Work Text:
47°: (Des||Con)tructive Interference
"What kind of ugly-ass name is Orchestrated Noise—" Thump. "—when I named my precious-wecious beauterrific adoratastic Noise Dissonance for a reason—" Thump. "—and I totez don't need your legit tragic naming skills screwing things—" Thump. "—up any more for me. You're gonna tell Nerdie that you mis~cal~cu~la~ted—" Thump. "—and set the record, like, straight or I swear I'll blow you to frick myself!" Thump.
"What the factor does the relational operator have to do with miscalculations?"
"Omigosh you are soooooooooooo zetta stupid! It's a wave dash, you socially stupid math otak—"
"Excuse me, miss, is everything here all right? Is this gentleman bothering you?"
"Oh, dear, everything is simply splendiferous! Such a scrumptious steak! Please, pass on our compliments to the chef, and applaud yourselves for such charming service!"
"...if you say so. Please...try not to disturb the other diners."
"Why, you gaze upon the very picture of perfect politeness. Be careful, or I'll charm you right out of employment!"
As the sweaty-faced waiter backed away—his variable at first was concern, and then relief during his exit—the double-cosine stopped banging her fists on the table and re-seated herself in the chair across from Sho. Glancing down at her blue-rare steak on the interestingly geometrical tablecloth flush with squares and rectangles of different widths and lengths, the double-cosine stabbed her fork through the meat with a juicy skwssssh and shovelled it into her mouth. She tore off one chunk after another between her razor teeth. Sho spooned his berry mix gelato onto his tongue as he watched her divide out the steak. "I can't factor out your problem. You call yourself Shibuya's Orchestrator. I'm defining the Noise with your own variable. It's all Dissonance."
"Ewwww, gross, you math-mind-reamed loser, don't you, like, daaare compare my kyootie-byootie-patootie Dissonance Noise-heart-emoji with that disgoosting nasty literally diseased stuff that that crusty musty dusty old cretin put out! Grooooooss!"
Sho leaned in his chair, tipping it backwards at a precisely eighty-four degree angle. "Fine. How do you determine the classification?"
"Um, duh! Call it Plague Noise, call it Soul Pulvis. Pulvis, dust, whatevz. I didn't call that sack of crap dusty just 'cuz! Even though he toooootez was!"
"Get your auditory processing checked, double-cosine. I'm not asking about the individual integers. I'm asking about the set."
She jabbed her fork into the steak with sufficient hectonewtons that reddish juice sprayed from the site of module injection. "The whooole thing? Any kinda UG-RG-fricking-up-the-booty Noise? Fuzzface calls it Disharmony. Disharmonic Noise. Ugly. Except for my delightastic pleasantiful Dissonance Noise of course! They're totez adorbz just like their cutest and petitest fairy princess-slash-Reaper-slash-Orchestrator in all of Shibunya."
He ignored her miscalibration in the pronunciation of 428's name. "What does the difference between calling it Dissonance or Disharmony come out to?"
"Wooooowie-zoooowie! When I heard you failed outta high school in the RG, I was like, waow, no wai! thought nerds were smaaart! But now seeing your legit dreadfunny brain I'm like, ya rly." Sho simply gazed at her across the table, nonplussed, even as she scraped the fork tines against the plate bottom and produced cacophonous vibrations. "The difference is that I'm gonna frig over all your miserawful sorrowretched 'works of art' if you don't STFU and listen to me. Don't be such a fricking noob, Mini-moto." She clawed her nails as she spoke. "Dissonance is like, not just some sparkle-sparkly perfect looking Noise. It's special. And it's mine. I came up with it. I figured it out. Pants-on-head stupid Fuzzface couldn't even belieeeeve it with all his oh-so-special super dee duper smart second sight because his motherflocker Higher Plane-poisoned brain couldn't even handle me being the smaaaaartest Reaper ever."
Sho scoffed. "I take that title. The area under your curve ranks in second."
If she kept gripping the fork like that, its stress over strain would reach the shear point. "You lit' can't even control your own Tabooboo-the-fool Noise. My byootiful Noise is totez dif."
"Good. The entire point is to let 'em graph their own vector paths."
"Ew this is why you legit couldn't Compose your way out of a cardboard box without me Orchestrating all your Sheet Music. All your Taboo Noise already had names in the Noise Report, you asshole abacus. Like trance rhino or whatevz." He grinned. "But the repugnasty Plague Noise and the Dissonance Noise entries just say the kind of Noise and its shape, amirite? Woooow, really activates the almonds! Inorite? Maybe you could use aaaaaaall that sugar in your brain and actually think about what that means?"
