Chapter Ten - Basic Game Theory Part 2
Waking up in hospital is never like it is in all of the movies. Consciousness does not come completely, it merely fragments and twists. A week feels like a second when you're trying to wake, unsure if this is life, death or the undefined haze inbetween, and similarly, a second feels like a wake when you twist in the night, your body plagued by pains and nausea. Because the morphine can only do so well.
When Don woke, the first thing he asked if he was dead. He could not speak, but his words echoed in his head, having nowhere else to go. A slur and a cough brought his brother to his side, but the image distorted and faded as soon as it appeared. Another day passed, those words echoing in his brain like the lyrics on scratched vinyl. No one answered yet.
Two weeks in a state of perpetual confusion. Sometimes it felt like a month, sometimes it felt like a day, but it was irrefutably a fortnight. He could sometimes hear people around him; talking to him. He heard David bring him flowers, while insisting to Colby that Claudia made him bring them. Don would have smiled if he was aware of his actions. Instead, those echoes in his head just kept on bouncing. He heard Charlie, and his dad, lots of times, asking him to get better. As if sheer willpower alone would help him recover from the pain and the trauma his body had experienced. But it didn't, not yet anyway.
He also heard Nikki, talking to him. Her words were clearer than most, perhaps because they were the most recent that he could remember. The DA had approved the case, and he was no longer considered a felon. For his clean service record, his intentions and the situation which his felony was committed in, he would not have to serve in state jail, though he was suspended from duty until further notice, but she swore that she heard a little birdy high up in the food chain saying that he wouldn't be gone for long. That the Bureau needed him. Now whether this was just gossip or wishful thinking, Don didn't know or care.
Finally, the thing which tugged him from a three day long slumber, was the sound of chalk hitting blackboard - one he was all too familiar with. Surprised to realise that he could, he smiled slightly, and tried to open his eyes. Everything was blurry for the first few minutes, but things gradually cleared, as his eyes refocussed to the world.
"Chuck, why is there a blackboard in my hospital room?" Don asked, surveying his brother through slitted eyes. Charlie leaped, shocked by the sudden noise from behind him. Although Don's voice was slurred, his little brother appeared to understand him just fine. Call it brotherly intuition.
"Well since I was spending a lot of time here, I thought that I could multitask. Plus, the nurses were really angry when I wrote on the windows." Charlie explained, and Don couldn't help but to smile further at his boyish smile and the smear of chalk on his cheek.
"What you working on?"
"P vs NP." Charlie said, and Don groaned.
"Charlie!-"
"Don, I was joking!" Charlie laughed, gesturing towards the board, and making his brother roll his eyes. "It's basic game theory. A branch of the Cognitive Emergence Theory, simplified and distilled."
"Basic game theory, huh?"
"Yes, what happened with you and Nikki and Lieve really set off a train of thought." Charlie said, holding the finger of chalk to his chin and creating yet another dusty smudge. Suddenly, he darted across the room and curled up on the chair next to Don's bed, pulling up his legs so they were crossed. "About relationships and trust within these relationships. It's not disimilar to Colby's trust metric, but... different." Don would have raised an eyebrow could he control his muscles.
"So dissimilar." He surmised, and Charlie glared at him, so he shut up.
"I mean that every single action, every thought, every lie which twisted its way into what happened two weeks ago, can be explained by basic game theory."
"Charlie, you can't possibly think that if you'd worked this out, you'd come to the conclusion that I'd be blown up." Charlie shook his head.
"I'm talking about the relationships between the people that's the basic game theory, not what these people did, but with a little help from Nikki and Megan, I can estimate what kind of actions the people will take based on their relationships and the time-lines, and predict what will happen." He sounded so happy that Don felt bad to shoot him down.
"Charlie, you can't predict the future with math."
"If I have the right data I can!" Don shook his head slightly, trying to contain his laughter because he knew that it would cause his chest pain.
"No way, Chuck. I don't buy it." Charlie glared, then stuck his nose in the air.
"What do you know? You need a calculator to know the square root of 207." He said, pompously, and returned to his board.
"Yeah, what do I know?" Don watched his baby brother, thinking back to what had happened in the motel room, and wondering what would have happened had he lost him. "I love you, Chuck." Charlie smiled widely at the board, still writing away.
"Love you too, Don."