#quantumbullshit

Two years ago

An hotel room in a city, somewhere in the U.S ( ft @quantumbullshit )

Understand: there is not a Duke Midan yet, but there is a man who shifts the base components of reality sitting on a hotel bed, watching a metronome tick. He is wearing gloves and they itch because they are new and because he has been wearing them all day, but he doesn’t dare take them off. 

In the bathroom, a nondescript man is dying his hair purple in the sink and talking, though his voice is soft enough that it ought to be barely heard over the water. ( it will take him three weeks to realize that the purple-haired man always sounds like that, clearly audible but always soft enough to make you feel like you should to be straining to hear him ) The man is saying, “King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. You’re more of a duke.”

It is a joke, maybe. He doesn’t feel like joking ( he feels like crying, but what else is new? ). The man, at least, does not seem to need his input. He is talking still, about research and development, and the man on the bed wants to scream, tell him that nothing is normal or alright and if he is anything he is a geologist and-- doesn’t. He is numb, still, but not enough to forget who is in a room with, or how much he owes to the other man already.

Eventually, the purple-haired man comes out of the bathroom with a faintly violet towel around his shoulders, and watches the man on the bed watch the metronome. He  reaches out to stop it metronome and---blurs, too many bodies in one space. When he tuns back to face the man on the bed, six copies of him keep turning, splitting off to examine the room, and the other man understands why it is he seems so calm about marvelous, extraordinary things. Thompson leans his back against the dresser and smiles at the man who will be Duke Midan, already thinking about the possibilities of a man who can bend reality.