Integrating his mouthful of gelato, he rolled his shoulders. "Such simple equations. Taboo Noise comes out fully formed. Like me. Noise with free will to write our own functions, not just plug in the numbers someone else gave us. Dissonance Noise, Plague Noise: garbage code with a net that folds into a certain polyhedron. The same spin of data that makes up a Plague Wolf can make up a Plague Grizzly just by adjusting the constant, not the variables or the scalars. Same with Dissonance Noise. Plague Noise multiples by zero: an operator that transforms any other integer into the same zero."
The double-cosine gave him a series of overly loud claps. "Oh em gee, we're really outta the basic addition woods. Maybe next we'll move onto subtraction. Good job, shishi! Good job! Pat pat for you! Plague Noise and Dissonance Noise isn't full Noise. Just bits of the same kind of Sound. Plague Noise turns aaaaall the other Noise it touches into more Plague Noise, and Dissonance Noise is like building bricks cobbled together into hu-eg Noise. I make real Noise too, like all those jungle funkeys you loooved pwning so much last time—" He narrowed his eyes. "—or my newest cuties!"
"The fade spinners," he supplied. The eight-limbed Noise's snare trap psychs made for a zetta sexy pin drop to halt harmonic progressions.
"Gold star for you, Mini-moto. Get three of those and I'll treat you to a whooole melon cream soda."
"Don't waste my time." The double-cosine mock-gasped at him, and he crossed his arms over his chest. "If I get three, I want three. Balanced equations."
She twittered in laughter. "'kay anywayz, I know getting nommed by Taboo Noise and crapped back out totez broke your limiters or whatevz—I gotta ask, were you all like, omigosh, Fuzzface, turn off my pain inhibitors!—" He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to retort that that made for an irrational equation, but the double-cosine kept talking: "—but Dissonance Noise lets me do that without fur-eaking giving myself Soul rabies so bad that it will kill you dead at some point no matter hoooow much copium you breathe in. Just don't drop to frothing seething dead on our rug, 'kay Mini-moto? Like, talk about putting the KY in KYS, amirite?"
"Stop wasting my time. I know."
"Oh, you knooooow, huh? You knowwwww how my Dissonance Noise works, too?"
Sho mapped out the topology at the bottom of the gelato cup. "Ha! Constructive interference. Different functions have different maximum wave amplitudes. My function's amplitude can go up to infiiiiiinity if I can work out the wave equation on my skills and find the material to oscillate through. But the Reaper function can only generate waves of so high an amplitude, ceteris paribus. All the other worthless trash just accept that limit. I figured out a way to break it and surpass it. You figured out a way around it."
"Pre-tty much!"
"Instead of generating a single wave with a high enough amplitude, you generate many smaller waves of smaller amplitudes, but with a catch. The waves you generate are perfectly calculated to sum to each other in phase for constructive interference, like all the different pieces of a stepwise function mapping out an image, forming a single wave of a much higher amplitude than a—"
"Run of the mill Reaper," the double-cosine hissed, her acute-angle teeth reflecting light of the same distribution as the steak's fluids.
He recognised H's words for her from the reports H had shown them, the goings-on that had occurred during the first and second impurifications of Shibuya. In that way he and she formed congruent functions. They both wanted the same result: credit for their work. For their derivations. Not H's. Not anyone else's. His derivations and hers. "—could. All these waves have to remain perfectly in phase for it to work, so you get high amplitude, high instability waves. With a couple of waves, the instability isn't a major problem. But make it a Noise the size of Shibuya, with all the waves that have to remain in phase for it to not hit a functional collapse—"
"Tapez was just the most adorbz!"
"—like the one with Crassitudo Canor as its base step, and it ends up so precarious that H couldn't even enter the pseudo-parallel world without collapsing it on top of the human tuple you'd integrated."
"Tee frickin' hee. And that instability and worry about hurting dear Neku and the roadkill bastard shooooould have kept Fuzzface and that drag out, but noooo, Fuzzface thinks he's so smart with his fugly imprinting. Whatevz." She chewed through her steak with her mouth open, the exaggerated clacking of her jaws against one another vibrating against his eardrums.
"Flawless calculations lead to flawless results."
