“Who wants nachos?” Rembrandt called, as he and Sam entered the hotel room.
He held a series of takeout containers, which held the dish. Rembrandt had been tickled to learn it had just caught on earlier that year. Unfortunately, the offering was hardly gourmet, being more a simulation of cheese sauce slathered ballpark nachos than the more flavoursome jalapeño dish he would have preferred.
“Smells good,” remarked Colin, lifting his head up from the notes the brothers had spread all over the table.
Quinn, who was facing the other way, looked around and gave a distracted wave as he scribbled.
“Hey, have you guys been doin’ math without me?” Sam said with mock disappointment, and crossed to the table to see their work.
Rembrandt placed the food on a side table, and surveyed the scraps of paper, arranged in a way that he assumed the eggheads understood, covered in letters, numbers, and other gibberish.
He grabbed one of the polystyrene containers and cracked it open. As he ate, he noticed nobody else was getting into the food.
“Hey man, we worked hard for this food, least you could do is eat it!”
Quinn looked up, seemingly realising for the first time that it was there.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, and grabbed a container. “Easy to forget about how hungry I am when I’m neck deep in this stuff.”
The other two men took containers of their own, leaving the final one for Maggie.
Rembrandt looked over to her on the bed.
“She been like that all day?”
Colin met his eye. “More or less, since we’ve been here.”
Rembrandt reached into his pocket, and produced a small paper bag he and Sam had managed to procure from some army vets in a homeless camp.
“Well, she’ll be wanting those nachos after this,” he said to himself.
He wandered over to her bed, and gently nudged her.
“I’m awake…” she said, keeping her eyes shut. “It just hurts my head when I talk. Or open my eyes. Or move. Or hear you guys talking. I wish I had a dark room to lie in.”
“Well, maybe this’ll take the edge off,” Remy replied, opening the bag and pulling out one of the four small joints that populated it.
He placed it between her fingers, and they closed around it.
“Thanks,” she said, and opened her eyes into a pained squint. Rembrandt lit a match from one of the hotel’s branded matchbooks, and she allowed him to set the end alight.
As she took a long, desperate drag on it, Rembrandt grabbed the complimentary ash tray that sat on the coffee table near the TV, and moved it to her nightstand. She coughed out the smoke, and the jerking motion made her clutch her head.
“What is that smell?” Colin wondered aloud, causing Quinn to laugh.
“Try not to breathe in the smoke,” he said with a knowing look at Remy, patting his brother on the back.
“Remember that time you and Maggie were all drugged up?” Rembrandt asked the kid who he affectionately referred to as ‘Farm Boy.’
Colin nodded, his face sour. “Don’t tell me she’s going to be intoxicated like that again…”
“Better that than the pain she’s in right now,” Quinn said.
Rembrandt noted that Sam had been awfully quiet since he’d started looking at the notes on the table. He saw that the Doc was now making some corrections to some of the equations.
Quinn followed his gaze.
“It’s good to get some assistance,” he commented to Rembrandt.
“Sure is,” Rembrandt said, thinking about Sam’s musical help. That this one guy could ease their burdens so much was impressive, and he only hoped that the Doc himself wasn’t taking too much of that burden onto himself. The big man upstairs had really put a lot on the guy’s shoulders already.
“Say…” he said, a thought coming to him, “you think the Professor of ’78 is in a position to help, too?”
Quinn grinned.
“Way ahead of ya,” he said, and pulled a note from the coffee table. “He’s an Assistant Professor. I’m gonna go visit tomorrow.”
“Professor?” Sam was looking at them with questioning eyes.
“Quinn’s old mentor,” Rembrandt explained, “he was slidin’ with us for a while, ’til–”
“–Rickman shot him,” came Maggie’s voice. “Yeah, that’s his name. Can’t believe I forgot…”
She was sitting up in bed, looking at them through tired eyes.
“Guess it doesn’t matter now. He went ‘splat.’”
She stuck out her tongue and made an open palm gesture towards the floor.
“Feeling better already?” Sam asked, looking relieved.
She shrugged. “Enough to have my eyes open. Can you pass me the nachos?”
Rembrandt grabbed a hold of the last container, and passed it to her. She hungrily began to eat.
