Stagnant

June 13, 2026

It’s been a few months since I wrote in here. A lot has happened.

My foot still hurts. It causes me pain very frequently. I don’t blame May, or hold it against her, but… for the rest of my relatively brief life I have to suffer this now, and I’m not so deluded that I can’t see that it’s because of her that I’m this way. I don’t think my opinion of her could ever change. I’m just glad she’s safe.

But I don’t foresee the pain getting better until the end of the world.

May’s been staying in her room pretty consistently. I’m not sure what to do. I’ve tried to reach out to her, but she always pushes me away, and I don’t want to be pushy back.

I think her sister holds it against her. She’s been quite standoffish, but she’s been helping me do the mundane things I now struggle with, like getting water. It helps that she isn’t at school.

On that subject, schools have all closed. The death toll from the extirpations is rising. People are starting to be genuinely afraid—as they should have been all along—and it isn’t as though it’s some clandestine thing that the phenomena are growing in size.

Just last week, I read a news article about the deaths of six men in a town nearby—a small suburb. There’s a rumor starting to spread that they were all collectively extirpated: the night they went missing, a grove of trees in the heart of the town disappeared, and them with it. In their place was a hemispherical hole.

In general, the work is going well. Irina has been much kinder, but just as fervent. I can tell now that it’s the guilt plaguing her mind that molded her to be this way. I’ve come to accept it as her new nature, grating though it may be from time to time.

She’s also been accommodating of me, and of my condition: I am now allowed to work at home. That part has actually been quite nice, and refreshing.

But… I can’t help but think about the idea that we aren’t moving fast enough.

Ken placed his pen in the binding of his notebook. Time to join a call, he thought, opening his laptop and plugging it into his workstation. The two monitors hanging from branching arms above it flickered on as the cable seated itself in the port.

The time on his laptop said it was 8:30, on the dot. Given Irina’s neurotic focus on punctuality, he assumed she was already in the call. She wouldn’t wait for him to join, though; instead, she would just start to work, and when he joined, she would greet him when her eyes passed over the screen long enough for her to notice he was there.

He wasn’t one to interrupt, so he usually just said hello, and if she didn’t reply, he would just sit there in silence until she did, doing his own work.

The computer played a chippy tune when he joined the online conference call. It was loud in the headphones he wore, and it startled him today just like every day prior.

“You’re late.” The first words he heard upon joining. Irina sat quite close to her camera, startling him again.

“No, I’m not,” he adjusted in his seat, trying to fit his head better into frame. “I arrived precisely when I meant to.”

She scoffed—in a mocking way, not playfully—but didn’t address it further.

“Anyways, did you run that simulation overnight?”

“Uh, which one?” Though he was used to always feeling like he was forgetting something, it was rare that he actually had. That may have been the case here—he hadn’t run much of anything overnight.

“You—” Irina cut herself off. She took a deep breath, eyes closed, and then began to speak again. “You don’t remember the batch of tests I asked you to run yesterday? In the morning?”

Ken furrowed his brow, pressing his eyes closed. “Mm… Nope. Sorry. I guess the concussion is still affecting me some.”

Irina looked annoyed, but kept whatever heinous thought she had loaded up stored inside. Instead, she simply said, “I guess so. Please run it tonight.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure…” He picked up the pen from his notebook, turning to the blank back page and tearing it out. “Uh, what was…?”

“I simply asked you to try to figure out why they are expanding. If you have a cloud of cold dark matter, what happens if that cloud of particles is suddenly injected with an arbitrary amount of additional particles.”

“Right, okay.” Ken scribbled the words verbatim on the page. He had a stack set up that could simulate dark matter and its effects on light, celestial bodies, and so on, but the environment in which the matter existed, as well as the quantities in which it was found, was relatively constant over time to simplify the model.

Seeing as cold dark matter was relatively slow compared to other kinds of dark matter anyway, considered cold due to its negligible speed relative to the speed of light, simulating it as being motionless or as having low but constant velocity and density was a useful and clean simplifying assumption. He supposed that Irina meant for him to do away with the density assumption.

He would have to sort out the particulars of it later in the day.

“Why is that theory relevant,” he asked absentmindedly, still writing.

“It’s my theory for why the extirpations grow.”

“Ah.”

They sat in silence for a while, each toiling away on their respective tasks.

After a time, though, Ken’s head popped up. “Irina, I have to ask you something.”

She nodded, still looking at her side of the work.

“Do you think we’ll actually succeed?”

She froze. For a long time. Eventually, though, her head turned back up. “Yes.”

“What makes you think so?” Ken tapped his pen idly on the desk, staring at her through the screen.

“This is silly. Just keep working.” Irina turned her head back down, but Ken could see that she was thinking about it. And that even she wasn’t working.

“You don’t actually think so, right?”

“I think…” She paused. “I must make it right.”

“But do you think you can?”

“I don’t know, Ken. But if you don’t, why are you still here?”

“It’s… not that I don’t think you can, or we can. I actually think there’s hope. I just… Pragmatically, I wonder if my hope and faith are misguided. We just haven’t made much progress on anything but the nature of the phenomenon. So, I guess, stopping it seems like a pipe dream when we don’t even really know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

Irina just sat there, silent. It had been about two months since he’d been let free from the hospital. And in that time, they had hit roadblock after roadblock—pursued theory after theory that turned out full of holes.

“I have nothing to say,” Irina said. “Except that if we don’t struggle, we are sure to die. And… at least if we die, we can do it satisfied.”

“That’s kind of dark.”

“Which is why I do not talk about things like this. Let’s get back to work.”

But Ken could see her mood changed. Sullen. Sunken. And he could see she worked more slowly now.

Perhaps his questioning had gotten to her, after all.