The three scraps of paper crinkled in between the three sets of trembling fingers that held them.
"Johnny, you first."
Johnny took a breath.
"Antinomy."
Johnny's gaze darted to the golden-eyed elder, who nodded faintly.
"Aporia."
The last of the trio squinted over the monocle on his left eye.
"Paradox."
There was a collective round of silence as the old men let these new, foreign words settle into familiarity.
The individual dubbed 'Antinomy' was the first to shatter the silence. "Why the heck are we doing this."
The man known as 'Paradox' gave his companion a pointed look. "I'll take it you aren't too enthusiastic about your codename, Johnny."
Antinomy coughed into his fist. "No, I love being named after a chemical element. And 'Aporia' sounds like a Pokemon."
"That's Antimony, not Antinomy." A magenta eyebrow shot up, unimpressed. "And really, Johnny? Pokemon? Really?"
"I was really hoping for something…cooler."
"Ah, then…what do you suggest our codenames be?" 'Aporia', who was not a Pokemon, piped up next to Antinomy.
"I've always wanted my codename to be something among the lines of… 'Victor Blade'. You know. Something badass." Antinomy swept into a dramatic pose and broke out into a grin, flashing the other two men his dentures.
"…" Aporia tilted his head ever-so-slightly.
Paradox's magenta eyebrow arched even higher. "Badass?" he repeated dubiously.
"Our codenames should promote youth and vigor," Antinomy urged as he dropped his pose, his shoulders emitting a brittle 'crack' from the movement. "It should add spirit to our mission to save the world and just…Antinomy. I mean, I don't think people in Japan can even pronounce that properly."
Paradox snorted. "Yes, but 'Victor Blade'?"
"Fine. How about 'Dark Glass'? That sounds cool, right?"
"How about you get acquainted to being called 'Antinomy', Antinomy," Paradox intoned with a cross of his arms. "Z-ONE said we can't switch our codenames once we chose them."
"That makes no sense. It makes even less sense than the method we chose our codenames in the first place," Mr. Shrimp Whiskers muttered.
"Perhaps if we understood the meaning behind our codenames…" Aporia suggested.
"A good point." Paradox produced an archaic-looking dictionary from somewhere on his being. He flipped open the cover and adjusted his monocle. "Seeing as this was your idea," —he jerked his chin at Aporia— "I shall do your name first. Hmm…from the looks of it, 'Aporia' is a logical term meaning 'doubt'."
"Well, it's true. He's far less gullible than I am."
"Shut up, Johnny," Paradox deadpanned without looking up, "Continuing on—although 'doubt' is the main definition of 'Aporia', my sources indicate an even earlier use for the word."
"…hey, Aporia, remember that one time Z-ONE played that April Fool's trick on us by saying he invented a machine that changes people's genders…"
"—AHEM, as I was saying," Paradox glared, his monocle going askew again, "…'Aporia' was a Greco-Roman mythological deity that served to be the abstract personification of a specific human condition. That is, helplessness, without power, lack of control, or in other words…despair," he ended, his face surfacing dramatically.
Paradox locked gaze with Aporia, whose expression immediately darkened.
Antinomy, on the other hand, was wholly oblivious to the huge fountain of WTFissues sprouting from the golden-eyed man next to him. He rounded to his companion with a supportive look.
"Your codename is pretty cool. Despair, huh?"
"…it comes from watching everybody I ever knew and love die in front of my eyes."
"The coolest name," Antinomy replied blithely.
Aporia chewed on some more ellipses while Paradox just shook his head in galling disbelief.
"Please do mine next," Sir Sunglasses pressed eagerly.
"Alright, then. Let's see here…" Paradox riffled through the book for a minute or two before finding the desired entry. "…'Antinomy' means the mutual incompatibility, real or apparent, of two laws."
Antinomy nodded in new-found appreciation. "Truly, this is a deep codename."
Paradox fixed him with an unimpressed stare. "You have no idea what I just said, do you?"
