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Perigee Spoilers: Post-Requiem, Season 8 setting with possible spoilers Summary: Scully encounters chaos and weighs the probability that not all laws of physics are immutable. Carol deviated from her usual routine and took the time to pour her customer's third beer into a frosted mug, angling it carefully to sculpt a perfect inch of foam at the crown of the amber liquid. She placed a new bowl of pretzels beside the man's glass for good measure. Then she stood back and folded her arms across her chest, waiting for the brooder to meet her gaze. This guy reminded her of one of those automatic blood pressure machines they have in the health food stores at the mall. Just when you think he couldn't get any tighter, he loosened up as if his muscles were attached to a mechanical timer. He'd methodically empty two Heinekens without even taking off his overcoat, and by the time the third one was poured, he was rolling up his blue oxford cloth sleeves and removing his tie. Only today, he didn't wear a tie when he came in, although his shirt collar remained buttoned. "Extra tough day, cowboy?" Carol asked, pretending to focus her eyes on the glasses she was polishing rather than the man's slow but charming grin. "Well, we can round 'em up, rope 'em in and padlock 'em," he responded in a poor but charming attempt at a drawl, "But we always worry about the one that got away." He took a long swallow from his mug, boyishly licked the foam from his lips, and flashed the smile that reminded Carol of a jigsaw puzzle piece stuck upside down: it almost fit, but not quite. After two months of this almost nightly ritual, she sensed that she was getting close to figuring out what made this particular G-man tick. "If you tell me which particular photo at the post office I should be looking at, maybe I can help," Carol teased. "I'm afraid you won't find her picture at the post office anytime soon," he sighed. "Although I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up with a postage stamp commissioned in her image." "I see," she said while nodding. "Your renegade's supposedly one of the good guys." "Technically, I guess," the man said as he finally reached up and unbuttoned his collar. "She certainly believes it." "And you don't?" Carol asked, her curiosity piqued. "No, it's not that," he replied with uncertainty. He watched Carol as she helped herself to some of the pretzels in the bowl in front of him. They were shaped like little footballs and hockey sticks. "She oozes integrity, although I personally find some of it a little misplaced." "She's holding out on you!" Carol chuckled. She winked and leaned close to his clean-shaven face as she whispered, "Her loss, trust me." Without missing a beat, he winked right back at her and laughed, "Damn straight." "Jesus, Frohike, do you think you can stop laughing long enough to unjam the damn thing?" Scully said sharply. She glared at Byers and Langly as they sat on her sofa, trying to hide their snickering behind the latest edition of "What to Expect When You're Expecting." "Sorry, Scully," Frohike said earnestly, which prompted an even more fierce round of laughter from his companions. "I just never saw a necktie get stuck in an electric pencil sharpener before. I might be able to resurrect the sharpener, but the tie's lost." He tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile. Scully rolled her eyes and grabbed the sharpener and tossed it into the wastebasket. "I'll get another pencil sharpener, but I'll be damned if I buy him another tie." Byers finally stopped laughing long enough to ask a cogent question. "Why is he holding YOU responsible for his tie getting caught in his pencil sharpener, anyway?" Scully sighed with exasperation and flopped onto a nearby chair. "He probably wouldn't have if this was the first incident," she said. Langly giggled again. "You mean he's had more ties chewed up by pencil sharpeners?" "No, not exactly," Scully said. "It's more like an escalating sequence of unrelated events that only seem to happen when he's alone with me." She had a vague sense of déjà vu, reminding her of an old college course, Physics 341, "The Science of Chaos." She made a mental note to follow up on that thought after her visitors left while admitting, "Believe me, I'd be laughing too if it wasn't getting so damned spooky." "She threw a cup of water in your face?" Carol asked incredulously as she brought him another Heineken. "Well, I didn't exactly SEE her do it, but one minute she's sitting next to me, sipping from the paper cup, and the next minute my face is soaked and she slam dunked the empty cup into the round file as she stomped her pretty little ass out of there." "Just out of the blue, she dumped water on you?" she questioned again, this time skepticism edging into her voice. "Swear to God," he answered with a Cheshire cat grin. "We didn't exactly get off to a good start," Scully admitted as she passed a plate of cookies to her guests. "He didn't REALLY use the word 'boink,' did he?" Frohike asked before Byers threw a pillow at him. "I don't even remember now," Scully answered. "He just pushed my buttons, that's all." She reached for another cookie and fondled it pensively for a moment. Then she brightened and said, "Would you guys happen to know anyone who works at Mount Palomar?" "Walker Planke!" Byers shouted enthusiastically. "No relation to Max. He's sent us coordinates from the Hale telescope to help track satellite movements. What makes you ask?" "I've developed an interest in astronomy," Scully