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For approximately nineteen months, Mimsy diligently recorded all research and observations pertaining to her most crucial personal project in a moleskine notebook, a larger version of the pocket-sized variety that she kept with her at all times. On its unruled pages were lines upon lines of neat, even writing, in perfectly practiced cursive, top to bottom. It was always the same type of pen, with the same line width, with the same pressure, right up to a point about three-quarters of the way through the book.

That was where the words began to wander aimlessly over the page, as if they themselves were as lost and uncertain as the writer had been. They slipped off of the margins and went crooked to force themselves in place, and oftentimes made very little sense. They had lost all of the practiced penmanship found earlier in the text, and no longer offered the same sense of calm restraint. There was inexplicable repetition, and more question marks than any other type of punctuation, and large portions that were scratched out so heavily that they were illegible now.

As it began to seem like the journal of a miserably lost cause, just a few pages after the troubled text started the lettering went right back to normal, like nothing was ever wrong. It was not addressed in the writing, and went entirely ignored as its author looked forward, moving on to items of greater importance.

The notes remained that way, right up until the end. The notebook was full, and the research stopped abruptly on the last page - it wasn't nearly done yet, not even close, but this space had been outgrown.

This was the notebook that Mimsy had brought with her, the most significant thing that she had to offer to the afternoon picnic, within the beginnings of a house that would have just enough room. Once Robert was finished eating (as she tried to avoid topics of importance when he was focused on food), she pulled the notebook into her lap and put both hands on the cover, palms flat against the surface. They would be shaking if she held them out right now, despite her confidence in this decision; there was an unavoidable uncertainty that preceded choices like this, when the results meant everything either way. Risks were always minimized when possible, but science was nothing if not a tremendous risk in itself, one leap of faith after another.

"After a great deal of consideration..." She lifted the notebook to extend it towards him, and managed to maintain a fairly steady hold on it, surprisingly. "I have decided that you should have this. It is an invitation, but you are welcome to decide whether or not you accept."

For something that she called an 'invitation', there were no words on it that any traditional invitation might provide, no time or place or contact information. There was only a rectangular label, where its contents were identified in her handwriting: R. Morris. c1-A. 08/12-04/14.

At first, Mimsy read his reaction as horrified or negatively taken aback, and froze in a perfect impression of a deer in the headlights. She should have thought of what she would say in this instance - she should have thought of what she should say at all - but all of her thoughts and planning ended at the moment where she opted to hand it to him.

That was a mistake. Maybe this was a mistake. Was it too late to ask for him to give the notebook back to her? It was socially rude to request for an invitation to be returned, right? Did that extend to situations with these circumstances?

Thankfully, however, the question he finally asked prevented her from talking herself out of anything too hastily.

"Well...a great deal of consideration, as I said, accounting for variables that I could never have accounted for, and all of my original projections never included Wonderland, of course, and I, ah, just--"

The spike of anxiety caught Svensyl's attention, when he had been respectfully silent until now. He piped up with a list of his own suggestions, which served well to remind her to calm down, in its own way. His commentary of the sort used to make this so much worse, but now she had no reason to worry.

Of course not. There was evidence of that all around them.

"Yes." The drawn-out word shook where her hands hadn't, part excitement, part trepidation. She reached to pat the notebook in front of him, and quickly pulled back to clutch both hands in her lap, eyes on him expectantly. "I am sure."

When he opened the notebook, Mimsy hurriedly moved to sit right next to him, shoulder pressed against the side of his arm. From there she could easily see the writing on the page, but it didn't matter, really. This part was memorized.

"You trust me," she murmured, nudging him with her elbow. "This is not part of the test."

Robert was as nervous as she was, wasn't he? It was reassuring, even though she thought it probably shouldn't be - they shared the adrenaline that marked the approach of an experiment, despite nearly two years of progress. This was like initiating the process all over again, after shifting some variables and removing others, a double-blind experiment of a new definition.

The picnic blanket bunched up around her legs when she shifted to get comfortable, still leaning just slightly against him when she settled and stopped. Then her focus was very firmly on the notebook again, too eager to start, too eager to notice that he was hiding a blush and not looking down at it with her.

At the very top of the page in slightly faded ink was his name, followed by the preliminary research on her very first candidate:





"The subject was already quite promising at this time," she quietly added, lips quirking into a smile. She pretended to adjust her glasses to disguise the smug little grin, but the unsubtle motion wasn't enough to hide how pleased she was.