"… …I fix motorcycles, not read books."
"I really ought to talk to Z-ONE about sending you on this mission, you know."
Aporia intervened with a well-time cough to steer the conversation back on subject. "What about your name, Paradox? What does it mean?"
Forever vain, Paradox immediately took up the offer to talk about himself. "My name is commonplace knowledge, which is probably for the best, all things considered. A 'paradox' is a logical statement that leads to a contradiction or a situation which, if true, defies logic or reason."
"Wait," Antinomy suddenly interrupted, "doesn't that mean the exact same thing as my name?"
Curiosity piqued. "Hmm…I do see the similarities between the two," Paradox admitted thoughtfully at how Johnny had pearls of wisdom from time to time.
Antinomy saw the opportunity and grabbed it. "Seeing as we can't have two of us being called the same thing (imagine the confusion that would bring), the only logical conclusion is pick a different codename!" he exclaimed. His eyes shone with veritable excitement, not that any of it was visible behind his visor.
Paradox mowed down Antinomy's dreams. "No dice, Mr. Blade. I said they were similar, not that they're the same thing. They're both essentially illogical impossibilities, but there are differences."
The monocle-wearing elder cleared his throat and straightened up, his posture suddenly modeling that of an academic professor's.
"Let's start off with Immanuel Kant who uses an antinomy to prove the thesis that time must have a beginning. He does this by showing that if time had no beginning, then an infinity would have elapsed up until the present moment. This is a manifest contradiction because infinity cannot, by definition, be completed by 'successive synthesis'—yet just such a finalizing synthesis would be required by the view that time is infinite…"
Sometime later:
"…since, necessarily, no time elapses in this pre-temporal void, then there could be no alteration, and therefore nothing including time would ever come to be: so the antithesis is proven. Consequently, 'antinomy' and 'paradox' are—while extraordinarily similar in nature—in fact, two different principles."
Somewhere mid-exposition, Paradox had wheeled in a portable blackboard to help illustrate his ideas. Said blackboard was now chocked full of convoluted sketches of infinity circles, lengthy equations with arrows pointing in every which direction, and the occasional smiley face doodled in the corners by Antinomy when Paradox wasn't looking.
By the time Paradox had finished his lengthy spiel, Antinomy had fallen asleep standing up and Aporia was just returning from the kitchen with a cup of tea. Antinomy let out a soft yelp when a gentle tug on his arm jolted him awake. Sir Sunglasses hastily swung his gaze around.
"Is he done? No, really, is he?"
A dry laugh. "Hah. Hah. …you're a riot, Johnny," Paradox snarked sarcastically, pushing up his monocle that stubbornly refused to stay on.
Aporia ran his gaze over the blackboard drawings. Having only obtained a middle school education, he didn't really grasp most of the high-level theories and philosophical concepts that Paradox had been lecturing on. However, he did have a pretty sharp mind and a good eye for detail. After all, it was his street-smarts that kept him alive all these years.
"So in a nutshell…our codenames mean 'doubt', 'incompatibility', 'contradiction', and… 'area', respectively," Aporia summed up, taking a sip of his tea.
"D-I-C-A," Antinomy spelled out, counting each letter on his saggy, wrinkled fingers.
Paradox frowned, the traces of irritation on his face being overwritten by somberness. "Well…the truth is, Z-ONE's name doesn't necessary translate into 'area'. Z-ONE adopted his codename quite some time ago—far before us, at least. According to him, 'Z' is the last letter of the English alphabet and the 'one' is an expression of solitude. His name symbolizes the reality that he is…or at least will be the last one remaining on earth."
The three friends dropped into a dark silence to brood on the transience of their mortal lives.
"For Z-ONE, this whole quest can be seen as a battle of karma," Paradox concluded quietly, "A test to see whether or not man can truly best its deeds of the past."
"So in other words, 'Z-ONE' means karma?"
"…and now our acronym spells D-I-C-K."