said noncommittally. "She tied your shoelaces together?" Carol screeched before popping a handful of pretzels that looked like catcher's mitts into her mouth. "The woman sounds unstable! "Oh, she is, Carol, she is, but she likes to call it hormonal. Did I tell you she's pregnant?" "No," Carol said, enjoying Doggett's true confessions more than ever. "What's her relationship like with the child's father? Can she be written up for unsportsmanlike conduct or something like that?" "I think I'd need proof that she did it, and I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even notice her tying them. And rumor has it that the child's father is her mysteriously missing ex-partner. I have $100 in the office pool saying she offed him for making her suffer through morning sickness." "But if YOU didn't tie his shoelaces together, who did?" Langly finally asked. "I have no idea," Scully replied, thinking vaguely of chain reactions. "We were alone in the office and the door was closed. I'd have thought he did it to himself if it wasn't for wedgie incident." Byers, Langly and Frohike looked at her and said in unison, "The wedgie incident?" Scully smiled. "We were standing in the office facing each other, right by Mulder's 'I Want to Believe' poster. Doggett was insisting that anyone who spent that many years investigating UFO's was capable of staging his own abduction to lend credence to his work. I was arguing that just because he didn't see it with his own eyes didn't mean it didn't happen. Then he kind of jumped and squirmed like he'd been goosed. I was standing about a foot away from him. He turned around, but of course no one was there." "Of course," the Gunmen said unconvincingly as they looked at each other. "So I had to get a new desk," Doggett said through a mouthful of pretzels shaped like Nike swooshes. "I would think so, after finding that dead rat in the old one," Carol agreed. "Oh, I vowed to keep Mulder's desk after the dead rat, smell or no smell. Dana Scully was not going to out-psych me. But broken fingers are another story. I finally decided to give it to Scully when I broke two fingers in the drawers. They kept slamming shut on me every time I reached in to get something." Carol was mesmerized. "Do you think it was Scully?" she asked breathlessly. "I was suspicious about the rat, I admit it, but I don't see how she could have broken my fingers. She was sitting across the room when it happened. She didn't have to laugh, though." "You don't think she has some sort of hormone-induced psychic powers or something, do you?" Doggett rolled his eyes. "Please, now YOU'RE starting to sound like Mrs. Spooky. No one can break someone's fingers from across a room, no matter how hormonal they are." "So Doggett's rat was really Schrodinger's Cat?" Byers concluded enthusiastically. "So it would appear," Scully said animatedly. She was more cheerful than she'd been in months. "When trying to illustrate quantum wave function, Schrodinger posited that a cat in box with a piece of uranium, a Geiger counter, and a bottle of poison gas is neither alive nor dead until someone opens the box. With quantum theory, it's impossible to predict how a uranium nucleus will disintegrate while in a closed box, and the disintegrating uranium nucleus is the necessary element to set off the Geiger counter that breaks the bottle of poison which kills the cat." Frohike stared at Scully blankly. "I still don't get what Schrodinger's Cat has to do with the dead rat in Doggett's desk." "Mulder used to argue that using statistics based on the probability of a given piece of uranium's half-life during its duration in the box gave enough evidence to predict the outcome of Schrodinger's Cat. Well, that was his intellectual argument, anyway. For practical purposes, he'd argue that we didn't need to open the metaphorical box to know the probability that the cat was dead. We didn't always need a smoking gun to get a search warrant, or break down a door or whatever if the laws of probability weighed heavily in the favor of whatever 'hunch' he happened to be favoring that day." "I still don't get what this has to do with Doggett," Langly interjected. "Mulder went out and bought his own Schrodinger's Cat," Scully said. Byers recoiled a bit. "He actually killed a cat to get a search warrant?" "No, not a real cat," Scully smiled. "A toy cat. A 'Hello Kitty' doll. He kept it in the middle drawer of his desk. Whenever we argued about whether or not we had enough evidence to obtain an arrest warrant, he'd consult with his little Schrodinger's Cat. He'd jiggle the drawer a little bit, and if the cat was face up when he opened it, Schrodinger's Cat was alive to 'tell' us to go get our warrant. If it was face down, the cat was 'dead,' and we needed to investigate more." Scully's smile whispered an inaudible longing. "I know, it all comes down to the same probability of a coin toss. Which was Mulder's way of saying that the science of probability was infinitely more practical than trying to apply quantum physics to everyday problems." "I still don't see how this connects with Doggett," Frohike said skeptically. "After Mulder...disappeared, I went through his desk. I removed all the paperwork he was working on and brought it home with me for safekeeping. I left most of his personal things, including Schrodinger's Hello Kitty, right where he'd left them. Then I locked the desk myself." Dana Scully had hoped to arrive at her office before Doggett did. She wanted to examine Mulder's desk locks for evidence of tampering. The minute she'd turned the