash that made up his mundane form, the trash he would dig through with his bare hands in decomposing flesh to reconfigure himself from the inside out if he could—he couldn't fish the writhing broken pipes out of his alveoli. He couldn't calculate himself into being fixed. He could have every exacting right answer, every exacting right angle all the way down to the godhood at the bottom of the well, and still find his steps uneven, in horrifically obtuse angles to the end.
This useless, worthless, garbage body, this cage of flesh, the bars of ribs and walls of meat that sought to lock him in like he were a songbird, a rooster capable merely of a thunderous crow.
He didn't crow; he didn't sing; he roared, and he would roar louder than all the roaring of his blood in his ears when he slammed the rooftop door open and his jittering gaze fixed itself on the man standing atop Pork City.
The man he identified by the same cut of his cloth that he always wore, by the same scruff on his chin, by the same hair trimmed asymmetrically short.
Only the brim of Sho's hat kept the brightness of the sun overhead from burning into his eyes. The chill of the February wind sliced through the feverish heat in his cheeks, but his blood would never stop boiling, not until—not unless—the impossibility of zero kelvins came to pass.
H had his hands loose in his pockets. Sho measured the angles of his knees, his elbows, his slouched neck. The same as ever. Within acceptable parameters of previous variations: scarcely any variation at all, unlike most everyone else he had ever met. H puppeted his body with such precision, as though that imperfect meat did heed his calculations, as if he had happened upon the secret to artistic perfection.
"Hey, Pi," H said, that same vibrational frequency he'd used when Sho had first met him waist-deep in the dumpster outside WildKat. "Thanks for meetin' me up here. Know you've gotta lot on your mind, but would ya mind peepin' at something with me first? C'mere."
Sho's boots scraped along the roof. Moisture collected on the inner seams of his nails. He'd ruptured his fingertips, smashing them against the steps like that, crawl-running his way up. Another failure of the stress-strain curve, another failure of his intrinsic Young's moduli. He stalked forward nonetheless, stepping into place at H's right side by the roof's edge.
The city stretched out below them. Thirteen stories up by the levels of Pork City, just shy of one hundred metres in height. The streets curved below, taking the paths of rivers long lost to asphalt, the transformations rendered by humans and used by others without an inkling of the history their vectors had displaced. The trashcans dotting the roads. The shops where he had noted the most interesting junk. The places where shattered signs and stoplights collected. The apartment complexes most likely to toss out old furniture. The myriads of people, incomprehensible in individuality, perfectly simulatable on this larger scale where he could reduce them to dots along terribly predictable paths, all the same tasteless tetrahedra, each dismissive as the last, throwing away matter that they had decided didn't matter.
He would use it all. Everything they had deemed worthless. Everything they had deemed futile, insignificant, contemptible. Every piece of refuse they had refused. He would crunch the art from it, squeeze the stone between his bare palms until it bled vermilion between his fingers and ran down his elbows.
This city. The city he could calculate with his nail in the palm of his hand. The city of mesmerising chaotic attractors. Its stochastic predictability precisely unfolding its beauty. To walk these streets, to dive into the dumpsters' depths as far down as the darkness could go, to drag his hands over the garbage that they produced, to pile it ever higher out from the shadows of the backstreets until he could reach the burning sun, until he could seize the burning sun with his left hand stained in the emerald tablet, until he could devour the burning sun whole.
"When'd you get taller'n me, kid? Look at you." Straightening himself for a moment, H raised his hand up to his head. "A whole adult. A daisy poppin' up right before my eyes."
"Eight point zero five centimetres." The difference between them.
"Sounds about right."
The words tore his throat raw. "It's precisely right."
"Sounds like you're still estimatin' a little to me."
"Eight point zero four nine—"
H lifted both arms, empty palms facing Sho. "I getcha, kid. Point taken." He flipped Sho's cap up from his head. Feeling the weight settle on his hair, Sho could identify the outlines of the fingers of H's right hand, the immaculate creases along his palm. "Say, Pi, wha'cha you lookin' at?"
