Shutdown (Glitch)

philosophy.”
    “Really?”
    “Both math and philosophy are asking the same question. Why? Then they use reasoning to try to discover the answers.” He nodded to himself. “They make sense when so little else does.”
    “Is that why you’ve spent so much time studying them?”
    He looked up at me, then down at his folded hands again. “Partly. After what the Chancellor did…” He swallowed. “Everything felt alien. All the people around me, you all felt … not just like strangers…” He paused as if looking for the right way to explain it. I was suprised he was actually opening up and didn’t say anything in case it made him clam up again. “It was like you were all a different species. You and Sophia were always crying whenever you visited me. You asked me questions I never knew the answers to. I didn’t know how to communicate with you. I genuinely didn’t understand what was going on around me at a very basic level.”
    His face contorted. “And on top of it all, I was being put through those strange and painful treatments. It was all so confusing. But around the second month, I started reading. I began with philosophy because I had that memory of you calling me a philosopher. At the beginning, you see,” he looked up at me, his eyes both searching and sad, “I genuinely wanted to go back to being him. It’s what you all told me I should be trying for, so I did.”
    Wow. I sat a little stunned. I hadn’t known any of that was going on in his head. I’d been so desperate for him to go back to being normal during those afternoon visits, I hadn’t seen how much he’d been struggling.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “But I never could. When I started working my way through the philosophy texts, though, I felt this rush of recognition because here, finally , were people speaking a language I could understand.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely curious. I hadn’t listened closely enough back then, but I could now. I accepted he was different, I just still didn’t understand why or how deeply the differences went.
    He looked upwards, as if sorting through his memory. “They were asking questions like: how do you know what you think you know? Is it because you trust in the power of reason to work your way to an answer? Or can you only know the things you personally experience through your five senses? And even if you trust in only what you yourself experience, aren’t those experiences filtered by the mind anyway? So is reality merely what you think it is?”
    My brain seemed to twist in on itself as I tried to follow him. “That all seems really complicated. I’m not sure I understand.”
    A half smile tugged at his lips. “I didn’t either, not at first, but slowly the puzzle pieces started falling into place. It was like the philosophers were turning life into math problems. With enough time, I could start breaking each one down into manageable chunks to start solving some of the equations.”
    “So what did you find out?” I leaned in. “What’s the answer to why ?”
    His face clouded over a little. “That’s the thing. At a certain point, it gets beyond logic, or at least the human ability to reason it out. It’s true of both math and philosophy. Like I said earlier, there’s always a point where things stop being facts and start to become theories about the way the world works. Like this.” He reached in his pocket and rummaged around for a moment, then pulled out a tiny object.
    “It’s a snail shell I found by the lake when I was gathering water last night.” He slid over closer until he was sitting beside me. He held up the shell closer. “See these tiny spirals all over the shell?” He traced the spiraling line with the tip of his forefinger.
    I nodded.
    “This shell and others all throughout the world follow the same mathematical sequence. Flower petals and pinecones and shells all grow according to this identical pattern. Even the ratios of the bones in the human body are related.” He held up his hand. “We see these patterns everywhere, but we don’t know why they happen.”
    He looked back up at me, his gray eyes bright. It was a surreal sight. I’d seen Adrien excited about ideas like this in the past, but it was different now, and not just because the blue-green color was gone from his eyes.
    He continued, oblivious to my scrutiny. “I mean, it’s an efficient growth pattern. But how do the plants know it’s the most efficient? Millions