For Tony Stark, it was supposed to be a very ordinary day. He got up late at noon, heated up a burger in the microwave, gobbled it down, and then dove straight into his research work.
In the afternoon, he went to the base in the dreamscape of the Luminous Alliance for a regular meeting, as usual, and after wrapping up all matters, sat in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, letting his inspirations shine.
That was how the day was supposed to go. But an otherwise uneventful day ended up with Shiller asking him a question with a very serious expression — "What is a Markov chain?"
Stark grabbed the wrist of Shiller's hand that was on his shoulder, then touched his forehead with his other hand. Looking into Shiller's eyes with his brown ones, he said, "Are you fucking mad?!"
This was something Stark couldn't utter at Shiller when he had tried swapping his own arm for his parents in return from Death. He rarely cursed in front of this psychologist.
Mathematics, a miraculous discipline. The magic lies in the fact that anytime someone who doesn't belong to this discipline mentions a term from it, they can instantaneously shift any scenario into a context of psychiatric analysis.
Math can turn idiots into madmen.
But Shiller wasn't an idiot, he was just a madman. He was mad enough without maths, so why would he get involved with it?
Stark pulled Shiller over to his desk, pushed him down onto a chair, and sat down across from him.
"First of all, I need to confirm: you're talking about the Markov chain in the mathematical models, right? Not some weird reimbursement code you've arranged with Nick?"
Shiller seemed a bit confused, as if his thoughts weren't entirely grounded here. After a while, he suddenly snapped back to reality, looked into Stark's eyes, and nodded.
Just as Stark was about to speak, Shiller hurriedly cut him off, "Okay, don't ask me why. Don't ask what's going on. I'm just suddenly interested in math. Given your genius, it shouldn't be too hard for you to explain these damn mathematical models, should it?"
Stark scowled, looking somewhat troubled. Logically speaking, he should've pressed on. However, having spent so much time with Shiller, he was all too familiar with the doctor's many plans. Any tip of an iceberg that surfaced seemed odd, irrational.
But when the entire iceberg rose above the surface, people would be astounded by its magnificence. That was Shiller's style. He wasn't good at explaining his plans.
Stark, on the other hand, felt a tad guilty about his previous overzealous therapy. Especially when Charles mentioned his relation to Erik, he felt the tense atmosphere he had created for Shiller could indeed affect their relationship.
A little guilty, Stark chose to be more obedient. He exerted a significant effort to clear his mind of curiosity and filled the gaps with heaps of knowledge.
"Do you want an explanation of this term? Or do you want its theorem and formulas? Or perhaps, the scenarios in which it could be applied?" Stark was the first to ask several questions.
Shiller immediately let out a sigh of relief. He had feared that even the genius would pull out a bunch of gobbledygook and tell him that these were the basics of the basics, and that he must learn it as he was Iron Man.
Thankfully, Iron Man spoke human languages.
Very soon, though, Shiller found out that he was oversimplifying it. The complexity of mathematics is not dependent on how much of a genius its explainer is. Even though Iron Man can speak human languages, math definitely can't.
Stark tried to explain to Shiller what a mathematical model was, how they are classified, and how they are applied, in as plain language as he could muster.
There wasn't any problem with this part. Shiller was completely able to understand these definitions, even without Stark explaining, he could have remembered them by reading documents.
However, when Stark really began to explain the principles, as expected, within 5 minutes he filled up an entire blank sheet of paper with undecipherable symbols, even scarier than the ones found on the paper Batman printed out.
As Batman once said, Stark's genius and his are of different sorts. Stark is gifted with a spiritual mind, a genius who always infuses his thoughts with inspiration, which means during his explanation, he often diverges, and abruptly shifts to more in-depth applications.
"Yes, the key is in the discrete-time stochastic processes. You have to remember this part, it's an important proposition in application. Of course, you don't really have to memorize all these complicated formulas. In practice, formulas are the least important. The key is to grasp the correspondence between case analysis and model construction."
"For example, I've built mathematical models for all the versions of my Ark Reactor. Let's take this one on me as an example. You should know what principle the Ark Reactor operates on, right?"
"Should I... know?" Shiller asked, looking lost.
Stark made an extremely helpless face, "You're in my lab every day. I've built over 20 versions of the Ark Reactors right in front of you. I even gave you a model one, how could you not know how it works?"
"When did you build an Ark Reactor in front of me?" Shiller asked, quite puzzled.
Stark stared at him. His ever-moist eyes were filling with a trace of sadness and dismay. He spread his hands and said to Shiller, "I've been waving in front of you for so long, showing you the tiny details of my genius inspirations so many times, I thought you understood all that!"