He asked if he could ask her something, and that was startling enough in its own right, even before his question was voiced. Why would he ever think otherwise? Maybe it was just this once, in the wake of a shift that followed her decision of inclusion.

Then he asked what he actually wanted to ask, his voice full of the clear indicators of something 'wrong', and Mimsy swallowed past the lump in her throat as she tried to form a response.

"I continued taking notes, didn't I?" Answering a question with a question was not the most straightforward choice, especially when he seemingly felt less than okay, but they had evidence on their side for this - a whole book of it, right in front of them, and it would be foolish to not make use of it.

"At the time...no, this observation changed nothing," she continued, reaching to thumb through the pages as she spoke, showing him at a glance how everything remained fairly similar in terms of her notes. "I remained uncertain regarding whether or not the subject would simply require an outstanding capability to love, or if it was necessary to love...well. Me."

She stopped turning the pages so rapidly when she made it past the halfway point, and it was obvious just by looking at it that something was different in the notes - something that extended past just the note-taking process. A few of the visibly disoriented pages passed, and she stopped to tap her finger in the middle of the page they were now on.

"When I did determine that my involvement was critical, that changed things. That was frightening. My uncertainty at that point in time was tremendous. I could not conclusively prove that you felt that way about me. Tests or suspicions were not enough."

She waved her hand dismissively over the page, and turned to the next. At the top was his name again, in cursive as steady as the first had been; her fingertips passed over it, and she sighed as she turned to look up at him.

"Regardless of how much I thought that you could offer what I needed, I didn't know that you would. I was confident that it was worth taking the chance. I knew that it had to be you."

With a little smile, one hopeful and absent of the last smile's pride, she reached to take his hand.

"I needed you, and was prepared to cease everything indefinitely if you...um." There was no other way to put it, so she tried to relay it as simply as she could. She squeezed his hand and looked away, eyes turned back towards her writing. "Didn't need me."

The sudden motion of being pulled into his lap left Mimsy momentarily breathless, frozen with the tentative wariness that came along with not knowing why he was doing this. She had not even reached the best part. Had she said something wrong? Was the knowledge that she had technically ignored his marriage from the start something unforgivable?

Then he spoke, and her breath returned with a smile. The desperation in his voice was thrilling - that was for her. Only her.

"But it..." She fumbled with the notebook, stopping only when he took her hand to kiss it. After a smile and a little laugh, she pressed her hand to his cheek, then returned to searching. Each page was clumsily turned with excited, shaking fingers, until she found what she was looking for.

"It was true. It was!" Insistent, she jabbed her finger against the words on the page. The letters smudged beneath the pressure of her fingertip, but still remained legible. "You wanted it to be true, and wanted to be who I needed, like you said...and I am glad that this was what you wanted, I'm glad that you still need me now, but what you wanted was...but it had to be you."

The wording in the notes had clearly changed, no longer entirely objective. It had to be her, as much as it had to be him. It was important enough to alter the methodology for formal reports, but the exception had been made with no difficulty. The choice was simple when she believed that no one else would ever read it.



"See?" she asked, twisting to look up at him. "This was the reason that I was so adamant. No one else even came close. No one else ever has. You tried without knowing what you were trying for, and succeeded without knowing the criteria. I know that if anything remains that is improperly functioning, I can repair it because your presence makes that possible. I can do it with your assistance. You are the one."

Whatever the Matrix was, he didn't seem to want her to associate him with 'the guy' from it. This was a complicated issue, because Mimsy only had a vague sense of it being some sort of science fiction reference, from what she knew of it. It was odd that he would be embarrassed by that, and she couldn't quite determine why he would not want to exist in a science fiction universe - but if he wanted her to stop, would. In an effort to safely avoid more comparisons, she closed the notebook and held it between them. She already knew all of the answers that it could provide, anyway.

"No one." She smiled, but slowly shook her head, still insistent. "You are an outlier, just like I am. There are few of us - that is the nature of outliers, of course. Separately, we are alone, just a single point of data that does not quite match any of the others. But together..."

Her thumb pressed once against his arm, and she moved it slightly upward before she pressed again, then drew a line between them.

"See? The others, who would not even be charted on your body in this instance, are too far from me. Only your specific data and circumstances allowed for you to be close enough to form this connection. The farther I am from anyone else, the less significant they are. And you are exceptionally significant, as I mentioned." She moved just enough to put her cheek against his head, remaining silent as she took several deep, comforting breaths filled with the scent of his hair.

