Fatal Equation

In a sub-zero blizzard, I stared dead at the smart lock screen on my own front door. A hyper-complex dynamic algorithm pulsed across the digital display. It was a parting gift from Penelopemy husband's childhood sweetheart and an Ivy League math Ph.D. Solve this, and you get to go inside.

I stood in that whiteout for three hours. Ice crystals sealed my eyelashes. The biting wind chewed through my coat until the world went black.

The steady beep of a heart monitor dragged me back to consciousness. Alistair sat beside my hospital bed.

He reached out to brush my hair, a casual smile on his face. "Don't be mad at Penelope. She was just pulling your leg."

"That equation takes her two minutes tops. How was she supposed to know you couldn't figure it out?"

I shoved his hand away.

"I want a divorce."

The smile slid right off his face. "You want to throw our marriage away because you couldn't solve a math problem?"

I turned my head to stare at the blank wall.

Deep inside my skull, a mechanical voicedead for seven long yearssuddenly sparked to life.

[Host, do you wish to initiate the detachment protocol immediately?]

I closed my eyes.

"Initiate."

Chapter 1

I blacked out in the snow. Suspended somewhere between dreaming and dying, memories flooded back. I remembered who I really was: a transmigrator dropped into this world. My mission had been simplemake Alistair fall in love with me and marry him.

Technically, I hit that milestone the second I said "I do." But a system upgrade severed my connection. Seven years later, the reboot was finally complete. The mechanical voice echoed in the void.

[Hello, Host. We apologize for the seven-year disconnection caused by the system upgrade. Your mission is complete. You may request detachment from this world at any time.]

[Upon returning to your original world, you will receive a standard bonus of thirty million dollars. As compensation for the delay, an additional thirty million will be deposited into your account post-mission.]

I let the numbers sink in. "Can you give me a little more time?"

My head spun. I couldn't tell if that robotic voice was a hallucination brought on by hypothermia or cold, hard reality.

Alistair gently propped me up, pulling my heavy body against his chest. Knowing my mouth tasted like bitter ash from the IV drip, he brought over a steaming caramel macchiato.

He coaxed me with that sickeningly gentle tone. "Take a sip of your favorite hot coffee to warm your stomach. Be a good girl."

He expertly tipped the rim of the cup against my lips. When I didn't open my mouth, a tiny crease formed between his brows. "What is it? Are you still mad?"

I clamped my jaw shut.

He settled onto the edge of the mattress and let out a long sigh. "You know how Penelope is. She's an academic maniac."

"She didn't think it through. It was just a prank."

"She doesn't have a mean bone in her body. How could someone who only cares about research be malicious?"

He stroked my forehead, smoothing down a cooling gel patch. "Come on, stop holding a grudge. She forgot about the equation right after she taped it up."

"She feels terrible about it. She knows she messed up. She didn't lock you out on purpose."

My face felt like cracked ice. I turned my head away, breaking his touch.

Alistair pulled me into a tight, suffocating hug. "I'll never let anything happen to you."

But he would.

Because this wasn't the first time.

My husband, Alistair, was a globally renowned math prodigy. His childhood sweetheart was a Ph.D. in the exact same field. Growing up, they were the golden children everyone else was measured against. They shared the same obsessions.

For years, they buried themselves in academia, practically hailed as the ultimate power couple of the math world. Penelope thrived on inventing impossibly convoluted theorems. And Alistair never got tired of cracking them.

Whenever he solved one of Penelope's puzzles, he'd grab me, spinning me around with breathless kisses. "She's brilliant. I can't believe she found a way to calculate the limit value like this."

His eyes would glaze over. Most of the time, I couldn't tell if he was fixated on the numbers, or on Penelope.

Five years ago, I was in a car wreck. The ER needed a family member's signature for emergency surgery. My phone dialed Alistair's number until the battery died. Nothing.

I found out later that Penelope had hidden his phone. She locked it inside a custom box, sealed with a brand-new equation. It took Alistair two hours to solve it. Two hours.

By the time he opened that box, I had missed the critical golden window for emergency surgery.

My body was left with permanent nerve damage.

Chapter 2

Three years ago. I was hemorrhaging on the bathroom tile from a miscarriage. Alistairs phone went straight to voicemail. So, I dialed Penelope.

She picked up, her tone dead. "Alistair is right on the verge of cracking my equation. You can't interrupt him right now. Just give it two minutes."

I waited. Two minutes bled into three hours. Because I missed the emergency window, the doctors had to surgically remove my uterus.

I permanently lost the ability to ever have a child.

