Chapter I: The Westeros Paradox

Issac Hart was not a man prone to bouts of fancy. It was a thing about himself he didn’t like. He was not an un-passionate person. Like many mathematicians, he saw himself as having the soul of an artist. But at its core, and much to his own personal frustration, that soul had a tendency to break things down into measurable distances. He had always had a much easier time conceptualizing the numbers themselves, as apposed to the things that they represented. And he was good at that. Conceptualizing the numbers. He was practically a computer. His memory was borderline eidetic, and even better than that, he wasn’t the kind of person who felt the need to tell everyone about it. But it was 2006, a period in human history in which anyone with a graphing calculator in their back-pocket could effectively nullify that advantage. He was a man who rarely lost his footing, mostly because he rarely stepped outside comfortable, established boundaries, and as a result had accomplished very little of note in his short career. But he didn’t like that about himself. Which is why, we assume, he is punching his entrance-code into the front door of the M.I.T media lab, at three in the morning, at the behest of his teaching assistant. 

This wasn’t the sort of business the media lab was meant for, but Robert Mann had made himself at home there all the same. He enjoyed the chaos of the place. Or got something out of it, anyway. It was difficult to track exactly what Robert Mann did and didn’t enjoy, but he always seemed to do his best work in places that where always just ever so slightly off-suited for his purposes. The media lab, for its part, was a space primarily focused on computer- science and robotics. All the most fun, aesthetically pleasing parts of it. Its halls adorned with colorful lego sculptures, robot dragons, and interactive-motion-tracking-projector-art. Nearly all of it funded by Epstein money. 

Robert likely doesn’t know that, Issac muses. If he had, it would have upset him, and it would have ruined whatever energy about the space that he was so attracted to. It was one of the many things, Issac assumes, that Robert Doesn’t Know. There were many things Robert Mann didn’t know, except for the things he did know, which he knew of in maddening amounts. 

Issac hated Robert. But it was a productive hate. A resigned, egoless hate. The kind of hate you have for someone for whom the things you struggle with come effortlessly. The kind of hate you have for a semi-truck that’s about to barrel over you. Not for the driver, but for the truck itself. The truck doesn’t hate you, it doesn’t care if you live or die. But it’s still going to kill you. Because it’s huge, and you aren’t. 

In the corners of that hate, Issac had found that the two of them could be quite useful to each other. In a frustrating way, they filled each other out very nicely. Rob would come up 

with some wild new idea, some mad, counterintuitive notion about how numbers fit together, obsess over it for a day, and then abandon it after having proven himself wrong. Issac would then pick over his leavings, and would almost always find that the issue was not an immutable truth of mathematics, but some high-school level error in arithmetic. Issac would pick up the pieces, take the notion to its conclusion, and then, innovation. 

Issac had accomplished much since Robert had become his assistant. And Robert’s name would always appear as a co-author on anything Issac published. But Issac suspects that if he’d taken the credit for himself, Robert would never have noticed. He’d say that Robert was in it for the joy of it, but Robert didn’t come off as an especially joyful person. Whatever drove Robert Mann, it was something in the work itself. 

Issac enters the conference space in the far corner of the building, and he can already feel the tinders of a migraine beginning to spark at the back of his skull. Roberts scribblings have exited the right side of the chalk bored and have extended onto the wall beside it, covering about half the room so far, and are growing. Issac knows he will not be going back home tonight. Once Robert tires himself out, he will have to stay back and scrub the walls. Even if Robert agrees to clean up his mess, he will not. Issac knows this from experience. He takes off his jacket, slings his bag over a chair, and sits down. He gives himself a few moments to take in the mad scrawling of his prodigy assistant. 

The migraine cracks deeper into his skull. 

Most of what’s written, Issac doesn’t recognize. It exists outside his area of expertise. It’s a physics problem, already outside the comfortable realm of pure mathematics in which Issac feels most at home. Something about relativity... but there’s also some quantum mechanics in there, and a few smattered sections of what looks like pseudocode. This is uncomfortable for Issac. He and Roberts symbiosis exists in a delicate balance, hinging on Issacs ability to pick Roberts pieces and make something out of them. But that requires Issac to know what those pieces are. That was simple enough for Issac when just dealing with numbers, but the thing Issac is looking at now is... bigger than that. Much bigger. Issac doesn’t know what he’s looking at exactly, but it is huge. And he isn’t. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Issac smells exhaust. 

“So you tell me if this falls under physics, or theology, or philosophy, or whatever. You’re the one with the doctorate, that’s your area, all I’m saying is that so far the math works out.” 

The sound of Roberts voice snaps Issac from his stupor. Robert hadn’t looked up from the wall, a flurry of symbols and numbers erupting in the wake of each flick of his wrist. A pang of annoyance cuts through Issacs bewilderment, just long enough to bring him back to earth. Here he is, at three thirty in the morning, watching his teaching assistant commit property 

damage that he would have to clean up, and he hadn’t even received so much as a “hello” or a “thanks for coming”. 

“So, we live in an infinite multiverse.” Robert blithely continues. Issac sighs, focusing in on the undergrad, letting the chaos of the work around him fade off into his periphery. It is as much a defense mechanism as anything else. 

“Sure Rob, I suppose we can assume that.” Issac replies weakly, deciding that if his student didn’t feel the need to bother with formalities, neither did he. 

“Yes, we can, because we do.” Rob nearly cuts him off. Issac grits his teeth, just a little, but he lets it slide. Just a standard case of Robert Mann’s mercurial certainty. Likely to fade just as soon as this fixation left him. 

