Chapter Text
Cannadrasteia Riqi is dying of theory.
When she was young, she loved the image of a clockwork universe, everything ticking together with firm causality, everything interlocked in one perfect mechanism. As she grew older, she knew this was at best an idealized dream, but she still loved coming up with theories and deductions that made sense of the world.
But now, when she makes a theory, it is always wrong. Somehow, she makes a mistake somewhere along the chain of deductions, or overlooks new evidence that changes everything. No matter how hard she tries, she can't ever be right -- and the proof of her failure very often takes the form of a horrific and implausible death she never sees coming.
She could perhaps avoid this. If she just stopped trying to understand the world, stopped trying to predict what will happen, stopped trying to find a way to make things make sense, she might be perfectly safe.
But a scientist who stops trying to make sense of the world can't be a scientist any more.
A desert town like this could never support a 24-hour Cinnabon. Cannadrasteia could explain how the economics would make no sense, how the low population and demographic profile would mean there aren't enough people who would visit in the wee hours of the morning to compensate for the operating costs, and how either a local diner or a more general fast-food chain would be much more reasonable if someone were to try to launch an all-night restaurant.
So, naturally, it came as no surprise to her that she ended up with her papers and diagrams spread all across a corner booth table in a thriving Cinnabon at 2:30 in the morning on the edge of town. Somehow, that was always the way.
It wasn't even empty, which would have at least had given it some justification as a money laundering operation. There were nearly a dozen other people there — a trio of coveralled workers laughing and swilling coffee, a couple on a late date night, a cross-country trucker on an urgent journey to deliver desperately-needed luxury cars to unconscionably rich people, a family making a late-night stop on their way to a far-off vacation spot.
She tried to push past the impossibility of it all to focus on her work. She traced her pen across a map of the town and surrounding roads, with special care to mark the road they'd used to come into town. There had to be a pattern…
"Food's up, Cannalona!"
Cannadrasteia sighed and shuffled some of her papers aside to make room. "I wish you wouldn't call me that. It makes me sound like an Italian pastry."
The taller woman was unperturbed. "A nickname's a nickname." She was taller than Cannadrasteia, and significantly skinnier, with curly red hair and a very Excrucian style to her. Chunky black boots, black skirt down to her ankles, black t-shirt advertising a metal band with an unintelligible logo in silver, long black duster, silver dangly earrings glinting in the light, a black beret. She looked like she'd rolled out of bed and half-heartedly decided to try to place in a gothic fashion show, just for fun.
Cannadrasteia always felt terminally underdressed around her, not that she particularly cared all that much. She'd never gotten into the aesthetic nearly as much as Suleik, though she recognized she'd probably never have worn a lab coat over black overalls when she'd thought she was human.
But all it took was one look into Suleik's eyes to remember the reason they'd been together all this time. Those eyes that were holes in the fabric of reality, eyes that had glitched out of existence and showed only a backdrop of blackness and falling stars, an infinite distance away. Eyes just like Cannadrasteia's.
She slid into the booth, setting down her tray with no regard for the spot Cannadrasteia had made in her paperwork, and took another look at the pastries she'd bought. "I got… classic, pecan, and existential dread rolls."
Cannadrasteia lifted her head from her papers and glowered at the tray of cinnamon rolls with a very skeptical gaze. "I'm absolutely sure one of those shouldn't be on the menu."
Suleik shrugged. "It's a broken world. It's inherently self-contradictory. It doesn't make sense, and shouldn't exist. So sometimes you get pecans on pastry." She passed Cannadrasteia a cup. "Also Chillatas."
Cannadrasteia huffed, but snatched the frozen drink from Suleik's hand and sucked at the straw grumpily. "Any word from Lodmath?"
"Texted me earlier. She'll be by in about an hour and a half — had to finish scouting out that hole she found between Orion and Scorpio." She picked bits off of her existential dread roll and popped them into her mouth. "So what are you working on?"
Cannadrasteia spread her papers out a bit more. "Charting the glitch." She pointed to a mark she'd made on the map, with a few words and numbers noted down beside it. "This is the hole in the sky Lodmath's working on." She added a couple more annotations to it, then moved across to another part of the map. "Here's the library where the mythic realm was bleeding through. This line over here is the marching cactus migration, the dots here are the forest of mannequins…"
"Ooh, did you get that one weird deer?"
"I'm still not convinced there was anything weird about it, but I did include it, yes. Mostly because I knew you'd never stop bugging me about it if I didn't."
"Trust me, no normal deer moves like that."
Cannadrasteia didn't argue. "I'm trying to piece together any common threads, any patterns of influence. There's got to be a way it all ties together, the core of the glitch. If I can just put the pieces together right."
"Okay, but problem: you've been one of us, what, two weeks now? Three?"
"It's been six months," Cannadrasteia said. "You know that. You met me barely a month after I figured it out, during that incident with the—"
Suleik waved a hand airily. "Whatever. Point being, it hasn't been long. So I guess it's fair that you still think that way. That the glitch is something that's, like, layered on top of a sensible world. But, well—" She gestured so as to encompass the entire restaurant, with special focus on the wall behind the counter, where a set of twelve Employee of the Month portraits now all showed her grinning face.
Cannadrasteia sighed. "I know it doesn't seem like it. But even broken things have patterns to them. Even something as fundamentally wrong as Creation has to have a reason why it's wrong. And I just… have to know."
