Three things motivate men.
Power.
Lust.
And grief.
If one does not get you, one of the others will. And as much as any philosophers (no, not those Philosophers) tell you otherwise, this is always the case.
Three things that men have:
Strength.
Intelligence.
Charisma.
Few have one, even fewer have all three. Whichever you have, you will use it, whether you intend to or not. Not to do so is to deny your nature.
Hal had no need for power, and lust, as far as he could see, was a rather red-blooded (and four-letter) word that happened mostly to other people. During his college years, there had been rather a lot of shouting and banging going on behind him when he was engrossed by something else (it had seemed very important at the time), and he had the sneaking suspicion that it was around that time that he should have been getting all his lust, as it were, in.
…
Bubblegum Crisis, that's what it was. He had been really into Bubblegum Crisis.
And as for power, well, he had been told he was powerful. Usually by kindly men with thick accents and nice suits, who then usually got noticeably less kindly (and developed much thicker accents, surprisingly) when he refused to acquiesce to their demands. But mostly, as far as he could see, he was powerful only when used as a pawn. Which he was fine with. It was only those with great physical power who regularly got into trouble of the arrgh-crack-squish-bleed variety, and Hal, who on one memorable occasion had had to have help lifting the expanded Sunday edition of the paper, was not one of them. He was okay with most circumstances provided they gave him enough drawing paper and something intriguingly circuity to play with. If he could just stop armed militants bursting through his door and trying to convince him, though not in so few words, to use his power for evil, his life would have been perfect.
But grief.
Some men are just born under an auspice. Hal would have dismissed outright the idea of a personality gene, but, as he got older, the idea of an indefensible fault in his blood; a black smudge somewhere in the double helix, loomed large in his mind. Everyone who he had loved, he had lost.
Was about to lose.
He put the idea far from his mind; tried to work around it, as a mountaineer works around the crack in a narrow path. With about the same level of success. His thoughts tumbled down again: genetics. Genetics had not been kind to him. Names and faces, caught at different angles, as the eye does, lined up and filed past him, the sounds of laughter (or the screaming oh god the screaming but what was worse was the sigh of the soon to knows it's hopeless) echoed past him.
The doctors had not given David long. That was three months ago.
He was not allowed back in the sickroom. For his own good. (Whether the doctor had been referring to him or David he had not said.)
He would be allowed a chance to say goodbye.
It was not enough.
He was not selfish.
He was never really allowed the chance to be selfish, and probably would not take it if offered. When the meek inherited the earth, Hal would be right at the back of the queue, and would say "oh no really, I couldn't possibly" when offered his slice. For it is difficult to be selfish without a self, and Hal's mind was moored to his body with so silvery and insubstantial a thread that desires of the flesh and the myriad earthly thralls found it difficult to work up the enthusiasm. They gave up, dispirited, when Hal drifted back from chasing a promising variable and noticed them for the first time in five hours of solid tempting. (Good quality, workmanlike tempting, too. None of the cheap stuff.)
(Neither was he the kind to go mwahaha. He had heard too many stories from David about this particular kind of megalomaniac, told in a tone of exasperated wonder. "He had me pinned in a corner," David would say, shaking his head ruefully, kicking the snow from his boots, "and he just started... talking. On and on." David would continue, in a low voice, "All about how I had made my final mistake, how the world was finally his. The prototype plans were stting right there, in my eyeline, and he's trying to talk me to death. And the laugh- mwahaha. Mwahahaha. Ugh. Kinda makes me sick just to think about it." Dealings with Philanthropy and the curiously... colourful opponents it brought them into contact with had more or less, (he hoped) immunized him against this kind of behavior.)
However.
Something inside his head had gone snap. Looking back (if that was possible, given the nature of events; "back" becomes a relative concept very easily) he could not identify what it was. It was not selfishness, and he did not let his emotions over come him for very long. (All he had felt was… numb.) But, at that moment, something had snapped in his head, and the desperate survival instinct of the prey had kicked in- no no, that's mine, give it back, don't take that from me, leave me that at least, leave me that- like a starving man tugging at scraps, he had dug in his heels and, with a last flail of his intellectual vigour, had hit upon a plan.
Surprisingly simple.
All you had to do was think.
Intellect, powered by grief.
God help us all.
He had begun to think about... perfection.
He had begun to think about it seriously. Quite a lot, really. For hours on end. Continuously. Over. And over. And over. Again. Couldn't get it out of his head. Odd, that. (He had heard that this was a sign of illness, psychological sickness. He didn't think so. He didn't feel different. Was acting perfectly rationally.)
