There was no turning back. He was about to cross the point of no return.
S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "Subtraction"
The air on the island was calm, without even a faint trace of storm clouds or snowflakes, but the atmosphere was anything but. A dark, overbearing tension hung in the ambiance, a dryness enough to make each breath of air feel like swallowing knives. Alexander could feel the electricity in his bones. Outside of the pulsing pain, the way the lead burned into his skin, and the stinging that came with every breath, he felt it, felt it above all else, and made those other sensations feel like absolutely nothing at all.
He took a step. He took a breath.
He held a long, brutal metal rod in his hands, clasped tightly in his spiderlike fingers as if letting go of it were a death sentence in its own right. Earlier, he had taken apart one of the many shelving units that dotted the island's facilities and disassembled it with the same care and caution that a scientist might go about splitting an atom. It had not left his hands since he had first taken it. Since then, he had used it as a cane to traverse the island more easily in his newfound woundedness.
He took a step. He took a breath.
That was not its sole purpose. Alexander had a plan; this rod was the keystone, the centerpiece by which it would operate. It was, by all means, a longshot—but, at this point, in this place, there were no such things as guarantees. It had come to an end—where there was no option but to press onward, to throw down your gauntlet, to throw down the dice and see the result that would come as they fell—and he could only hope, in his heart and his head, that this would, against all the odds, work.
He craned his head upward and turned it, narrowed, half-hazed eyes shifting back and forth across the locale. He had ventured to the island's central township, where the original inhabitants had housed themselves. However, that fact, on its own, was not what had drawn him here. It was the fact that, across the entirety of the island, this was one of two places he could still cross to reach the ocean; most of them were now Danger Zones, but not here, not this place—an oversight he would use.
In the distance, he could see the water, sparkling, frigid, bits of ice forming on its surface where it met the concrete. He moved towards it, tiny drops of blood forming in his wake, one step at a time, one breath at a time. And, even though death was closing in on him, Alexander felt unstoppable, as if nothing could touch him anymore. He felt liberated, even though, as of yet, his liberation had not come. And Alexander drew closer towards the steps that led into the water and then took the first.
Alexander did not care if he died. From the moment he had first awoken on the island, he had considered it a possibility; such was his mindset that death was a fact of life and would come when it wished. But, back then, Alexander intended to find an alternative to the game for a separate reason. Because otherwise, there was no path in which he and Valentin could maintain their existences. He would have gladly traded his own for Valentin's if it had come down to it. They took that option from him.
Perhaps he would have gone along with their game if the circumstances had gone differently; maybe he would have killed for himself and Valentin. But those were what-ifs. His death had broken Alexander, but it broke him to the point that he did not care about what happened to himself. Alexander was a creature of spite and anger, and if he died, he died. He did not care. He lived only insofar as he did so he could still exact his calculated vengeance upon those who had done this to all of them.
Alexander wanted to shatter this game like it shattered him, to smash it into pieces and put them back together in his image. He wanted to prove—to the terrorists who had thought themselves so clever, to his classmates who had never believed in them, who had turned on one another so readily, to the whole world outside of this island—that he was right all along. To prove that this game—this terrible, terrible, terrible game—could be won, not on their terms, but on his terms, and his alone.
Perhaps it was a form of madness. But there was a method in it.
Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist, philosopher, and founder of statistical mathematics, died by his hand in 1906, aged 62; carrying on his work, Paul Ehrenfest did the same in 1933, aged 53. Évariste Galois died in 1832 of his wounds after a duel with an unknown assailant for reasons lost to time, aged 20. André Bloch murdered his entire family in 1917, aged 24, and continued his work at the Charenton lunatic asylum until his death. Kurt Gödel, aged 71, starved himself to death for fear of being poisoned.
Alexander Hawthorne, in the year 2021, aged 18, was about to cross the Rubicon, entering the pantheon of mathematicians who had lost their minds.
He devised a theory regarding the collars around their necks, the Swords of Damocles, that kept them all in line. It was a matter of the most basic deduction. They had to close; thus, they also had to open. That meant that the collar must have a locking mechanism; this also meant that it must have a clasp, hinges, and rivets. All of these things were logical extensions of facts about the collar. If there was a locking mechanism, that very mechanism was a possible vector of attack against itself.
He had spent so long thinking about how to turn off the collars from a mechanical and electronic perspective—how to render them nonfunctional—that he had overlooked the most basic possibility: simply removing them first. Thinking more, he imagined that was how the terrorists would want their captives to approach the collars. This area would likely have seen the most scrutiny thus far, giving the captors more valuable information and opportunities to refine their mechanisms further.
They had created an operant conditioning chamber—a Skinner box; Alexander was the rat in a cage. And they wanted him to press the lever.
Effectively, to draw from the above, they had given the students a heavily guarded door—the collar's actual mechanisms and electronics—and they had repeatedly dashed themselves against the rocks in an attempt to slip by. He intended to reject that framing and to strike against an area that was less considered. If he had, in his single-minded focus, overlooked such a thing, was it not also possible that the terrorists had themselves forgotten the possibility—neglected it as a valid plan of attack?
That was where the metal rod would come into play. Alexander's method of choice was to use a lever (the metal rod) to create torque—twisting force—and build amounts of pressure within the collar, the ultimate goal being to pop open the collar's rivets and clasps from the inside out, opening the collar without any risk posed from the internal systems. This plan would, in his estimation, result in a scenario in which the collar "unlocks," its clasps and rivets unraveling in such a way that the collar unclamped itself from his neck in such a way that it can be quickly, cleanly, and safely removed; this should not result in any detonation from the collar except for one done manually after-the-fact as a means of damage control. It may mangle his hands as he removes it, but he did not care; his hands were an acceptable sacrifice in the grand scheme of things. It was a plan that was, at a glance, utter madness—but could it be mad enough to work? He had to bet on it. There was no alternative left for him to find.
It was simple. It was beyond simple, an entire life hinging on an equation:
T = F × r × sinθ
Of course, he was not foolish; he had a contingency if his initial theory was incorrect. He intended to dive deep underwater. If something were to go wrong—and the collar, instead of opening directly (popping itself open from the pressure build up inside it), was cleaved through by the rod—the device would become flooded with seawater. That seawater would cause the battery to discharge more quickly, and the current would break down the salt by electrolysis, producing hydrogen and chlorine gas. After that, all the metal components, including the connectors, would rapidly corrode, rendering the device nonfunctional, a second chance reaction:
LiCl + H2O → LiOH + HCl
Alexander was not out-thinking the parameters set forth by the terrorists; he was thinking entirely outside of those parameters.
"I am not afraid anymore," Alexander declared as he stepped further into the screaming sea, restrained anger in how he spoke, bleeding and seeping into each word like acid dripping from his teeth, iron on his tongue, mettle in his voice. "Because now, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—left in this life for me to be afraid of; there is nothing left for me to lose. The only thing I have left in this world is my hatred—my hatred of you."
Lurching forward, he stepped forward again—once, twice, thrice—and let himself plunge into the ocean. The cold water stung him down to the bones. With a gasp, he felt his mouth fill with water, bubbles streaming from the corners of his lips. Then, as quickly as he could, he slid the metal rod into place, between his neck and the collar, and he rotated it into position; one end above one side of the collar, one back below the other. Then, with all the taut strength he could muster, he gripped each end with the opposite hand and pulled them, exerting pressure onto the collar.