“We live in an infinite multiverse.” Robert continued. “Emphasis on infinite. And infinity is... weird. Right? Infinity has some weird implications.” 

“Sure.” Issac concedes, side eyeing his companion before squinting at the scribbles trailing behind his hand. It is late, or early depending on how he chooses to look at it. He considers the thin line between genius and mania, as he often does when considering Robert, and wonders if perhaps this falls on the wrong side of it. 

“Like, if I were to wave my hands around and say, I summon a dragon-” 

This time, its Issacs turn to cut off Robert. It’s too early for this, he’s decided. This expedition outside his comfort zone has been a mistake. He had given his entrance codes to someone who clearly could not be trusted with them, someone who he was watching deface school property, on the off chance that he could leach something off their wild nature, and now he is being punished for it. 

“Yes, technically there’s a chance one would appear. If there are infinite universes in which to run out that scenario, eventually, there’d be at least one where something unexpected and unexplainable falls into place, and a dragon really does appear. And if it happens in one universe, that also means it happened in infinite others. Which, technically, means that we are just as likely to be in a universe where a dragon does appear as one where one doesn’t. Rob, this is all very fun stuff, but its also what they teach to kids on NOVA specials, did you have to get me up in the middle of the night to-” 

Robert interjects calmly, his gaze never once leaving his maths. 

“Thats not my point. Yes, there’s a chance that if you try and summon a dragon, that one will appear. But you know the funny thing about dragons, Issac?” 

Issac sighs, suddenly feeling very defeated. “What, Rob.”
“They aren’t real.” 

Issac is silent for a slow moment. Not because his mind is blown or anything. Or if that is why, it’s the sheer Nothing of the statement that gets to him. Robert has had his share of mad ideas, but Issac has always been able to see the path he was trying to lay out with them. He is not used to his protégée saying meaningless things. It feels to him like God telling you his favorite Pokemon. 

He takes too long to respond, apparently, and Robert moves along. “We made them up. They are, one hundred percent, an invention of the human mind. And yet, it is a fact, that at this moment, somewhere out in the multiverse, there are dragons, Issac. And here’s the important part. They are exactly as you are imagining them.” 

“What’s your point-” Issac starts to say, but Robert barrels on. Issac understands that his role now is not collaborator, but sponge. A cork-board for his student to stick ideas that his hands are too slow to record. 

“Game of Thrones is real.” 

The migraine cracks the back of Issacs skull like a fucking coconut. “Jesus Christ Rob, c’mon. What the fuck am I doing here?” 

For the first time, Rob drops his writing arm. He whirls to face Issac, suddenly bursting with manic energy, hard enough to make the mathematician flinch in his rolling chair. 

“Tell me how I’m wrong!” He exclaims. “Thats what you do, right, that’s what I keep you around for? I’m not saying anything that we don’t technically know to be true! Somewhere out there, in some reality, there is a world, infinite worlds, that are exactly as George R.R Martin describes them in A Song of Ice and Fire! Any time a person dreams something up, hell, any time they have an errant thought about the way the world might be, there is a reality, somewhere out in the multiverse, that matches up with that idea exactly.” 

Issac takes a long, hard, critical look at Robert. “When was the last time you slept?” 

The look that crosses Robert’s face is a cocktail of disgust and disappointment, shifting seamlessly a moment later into a resigned apathy. He turns back to the wall, and the scribbling recommences. He continues with his speech, adopting an all too familiar tone of voice that makes it clear to Issac that Robert is now talking more to himself than his teacher. “So what does that make us? What does that make George R.R Martin? Is his brain a conduit to another dimension? Is he a God? Or is it something in between the two?” 

Issac picks his words slowly, carefully. In spite of everything, he does not want to loose his protégée. He is too valuable. “I mean... neither? It’s just a weird sort of coincidence. A funny little trick you can play with math.” 

Robert is quiet for a while. Long enough that by the time he answers, Issac had assumed that he’d forgotten he was there. 

“Yeah. Maybe.” 

Robert is quiet after that, save for the sound of chalk moving across wall. Whatever the mad genius had called Issac in for, the task was apparently complete. Issac waits, knowing he will have to deal with the wreckage. Eventually, he falls asleep. 

Robert is gone when Issac wakes. But his work remains. A mural of ragged white lines circling from one side of the room to the other. It terminates just before returning to the chalkboard, an equation left unfinished, a shattered stick of chalk on the tile floor below it. He observes with sleepy half-interest before rising to his feet, yawning, stretching, and making his way to the bathroom. He stops at the janitors closet to get a bucket, filling it up with water, stuffing as many paper towels under his arms as he can carry. He’ll have to make another trip, he knows. 

He returns to the conference room, piles together a huge wad of paper towels, and dunks it in the water. He raises it to the wall. But before he can start scrubbing, something catches his eye. A small mistake. Numbers carried where they shouldn’t have been. The kind of mistake a person makes when they insist on calculating large sums in their head. Issac tends to rely on mental-math as well, but to his credit, he is much, much better at it than most people. So he drops the paper into the bucket, and picks up the broken chalk instead. He fixes the mistake. And suddenly, the scribbling that comes after it does not seem nearly so alien as it did a moment before. He continues along the wall, checking, tweaking and eventually backtracking, filling in the parts that he can. The scope of the thing is still lost on him, but as he goes, he can sense that thing he’s been searching for. The thing that Robert has and seems to appreciate so little. The thing that has always been just out of Issacs reach. Something resplendent in its truth. The meaning behind the numbers. 

As sunrise begins to glow through the cool tile of the hall, Issac works.