She pushed her papers away and leaned back, staring out the dark window at the insufficiently-lit parking lot. "All the others like us, everyone else who's seen the glitch… they all want to tear everything down. And I get it. But I don't want to destroy the world before I figure out what the hell's wrong with it. Is it something inherent to it, or is it something inside us? Is it happenstance or by design? Is it something that can be fixed, or is it something that's fundamental to its nature, like how Gödel proved there will always be gaps in a logical system?" She ran a hand over her head, pushing her bangs up before letting them flop back down to brush her glasses. (You would think that eyes that technically didn't exist wouldn't require corrective lenses. You would be wrong.) "If we destroy the entirety of Creation and every living thing in it to remove the torment of its horrific glitch, and then discover, oh, the problem was just that we were allergic to causality and there's an easy cure, I'd be incredibly pissed."
"You always were the deep thinker," Suleik said noncommittally. "Smarter than me by a mile. It's just…"
"Um, excuse me?"
The kid was maybe about twelve or so, one of the family improbably stopped here on a late-night journey. He was looking up at Suleik with nervous awe, and squeezing a stack of baseball cards between his fingertips so hard they were turning white.
"I was just, um, wondering… Um, could you sign…" Overwhelmed by embarrassment, he thrust the cards and a pen at her, ducking his head to hide his blush.
Each card, of course, was of Suleik. A different pose, a different uniform, a different position, but every baseball player on them was her, mugging for the camera outrageously.
Smirking, she grabbed the pen and scrawled a quick signature across every card. "Here you go, kid. Maybe they'll be worth something someday, eh?"
He grabbed them back with a brilliant smile on his face. "Thank you, thank you so much!" He ran back to his family, waving the cards in glee. "I told you it was her! It's amazing — the top five baseball players in the world, and she's all right here!"
Suleik, struggling to hold back laughter, made a gesture with open palms towards the kid, as if to say to Cannadrasteia, 'well? There you are!'
"See, a world where that can happen and nobody blinks an eye — where people can actually think like that — there's no way there can be anything right about it, right?"
"I know, I know," Cannadrasteia said. "I'm probably wrong, like always. It's just…"
She trailed off, staring at her papers. "I was a scientist, once, you know. An astrophysicist. Back when I thought the world made sense. And then the world started killing me, over and over again. The first time was when I charted the orbit of a recently-discovered near-Earth asteroid. I thought it would make a pretty interesting circumpolar orbit." She gestured at her forehead, a finger-gun going off right between her eyes. "It actually settled into an orbit that took it right through my lab, killing me stone dead."
Suleik snickered. "Stone. Because it's an asteroid."
Cannadrasteia didn't see the humor. "The second time I died, I was making observations on a black hole, trying to pinpoint its location from the data we had. I figured it was out past the Andromeda Galaxy. Turned out it was in the apartment two doors down from me." She huffed. "Teach me to try to return misdelivered mail. I was over the event horizon before I knew what was happening."
"Must have been crushing to realize it."
Again, no laugh. "At that point, I had two theories. That somehow space was out to kill me, or that my antidepressants were making me hallucinate dying. I got a new prescription, and promptly had an allergic reaction that made my organs liquefy and my head explode.
"It took me a while to figure it out, but it was inevitable. It was that every theory I made was wrong. Even when it was beyond all rational possibility. And most of those theories wanted to kill me. My reasoning, my deductions, my theories and explanations, they turned on me. Everything important to me was slipping out of my hands like sand.
"When I finally understood my bane, and how the world was flawed, I dove deep into Ninuan," she said, every word hauled painfully up from the depths inside her. "I wanted to see if going deep enough into that… that un-place would show me something that would make it all make sense, would give me the perspective I needed. And when I got as far from reality as I could bear, I met a man with eyes like ours, who radiated power into the nothingness. I told him what had been happening to me, and why I couldn't bear it. I asked him why I was always so wrong.
"And he told me: 'You are not wrong. Your logic is impeccable. Your data is reliably sourced. Your methodology is rigorous. Your bibliographies unimpeachable. You are not wrong. It is the world that is wrong. It is Creation that takes proper logic and understanding and makes a mockery of them. If it were not for the glitch, your theories would be shown to be beautiful and true, as they are. And that is why we must destroy the world.'"
Suleik looked impressed. "Wow. I wish I'd had someone saying sweet things like that when I was new."
"I think it's the cruelest thing anyone could ever say to me."
"Oh." Suleik paused to think about that for a moment.
"I could have joined the Riders right there and then. He was reaching out to me, making the offer with no strings attached. And I wanted to. I wanted to tear down the world, find out what was wrong with it, and maybe rebuild it up from scratch in a way that made sense, or maybe replace it with nothingness that had all that was good about it and none of the bad."
"So why didn't you?"
"Because at that moment, the only thing I wanted more than that was to punch him in his smug face." She thought a moment. "His not-face. His λ-face. Whatever."
The Cinnabon was suddenly flooded with a brilliant white light, harsh and blinding, shining through the windows from outside. Even eyes that were nothing but empty openings to the distant cosmos couldn't help but squeeze shut, tearing up at the intensity, as the ordinary people in the shop shrieked and dove under the tables or tried to cover their heads with their arms.
A bullhorn crackled on. "Suleik Sarauwa! Come out with your hands up! We have three hundred and twenty-five warrants for your arrest!"
Suleik couldn't help but laugh with abandon as she bolted to her feet and dashed for the kitchen, making her way for the rear exit. Cannadrasteia scrambled to grab her papers, stuffing them into her bag as she followed, still grousing.
"You don't get to say the data must be wrong because the theory's right! That's like going fishing and bragging about catching the lake!"