A Nobel prize in the physics category for research on matter-antimatter asymmetry in the cosmos, specifically in the context of neutrino/antineutrino relations, was no small feat. Neither, for the matter, was the admirable accomplishment of being on the team that created Jython, an implementation of the Python programming language designed to run on the Java platform. With a resume long enough to represent ten men and an education from Cornell University, Dr. Pearson was your hardware guy, your software guy, your 'go-to guy' in general.
All of this over the course of a few decades. He'd assumed he was only at the beginning of his journey, and he was thus sorely surprised to find that 2002 would mark the zenith of his career. How soon he realized both that he was a modern Daedalus and that Jon Spiro would be the Icarus that would send them both careening into the sea.
Pearson paused in his work to take a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
Or would it be more accurate to say, he wondered, that he was Icarus — which, of course, would thus make Spiro the sun that cast him down from the heavens.
Jon Spiro was the sun, he decided, he was Icarus, and that… boy was the ocean that had damned them both. Pearson readjusted his glasses as he tapped away at his laptop, slightly shaking his head in annoyance as he did so — he was no good with metaphors. It was no matter, though. He would clean up any odd phrases or clunky language when he finally finished his autobiography. He was an American, after all — getting the chance to self publish a twee memoir was his God-given right.
He was torn from his thoughts when his phone rang. Dr. Pearson let it ring through once, allowing himself a small chuckle at the first few notes of Toccata & Fugue in D Minor that played over his speaker. It's really the small joys in life, he grinned, finally accepting the call.
"Hello, Bill," he said, leaning back in his leather chair. "I assume you're calling to apologize for earlier, of course? I do hope the fact that your little boss' project would be lost without my aid doesn't weight too heavily on you."
Pearson waited for Kong to snap at him for ribbing him, but the line was silent. He cleared his throat nervously, straightening in his seat despite the fact he was alone in his office. "Billy?"
"You were wrong, Pearson."
Although he'd usually gripe about not being referred to his proper title, Dr. Pearson found that he suddenly had much more pertinent matters to worry about.
"W- how was I wrong? What are you talking about, Kong?"
"Whatever calculations you were bragging about earlier were full of shit. The demon never showed up."
Pearson blanched. "My calculations were —? Excuse me, demons? What the hell are you talking about?"
He heard the faint sound of voices speaking Italian in the background. Billy let out a beleaguered sigh, the sound of him shifting his weight in his nice polyester suit crinkling over the receiver.
"It never appeared on stage," Billy clarified, patience short. "Paradizo wants to see your math as soon as we get back. She wants to know if she was comparing her own conclusions to junk back when you said her prediction looked good."
Pearson hesitated, chewing on the inside of his lip.
"Pearson."
Fiddling with his a pen, Pearson forced himself to swallow. "Sure. Of course."
The line went dead.
Practically throwing it down on the desk, Pearson chucked his cell phone away as if it had scalded him. He needed to work quickly. Inhaling shakily, he pulled open his work program on his desktop's screen.
Glancing at the faxed documents Paradizo had sent him, his eyes flickered between the pages on his desk and the glowing computer. He'd never forged his work in such a short amount of time before.
First time for everything, I guess, he thought, almost in hysterics.
After a moment, he got to work. The kid's predictions came from three places: frequency of social media posts with similar keywords, power outrages that messed with electronic memory, and proximity to historical sites. She'd see his bullshit a mile away if he populated his working prediction model with the same variables as hers — that was out of the question. New stuff, new stuff, he screwed his eyes shut, keeping the phrase on his mind almost like a mantra.
"Uh… let's try… mapping output to…," he tapped the desk with the pen as he tried to think. "Time of day?"
He cursed. "Stupid."
He didn't have time to make an entirely new set of variables. Pearson would have to settle for making up one — he'd keep the variables of social media keywords and spikes in surges of data loss. He had no more than an hour to reverse engineer a working explanation for why he'd been so confident in backing Paradizo's calculations about whatever this weird event was that she was tracking. If she so much as suspected that he'd simply been a yes-man on this, she'd be livid. And if she was livid, he shuddered, Kong would be a damn hurricane of a man.
Wracking his brain, he attempted to find a common thread behind the phenomena. Time of day was out of the question, he snorted. The data points he'd been given when he'd started the project pointed to the events occurring with increasing frequency.
Pearson's eyes snapped open.
The moon.
He remembered that from his dream. The moon was always there.
Fingers tapping on the keyboard unsteadily, he pulled up each of the days Minerva had listed as being significant.
The phase wasn't the same, he frowned. But then again, he wasn't really expecting it to be. That wouldn't produce the same exponential results Paradizo had generated. He scrolled through the news section of Bing, his computer humming softly.