"I..." Shiller smacked his lips before saying, "I know you're sad, but don't be. You're teaching me math, not giving me psychotherapy."
Stark heaved a heavy sigh, saying, "All right, you've heard of new elements, haven't you?...Dear God, don't look at me with such a look—I see sheer stupidity there!"
Stark locked his gaze onto Shiller's eyes. He wasn't kidding, he'd never seen Shiller with such a bewildered look. His eyes were so droopy at the corners that they made him look especially non-aggressive—in layman's terms, tired.
Indeed, Shiller's eyelids began to fall. But just a second before he slipped into sleep, he suddenly woke with a start, shouting, "No! Batman! I'm not looking at any damned mathematical analysis!"
Stark was about to question who exactly Shiller's Batman was, but Shiller clasped his wrist, saying, "Forget about your Ark Reactor! Can you start explaining it all from the basics?"
Stark returned to his seat, gently prying his hand away from Shiller's grasp. He pointed at the paper covered in Markov chain equations, saying, "This is already basic."
Shiller and Stark held a staring contest.
Unable to help himself, Stark admitted, "In other words, if we were to transcribe the Ark Reactor into notations like these, it would take up all the space in Stark Building."
"It's not nearly as complicated." Stark didn't know what else to say; he tried his best to explain, "When I'm inventing, I don't derive from one to ten. I correlate one with a thousand. After arriving at a result of a thousand, I then contemplate what corresponds to a thousand, or within a series of numbers less than a thousand, back to one."
"So, as I've said these equations don't matter—they are not equations, but instincts. These things practically don't stay in my mind for 0.001 seconds. The result directly appears in my brain, so I can't really give you a step-by-step lecture!"
Seeing Shiller's eyelids start to droop again, Stark took a deep breath. Grasping Shiller's hand firmly, he said, "Fine. There's nothing the genius Stark can't do. When I was picking up Helen, I should've spent more time at her kindergarten and learned how those teachers taught!"
"Come on. We'll draw a diagram first. Look at this model. Then we'll go through the first equation. As per the system's development, time can be discretized as n=0, 1, 2..."
Stark purposely slowed down his speech, pronouncing every word very clearly. He first drew a cube on the paper, then used a few lines to divide it. After that, he introduced more lines and wrote heaps of terminologies on them.
Of course, the formula he first wrote was very simple, consisting only of a single letter and a few numbers. Generously, Stark even explained the so-called "system" and "time discretization."
Everything was still under control. But because Stark's speech was painstakingly slow and too detailed, Shiller began to feel drowsy as he listened.
He struggled to stay focused, incessantly pushing back his hair or shaking his head to prevent his mind from wandering.
But, as most people know, when things reach this point, mental drifting is practically unavoidable.
Shiller swore; he had only lost focus for two seconds. There was a clock in his Tower of Thought, so timing without a timer was a basic skill for him. But after two seconds went by, things escalated.
Stark had filled an entire sheet of paper with equations. To describe what he did during those two short seconds, if paper could pray, even God would shed a tear for Stark's forceful violation upon its brain.
Suddenly, a forest of upside-down "M"s, "U"s diving headfirst, "X"s that seemed capable of crushing people with their weight, "P"s with a train of small tails, both big and small "j"s "n"s "a"s "i"s, never-ending "()"'s, and "—"s that seemingly divided things but felt rather lonely appeared on the entire sheet.
"Alright, this is the basic theorem of the regular chain. It's not that hard, right? You must firmly remember this necessary condition and these two theorems..."
With a thud, Shiller's head hit the table. His soul drifted out of his body and, short for saying, he died on the spot.
But that was only how he felt. In reality, death wouldn't even claim him.
By normal standards, Shiller's intelligence was perfectly capable of understanding this mathematical knowledge. In fact, by normal standards, most people could understand it, as it didn't challenge the upper bound of human intelligence at all.
But humans are peculiar. Despite having sufficient intelligence and diligence, another infuriating situation might occur. Briefly, it could be summarized as—the knowledge just doesn't sink in!
That was what Shiller was encountering. His reason told him that his brain could comprehend what Stark was saying. His brain acknowledged that his reason was right, then kicked the knowledge right out the door.
Typically, when Shiller acquires knowledge, the personality controlling his body at the upper level would open the storage of memories inside the Tower of Thought, categorize the recorded fragments into groups properly. If needed, they would be retrieved for comprehension.
But what Greed was dealing with now was different. The storage was open, the move was assumed, but when the jumbled mess written all over the paper reached the door and glanced inside, it committed suicide right there and then.
Shiller felt a sort of grief; it wasn't him who abandoned math, but math who abandoned him.
Of course, math wouldn't abandon anyone—it simply wouldn't.