The movie she’s longed to see of her young self in London is the one she just watched in that flurry of memories dislodged by the upload. What more does she need? How could revisiting that time in its unfiltered state improve upon the story her memory has made? What if, like those vile moments inside her father’s mind, the truth disappoints?
Roxy understands now why Chris Salazar opposes even the most private, limited use of Own Your Unconscious. The logic of this process pushes out. She feels it as a natural force, a current drawing her consciousness beyond the limits of her self into a wider sphere. To converge, to be subsumed—how she longs for this! The prospect shimmers before her: a fulfillment of everything she has wanted in her life. Make my mark.
Energized by a need to act before she becomes afraid, Roxy aligns the Cube with her Wi-Fi and sits cross-legged in front of it. She provides the required DNA swipe from inside her cheek and the Cube begins to hum, Artie purring rapturously at the rush of new heat. She feels a whirring deep within her body, the gush of her consciousness pouring onto the Internet: a torrent of memories and moments, many painful—some actually memories of pain—all emptying into a cosmos that writhes and twists like an expanding galaxy. Her father is there, somewhere. Roxy feels their memories conjoin at last, like their two arms swinging on that long bright night. The whole of her past whirls through a portal and vanishes onto a separate sheet of graph paper.
And on this one, a secret new life known only to herself, Roxy will go to D&D and say, to Chris and Molly, “I’m ready to make my character. Will you help?”
i, the Protagonist
Chris Salazar couldn’t remember what sort of work he’d envisioned when he first fell under the sway of Sid Stockton, the weirdly charismatic CEO of SweetSpot Networks, during a pandemic Zoom interview, and wound up ditching his editing job for Sid’s entertainment start-up, but it definitely hadn’t involved filling entire walls with algebra. Yet here he was, two years later, with an aching arm and a racing heart, having run through several dry-erase pens defending his suite of “algebraizations”—a word he would have had trouble defining two years ago but now used upward of eighty times a day （he’d counted）。
Why, the professional counters wanted to know （Jarred especially; Stanford ’19, like Chris, but a calc major）， had Chris algebraized A Drink in the Face—
a （+ drink） x （action of throwing drink） = a （– drink） + i?2
—making i, the protagonist, the target of the hurled drink rather than the hurler?
Without looking directly at Jarred, whom Chris made a point of ignoring, he explained to the group that a drink-hurling protagonist belonged to a different story block, Hero Delivers Comeuppance to Perennial Jerk, which Chris had algebraized several months back.
Jarred was dissatisfied; Jarred was always dissatisfied with Chris, and the feeling was mutual. “Shouldn’t i be squared after the drink lands in his face?” he pressed.
“Having a drink thrown at you is humiliating,” Chris said firmly. “Which is more likely to make i feel reduced, or i halved.”
“Yes,” intoned Aaron, their boss, a man of so few words that the occasional word he did utter had the cleaving finality of an ax splitting a log.
Chris experienced a jolt of manic exhilaration. He was killing it, crushing it; murdering this meeting; he was destroying Jarred, having powered through an entire set of algebraizations with nary a mathematical change required. These included, in addition to A Drink in the Face, which he’d catalogued as 3Aim:
A Slap in the Face [3Aiir]
“You Never Cared for Me.” （Shouting） [3Aviiiy]
“How Dare You?” （Whispering） [3Aviiiz]
Protagonist Hits Bottom Alone, at Night, on City Streets （with Soulful Music） [3Aixb]
Protagonist, Drunk, Drugged, or Hit on Head, Stumbles Through Distorted Landscape [3Aixd]