corner towards the basement office, however, she disappointedly realized that she was too late. The nauseating aroma of Doggett's ritual Egg McMuffin wafted up to greet her. "Good morning, Dana," Doggett said cheerfully. She'd asked him repeatedly not to call her by her first name, but he continued to ignore her request. She responded with disinterested silence. "You just missed a phone call," he continued. "From a Dr. Planke. Who's he, your obstetrician?" Scully seethed silently but managed to give Doggett a polite smile as she retrieved the memo with Planke's number on it. "No, John, he's a urologist. His specialty is repairing traumatic castrations." Doggett winced and mentally ceded the point to Scully. As he predicted, she immediately picked up her phone and returned the missed call. He made no attempt to hide his eavesdropping. After she identified herself, Scully listened intently, picked up a pen and scrawled several quick notes. "And what's the source of these coordinates?" she asked. She nodded and wrote some more. "Yes, that e-mail address is fine. Would you characterize this phenomenon as a particle exhibiting wave-like properties, or a wave exhibiting particle-like properties? Yes, that would be great. Thank you." She replaced the receiver and met Doggett's stare. "What the hell was that all about?" Doggett asked as he moved towards her workspace to look at her notes. Scully was about to sweep them into her briefcase when Doggett cried out in pain and dropped to the floor. "Five stitches to the head," Scully repeated into the phone. "It was the strangest thing. You wouldn't think that something as round as a globe could cause such a deep wound." Scully cradled the cordless phone under her chin as she set up her laptop on her kitchen table. Her notes from her conversation with Dr. Planke were strewn across the surface. "No, neither of us could have bumped the shelf. I was seated about three feet away from it, and the globe was a good foot away from Doggett when it fell. But you want to hear the really weird part about it? There was an old post-it note attached to it. It said, 'Ptolemy wasn't the only one who had the center of the universe wrong.' It was Mulder's handwriting." Scully smiled as she listened to the cordless. "I've got to go, guys. But thanks for the introduction to Dr. Planke. And have Byers call me if the pattern of those coordinates is anything but random." Scully awakened suddenly from a deep, dreamless sleep. It was still dark. Shadows of leaves backlit by moonlight danced across the wall opposite her bed. Despite the dead night chill, she climbed out of bed and took a cautious tour of her apartment. The doors and windows were locked. Satisfied that her repose was disturbed by a forgotten dream, she headed towards her bed. Then she noticed that her laptop was on. Her browser was stopped at a page about Josephson junctions. They required electrons to gain additional energy in order to pass a barrier. There was a quote by Heinz Pagel that was highlighted, emphasizing that "some electrons compensate merely by tunneling right through the wall." She closed the page only to reveal another open one behind it. It was the "Hello Kitty Web Museum." There were also three e-mails from Walker Planke. The first one informed her that although he could not identify without error the scientific nature of the coordinates he'd been receiving at Mount Palomar, he was convinced that they were behaving as particles with wavelike properties. The second e-mail was an update to the first. Apparently the wavelike activity was being reproduced with a slightly modulated amplitude, almost as if there was an echo, or some kind of mirror. In the third e-mail, rated "high priority," Planke stated that he believed he isolated the location of the echo or mirror. It was in the greater Washington, D.C. area. "Even if we could extrapolate that the Einstein-Podlosky-Rosen paradox could be applied to supra-atomic particles instead of just electrons, we still have that sticky little detail about the space-time continuum to deal with," Langly insisted. "Just imagine the space-time continuum as a wave instead of a linear construct for a minute, okay?" Scully argued. "Isn't it conceivable that two electrons, or particles, or whatever could affect each other simultaneously despite their distance from each other? Especially if their distance was a product of some sort of forced separation in opposite directions?" Byers, Frohike and Langly looked at each other with concern. They'd never seen Scully abandon logic like this before. Frohike finally spoke. "I suppose all these things are possible, theoretically, if only because half of our existing theories about quantum physics exist only because we haven't been able to disprove them." Frohike's expression softened to one of pity. "I know you've been having a hard time since Mulder's been gone..." Scully shook her head vigorously. "He's been here. I don't know how, but he's been here. I've felt him." Scully was surprised to see Doggett walk into the office. Once ten o'clock had passed, she'd assumed he'd stayed home to nurse his global head wound. "I know who Walker Planke is," he said sharply. "Chief Astrophysicist at the Mount Palomar observatory in California. And I know why you're in touch with him. You think he's located you partner." Scully looked at Doggett wide-eyed. She'd underestimated him, or at least she underestimated his motivation to uncover what she was investigating on her own time. "So what if I do?" Scully asked defiantly. "I don't see you turning up any