They silently brooded on that for a while too.
"This does not bode well for our team morale," Aporia finally commented.
"…"
"…"
A floating shrimp-mobile bobbled in to witness three old men gathered under a massive thunderstorm-cloud of depression. Z-ONE would have canted his head to the side to convey curiosity, but that action would just flip the entire machine upside down so he ended up looking like a giant comma.
"My friends…why the long faces?"
Antinomy immediately jumped up. "Z-ONE! I want to change my codename!"
"That is not allowed. It has been decided by the sacred ritual of which decisions the four of us has vowed to uphold."
"Why?!" protested Antinomy.
"No objections," said Z-ONE.
"I tried to tell him that—" kvetched Paradox.
"Objections shall be thrown into a pit and burned with petrol," said Z-ONE.
"Z-ONE…" sighed Aporia.
"Anyone who chooses to object will wake up to find significant alterations done to their robot bodies."
That got them to shut up.
"…will they be cool alterations?"
Z-ONE fixed a blue eye on Antinomy with a stony gaze. Shrimp-whiskers shrugged, looking sheepish. Z-ONE turned away from him.
"Johnny, consider your D-wheel confiscated until the start of next year."
Aghast. "W-what? But I'm not even going to live that long! Not unless you happened to discover a way to reverse my stage-four cancer!"
A deafening hush suddenly fell over the other three men.
"Even science has its limits, I'm afraid," Paradox spoke up sympathetically.
"Indeed," Z-ONE concurred, "Science has a long way to go before it can hope to battle cancer."
From Antinomy's wrinkly lips flew out an indignant sputter. "Wait…so you mean to tell me that we came up with a way to go back in time—but we still don't have a cure for cancer? How is this even possible?"
"Nanomachines, son."
Flabbergasted silence. "… What does that even mean?"
"It means that while we can't cure cancer, we can go back in time and stop cancer from ever coming into being," Paradox explained impatiently.
"We could've made significant breakthroughs in the realm of medicine if you and Z-ONE didn't set fire to that oncologist we found 30 years ago," Antinomy snapped. "Then I wouldn't be dying. Of cancer, I mean."
"I did no such thing," Z-ONE said. "The nitroglycerin combusted itself."
"Enough with it, Johnny! I don't want to hear any more quibble from you!" Paradox finally exploded into a conniption. He was up to here with Antinomy's bellyaching. "You've pinned the blame on us these past some-odd fifty years for every single thing that has gone wrong! 'The showerhead is broken—why couldn't we have found a survivor who was a plumber?' 'A PhD in Astrophysics isn't going to make this vegan lasagna taste any better!' I'm surprised you haven't complained about Aporia's lack of expertise as a world-renowned waffle chef when we found him!"
Paradox enunciated his point by flourishing his arm at a slightly meek Aporia. The last of the four grandpas had subtly shrunk back while the two friends duked it out. He couldn't help but feel a little out of place in the banter as most of the events in question had occurred long before he joined the group.
"You burnt those things into a crisp that morning!" Antinomy shot back. "I nearly choked from eating that garbage!"
"You are a grown man—learn to cook yourself, you lazy squatter!"
Aporia idly tapped his cane against his foot. "…I do happen to recall an old family recipe on Belgian waffles, if anyone is still interested."
"I don't have time to cook because I spend it all removing the two pounds of hair you leave in the shower drain every single day."
"You leave my hair out of this!"
"My friends, my friends," came the low booming voice of Z-ONE who had been lingering in the backdrop, commiserating over how the fate of mankind was being entrusted to this lot of fools. "…please cease this pointless arguing. You shall see the significance of your codenames in due time."
Everyone calmed down, their temperaments placated by the levelheadedness of their leader.
A brooding silence invaded the atmosphere once again.
Unable to bear it any longer, Antinomy finally addressed the elephant in the room with a flat, "…I still think there's a better way to choose our codename than to pick one out of a hat."