Perdition of Reality

Chapter One: A Spark in the Cold

The biting cold of a northern Washington winter blanketed the open campus of Westbrook College. Snow crunched beneath boots, and the sky, a dull gray, hung low over the wide, snow-covered fields. It was late afternoon, and only a few students trudged between buildings, their faces obscured by scarves and winter coats.

Inside the Math and Physics Hall, Lev Sushkin was finishing up another tutoring session with his best friend, Tom Callen. They were hunched over a desk in the quiet study lounge, a nearly empty classroom save for a few stragglers working silently at other tables.

"One more problem and we'll call it a day. That ok?" Lev asked, tapping the edge of Tom's workbook with his pencil.

"Fine by me," Tom muttered, exhaustion clear in his voice.

Lev pointed to the next problem, one of the more advanced ones from the calculus textbook. "Take 1.15. There's a sphere with radius R=1. Inside, you inscribe a cylinder with the maximum possible surface area. You need to compute the width and height."

Tom groaned, leaning back in his chair. "Damn, that's spicy."

Lev chuckled, enjoying the moment. "Not so bad once you break it down. The trick is setting it up as a conditional local extreme. You're working with a cylinder's surface area inside the constraints of the sphere. It's all in how you apply the Pythagorean theorem."

Tom raised an eyebrow, clearly lost but trying to keep up. "Sure... I think."

Lev quickly sketched a diagram on the notebook, pointing out the critical parts. "See here? This forms a right triangle. Now, apply the constraint that the cylinder touches the vertices of the sphere. From there, you just plug it into the Lagrangian function and solve."

Tom blinked, staring at the mess of numbers on the page. "Yeah, you lost me again."

Lev just grinned, pulling his coat tighter as the session wound down. "Don't worry. Once you see it, it'll click."

The session ended soon after, and the two friends gathered their things. Tom looked at Lev with a bit of admiration mixed with frustration. "How'd you get so good at this? You make it look easy."

Lev shrugged as they stepped out into the bitter cold. "I guess I just like it. There's something satisfying about the logic of it all. Math doesn't lie."

"That's the last thing I'd ever call it—satisfying." Tom shook his head as they crossed the snow-covered lawn toward the parking lot. "You're a foreign student and you're still better at this stuff than half the people here."

"I just practice," Lev said, but there was more to it than that. Calculus was his safe space, his escape. The rigid precision of numbers and formulas kept his mind occupied, kept it from wandering into places he didn't want it to go.

They climbed into Tom's car, the engine sputtering to life against the cold. As the heater slowly kicked in, Tom glanced over at Lev. "You ever think of doing something else, besides all this math stuff?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something fun. College is more than just classes, you know."

Lev gave him a sidelong look. "Fun? Sure, if you count cracking console security systems in my spare time."

Tom laughed, shaking his head. "You and your weird projects, man."

Lev didn't respond, but his mind drifted to the project waiting for him back at his apartment—the console sitting on his desk, its internals spread out in a mess of wires and circuit boards. Cracking the encryption on that thing was a puzzle that had consumed him for weeks now. He was close, but something kept eluding him.