After that, I slammed divorce papers onto his desk.

He broke down. He dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor, begging and pleading for days for one last chance. He swore on his life it would never happen again. He even cut off all contact with Penelope to prove it.

But it only took a few days for Alistair to cave.

Penelope crashed her car. By the time Alistair rushed to the hospital, she was already in the ICU. The attending physician claimed the crash was due to severe insomnia and anxietythat if she had lost another pint of blood, she wouldn't have made it.

Alistair ran a hand over his face, unable to meet my eyes. He cornered me, insisting that our marital issues shouldn't drag an innocent bystander down.

Penelope was just an academic. She wasn't malicious. The miscarriage incident was just a tragic misunderstanding.

And besides, Penelope had already paid the price.

Right. She spent two days getting a blood transfusion. I lost my uterus.

Alistair begged me to let it go. He swore hed spend the rest of his life making it up to me. We coasted in suffocating silence for the next few years. Until two months ago.

There was a massive international academic summit. The committee invited both Alistair and Penelope. As Alistair's plus-one, I was dragged along to London. Penelope cornered me to deliver her apology.

"I am so sorry, Sloane. I literally had no idea there was a whiteout blizzard." She dabbed at her dry eyes.

"Plus, I just assumed that after being married to Alistair for so long, some of his genius would have rubbed off on you. That equation was so basic. Just freshman calculus."

"Then I got so absorbed in my research, you slipped my mind" She forced a sob, her shoulders shaking.

"It's entirely my fault. I don't expect you to forgive me, but please, stop punishing Alistair. I can't stand knowing your marriage is suffering because of me."

She held out a tin of artisanal cookies. The packaging was intricate, sealed tight.

"I bought these here in London. The tin was just too clever to pass up." Penelope tilted her head, a sickly sweet smile on her lips.

"Look, there's a lock right on top. The hint is incredibly simple. Im sure you won't get locked out this time, Sloane."

Alistair slung a heavy arm around my shoulders, squeezing me tightly to smooth things over. "Its just a geeky prank from the summit merch table. It's funny, honestly. Just take the box."

I smiled. A dead, hollow stretch of my lips. I took the tin from her hands. Alistair let out a sigh of relief.

Then I raised the box and slammed it straight into the marble floor.

The metal warped with a deafening crack. The lock popped off, and shattered crumbs exploded across the room.

"I find this method much more efficient."

Penelope stared in horror at the pulverized mess. "The logic puzzle on that box the summit committee specifically invited Alistair to design it"

Alistairs relaxed posture vanished. The blood drained from his face, his jaw clenching tight.

"That was a peace offering from Penelope! Why the hell would you do that?"

He pointed at the mess on the floor. "She already apologized! What more do you want from her?"

I didn't say a word. I just stared down at the jagged metal and the crushed debris scattered across the expensive marble. My fingernails dug so hard into my palms that the skin nearly broke.

Alistair grabbed his coat. He slammed the hotel room door so hard the walls shook. He didn't come back for days.

Chapter 3

On the third night, the mattress dipped. Heavy arms wrapped tightly around my waist from behind.

"Alright, enough with the silent treatment," Alistair murmured into my hair. "Let's just move past this. Neither of us brings it up again, okay?"

"Penelope genuinely wanted to apologize. Shes just so hardwired for academia, she didn't realize picking up a random puzzle gift would trigger you like that."

He pulled a small velvet box from his pocket. "Look. She picked out a new apology gift for you."

I flipped the lid open. A star-and-moon pendant rested on the black satin.

I remembered a math conference in Paris three years ago. Penelope had stood at the podium and declared to a room full of scholars, "The ultimate end of mathematics is astronomy." Stars and moons. Penelopes absolute favorite motifs.

In the dead of night, Alistair's phone lit up the dark room. Penelope flashed across the screen.

He hit ignore. It rang again. After the third consecutive call, he finally answered, putting it on speaker.

Penelopes voice buzzed, high and breathless. "Alistair! I have a massive breakthrough on the Ramanujan black hole formula."

"You need to come over right now. I need you to verify my hypothesis!"

Alistair let out a harsh breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. "We'll run the numbers tomorrow. It's too late right now."

She huffed loudly through the speaker. "Fine, fine. Just sit there and miss out on the greatest mathematical conjecture of the century."

Alistair turned his head, a perfectly practiced look of guilt pasted on his face. "Sloane"

I gave a dead, hollow smile. "Go."

Midnight summons weren't exactly a new development. Throughout our seven years of marriage, she constantly found reasons to drag him out of our bed.