"Because, you see, there is such a thing as perfection," he had told the wall.
"I see it, sometimes." This quietly, in the tone of a closet fanatic. "When you stay awake long enough, if you work hard enough on something… you see it." The eyes glittered, under the glass. "Only for a split second, but you do. And it can solve everything, if you only see it. Ha," he said quietly, "But you don't believe me, do you?" This he addressed to the fireplace, who seemed unmoved.
"But I saw it the other night. The perfect equation. I won't lie to you, I'd been having a difficult time. I'd…he's… but never mind. And it… jumped out at me, really. It's quite simple, once you realise the laws of physics are rather arbitrary. You can persuade X to be nearly anything, and if you can fool X, you can infiltrate maths, and if you can do that, you can get X past the rest of physics too."
"And… and it's always so fleeting. " His hands dropped, weighed by some memory.
"But… I can see it. " he said. "In things. In places. In… times."
He's wrong. There is no such thing as the perfect equation.
Equations are created by humans, in an attempt to get the universe to stay put and stop squirming for five minutes.
Humans are flawed.
And the human mind, it has not often been said, is like a rubber sheet. Thoughts are lead weights. They distort things around them. You may not mean to make a mistake, but you will. You may not mean to remember something, but you will.
God help them all.
He had studied the machine uneasily. It had the black, oily quality of something that has poked its insidious way through quite a few dimensions to be there, but wasn't letting on.
(If ever you see a rip in your bedroom wall, late, in the dead of night, and a faint, whispering voice chatter through it; look through it, if you are brave enough, and you will see a grin. The teeth of the grin will be that colour.) It had the squat, greasy smugness of a machine that knows it is smarter than the operator, but is also smart enough not to let on. And it seemed to be leering at him. Hal screwed up all his courage, and peered into the slit running horizontally through the casing of the machine. Inside, he could make out...
a glint of toothed wheel, the rounded sheen of two iron spheres, and blackness. Nothing more.
Hmm.
The Koppelthorn engine was, to put it mildly, an odd duck. The kind of duck that quacks in colours and knocks over Tokyo. He had been given it in the spirit of good-riddance by a friend in the military, and had rightly refused to tangle with it for niggling fear of explosion. Nevertheless, times were desperate, and Hal was forced to do something he never thought he'd do.
He opened the manual.
" 'Thank you for purchasing the Koppelthorn Engine. Be careful in operation, as this may be the first non-Boolean operating system you have ever used…' He frowned, skipped a few pages. "Blah blah blah… 'untold temporal havoc', so on so forth… 'mac compatible'…"
He threw the manual aside; it landed with a pflapf on the workbench, where it coughed up a handful of dust. This was no good. Clearly, precision engineering was required.
He took a deep breath, and, taking careful aim, hit the device with a hammer.
He looked, with bleary eyes, at the screen before him, at the finally compiled code. It was an… odd programme. A unique one, certainly.
Perhaps that was something of an understatement.
He had the sneaking suspicion it could rip holes in time.
Whenever it pleased.
Whenever he pleased.
Something more, he felt, was called for. He cleared his throat.
"Ahem." he said.
"Mwahaha. Mwahahahahahaha."
It rang hollow, somehow.
And all it would take was to push a button.
He frowned at the machine. Normally Hal was quite conversant (chatty, even) with technology, but this time he hesitated before initiating the programme. This lapse in curiosity was rare enough in itself, as his poor, beleaguered oft-burned eyebrows would concur. He was, in all truth, a coward. And he had a sneaking suspicion that he was dealing with something that he probably couldn't (shouldn't) handle.
(And a large part of his brain was pointing out excitedly that a shape-shifting robot assassin (inevitably with, yes a thick accent, but no suit) would probably become involved.)
But he thought on- of perfection, and loss, and whether or not, he thought blackly, that karma owed him this at least, and of love, on the battlef…
(He groaned. Age gives one perspective. Well, even if he could only go back briefly, he could at least try and do something about that particular moment.)
He took a deep, wobbly breath.
One stroke of a key…
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Well, I finally posted it. Damn you, damn you all to hell etc. I don't even know what you'd call this- alternate continuity what-if fic? Bleh. Anyway, please ignore my entirely disreputable prologue, if it suits you, and skip straight to the main: this one promises to be dense, nerdish, deeply weird, but fun.
Well, for me anyway.
Disclaimer, of sorts: I'd be terrifically flattered if Konami kicked off over this, but Bigod, lads, I don't think it'll happen. Besides, Hideo Kojima (insert guitar riff) knows I'm joking. Because Hideo Kojima (insert guitar riff) knows everything.