1166. About passion, 7
(Armylè)
Morhens was tired.
Time had not been kind. Mental respite was mild.
He washed again his face. He discovered again in the mirror a man he did not recognise. Exhaustion was heavier again over his face. His hair had turned all grey. He was in his fifties but looked easily a dozen years older.
Three fifths of his life had occurred after the dreadful event.
He sighed again and returned to his kitchen to get something to drink.
Anything to get his mind away from the dream again.
Somewhat rested, but not ready to work again, he was weighing his physical condition more reasonably against his ambition now.
He broke his cup.
His vertigo grew dire. His fingers clenched more uncontrollably over anything while his legs gave way.
A sharper pain rose inside his chest and blocked his breath.
Morhens tried to call for help but fell powerless.
~
That day thankfully, Johann had the right intuition.
Morhens had been unreasonable in his previous rant, but it still was unlike him not to be there at the first hour around the office. Morhens was not late.
If he was late, it could only mean one thing.
So Johann had walked the way to the doctor’s home, carrying the notes. If he wanted to rest at home that was fine as well, but surprising.
As he approached the house, he did not expect to find a spouse or a family. He was slightly intimidated, even if there was nothing special about the place logically.
A small suburb house like a thousand others, smaller than what he could have asked for. Johann already knew how much that would have been pointless for this doctor. Morhens had a form of humility that was bordering on authentic cynicism.
He called, and entered through the open door.
And from intuition or otherwise, he quickly found him on the floor.
He was terrified for a short moment, but quickly overcame that feeling. He calmly came closer and checked on his vital signs.
Morhens was breathing still, his pulse unsteady. Not dead at least, thankfully.
But not good still. He called for help.
~
Morhens woke up in a pale yellow room. The bed was sideway in the middle of it. For him, that was the first time.
He sat on the bed clumsily, realising he had things attached to him to check his health.
He was feeling heavier than usual, and then surprised to find himself in one of these hospital sterile rooms.
That didn’t put him in a great mood and he felt well enough already.
He should have waited, but perhaps the treatment given to him already had sufficed for a while. Not that he asked himself that when he began ripping the cables and electrodes away from him.
He pulled the perfusion out of his arm just as abruptly.
He stood up, found his clothes and dressed up to leave.
A doctor must have been on his way to see him already, but Morhens was not willing to meet anyone else.
By the time the medical team arrived, he was already walking out, feeling rather well. Even if it wasn’t meant to last.
He walked a little through the downtown under daylight time. It was odd. He didn’t know what day it was.
He just went home, seemingly unconcerned about his health.
He changed clothes, and then found the reports that Johann had brought at the time and then left behind.
Morhens took them and began reading them, the drugs in his circulatory system keeping him quite able and well.
He read them properly, then sitting in his armchair to take his time.
He was frowning and sighing. Morhens didn’t like what he was seeing through them.
It was apparently not a mistake. The previous results that had made him so mad were not erroneous.
It was the previous level of energy of T.I. in the city that had been?
Everything ambient had lowered suddenly.
The Terra in inside their tanks was under control and continued to be concentrated steadily.
So long it wasn’t released in more dry environment, it was steady. Now when they experimented in what had been standard condition in the past, the baseline had shifted. They needed to realign the intensities and levels and it was taking time. Even understanding it took time. And they couldn’t explain why that had changed.
They had no open theory as to why T.I. was even in the air of the city. Morhens had kept that part of his thesis especially elusive, for good reasons.
The scientific council aware of the events outside the walls was able to connect two and two together, but nearly no one else but them.
But then something else and new happened as well under Johann’s watch.
The way the effects scattered and turned random again, it was not just entropy, there was something else.
When a concentration of T.I. was reaching that kind of threshold Johann had been trying to point at, it behaved differently. It was not controllable the same way. It had different properties.
And it happened rather brutally. You could control a stream and its effect, and as you narrowed the width of the beam, it suddenly turned erratic and turbulent. It was rapid, and then unpredictable.
Hence the different teams had been struggling lately simply repeating previous experiments, because on one side the baseline had lowered, and on the other hand simply increasing density to compensate did not work linearly anymore.
So the model they had was not working anymore.
They needed to return to the mathematics and stop experimenting in the dark.
Morhens was stroking his beard, thinking about it.
It was as if the principles of T.I. they had relied upon so far had changed recently... An influence had come or left, around that time.
Unfortunately for everyone, Prume was no longer around to wink at this.
Not that she would have realised her influence on T.I. herself, nor winked to anyone.
So we were in grief and Morhens in the dark.
He thought about everything, trying his best to understand and weave new theories to explain the new results coherently. His gaze was lost in the distance, not looking at anything especially.
Trying to understand what could have changed.
Johann had been annoying but right, in that this science was still very young. They did not know everything.
Now was the time to amend their models and methods.
Morhens had to admit he had been conceited and rested on what he thought had been acquired.
He had been too focused on using his discoveries instead of steadying the knowledge. That had been a mistake, and now the landslide had come. It costed him a streak of failed experiments. In one instance, the object meant to pass through a wall repeated the one of the diamond, and blew up a part of the wall in a vibrant explosion.
They had gone too far with their basic understanding of this meteorology, and now the sun was not shining anymore, or differently.
The engine had shut down, without surprise. And now came disarray.
The more he thought about it, the better he admitted it now. He had been mistaken.
He had let anger taking the best of him, and felt wrong about it. Now that he had had some forced time to rest, things appeared more clearly.
They had neglected the study of the meteorology aspect, meaning the wider scale of things that acted as their reservoir of ambient T.I. The season had changed, and now they were shivering in the cold, lost as if an ancient god had turned the wheel of time in the sky. Primitive.
Were they actually some influences at a wider scale over the streams in the air like seasons, or rain and winds?
They now had identified many flavours to T.I. according to the affected influence on quantum mechanics.
And statistically it seemed there were still many unknown flavours that appeared neutral to their measurements.
Morhens hated that he had maybe fallen himself a little in the trap he despised.
He had made a show with the Rutherford experiment, and then considered it a success in itself.
That had brought progress, but also hidden some more valuable things in exchange.
He kept thinking about everything.
Every choice he had made. He was questioning everything again from his plan, his strategy and his understanding of everything.
He was ready to reorganise everything if that was necessary.
He laid down everything in his mind.
He made new choices.
His experimental results changed slightly the priorities for the next discoveries and technologies to develop.
Rutherford gained a new priority, although some things would need to be arranged in different orders.
Before they would achieve the next big plasma experiment, they would need it.
Morhens had a sudden thought and recalled a minute detail from the reports. He had not considered significant at the time, but now grabbed the sheet to read it again.
A small information that did not seem to mean much. A simple factor from a simple equation, describing empirically the relation between the dissonance of results and the expression of intensity of concentrated T.I.
A detail of correspondence that meant nearly nothing, except to him now.
That little change might help him later on. For a wider and longer plan.
He intellectually rearranged the pieces of his strategy into more logical coherence.
The paths were realigned with newly intended efficiency.
The global reorganisation was looking alright. Until the next reef to hit his theories.
Morhens still had something akin to a smile. He had hit a wall of uncertainty, but now the new course was ready.
He was almost happy, because as far as he could see, success was getting closer and closer to his reach.
He kept everything of this planning neatly written in his memory, now looking more steady and harmonious.
G - Perfect...
~