"I have a new hypothesis." "I found a different angle to solve this." "A new verification method for the Riemann hypothesis" "I just discovered the greatest mathematical model of this century."

It didn't matter if every single one of her "breakthroughs" ended in total failure. It didn't matter if Alistair showed up only to find out she was drastically exaggerating. He thrived on it. As long as Penelope called, Alistair would brave any blizzard, drop any obligation, and run straight to her side.

"Don't take it personally, Sloane," he would always say, throwing on his coat. "This is just how we academics are wired. When an idea hits, we can't sleep until we test it."

"Sometimes, you have to choose between your family and scientific progress. It's about contributing to research. It's about serving the greater good."

He always elevated his excuses to some untouchable moral high ground, pinning me in a corner where I had to step back. If I pushed back, I was instantly branded as selfish, short-sighted, and emotionally manipulative.

But after all these years The fatigue had settled deep into my bones.

Alistair stayed at Penelope's hotel suite for the entire night. Early the next morning, he ran halfway across London to bring me breakfast.

"Sloane, your favorite avocado bagel and iced Americano," he said, setting the paper bag on the table. "You have no idea how long the line was at that viral spot."

There were two identical sets of breakfast inside the bag. He probably thought I had forgotten. Avocado bagels and iced Americanos were Penelopes exact go-to order.

I didn't reach for the cup. I kept my hands folded in my lap, my voice flat. "Let's get a divorce."

Alistair froze, a bewildered laugh escaping his lips. "Sloane, stop this nonsense."

I stared right through him. "I'm deadly serious. I want a divorce."

Chapter 4

The iced Americano slipped from his fingers. The plastic cup hit the floor with a sharp crack, brown liquid and ice cubes exploding across the tile.

"Why? Tell me why, Sloane. Because Penelope gave you a math problem and you couldn't get inside?"

"Or because she handed you a puzzle box? Stop this. You're not Penelope. Can you stop acting like a child?"

His phone buzzed. He picked it up without missing a beat. "Alright, I know. I'm on my way."

It was Penelope. Again. They were prepping for a joint lecture at University College London next week.

He pocketed his phone and looked at me. "I'm going to pretend you never said that today. Sloane, I need you to stop throwing these tantrums. Can you just be a little more understanding?"

Alistair pulled me into a quick, suffocating hug before grabbing his coat. "Wait for me to get back. I booked a table at your favorite steakhouse. We'll go get that dry-aged ribeye you love tonight."

He broke his promise. Around 7:00 PM, my phone lit up.

"The university faculty is dragging me out to dinner. I can't get away. I'm so sorry, babe. I promise I'll make it up to you tomorrow."

But I was done waiting. In all our years together, the phrase I heard the most was: Wait for him.

Alistair and I met in high school. He was a year ahead of me. I waited for him through high school, then through college.

Then I waited for him to finish his master's. After that, he flew overseas for his Ph.D.

I knew I was supposed to support his career. Academia was an endless grind, and research was a noble pursuit. And he delivered. At just thirty-three, he bagged an internationally recognized award in mathematics.

But as his wife Over all these years Straining my neck to look up at him had left me utterly exhausted.

Not to mention the third shadow that constantly trailed behind him. Even in our wedding photos, Penelope was planted right next to his left shoulder.

Whenever I brought it up, Alistair would just brush it off. "I view Penelope as a little sister. If there was ever going to be anything between us, it would have happened years ago."

It wasn't like Penelope never dated. But every single one of her relationships crashed and burned. After parading around with some new guy, she always circled right back to Alistair.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Sloane," she would say. "Alistair and I grew up rolling around in the same backyard mud puddles. I've seen him looking like an idiot in his diapers. I feel nothing for him."

Yet, on the day Alistair and I tied the knot, she showed up and caused a scene at the reception.

Back then, I was young and blinded by adoration for my husband. I caved to his every demand. I swallowed my pride and tolerated Penelope at every turn. And all that bought me was her constantly pushing the boundaries, unchecked.

For seven years, there was always a third person breathing down our necks.

I was done.

I stared at the wall for a long time. Finally, I summoned the presence buried in my mind. "I've made my decision. I want to request detachment from this world."

The mechanical voice chimed in immediately.

[There are multiple methods for world detachment. Which protocol would you like to select, Host?]

I let the silence stretch. "I want him to be the one who pushes me over the edge. I want him to spend the rest of his life choking on regret."

A static hum vibrated in my skull.

[Understood, Host. This aligns with the 'Faked Death/Grovelling' detachment protocol. Please allow me a moment to query the database.]

Chapter 5