"428." Sho leaned out over the edge. The factoring hectopascals squeezing against his pericardium were nearing a local minimum, at least for this interval.
"Thought it'd make ya feel a little better, kid. You love this city, don't ya?"
"Between my flawless calculations and 428's beauty..." He leaned further. The wind racing up from Pork City's thinner side rattled the windows and cut along his cheeks. Cars and buses streaming hues down the pavement, lights in red and green and gold, billboards setting the sky ablaze, buildings reflecting the radiance above. He could perch on high for a moment to observe, to seek out the next groove in spacetime, but nothing felt so zetta good, so zetta sublime, as that moment of crunching the materials, that in-the-action-of-the-doing of art. Not with this useless body that he couldn't change, couldn't transform. He was out of his own radiamn vector. If only he could align it with the numbers he'd already factored out, use himself as his own canvas, freed of that beat-beat-beating that tried to keep him from running. But he would run. He would run until the moment he dropped.
His boots wobbled along the edge. The hand in his hair drew his head slightly back. "Careful, kid. Don't go wastin' that Imagination of yours."
That word. That inflection. Not imagination, but Imagination. But even if Sho had subtracted the difference, none of the identities he knew or could derive made sense of it, like a speculative loop of 4-2-1, hovering just above but not reaching the asymptote. "H."
"What numbers you got jumbled through your head?"
"Those attoteslas miscalibrated my values." The papercut from the envelopes bearing his rejections still stung forty-two minutes later. "Rejected me from every one. The mathematics and the arts. Worthless trash. I'll compost them all. They wouldn't know aesthetic if their cardinals were full of it, not 'til they hit the collapse."
"Mm-hm." H ruffled Sho's hair, his hat still waving in his other hand. "So you got rejected from all the colleges you applied to this time. Tough break, kid. But chin up: you'll have opportunities come knockin' before ya know it. You've got nearly a full year before you'll hafta reapply. Plenty of time to get your ship ship-shape."
His fingers convulsed when he pressed his nails into the lines of his palms. Pops made him cut them blunt after what he'd done the time right before he'd started swallowing salt. But Pops didn't have to know he'd started flushing the pills. Pops didn't have to know he'd stayed up in the dead of night, eking out every hour he could from his garbage body, carving himself down to the minutes, to the seconds, the Planck's lengths of time. He'd learned. He'd learned not to pace in his room. He'd learned how to sneak out through the back without alerting Pops. He'd learned how to force himself to go back before daybreak, keep Pops none the wiser.
Pops had asked him, a time or two, if he'd need to up his dose.
No. No, he didn't need to titrate his dose, he needed to tetrate his de—
"Pi. You're shaking. Talk to me, kid."
"I don't have time for uninspiring integers."
H chuckled. "Then inspire yourself. You've got the whole world to you. That Imagination of yours's climbin' faster than the towers you're heaping."
"No." Even here, still, unmoving, bordering on immutable, his heart wouldn't stop hammering, wouldn't stop pushing outwards, wouldn't quit the pressure that the thin-walled vessel could only take so much of. If he were made in iron—made in anything he could transform—he could engineer himself harder, better, faster, stronger. But the protein forming him couldn't take that heat without denaturing. The boiling of his blood would cook him alive from the inside-out. "No, I don't have time. I had my proof in hand, H. Proving the zeta hypothesis. Just waiting for that last proposition. That which what was we wanted. As soon as I got that, I wouldn't have to deal in anything but flawless calculations ever again."
"Kid, I know you've got it rough in school. They just don't get you. They don't see the genius you've got up here, and it ain't fair that they're makin' ya waste your talent on jumpin' through their hoops. But ya gotta get through those hoops to get to where you wanna go. And then, like you said, you'll never have to do anythin' but art, math, and Imaginin' long as you live."