Her teeth ground against one another. "And whaaaaat is that supposed to mean, Mini-moto?"
"Means your calculations were flawed. Calibrate better next time. I won't be checking your work."
She had just reared back with the fork in hand, the potential energy of the imminent arc translating to enough kinetic to stab an eye out, when the waiter passed by. Instantly the double-cosine resumed daintily consuming her steak with one pinky finger sticking out. "You're so wonderfantastically right, dear Minamin!" Sho choked on the gelato spoon. "Instead of making a single whoooole big Noise, I make a bunch of charmagically cute li'l Noisy-woisies and then klik-klik them together into one biiiiiiiig Noisy-woisy! That's my adorabrilliant idea!"
He thumped his chest with his fist as he fished the spoon from his throat. Clearing it, Sho tilted his cap up. "Takes petacandela of brilliance to find an alternate solution to the proof. Adding together individual canonical mice to make up an entire desired set...and canonical mice that can transmit algorithms to determine their behaviour at the ends of the domain. Not bad for the first term in race of twelve-plus-one. The obtuse angles can add all the quadratic restrictions to this Riemann space they want, but we'll still find analogues to their Finsler geometries...and our own geometries."
The double-cosine beamed, the triangular cut of her teeth forming exactly the kinds of angles that could bisect obtuse ones. "Ewwww, stop with the nerd calculator-speak. Well? What are you waiting for? Go on, go on! Praise me mooore!"
"Heh heh heh." Sho leaned forward, spinning the spoon in his palm at thirty-six oscillations a second. "I would've been an inverse idiot to forge a pact with some random rancid-brained radian. You found my 𝑥, and I solved for yours. You're constantly miscalculating, dividing out your own intellect with behemothic bifurcations, but what you lack in processing power you equate out in the Imagination to come up with entirely new fields of study. A denominator so sizable your fraction would be near zero...but a numerator to match. I'll clean up your trash for you and carry the ones you drop, crunching 'em into a zetta beautiful heap."
"Boooo. I said praise me, not you." She pouted. "Buuuut I guess I can forgive you from the bottom of the heart of the most generous fairy princess in the whole wide world, 'cuz that's totez what the royal court's emblem of kindness and charity should do, amirite? You're totez welc. And besides, you're paying for this, riiiiite?"
Sho dropped the spoon to the table on a perfect axis between himself and the double-cosine. "I've got a number to plug in to this function."
"WTF are you blabbing about?"
"I'm cashing in that gold star from earlier." He crossed one leg over the over and tapped the top of his boot against the table underside. " You pay."
Her mouth dropped open. "Totez not what I meant, you rotting bag of Noise cancer!"
He smirked. "I never miscalculate. Who gives a digit about whether or not we get banned from this restaurant? Their relevant enumeration is three items long."
"I give a digit! IDC that they only have three desserts for you to put your ass into a sugar coma! The steak is deliciousanguine!"
His smirk widened. "Looks like even you can add one and one together. If you can give a digit...you can give your ShibuPay digits, too. Q.E.D."
The double-cosine flew up from the table, her hands trembling on her hips, her parabolic mouth and obtusely angled eyebrows making her variable indignant, and Sho just laughed at her. But she took out her phone anyway when the waiter breezed by to subtract the pay for the meal. The waiter's tangent took him off into the distance as Sho and the double-cosine left the restaurant's quadrant.
As soon as they made it outside to the midday sun offset by the shadows of his 428's skyline above, she slugged him in the side, painful enough for him to feel it. He laughed through the imprinting of the chaotic-attractor pattern in the shape of her knuckles on his ribs. "I'll correct the odd function on your Dissonance Noise and the mind-molten millikelvin's use of Disharmonic Noise I intersect your axis again."
"You frickin' better, line-graphing loser!" The double-cosine punched him again, but this one had almost no force behind it, barely worthy of a momentum calculation. When her hand came adjacent to his side, she unfurled her fingers and rested her palm there for a moment. "...and thanks, Mini-moto."
Sho shrugged. "I never miscalculate. But I can miscalibrate. I carry your ones; you carry mine. Balanced equations."
"I think that's called cooperation, Mini-moto. Grooooss." The double-cosine's eyes gleamed like the metallic bullets loaded into her pepperbox revolver. "But I like our 'variable definition' better when we put the bloodthirsty in adorathirsty. Sooo...wanna go rip 'n' tear some more featherfricks?"
He cracked his knuckles. "Is your angle less than 90°?"