October 21st, 2002: Orionid meteor shower. November 19th, 2002: Full Moon and Penumbral lunar eclipse. December 21st, 2002: Ursid meteor shower and December solstice. January 29th, 2003: Mercury at dichotomy. February 16th, 2003: Full Moon. March 24th, 2003: Moon at Last Quarter. April 7th, 2003: Close approach and conjunction of the Moon and Saturn. April 28th, 2003: Alpha-Scorpiid meteor shower, conjunction and close approach of the Moon and Venus.
And today — May 7th, 2003. Transit of Mercury.
Just out of curiosity, he typed in the next date he knew. May 15th.
Sure enough, there was going to be both a Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse.
He grinned. He could make a mountain out a molehill.
"There ain't no faith like bad faith," he muttered under his breath, not bothering to keep the glee out of his voice. His once frenzied tapping on the keyboard now relaxed into an almost musical clacking, and he hummed along as he worked.
The idea that the cosmos were also impacting these strange events that Paradizo was tracking sounded grand enough to be his dummy variable. It was easy enough to find some cosmological event occurring on the days he already knew that the event would happen — and, more importantly, the idea of outer space fitting into this little theory Minerva had sounded nice. Sounding nice was what mattered the most here.
At the end of the day, so what if he'd fumbled a prediction — he wasn't always right, he reasoned. The odds he played were still far better than anyone else's.
Billy Kong would get to meet this… demon, or whatever, soon. Pearson was sure of it. His luck was changing, he smiled at the 8-ball on his desk. Things were looking up for him these days.
Many, many years ago, Dr. Pearson had been known as Abe Pearson, and Abe Pearson had been hated.
Pearson knew why, of course. He'd been annoying. A certified dickhead, really. A bonafide know-it-all in a small town. He seemed to know almost everything, but one of the only things he could never figure out was why no one else was as good at figuring out the world as he was.
In elementary school, he'd made his friend Elisa cry when he mocked her for not knowing what she should have studied for the math final. He'd gotten 100%, whereas she'd received a low C-.
"I looked at the study guide, same as you!" she'd sniffed at him angrily, storming off to throw out her red-marked test.
He'd genuinely been flummoxed. He hadn't even looked at the study guide — he just knew what he had to study and then, well, he'd studied.
In middle school, he'd pissed off a group of his friends when he spoiled the ending of The Empire Strikes Back. It'd been a week or so before it was due to be released — he'd bragged that his uncle had taken him to the Hollywood premiere as an early 13th birthday present.
The only uncle he had worked construction over in the Bronx.
He'd been right about the ending, though. For the rest of the year, he holed himself up in the corner of the library to study alone.
(Dreams, dreams, dreams)
In his junior year of high school, he'd dreamed that his house burned down. The image of curling smoke and licking flames was burned into his memory, and he felt that he could picture how it would feel to gasp for breath, only to choke on the blistering smog.
He ended up not having to imagine what it would feel like, as he woke to the sound of his smoke detector blaring and his mother screaming at him and his brother to get out of the house.
As he stood upon his lawn in the dewy grass, watching his childhood home crumble and burn, his eyes had been wide open.
That had been both the end of Abe Pearson and the birth of Pearson, just Pearson.
Pearson was the best thief the world had ever known, mainly because it was impossible for his victims to realize that they were being stolen from.
Ronald Miller wasn't scheduled to get the idea that would make Jython work for at least another few weeks when Pearson had brought the idea up in a meeting. Óscar Wanchope and Claudia Ferrer wouldn't have formed the team to investigate neutrinos and antimatter until at least 2008.
Could you interrogate the contents of a dream as being the proof of plagiarism? Could you prove that things might've gone differently had he held his hand and let the future run its course?
Dr. Pearson didn't think so.
After all, sometimes he got things wrong. He'd lost money when he bet on the 1999 Superbowl. He was surprised when Y2K didn't result in even a teeny bit of chaos.
… And he'd also failed to predict that Artemis Fowl would completely trounce Jon Spiro last year.
Dr. Pearson was by no means a proud man. A few failures in the grand scheme of things meant nothing. His day was yet to come, he knew it.
Minerva Paradizo would be the first stepping stone on his path back to glory.
AN: oof this is coming after such a long hiatus sorry. Also! Pearson doesn't have a canonical first name iirc, so I just chose one. Abe is quite close to Abae, the name of an ancient town in Greece that hosted the oracle of Apollo. It was burned down twice in a fire, and it is said that there were three bronze statues in it: one of Apollo, one of Leto, and one of Artemis. Make of that what you will! Also, the cover art for the new Fowl Twins book is super cute and I'm proud of my sons :'') Reviews are super appreciated!