He couldn't have shouted more loudly if he'd had a megaphone in hand. "Do I look obtuse to you, H!? You think I don't know that? The calculations were perfect. Get into college, never have to transform a single matrix that isn't in the coordinate space I've designated. Those zetta sums of digits. I don't want to unbalance this equation with Pops any further. Inequalities are garbage! Dependencies are garbage! Crunch! I'll add 'em to the heap! Another year—with 𝑃(success) < 1—"
"Don't think he minds havin' ya 'round, kid. The guy loves you."
"Who gives a digit what that soup-steeping centisievert minds? I mind. Any worrying Woodin would want my genius around. My cardinality wants the aleph-null and the omega!" As he wrenched his hand up towards the sun, its winter glare seared his retinas; his eyes watered, but he gazed, defiant at the pain, until his vision whited at the edges. The angle of his glare sank down to acute, staring once more at the streets below. "But I can't measure my degrees if I don't get a degree from them. And I can't get a degree from them if I don't integrate their statistical refuse, screwing up my calculations. But I can't."
"Mmm." That sound again. That sound that kept recurring 'round and 'round, a parametric function unable to break free, no matter how many pieces Sho shattered himself into. That vibration of H's vocal cords that could take the entire expansive skyline of his city and fashion it into a collar with a radius small enough to choke. "You can. Surpass your limits, Pi. There's always another way out; I'm sure you of all people can factor it out. Look at all the potential you've got. You only need to play by their game a little longer."
Another way out. An alternative displacement for his vector. Even with his nails cut blunt he could still dig them in into his skin and draw blood. He could surpass his limits here. No matter how badly they shackled him, he still had a choice. Either he would break his shackles or himself, but he wouldn't stay shackled.
The droplets of wetness forming at his knuckles served as proof of that.
"I have this potential energy." He gazed down at the city. His city. The street below. The ground falling away beneath him. The limits, surpassed in his own way.
"That's right."
"58663.3803 J. Just need to convert that potential energy into kinetic." No, he wouldn't climb the ladder to the heavens. He had to descend, had to go down as deep as he could go, meet his own shadow in the depths, and build his own material cosmos, line by line, scrap by scrap, sound by sound, until no one could dismiss his cacophony. If not by understanding, then by the deafening sound itself. So much noise that they'd have to listen. So much red that they'd have to see. "I don't have time." He jerked his left hand away from the space between himself and H, crushed his palm against his sternum where his heartbeat slammed into his fingers as though he could tear from his innards if only he sank his nails in. "Even if I don't have time, but I have potential energy. I just needed to open up my eyes this entire time to the possible transformation. All this worthlessness. I can crunch it. I can make myself my own masterpiece."
H nodded. Smiled. Gave Sho that last proposition he needed. "You just need to take a leap of faith, Pi. The heavens got their mysterious ways of making things work out." His hand rose from Sho's head; he replaced the cap.
Sho pinched the visor between thumb and forefinger, tilting it up. "A leap of faith, huh?"
"A leap of faith," H affirmed, the very Image of logos.
"Yeah." The dampness from his aching palms would leave the brim ringed in red. His own fingertips. His mark. "I'll try plugging that number into my function, H. Perfect calculations lead to perfect results."
He turned from the roof's edge. Walked back towards the door. Listened to H chuckling to himself, saying something about how Sho had had him worried there for a second, looking out towards 428 and not back at Sho, when Sho reflected himself back on his heel. When Sho gazed out at the city he'd adopted, the city that'd adopted him, the strange attractor in all of its beautiful chaos, to which he would—in a moment—add another masterpiece: Himself. When he felt, for one final betrayal, his garbage body trembling.
No. He'd surpass his limits. On his own terms. Not on theirs. Not on his body's.
His own.
And he'd never stop running.
Not until he dropped.
"Q.E.D."
Sho never stopped running until he started falling, a nice trajectory from the roof of Pork City, not even reaching terminal velocity, only a pathetic 82.8673639016 metres per second when his heart stopped running.