promising leads sitting around waiting for a report of the next disoriented or deceased John Doe to cross your desk." "You know, I was going to give you a chance. In fact, I've given you about two dozen chances. But I think you're incapable of handling this missing person investigation in a professional manner. You're seeing things that just aren't there. Even if a telescope has picked up some fluky signals...so what? I'm supposed to believe your partner's sending you Morse Code love notes from his UFO?" Doggett paused to catch his breath. He immediately regretted his last sentence. He'd hit her below the belt. He half-expected her to cry, or to throw something at him. Instead, she just started packing up her notes to leave. Her apartment was unexpectedly warm when she walked in. She opened several windows to inject life into the mausoleum-idle air that surrounded her. She was tired, exhausted. Her head throbbed. She reclined across her sofa and closed her eyes, silently willing the pain to go away. She slept deeply. Her eyes were shrouded dreamlessly still beneath their lids. Her compact body was molded gracefully onto the cushions, her muscles finally surrendering to the relaxation demanded by sleep. There was a slight, almost imperceptible swell beneath the hem of her shirt. The soft material wrinkled slightly, as if disturbed by the slightest, gentlest of caresses. Her hand moved slowly, protectively towards the area and rested gently. Still deep in slumber, her mouth curved into a smile. Then she turned her hand so her palm faced outward and upward, and her fingers curled slightly inward, as if inviting approach; or was the gesture an offering, a revelation? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ When she opened her eyes, her apartment was cool and dark. She must have slept for several hours. Absently, she moved her hand towards her abdomen and held it there momentarily, as if sensing a new sensation. Then she examined her hand, turning it slowly as if she expected to find something different among the familiar creases. She frowned slightly as she sat up. Her expression tightened into surprise when she looked at the small coffee table across from her. A small box rested on the table. It was nondescript - a plain brown, corrugated box with no markings on the outside and a matching, unmarked brown lid fitted tightly over it. Cautiously, she lifted the container and shook it gently. It was light, probably empty. She slowly positioned her finger under the lid and began to lift, but then she stopped and held the box on her lap. "We don't always need to open the box to accurately predict what will be inside of it, Scully," he had told her once. "You don't have to hold Schrodinger's Cat in your hands to know if it's alive or dead." At the time, she berated him for being him for being so macabre. Now, she missed his twisted sense of humor. Since he'd been gone, she'd literally ache at the withdrawal of his physical presence. There was one day that she cried until her chest hurt because she thought she'd forgotten what he'd looked like. She felt his lingering scent diminishing into only a confused memory. Today it was different. She had a strong mental image of him, looking pale, sad, and serious, but with hope in his eyes. She remembered he looked that way the day she left the hospital, her cancer cautiously in remission. Her ringing phone startled her, and she almost dropped the small box. Carefully, she replaced it on the table and picked up the cordless. It was Dr. Planke. At precisely 3:25 p.m. Eastern Time, the coordinates tracking the object that he tentatively called a particle with wave-like properties, which he emphatically insisted he would incontrovertibly identify, reached a point that he called a perigee. Scully remembered that satellites were described to meet perigee when they reached a point in their orbit where they came the closest they could possibly come to the body they revolved around. Then the satellites would retreat on a course towards apogee, the most distant point from their "home." Planke excitedly asked Scully if this information meant anything to her. She glanced at her clock. It was 4:30 p.m. She slowly moved her gaze from the clock, to the box on her table, to her belly, and finally to her hand. "No, Dr. Planke," Scully lied. "I appreciate your efforts, but I've been looking too hard for a pattern to all of these coordinates. I'm sure Byers will want to keep updating his information, but I don't want to take up any more of your time." She replaced the phone and walked towards the box again. For a moment, she was back in the lecture hall for Physics 341. She remembered underlining a paragraph in her notes. "An electron has no precise location in particle-wave duality. It exists in a superposition of any number of probable locations. The moment of truth comes at the instant the scientist observes the electron first hand. It is this moment that the electron collapses into a true location." She smiled. Sometimes chaos could have a beauty all its own. Scully gently lifted the lid of the box. Inside was Mulder's "Hello Kitty," smiling at her, face up. She lifted the tiny doll and held it tightly. She gazed out her window, beyond the tops of the nearby buildings and trees, to the distant and paling late afternoon sky. Yes, chaos had its charms, but the simple science of probability was infinitely more comforting. END Thanks to Amanda for the encouragement, beta and for making me see Hello Kitty in a whole new light.
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