“That’s really good,” she said, mouth full.
Satisfied that Maggie was doing okay, Rembrandt turned back to the others to finish their discussion.
“Anyway, the Professor’s a big book-smart kind of guy.”
“He specialises in cosmology,” added Quinn. “but he’s well read in a lot of areas. And he’ll have some resources we don’t. Labs, equipment…” To this, Sam’s face lit up.
“Great! I’d like to meet him. What’s his name?”
“Maximillian Arturo,” Quinn said.
“Huh, that rings a bell,” said Sam, getting lost in thought. “Maybe I’ve read one of his papers. Wish I could remember…”
Quinn pursed his lips. “Maybe you’ve read his work on Coset Wormholes in Keller Oribifolds?”
Sam clicked his fingers and pointed as he recalled. “That’s it!”
“Oh yeah, of course. Closet wormholes in killer ribeyes,” Maggie commented with a snort, eyes still on her food. She looked up at Remy with an exaggerated gesture. “Groundbreaking stuff in the field of beefology.”
She stifled a laugh, and Rembrandt gave her a token grin. She may have been a little stoned, but it was a relief to see her in good spirits despite everything.
“Looks like we’ve got a heckler,” Quinn said, sharing an amused smirk with Sam.
“Oh jeez,” Maggie said, now no longer smiling, but looking up at them all with uncertainty, “am I being a pain? I haven’t smoked this stuff since I was in basic training. You gotta tell me if I’m getting on your nerves, okay?”
“You’re fine, Maggie,” Sam said. “You go ahead and crack as many jokes as you like. It’ll let us know you’re feeling alright.”
“Basic training?” Rembrandt tested. “Only one of you ever went there, right?”
At this, Maggie leaned her chin in her palm, looking into space.
“Huh…”
This train of thought made her go silent for a while, her brows knitted as she tried to work something out.
A moment passed as Rembrandt waited for her to come to some conclusion.
“Huh what?”
She looked up at him, startled. “What?”
“You looked like you were in deep thought.”
Maggie blinked a couple of times. “I was just thinking about those burgers at White Castle… you know they call them sliders?”
She seemed highly amused at this. Rembrandt tilted his head, confused.
“How the devil did you get to that from basic training?”
She looked at him blankly for a moment, before explaining: “Well, I was thinking about my time training at Fort Knox. We’d go up to Louisville when we had time off base, and we sometimes went to White Castle.”
She looked toward the ceiling, her jaw slack. “I wish I had a slider…”
“Next she’ll be baking cookies,” Colin muttered, referencing the last time he saw Maggie acting this loopy.
Quinn, in contrast, seemed happy to hear this meandering story.
“This is the clearest memory she’s had since we got here,” he pointed out.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Rembrandt asked.
“Not necessarily,” Sam said, pensive, looking at the equations. He pointed at a section. “We need to collect Maggie’s biological data so we can populate the variables in this formula, but if we follow my current assumptions, it may indicate a dominance trend.”
Quinn’s smile dropped away. “Oh, I see what you mean.”
Colin chimed in: “That would suggest a return to baseline; so if she was left alone, she’d eventually stabilise, would she not?”
“Yeah, but–” Quinn began, but Rembrandt interrupted.
“Hey, brainiacs, give us some plain English, would ya?” he said, feeling quite left out.
Sam put his hands on his hips, surveying the notes, before raising his eyes to meet Rembrandt’s, and nervously running a hand through his hair.
“I think that if we don’t separate the two Maggies, one of them is going to take over the other. I don’t know which one.”
“And the one that doesn’t?” Rembrandt’s voice trembled.
“Her atoms will disperse and she’ll be gone,” Colin finished, finally grokking what Quinn had been trying to explain to him.
“Oh, boy!” Maggie proclaimed with feigned positivity, her words dripping with sarcasm. “Let’s take bets on which one of me sticks around.”
But she was met with a room of grim, sombre faces.
Her facade dropped away, too, and the five of them fell into a morbid silence.
After a minute, Maggie piped up. “Got an ETA on this process?”
“Can’t say,” Quinn replied. “We need to get samples of your cells into a lab; that may be able to give us the data we need.”
“And that brings us back to the Professor,” Maggie concluded.
“Precisely.”