There was so much more that she intended say, but she couldn't quite make the words come out of her mouth. Each time she tried, her breath caught painfully within her chest, and she went right back to taking in the way he smelled, or felt, or how he looked in the house that he'd built for them.

"Should you read them, a point that the notes will not formally address is that you cared - and continued to care - in ways that I had never observed before. I cannot begin to fathom how many imperceptible factors are involved. In my naïvety I presumed that observation would be enough, but I was incorrect, as difficult as it is for me to admit." She slowly curled her fingers in his hair near the base of his neck, and idly began to pet him, an action to ease her anxiety as much as an action of praise. "So I think...if I am adequately verbalizing it...that the invitation that I am offering to you with this is an invitation into my, er...well."

An irritated noise rose from her throat, and she wished for a moment that she could speak in equations, or write all of this down in a formal proposal with a standard cover sheet. It was directly evident that she was failing to adequately verbalize it.

"I cannot--I don't want to do this without you. I hope that you will accept." Her grip on the notebook tightened. "I understand that this may seem redundant, considering our marriage, but."

She couldn't bring herself to explain that this was different, because marriage was already a part of the methodical step-by-step plan that it included. Nor could she manage to say that this was something that previously sat a step outside of their relationship, which was the topic of study, detached in a way that she had found necessary. And she certainly couldn't say that she was attempting to extend the position of researcher as she joined him in the position of participant, because that was part of what made this so terrifying in the first place.

It was slightly over half a year ago that Mimsy had begun to help him study, encouraging him through medical terminology and guiding him through words he could scarcely spell. Now he spoke with confidence about reading her own writing, which contained some portions of very complex material, and she could only feel pride. It was so far from the vague horror of the day when they first spoke about his academic history that it seemed like there had been years between then and now - but that didn't give him the proper amount of credit, ignored all of the work that went into progressing in such a short time, and she tried to remain mindful of that.

The 'I do' was an odd answer, and a look of loss and confusion crossed her face as she tried to determine what it meant. Mentioning their marriage might have been the wrong comparison to make in this instance, if that was his reply. She already knew that he wanted to be married to her. She knew that in quintuplicate, in fact.

But the expression didn't last for long - she was smiling, crooked but visibly content, when he put her on his lap to face him.

"Death would be a conclusion, yes." She placed a gentle hand on his chest (which couldn't help wandering towards his heart), and the smile grew a little wider. "It is not the one that I am seeking right now. But...thank you. It is very exciting to hear those words from you. I foresee a future of immeasurable excellence together."

Her gaze fell as she allowed her thoughts to consume a greater portion of her attention, and she watched her fingers trace patterns over him with a restrained silence. Where her excitement had been very visible just moments ago, she was doing a good job of containing it now; there was still an air of eager positivity about her, but the same display of patience that was reflected in the notebook seemed to be doing its job again.

"With our data connected, I have no doubts," she murmured, thumb pressed against one single point in the center of his chest.

The explanation provided made a minimal amount of sense at first, but Robert seemed to register that fact, so she calmly waited for him to finish. It took a while to process, and Mimsy's only response to some of his questions was a somewhat quizzical look, but she eventually understood.

Probably.

As she opened her mouth to speak, half of a laugh came tumbling out - she apologetically bowed her head and fidgeted with her hands, struggling for every ounce of composure that she could muster up. The kisses were nice, but they tickled.

"I understand," she began, pausing to clear her throat and hide a smile. "I have a similar theory. I have known since my assessment of you was complete, that you had something that I did not possess. It was always intriguing to me, and I was awed as I acknowledged something so incredible that I had never seen before. I just thought--"

That she needed to take his heart? Replicate it? Consume it? That she could easily be in a position to steal whatever the mysterious secret within him was? That taking him apart and examining each and every little piece was the only way to find her answer? She swallowed those words, the only words that fit, and forced a smile. Now that she actually needed a smile, she felt foolish for ever hiding one that came naturally.

"I thought reckless things." She pulled her hands away, and slid them around for a tight hug instead. "I had theories that would not have brought us to this. It would have meant irreparable emptiness, which is frightening to consider now that I understand. I am glad that we arrived here, at this point, instead of any other possibility. I am glad that we arrived here together."

Neither she nor the notebook would address how close she had been to selecting the wrong method, though it was the only thing on her mind. Something so alarming was hard to ignore.