Eight

Baxter woke with a start. He sat up in his cot, knowing that all was right with the world. He pushed the blankets off his half-naked form and stumbled across to his whiteboard. Using his elbow, he cleared a space in the middle of his current calculation, wrote the number eight in thick black marker, and circled it. It looked like a coffee ring. For a moment, he stood basking in its perfect simplicity and then began to dance around the room in stockinged feet.

The euphoria of knowing the answer felt like electricity arching through his body. As he spun around, he flipped the switch on the kettle and grabbed the spoon and cup that he had discarded in the sink the night before. As he clinked the metal against the chipped porcelain, an eight-beat staccato rhythm, his elation began to fade. Baxter imagined light weeping from a small tear in his skin. At first, it was almost imperceptible, but after a while he could feel his body begin to physically deflate.

Eight was the answer, of that he had no doubt. The problem was that he had no idea what it was the answer to. The walls of his room were covered in scientific notation, complex equations that had been discarded, defaced, or partially destroyed. Even a cursory glance told him that eight would not solve any of them. Within a matter of moments, he also knew that it wasn't some unknown variable that he could plug in or factor he had failed to include in his original supposition.

"Fuck!" he swore, squatting down, the cup still clenched tightly in his hands.

"Is everything okay, Dr. Baxter?" a voice crackled through the intercom.

He had grown accustomed to ignoring it, partly because science couldn't be rushed, but for a while now Baxter had begun to worry he was imagining it. The speaker was there; that was something he had empirical proof of. The voice coming through it, on the other hand, was a different matter. How many times had he taken it down and dismantled it, just to confirm it was working? For a moment, hope swelled in his heart, only to dissipate just as quickly when he confirmed it had been well over a dozen.

Baxter waved the voice away.

"Very well," it replied.

Baxter remained on the floor, staring at the endless sea of red and black markings. Numbers that had at one point made perfect sense to him, like the world had once done. He wished the kettle would hurry up and boil; he needed tea to stimulate the last of his sleeping grey cells. If only he drank a fixed number of cups per day, he smiled at the thought of such a simple solution.

Something heavy collided with the window behind him, as if acting as an exclamation point on Baxter's current train of thought. He made it a rule not to look outside if he could avoid it, even though one entire wall of his room was given over to impenetrable glass. For the most part it was soundproof and shatterproof, but if hit with enough force it could still make a noise.

Baxter thought about the paper he had covered it with and torn off the week before. It looked like the window of a long-abandoned shop that had been set upon by fly-posters and the elements. Taking a deep breath, he turned slowly around and looked at the teeming vegetation that had all but smothered the view. Between the branches and leaves, shadowy caves had formed, and what had once been people watched him from within.

It was as if he were in a zoo, and the children of this new world would bang on the glass to get his attention. Only instead of waiting for it, they would scurry back into the safety of the trees. Baxter fogged up the glass with his breath and wrote the number eight. Maybe one of the people watching him would react to it, hesitantly emerge from the undergrowth and scrawl some kind of reply upon the other side of the glass. Some kind of primal cry from the last vestiges of their humanity: please don't give up, we are still worth saving.

Tilting his head, Baxter squinted into the gloom. For a moment all he could see was the ghost of his own reflection, then he saw the fogged eight had become the symbol for infinity. He slowly took a step back, the fear of this interpretation crawling up his spine.

Kicking the remnants of the paper that had been on the glass into the air, Baxter heard the kettle click off. He placed the mug down on the bunker, his attention drawn to the ragged strip of equations still clinging to the window. He slid his fingers down it and pulled it free. Some primitive instinct told him that the problem to his solution was nearby. It made him think of a game he had played as a child. He could imagine his friends shouting "Hotter" and "Colder" as he moved around the small corner of his room.

Focusing on the fragment of paper held in his other hand, he placed the teabag and milk into the cup, replicating his usual process without thinking. It was like reading the ravings of a madman, or at the very least a man deprived of daylight and company for months on end. Steam scalded his fingers as he flooded the cup. A signal was sent to his brain telling him it was sore, but it was overridden by the certainty of his impending breakthrough.

He heaped in two large spoonfuls of sugar from the crusty bowl, a constant he promised to one day reduce, before stirring four times clockwise and then four times counter-clockwise. He crushed the paper into his fist, tossed it into the air, and punched it across the room. Baxter shook his head, embarrassed at the childish notion that the problem would be discovered by instinct and muscle memory.

Baxter put the cup to his lips, blew a little, and took a sip. The hot tannin coated the back of his throat and warmed his stomach. Feeling the heat radiating through his fingers, he considered and discarded the potential applications for his answer. Eight dimensions? Eight chromosomes? Eight stages of infection? None of them held up to scrutiny. Sipping more of the beverage, Baxter took solace in finally cracking the formula for the perfect cup of tea.

The trick had been stirring just the right number of times.